A private Israeli company specializes in the development, production and import of pharmaceutical products.
The company supplies its products to the Israeli security forces.
Trima enjoys the advantages generated by the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands allowing the company to exploit the Palestinian market.
The Paris Protocol, an annex to the Oslo Accords, which regulates the financial relations between Israel and the PA, placed both entities under the same taxation envelope. As a result, the Palestinians continue to depend on Israeli policies, customs laws and services for the import and export of goods. This dependency has inflicted strong negative economic effects on the Palestinian pharmaceutical industry. Various hindrances generate extra costs that harm the development of the local industry: the burden of the annual licensing of imported raw materials, the costs of back-to-back deliveries to and from the WB and Gaza, the costs of shipping drugs in bulk via Jordan, the exclusion of large Arab markets as well as in Israel, and the inability of the Gazan industry to develop and expand due to the prohibition on export.
Trima, likewise other Israeli and multinational companies, enjoys the aforementioned situation in several ways. The company enjoys easy access to the Palestinian market, free of customs and checkpoint, e.g. change of trucks at cargo checkpoints. Trima's agents do not have to amend any of their products in order to sell them in the OPT. Thus, the company can sell drugs that are not labeled in Arabic.
For further information, check our report on the Pharmaceutical Industry:
Captive economy.