The Diabolical Consequences of the EU-India Free Trade Agreement
By Stephen Lewis
February, 13 2012
Excerpt from Stephen Lewis’ remarks at the Dean’s Signature Speaker Series, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, Toronto, February 13, 2012.
You asked me to address Corporate Social Responsibility, and I have done so with many vivid examples demonstrating that so-called CSR can often be a sham.
However, let me end with one of the most offensive current international examples of how multinational corporations can actually make a fetish of irresponsibility, regardless the potentially catastrophic human consequences.
The European Union and India are in the final throes of negotiating a Free Trade Agreement. From leaked texts, it has become clear that the European Union, serving as the shill for the pharmaceutical industry, is putting great pressure on the Indian Government to accept changes to patent policy that would straitjacket the Indian generic drug industry and guarantee the brand name industry access to wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. And that’s saying something about some of the most avaricious corporations on the planet.
It’s no minor matter. At present, Indian generics supply fully 80% of all the AIDS drugs in the developing world, keeping millions of people alive. Shortly after the generics became available, prices actually dropped by 99%! In 2008, of 100 countries requiring anti-retroviral drugs, 96 purchased the drugs from India. If the drugs or the prices are put at risk, millions of lives hang in the balance. You would think that the priorities of global public health might spawn an ounce of concern for the well-being of millions, but not when well-being conflicts with balance-sheets.
To be sure, the negotiations are carried out by the EU, and you might think that they, too, would flinch in the face of human need. But the pharmaceutical lobby is the strongest lobby there is, before which governments regularly genuflect and human rights are cavalierly jettisoned.
In this instance, if I may mercilessly simplify the arguments, the EU is demanding three major concessions. First, a change in so-called “data exclusivity,” the effect of which would be to delay, possibly for years, the registration of generic medicines, thus keeping them off the market. Second, stricter enforcement and expanded definition of intellectual property rules that would permit lawsuits to be launched by brand name drug companies, even against the Government of India in private courts, for a range of specious reasons. In the process, it could tie up generic companies and third-party suppliers and purchasers in litigation for an eternity. Third, tough and utterly unjustified border measures that would allow custom officials to seize generic drugs destined for patients in developing countries.
The Treatment Action Campaign of South Africa wrote an open letter to the Citizens of Europe under the heading “Don’t let your Governments trade away our lives.” The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, a citizen of India himself, said that it would be “a colossal mistake to introduce data exclusivity.” And Elton John, in an eloquent column in the Independent just three days ago under the headline “We must end the greed of these corporations,” wrote: “We cannot allow Europe’s greed to triumph over the needs of HIV patients around the world.”
If, for the sake of promises of increased trade, the Indian Government capitulates to the demands, then the death of countless numbers of men, women and children is the preordained result.
There are dimensions of terrible irony in all of this. The Free Trade Agreement comes at precisely the moment when we know how to defeat the pandemic of AIDS, and the defeat is entirely dependent on low-cost drugs. More, the FTA comes at precisely the moment when donor funds are drying up, so much so that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria had to cancel its most recent round of grants.
If the Indian generic drug industry, on which almost all the world depends, is now shackled by diabolical intellectual property rules, then the assault on the poor and the vulnerable of the earth will be complete.
I have heard UN voices, I have heard activist voices — tens of thousands marching in the streets of capital cities all over the world this last week — I have heard the voices of people living with AIDS speaking in crescendo about the apocalyptic possibilities. I have not heard a single corporate voice.
That says all that needs be said about corporate social responsibility.
Download a copy of this speech (PDF, 127 KB)
For more information:
Christina Magill
TEL: +1-416-657-4458
clm@aidsfreeworld.org