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The Real AIDS Scandal
The Washington Post, April 25, 2001
The feisty advocates who lead nongovernmental groups like to paint themselves as little guys, and in some ways this is reasonable. They have less money than their business foes and less raw power than governments. Yet the South African AIDS-medicine case that closed last week demonstrates the power of campaigning groups like Médecins Sans Frontières and Oxfam. These supposed Davids loaded their slings against the pharmaceutical industry Goliath and felled him.
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This ought to be good news for anyone contemplating the fairness of the global system. The South African case shows that, to borrow a phrase from globalization's foes, profits do not necessarily triumph over people. An alliance of 39 pharmaceutical firms sued the South African government in order to enforce restrictive drug patents that would have slowed the fight against AIDS and other killers. Because the firms' arguments were self-serving and thin, nongovernmental groups were able to shame them into capitulation. Last Thursday's settlement even commits the firms to paying the government's legal expenses.
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Having won this case, South Africa's government is free to license cut-price copying of patented AIDS drugs or import them from the cheapest source available. This should focus attention on the main problem in the international system, which is not that rich companies rig the rules but that governments lack the drive to grapple with big challenges. Nearly half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day, yet aid budgets in the prosperous world are stagnant. Ethnic and resource-plundering conflicts cost countless lives around the world, but even though a small troop deployment might have prevented genocide in places like Rwanda or Sudan, the world lacks the fortitude to get engaged effectively.
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The story of the AIDS epidemic is no different. The death toll from this plague was foretold 10 years ago, yet governments in both developed and developing countries did little about it. South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki has speculated idly about the causes of the disease; meanwhile, 4.7 million of his people are living with HIV, and half a million of those got infected last year. The Bush administration shows little interest in leading an international effort to fight the scourge, even though an expert group led by Harvard's Jeffrey Sachs recently estimated that 3 million Africans could be brought into treatment over the next half-decade. It is this indifference, echoed to varying degrees in capitals throughout the world, that is the real scandal of the international system. |
