As you already know, the governments of the western
hemisphere and their corporate bosses are signing our
names to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas as
we speak. This secret treaty is being drafted to destroy
activist victories, privatize public services, and gut
public safeguards; to roll back everything that 500 years
of resistance has won. Our world and our lives are on
the auction block. We understand this and that's why
we're going to stop them. And people with AIDS and
their allies are going to be on the front lines.

D A Y S O F
A C T I O N

The FTAA and the AIDS Crisis
in the Global South

ACT-UP Philadelphia and the Global Access Project

As you already know, the governments of the western
hemisphere and their corporate bosses are signing our
names to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas as
we speak. This secret treaty is being drafted to destroy
activist victories, privatize public services, and gut
public safeguards; to roll back everything that 500 years
of resistance has won. Our world and our lives are on
the auction block. We understand this and that's why
we're going to stop them. And people with AIDS and
their allies are going to be on the front lines.

ACT-UP and the Health GAP (Global Access Project)
Coalition have recently begun a campaign to defeat the
FTAA. Our mission is to end the global AIDS
pandemic, while the FTAA's mission is to make it
worse. If it is put into effect, the FTAA will stop the
growing movement by poor countries to manufacture
cheap AIDS drugs, to treat the 30 million people with
AIDS in the global south.

Unfortunately, because the FTAA threatens so many
human rights on so many issues, many
anti-globalization activists are not yet aware of the
FTAA's grave implications for people with AIDS
worldwide. So we'd like to provide all anti-FTAA
activists, speakers, roadshows and organizers with
information about this issue in hopes that our
movement's opposition to the FTAA will address its
massive threat to the 30 million people living and dying
of AIDS right now in the third world.

Put simply, the FTAA will kill people with AIDS in
Brazil - immediately. But far worse, it may push back
the cause of treating AIDS in the third world by
decades. And the misery and death this would cause are
simply not measurable. Here is a brief summary of the
situation.

Someday we may look back on 2001 with nostalgia, for
a time when AIDS was merely a global health
catastrophe. AIDS is hitting the third world in a way
not seen since the Black Death killed a quarter of
Europe. AIDS is not just a health crisis in some parts of
the world; it's causing the wholesale collapse of Africa.
More than 20% of people in many sub-Saharan African
nations have the virus; for young people in South
Africa, the rates are higher than 50%. Ten, twenty
years down the road, this disease will be having effects
the likes of which we cannot even comprehend now.
The world has never yet seen a continent virtually die
because its people are poor. We will.

And that is why they're dying - they're poor. AIDS is a
manageable disease for people in the First World and
the rich. Triple-cocktail drug therapy has caused AIDS
death rates to plummet in places where people have
access to them. But the corporations that make those
medications charge between $10,000 and $15,000 US a
year per person. America can barely afford to make that
available to its people. No third world nation can. This
results in a situation where 95% of people with AIDS
worldwide have no access to medicine. 30 million
people are dying and its getting worse.

But the pills actually cost pennies to produce. Any
developing country could manufacture these drugs and
treat AIDS. But pharmaceutical corporations - the most
profitable industry in the world - depend on their
iron-clad patent laws to make billions of dollars in
profit. And to protect their power and wealth, the
corporations use the American government to force
third world nations to not make generic versions of
these drugs. It's a simple equation. Because the US
forces global trade policies to protect corporate patent
rights, 30 million poor people are dying.

So people in the global south and north have started
fighting back. American AIDS advocates have brought
pressure to bear on their government and rich
corporations, while a small number of third world
countries have begun defying the pharmaceutical
industry and manufacturing the needed medications.
These countries - India, Thailand, Brazil, and South
Africa - have said a big, risky fuck you to the richest
industry on earth, because they must. And Brazil is
leading the way.

Brazilian civil society forced their government to
implement a health plan that does what no other country
does - ensure every human being with AIDS that they
will get the treatment they need. In just a few years
their comprehensive program has cut AIDS deaths
there in half, and caused infection numbers there to be a
mere fraction of what analysts were predicting for
2001. A New York Times headline recently read "The
World's AIDS Crisis is Solvable: Look at Brazil." Brazil
has done more than just provided treatment for their
people; they have started a move in the third world
towards dealing with the AIDS crisis. And they have
done it by ignoring corporations' patents and placing
human need over corporate greed. This scares the hell
our of greedy pharmaceutical corporations.

Brazil's system works. It is the system the world needs.
And Brazil has offered to teach any third world country
how to set up their own generic systems. In May at a
generic AIDS drug conference in Burkina Faso, they
may begin doing that. The tide is turning towards life
for 30 million infected poor people, and the
corporations are desperate to stop it.

The pharmaceutical corporations are bringing massive
pressure to bear on the Brazilian government. Today,
February 1, their lackeys in the United States
government are formally denouncing Brazil's free AIDS
drug program at a WTO meeting in Geneva. And their
plan to destroy Brazil's program is to create new, more
powerful and pro-corporate intellectual property laws in
the upcoming Free Trade Agreement of the Americas.

If the US succeeds in placing stronger, pro-corporate
intellectual property laws in the FTAA (called
TRIPS-plus), Brazil's generics system will be dealt a
death blow. The FTAA's corporate patent protection
policies will force Brazil's generic drug program to stop
manufacturing essential medications by extending
corporate patent length and attacking the generic drug
system through the backdoor with a variety of crippling
regulations. This spells disaster for people with AIDS in
Brazil, but the larger picture is even more grim. The
possibility of treating AIDS in the third world that Brazil
offers will be gone - and with it, a golden, practical
opportunity for treating AIDS worldwide.

The FTAA has large-scale ramifications for 30 million
people with AIDS in the third world that are simply
deadly. Let's name the problem: Rich corporations are
using the FTAA to kill millions, to ensure their profits
continue.

This will not stand. People with AIDS and their allies,
from Brazil to the US, are fighting this agreement. And
we will win. ACT-UP and AIDS advocates worldwide
are resisting the FTAA, specifically on the grounds that
TRIPS-plus intellectual property provisions are
unacceptable and deadly.

In the light of this deadly threat, we hope this
information will help folks raise the AIDS disaster issue
as part of their FTAA activism. Right now, the
movement isn't talking much about the suffering and
genocide corporate greed and globalization are causing
through the AIDS crisis in the developing world. But
the issue is going to be on the table. 30 million people
living with AIDS in the global south have their lives on
the line.

We plan to be in the US Trade Representatives face, we
plan to be in Quebec City, and we plan to be
everywhere it takes to defeat this death sentence for
people with AIDS in the global south. We invite
everyone who fights globalization and corporate power,
and everyone who places human need above corporate
greed, to join our demand and work together to defeat
the FTAA.

We're specifically hoping that all anti-globalization
activists will put the AIDS issue among the forefront of
our movement's opposition. 30 million people with
AIDS in the third world should not be thought of a
side-issue or footnote. We've come too far for that.
AIDS and the global south are central to the suffering
globalization causes so they need to be central to our
resistance as well.

Silence is death. Resistance is life.

NO FTAA!
NO TRIPS-PLUS, EVER!

ACT-UP Philadelphia

Health Gap