“Of course, many African governments like these schemes because they help protect their own pharmaceutical companies or transfer the blame for their own failures in health care onto foreigners such as multinational pharmaceutical companies.”_________________________
by Temba Nolutshungu
(May 07, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) Soon after the real colonialists had left Africa, a new breed of Western colonialists emerged: the statist Non-Governmental Organisations that want to save us from everything from genetically-modified food to globalisation--and growth.
These "consumer" and humanitarian groups and "development" charities are united in the belief that modern industrial civilisation, profit and competition are unethical. In their view, people, particularly in developing countries, would be better served by state control that puts "equity" and the redistribution of wealth ahead of the economic dynamism that has enriched the West and such eastern countries as Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.
But despite their claims to speak for the poor, only a few hundred of the several thousand NGOs registered at the United Nations come from developing countries. The vast majority are from the USA, with many from Britain, France and Germany.
These groups have influence way beyond their size. Many poor countries do not have the technical capacity to formulate their own policies for services such as health, so they consult NGOs or bodies such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), mandated with providing impartial scientific advice to governments.
The WHO has been colonised by these NGOs, acting as policy consultants and playing a big part in formulating the WHO's technical and policy advice to members. But the NGO advisors consistently get things wrong.
Take AIDS. Because there is no cure, the only way to tackle its spread is to prioritise prevention, to stop the number of infections increasing every year. Of course treatment is essential but the NGOs pushed hard for most public money to be spent on drugs for those already infected--even though the worst affected countries do not have the doctors and clinics to administer the drugs. The WHO gave in, so infections continue to rise and treatment is haphazard.
A similar thing happened with malaria. For years, countries from India to South Africa successfully controlled malaria by spraying the insides of houses with DDT.
Environmentalists and NGOs played up scientifically unsound scare stories from the USA to demonise the pesticide and pushed for a ban: the WHO stopped recommending it in the 1990s, malaria soared globally and millions died. Recently, South Africa reintroduced DDT spraying and cases plummeted but few other countries have dared upset their NGO advisors.
Western pressure groups have also scared European consumers away from buying GM crops grown in Africa: Uganda has been directly threatened by European Union representatives and Kenya avoids GM.
NGOs operate at national level too, directly feeding governments with statist policies. In their latest campaign they argue that, because very few drugs have been developed for a handful of tropical diseases that occur in the poorest countries, patents prevent this and are inherently unjust.
They want bureaucrats rather than markets to determine what diseases are researched and they want subsidies for setting up medicine factories in Africa, where ingredients, technicians and managers would have to be imported and where there are very, very few laboratories to test quality: bad copies are often worse than no medicine at all as they encourage drug-resistance and virus mutation.
All this in the hope that removing profit will usher us into a magical new age in which cheap new medicines will become freely available to the poor--never mind the fact that market-led research and development has produced the vast majority of all treatments available.
The final stupidity is that you could give every African every drug for free, to no avail: without the infrasructure to monitor and administer them, many drugs are useless or dangerous.
The NGOs achieved this by lobbying African governments at the WHO: the similarities between the NGOs' campaign literature and the official position of Kenya, a leading proponent of the R&D Treaty, are too many to be a coincidence.
Of course, many African governments like these schemes because they help protect their own pharmaceutical companies or transfer the blame for their own failures in health care onto foreigners such as multinational pharmaceutical companies. And these schemes will be aired in Geneva this week at the WHO's Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG): member states need to put the real needs of the poor first and kick out the counter-productive ideology.
Statist NGOs have enormous influence on public opinion, the UN and African governments even though their ideologies have been shown not to work in their own countries: before taking the neo-colonialists' medicine, we must carefully read the label or suffer nasty side effects.
( Temba A. Nolutshungu is a director of Free Market Foundation, a South African think-tank.)
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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