| The Constant
Gardener
The facts
Roughly 1.42 billion people in developing countries have no regular
access to the drugs they need, partly because prices are too high.
Price matters because most people in poor countries pay for medicines
out of their own pocket.
 Companies
can set these extremely high prices because global trade rules –
agreed by the World Trade Organisation –mean every country
has to grant 20-year patent protection on new medicines. Patents
give companies the exclusive rights to make, use and sell the patented
product. These rules stop competition from manufacturers who could
otherwise produce cheap copies of the drug, called generics.
Companies in India and elsewhere will not be able to produce affordable
equivalents of new drugs unless their governments agree to suspend
patents. Some governments, such as that in Brazil, are considering
doing this for key drugs but poor country governments are under
immense pressure from rich countries to enforce the highest levels
of patent protection. This means affordable versions of vital drugs
may be prevented from being sold for years - even after the patent
expires.
The big drug companies argue that the high prices they can charge
as a result of patent protection is needed to help pay for research
and development (R&D) into new treatments. This is true up to
a point but rich countries benefit from most of the R&D. So
why should the world's poorest people pay the price?
In fact, most of the $40 billion that the drug companies spend
on R&D goes on medicines that will sell in rich countries or
on producing different versions of their most profitable drugs.
It is taxpayers and private foundations – not the big drug
companies – who pay for most of the research on diseases that
affect poor countries.
The big drug companies have put a lot of money and effort into
securing patent rules that will allow them to charge the highest
possible price for their medicines, and they are lobbying hard for
even tougher patent rights. They contribute little to R&D into
medicines that will benefit the world's poorest people and while
some companies have drug donation programmes or have reduced the prices of some drugs, this doesn't fill the gap they have helped
create.
Companies are not charities. They have to compete and keep shareholders
happy. But they also make products that save lives and are granted
patents to further that end. This means that they have to be socially
responsible in the way they do business and in the rules and regulations
that they seek from governments.
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