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HIV/AIDS and Food Insecurity in Southern Africa - December 2002
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6. Unfair international trading systems exacerbate poverty, food insecurity, and HIV/AIDS
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A major cause of the current humanitarian crisis in Southern Africa is the failure of agricultural policies. International financial institutions - such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - designed agricultural reforms for these countries without first carrying out a serious assessment of their likely impact on poverty and food security. Far from improving food security, World Bank and IMF-inspired policies have left poor farmers more vulnerable than ever, exacerbating the exclusion of the poorest from the market.
The ability of governments to tackle the crisis is further undermined by crippling debt repayments. Debt servicing this year is eating up 23 per cent of Zambian government revenue; Malawi spends the same amount servicing its debt as it does on health.
Another major problem is the inaccessibility of essential medicines, including those to treat opportunistic infections, and antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) for the majority of those living with HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa, due to high prices and the lack of health infrastructure.
WTO patent rules set out in the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), require all countries to provide 20-year minimum patent protection for all new inventions, including medicines. This provides companies with an effective global monopoly, allowing them to set high prices for the duration of the patent. Poor people cannot afford them and neither can the health budgets of poor countries. While enormous public pressure has obliged the large pharmaceutical companies to reduce significantly the prices of ARVs in sub-Saharan Africa, they still cost about three times the price of equivalent generic drugs produced in India.
The only sustainable way of reducing prices and increasing access to medicines is generic competition, which requires a more flexible application of patent law in developing countries. For this to happen, the US government and pharmaceutical companies must stop pressuring developing countries to introduce unnecessarily high standards of patent protection on medicines.
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