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Stiffer laws to combat
counterfeiting and piracy - President Kufuor
Accra, July 21, Ghanadot/GNA - President John Agyekum Kufuor
on Monday expressed government’s determination to ensure
that stiffer laws are enacted to make counterfeiting and
piracy crimes as offensive as drug trafficking and punish
offenders as such.
He said government was poised to make Ghana a no-go zone for
counterfeits and would ensure that special courts were
established if necessary to hear cases involving the
manufacture, distribution and sale of counterfeit or pirated
products.
“This insidious crime of product counterfeiting has become a
global phenomenon; it’s no longer the canker of the
under-developed or developing world. The developed world is
also battling with counterfeiting products albeit at a scale
lower than in our part of the world,” he said.
The President made this known in a speech read for him by
Mr. Kwadwo Mpiani, Chief of Staff, at the opening a two-day
National Dialogue on Counterfeit Products in Accra for
stakeholders.
The dialogue, the first to be organized by the Food and
Drugs Board (FDB) in collaboration with European Union (EU)
and the Institute of Packaging, Ghana, is on “Protecting the
Consumer against counterfeit products through Inter-Agency
and Regional collaboration”.
President Kufuor noted that government was worried not only
of the threat to human life but also the fact that
counterfeit products denied genuine products of the rightful
market share, costing governments significant amounts in
lost tax revenues as well as threatening jobs and creating
lack of consumer confidence in products.
According to the European Commission, counterfeiting and
piracy cost the EU eight billion euros a year in lost
economic output between 1998 and 2001.
“We can no longer ignore this activity whereby certain
unscrupulous individuals and criminal gangs produce
counterfeit medicines and medical devices which risk the
lives of people, or as in the reported case in China a few
years ago involving dummy milk formula for babies in which
several children died.”
President Kufuor urged the meeting to make appropriate
recommendations to government on policies and strategies to
curb counterfeiting and piracy and develop strategies to
overcome the major challenges confronting the nation, which
he described as coordination of the activities of the
different agencies in this area.
Health Minister Major Courage Quashigah (Rtd) said the
counterfeit menace was worrying and its impact was enormous,
adding that, counterfeiters deterred honest manufacturers
from investing resources in new products.
He said various medicines, food and beverages, cosmetics and
medical devices such as condoms were being counterfeited and
noted that though scientific data was very scanty, efforts
at fighting the menace needed to be more proactive.
Product counterfeiting, he said, hit everyone hard in the
pocket and only the faceless persons behind the crime
benefited, while legitimate businesses collapsed and many
people also lost their lives.
“The magnitude of the problem caused by counterfeiting
requires strong and sustained action from all stakeholders
including businesses and consumers,” he said.
Government, the Minister noted, was therefore committed to
mobilizing resources to protect intellectual property and
said that Ghana had a high stake in optimizing the use of
intellectual property to protect the national knowledge,
inventions and creativity.
He commended the role of neighbouring countries represented
at the meeting and called for increased inter-agency
cooperation at the national and sub-region levels and said
it would enhance collective action against the heinous
crime.
Miss. Shirley Ayokor Botchway, Deputy Minister, Trade,
Presidential Special Initiatives and Private Sector
Development said issues of intellectual property could not
be overemphasized and that government would continue to
wilfully support activities of regulatory, security and
stakeholder agencies that were committed to fighting the
crime.
She said the worrying nature of the crime was that consumers
were increasingly being put at the risk of harm and death
from unsafe and ineffective products which were exported
through complex distribution channels before getting to the
consumers.
She therefore called for a concerted effort to fight the
crime and put in place quick decisive and punitive measures
needed to bring rampant counterfeiting and piracy activities
down.
Mr. Emmanuel Kyeremanteng Agyarko, Chief Executive Officer
of FDB, said the fight against counterfeiting and piracy
could only be successful if stakeholders, including the
consumer worked closely in a coordinated manner and across
borders with the aim of “dismantling the modus operandi of
the criminal gangs behind counterfeiting”.
He noted that, it was time to get tough and deal decisively
with the rip-off-artists and make them pay for the harm and
pain inflicted on consumers and the economies of various
countries.
Mr Agyarko urged participants to ensure that various options
should be deployed to make markets better secured from
counterfeits products.
GNA
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