Medicine and land will be more expensive if a Pacific Rim trade deal passes, a protest organiser says.
Temuka woman Abbeyrose Neho is organising a protest on Timaru's Piazza on November 8 against New Zealand joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.
Neho, 20, said subsidised medicine would be threatened by the proposed 12-country trade deal.
Diplomats have been negotiating the text of the agreement since 2010.
Neho, a Presbyterian Support worker, social work student and Greenpeace activist, said leaked negotiating texts showed the New Zealand Government's single-buyer drug agency, Pharmac, was under threat from foreign business interests.
She knew several diabetics and thought their medicine could become more expensive if the deal passed.
She also believes the deal will limit government restrictions on oil drilling and foreigners buying land and fears environmental damage and higher property prices will result.
Timaru Grey Power president Denise Fitzgerald said some local members had concerns about the effect a deal would have on Pharmac, as well as a general feeling of disquiet about it because it had been so hush-hush.
She would be attending the protest, she said.
Grey Power's national body has echoed Christchurch psychiatrist Dr Erik Monasterio's concerns the deal could remove much of Pharmac's power to control medicine costs.
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