Carlos Alexandre Geyer*

Changes in rules cannot be done without costs and losses. The National Laboratory Association (NLA) sees that the pharmaceutical segment has undergone wide modifications. Some of them, more  recently, are the takeovers. Such changes according to the current model and values hadn’t been seen before on the market. Companies acquire others from different segments in order to broaden the frontiers. Companies from the same segment, altogether, start to lead the national and even the Latin American market.

NLA, aware of such scenery, full of wide and considerable changes , thus attempting to play its crucial role for the development and strength of the national pharmaceutical industry, recently promoted an important workshop called "Diálogos de futuro 2005-2010" (Future Dialogues 2005-2010). Representatives of the national industries, associates or not, got together and concluded that the entity is responsible for making an effort so that the market can offer similar conditions of existence and growth. According to that, they must struggle for public policies for industrial impact, regulatory and pharmaceutical assistence, for instance, acceptable for competition and balanced survival. The acquisitions in the pharmaceutical segment come from the effort of the industrial policy to make national companies able to export and intenationalize, two diverse things, though only now we can tell them apart.

Under such mobilizations and transformations of market relations there is an expressive group of pharmaceutical industries which, together with the others about to be taken over, represent 42% of the national market and show the importance of a strong national pharmaceutical segment, able to support an independent project in an independent country (although the way of saying in our present world, must not look like – not even be – market reserve neither national isolation).

These are companies that need, at first, attention, because under diverse conditions and demandings, they lie at the cutting edge of the industrial policy,  which are under sanitary, economic and regulatory rules, usually practiced by regulatory agents of the pharmaceutical segment, Anvisa and CMED. Besides, other several surprises come from the Congress as public benefits, though if they really went ahead, they would close the doors of  most of the national pharmaceutical industries, withouht trying to have a previous discussion or  agreement.

There is no balanced market when a company lies at the cutting edge of the public policies, being open to speculations in order to have the segment regularized. In 2005 the pharmaceutical segment had the average of a measuring proposition by changing or imposing one regulatory action a week – 12 public appointments, 38 resolutions. There is no company, it doesn´t matter if big, average or small, which is able to survive in an unstable environment, uncontrolled and mostly irrational.

Something is to create regulatory and productive marks that focus on what really matters to society – the minimization of the sanitary risk – other is to think that changes in rules can be absorbed without any costs, losses or instability. It is crucial to concede the necessary time to its implementation. Something we can take for granted, and the public management must be aware in order not to risk the soberanity of a country and its industrial political basis: the pharmaceutical market must take a breath.

(*) Carlos Alexandre Geyer is the president of The National Laboratory Association (NLA).