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Shaping Global Rules: Proprietary Pharmaceutical Companies as Global Political Actors

In a book published recently, AIDS Sutra: untold stories from India, 16 of India’s most influential writers try to cut through the stigma that surrounds acquired immune difficiency syndrome (AIDS) and document the human story behind the epidemic that currently affects around 3 million people in India. Their aim is both noble and timely: if AIDS continues to be stigmatised as it seems to have been until now, the likelihood of the epidemic reaching proportions surpassing those experienced by some African countries is apparently quite high. Stigma is obviously not the only factor preventing AIDS victims in India and across the world from improving their lot. Lack of information, lack of suitable healthcare facilities, poverty and lack of access to appropriate and affordable medicines are also important factors. Some of these and other factors are regularly mentioned in various AIDS studies, each arranging and ordering the elements that constitute the complexity of the endemic in an order that highlights certain elements at the expense of others. When the finger has been pointed at the high price of patented antiretroviral drugs, proprietary pharmaceutical companies (PPCs) have responded quickly with reports and studies that downplay the importance of their patents to patients’ access to (affordable) medicines, blaming poverty and limited healthcare spending by governments instead as the main barrier to access. The issue of pharmaceutical patents and access to medicines was highly politicised during the late 1990s and early 2000s and it denotes a recent display of the longstanding political agency of PPCs at the national and international level. At the very least, the notion of a (political) actor implies some sort of unity of purpose and one key set of issues around which otherwise competing pharmaceutical companies have joined forces has been that of securing favourable industry regulation, whether at the national or international level, in conjunction New Political Economy, Vol. 14, No. 2, June 2009