Six-thousand out of the eight-thousand people dying of AIDS daily are dying in Africa. There are over 10 million AIDS orphans in Africa alone. Nevertheless, less than 2 percent of AIDS sufferers in sub-Saharan Africa have access to the life-saving drugs they need. The World Bank estimated that in sub-Saharan Africa there were 290.9 million people living on less than $1 per day in 1998.

Needless to say, this figure has skyrocketed since then. Even so, the pharmaceutical corporations that hold the patents on desperately needed AIDS anti-retroviral drugs still expect exorbitant profits for their life-saving drugs in this same devastated market and will go to almost any length to protect their “territory.”

Despite 2.4 million AIDS deaths in Africa in the year 2000 alone, researchers say less than 10,000 people have access to the anti-retroviral medicines that have transformed the AIDS epidemic from a death sentence to a chronic illness in countries such as the United States, which had less than 10,000 AIDS deaths in the same year.

As tragic as all this is, debt-ridden African countries with an average external debt amounting to 108 percent of the average gross national product have little resources for health care and other social-service safety nets. Pharmaceutical trade liberalization fostered by the World Trade Organization’s trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights has structurally constrained Africa’s means of self-preservation by limiting accessibility to affordable medicines.

Although TRIPS (trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights) are said to contain real “public health safeguards,” the actual incorporation of these “safeguards” has proven elusive to African countries due to coercion by the WTO. These so-called “safeguards” were designed to permit countries to override TRIPS in public-health emergencies through provisions for compulsory licensing and parallel importing of generics.

Even though these “safeguards” do exist in written form, their actual incorporation has proven elusive due to WTO coercion of African governments via threats of international trade sanctions. Is pharmaceutical patent protection more valuable than millions of African lives? I would like to see President George W. Bush address this corporate crime to humanity at his next big conference on “corporate responsibility” because Enron and Worldcom are not the only shady corporations out there.

Paul Goodman

Senior

Sociology