BPOM Strengthens Synergy with Industry to Respond to Geopolitical Impacts on Medicine Access
Jakarta (ANTARA) - The Food and Drug Supervisory Agency (BPOM) held a discussion to strengthen synergy with the pharmaceutical industry in maintaining national medicine resilience amid global geopolitical dynamics, ensuring the availability of medicines and meeting public needs.
BPOM Head Taruna Ikrar in Jakarta on Wednesday stated that global geopolitical conditions, particularly tensions in strategic world regions such as the Middle East as a major trade route, are impacting the stability of supply chains for various important commodities, including the pharmaceutical sector.
“These conditions directly affect price increases and potential disruptions in medicine availability. This situation is a serious concern, given Indonesia’s high dependence on imports of pharmaceutical raw materials, reaching 94%,” he said.
Taruna Ikrar added that based on previous discussions, medicine availability in Indonesia remains safe for the next six months. However, this situation still requires serious anticipation.
As the regulatory authority for medicines, the agency is committed to ensuring that circulating medicines remain safe, effective, and of quality. Additionally, BPOM plays a role in supporting medicine availability, which is the responsibility of the pharmaceutical industry.
In facing global challenges, BPOM is opening room for measured regulatory flexibility in certain conditions without reducing safety aspects.
“Therefore, today we are dialoguing to understand the real conditions of the pharmaceutical sector, identify risks, and then formulate concrete, adaptive, and sustainable mitigation steps together,” Taruna said.
According to him, close collaboration between the government and business actors is the key to maintaining the stability of national medicine supply and prices.
Representatives from several pharmaceutical industries and wholesale pharmaceutical traders (PBF) attended to provide opinions and input in the dialogue.
The pharmaceutical industry conveyed several challenges currently faced in the medicine production process, particularly the limitation of raw materials causing increasingly high prices and affecting medicine prices.
Another issue highlighted is the ease of access in obtaining raw materials. They view that a strategy is needed to keep medicine prices affordable so that public access to medicines is not disrupted.
The industry also requested that BPOM provide conveniences from the licensing side, such as accelerating permits for variant products and no restrictions for essential medicines.
In response, Taruna stated that all insights, suggestions, and input from today’s discussion will be considered in policy-making.
These decisions, whether in the form of conveniences, rule relaxations, new rules, exceptions, or restrictions, are aimed at supporting the growth of the pharmaceutical industry while ensuring medicine availability for the public.