A FORMER president of Nigeria has warned that a British-India trade deal “will come at the expense of lives in the global South” if the Tory government’s negotiating demands are met. 

British ministers want India to implement sweeping changes to its intellectual property rules as part of any agreement, a stance that is “threatening India’s ability to supply inexpensive quality medicines to the rest of the world,” Olusegun Obasanjo said.

Mr Obasanjo, who was president of Nigeria from 1976 to 1979 and from 1999 to 2007, spent much of his second term leading the country’s response to Aids. 

Writing on Devex, a media platform for the global development community, he described Indian generics as “a lifeline” that helped make HIV medicines affordable for African countries. But they are a lifeline that “a trade deal between India and the UK could cut short.”

Last year, a leaked negotiating paper revealed the extent of Britain’s intellectual property demands of India. 

Among them are an extension of the 20-year monopoly which pharmaceutical companies can have on medicines before facing generic competition and the repeal of Indian legislation allowing patents to be challenged before they are granted or extended.

Mr Obasanjo said Britain’s proposals would lead to “huge cost increases for health systems and catastrophic delays in accessing medicines.” 

India provides more than half of Africa’s generic medicines and a third of those used by the NHS. Disrupting their supply “is not in the interest of our patients or our health systems,” the former president wrote.

Britain’s pharmaceutical industry has lobbied for stricter patent rules to be included in any agreement, while Indian negotiators have described the issue as a “red line.”

Last week, the People’s Vaccine Alliance revealed that the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies had spent almost as much money on enriching shareholders and executives during the Covid-19 pandemic as they spent on developing new vaccines and treatments.

Some $1 million (£825,000) was paid to shareholders and executives every five minutes from 2020 to 2022.