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The People’s Health Council warned on Tuesday that the China-Asean Free Trade Area, which will open Indonesia’s health sector to competition from abroad, would only serve to make people here sicker.

“If CAFTA is implemented, there will be health issues the government won’t be able to solve,” Web Warouw, the secretary general of the nongovernmental organization, also known as DKR, said on Tuesday.

Warouw said that if the free-trade deal were implemented, China would use its enormous capital base to build and operate world-class hospitals in Indonesia that would dominate the market, to the detriment of domestic providers.

He added that the general public would not be able to afford the costs of medical services, as domestic hospitals would have to increase their fees to upgrade their facilities to compete with the influx of high-quality health care from China.

Siti Fadillah Supari, a member of the newly installed presidential advisory board and a former health minister, said the nation should not be worried as long as the public was ready to face the challenge. However, she said Indonesia would have to fight hard to survive China’s potential domination of the health sector.

“It is indeed a bit worrying that we have to compete openly with China. Thousands of Indonesians have chosen to travel to China for medical treatments that were available at home, and this was long before the CAFTA was signed,” said Supari, who is also the DKR’s main adviser.

She added that many Chinese health clinics had been operating in Indonesia for years, many of them without any permit from the government.

“If we want to compete with these [foreign] clinics, the government, especially the Ministry of Health, should increase monitoring.”

To respond to the inevitable surge of pharmaceuticals from China after the trade deal is implemented, Supari said the government must strengthen domestic drug producers’ ability to compete.

“We signed the agreement in 2002 and it is impossible to pull out. The best the government can do is to prepare Indonesia to face the challenge,” she said.

Supari said the Health Ministry should immediately move to lower the price of generic medicines.

“If we cannot reduce the price we should at least be able to prevent price hikes. Don’t let foreign pharmaceutical companies dictate and control the price of medicine in Indonesia,” she said.

She said the government should also establish a campaign to promote locally produced medicines.

“We need to come together to protect the local market,” Supari said.