November 27, 2008
JAKARTA, Indonesia: Indonesia's health minister is confident foreign pharmaceutical companies will comply with new rules requiring them to build local factories, saying they would not risk being locked out of the country's $2 billion drug market.
"I don't think they'd dare leave," Siti Fadilah Supari said Thursday. "But if they do, it's their loss."
The decree, which was issued earlier this month, is designed to encourage the transfer of technology and to create jobs in the nation of 235 million. It says foreign drug makers will only be allowed to sell products if they build local production facilities. Critics say the rules could prevent some lifesaving medicine from being sold here.
But Supari said she was not worried, noting local and international drug companies that already have factories in Indonesia can import some medicine with "special access" licenses, ensuring that all domestic needs are met.
Foreign companies can't just act like retailers, opening tiny storefront offices to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of drugs and then give nothing back, she said. "They have to invest, so our people can benefit too."
Currently, 13 foreign companies import and sell drugs through subsidiaries in Indonesia - but don't have factories in the country. They include Wyeth, Eli Lilly & Co., and Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. of the United States; Servier and Sanofi-Aventis of France; and Astrazeneca PLC of the United Kingdom. They have two years to comply with the new regulations, Supari said.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue wrote a letter to Indonesia's president last week urging him to "to consider revising the decree so that foreign companies that already have subsidiaries in Indonesia are exempt and can continue selling medicines."
Supari is no stranger to controversy.
Last year, she stopped sharing her country's bird flu virus samples with the World Health Organization, arguing drug firms would use them to make vaccines that were ultimately unaffordable to her own people.
Critics said she was making it impossible for international health experts to see if the virus was mutating into a more dangerous form.
hat-tip Carol@SC
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