Secret ploy to starve India of medicines

Just when I hoped never to hear the name Peter Mandelson again, the Prince of Darkness emerged into the Swiss sunlight. A video on the internet shows this architect of New Labour trying to conceal his unease with a grin when confronted by protesters at the annual meeting of the ultra-elitist Bilderberg Group in St Moritz earlier this month.

Mandelson now runs the consultancy firm Global Counsel. As his job involves helping corporations penetrate the markets of developing countries, it is something of a continuation of his stint as Europe’s trade commissioner. His penchant for accepting trips on billionaires’ yachts brought the occasional controversy to his four years in Brussels (2004-08). Yet it was some of his more mundane activities that were truly scandalous, particularly his efforts to increase the bills that the world’s poor pay for healthcare.

In July 2007, Mandelson wrote to the Thai government, urging it to abandon plans for keeping the price of medicines affordable. He was irked by indications that the Bangkok authorities would overrule patents in cases where branded medicines were more than 5% dearer than the price of generic versions of the same products. His letter had menacing undertones – warning Thailand it could face “isolation” from certain types of foreign investment if it pushed ahead with its “new approach to access to medicines” (Mandelson’s words).

I was reminded of Mandelson’s less-than-subtle threat over the past fortnight when I received a new batch of correspondence between pharmaceutical lobbyists and the European Commission. These documents – dating from 2007 to 2010 - indicate that major drug companies are determined to prevent developing countries from saving lives among the disadvantaged, whenever profit is at stake.

Indeed, there is little difference between the substance of Mandelson’s letter to Thailand and an email message relating to India that the European Federation for Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) sent to various Brussels officials in September 2010. That message concerned a discussion paper from India’s department of industrial policy, which raised the possibility that compulsory licenses (CLs) could be issued to ensure that larger quantities of branded medicines are made available in generic form. According to EFPIA’s trade specialist Louis-Nicolas Fortin, the paper “includes considerations that raise key concerns for our industry”. Among them were the possibility of “broadening CL grounds beyond public health emergencies.”

I read the Indian paper meticulously and found that it had a strong relationship with common sense. It began with a history lesson about how compulsory licensing allows a government to authorise the production of a patented item without the consent of the patent-holder. During the world wars, that system was used to share aviation technology and for manufacturing penicillin. A few pages later, it cited estimates that 700,000 people in India are diagnosed with cancer each year and that most of them are unable to pay “for expensive anti-cancer medicines”. Moreover, it said that India has the highest number of HIV cases in South Asia but only 300,000 out of 2.5 million Indians infected with the virus are being treated.

The only humane response to all this pointless suffering is to get medicines to the people who need them. If that means violating patents, then so be it. How dare the suits in EFPIA’s Brussels office imply that the high levels of cancer and AIDS in India may not constitute an emergency.

After I finished reading that Indian paper, I turned to one drafted by EFPIA itself in September last year and marked “confidential”. The latter document outlined a number of “priority issues” for European pharmaceutical firms trading with India. Not one word of concern was expressed about the dismally low levels of medical treatment in the country.

Another email by the diligent Louis-Nicolas Fortin underscored that the “overall, top-most priority for our industry is to ensure commitments to introduce effective and significant regulatory data protection” in India. Regulatory data protection – also known as data exclusivity – is a means of forbidding makers of generic drugs from using information that the “originator” of a medicine hands over to the authorities when registering that product.

In a recent interview with medical journal The Lancet, India’s trade minister Anand Sharma stated there is “no question” of accepting data exclusivity in the free trade agreement he expects to sign with the EU later this year. To allay Indian fears, Karel de Gucht, the Union’s current trade commissioner, claimed in May that “we’re not asking for data exclusivity, we’re just not”. It is difficult to take his assurance seriously as some versions of a proposed trade agreement drawn up by Brussels officials were definitely aimed at restraining India’s generics industry – a leading supplier of low-priced medicines to Asia and Africa.

The batch of correspondence illustrates that EFPIA’s bludgeoning is by no means confined to India. In 2009, it reacted with horror to the idea that a data exclusivity provision which the EU wanted to insert into a trade agreement with Colombia and Peru would allow some flexibilities for public health reasons. According to the lobby group that “would set a precedent of a much weaker standard” of intellectual property than the one it coveted.

Back in 2003, a study carried out for the European Parliament named EFPIA as one of the most effective corporate interest organisations in Brussels. No doubt, it was proud with that recognition. But it’s disgraceful that its success depends on restricting medical treatment to the rich.

·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 19-25 June 2011

Cruel and cunning: Van Rompuy's true face

Conspiracy theorists make me laugh. So when I’m in need of comic relief, I occasionally check out the website of Jim Corr, knowing that its contents are a lot more entertaining than the music of his banal pop group The Corrs. For a number of years, Corr has been spouting pseudo-scientific gobbledegook in an attempt to persuade the gullible that man-made global warming is a hoax and that the collapse of the World Trade Centre wasn’t actually caused by the planes flown into it.

Just because conspiracy theorists are nearly always wrong doesn’t mean everything they say should be dismissed. A dedicated bunch of researchers and bloggers have made it their task to follow the activities of the Bilderberg Group, that bunch of businessmen and politicians which meets in top secrecy on an annual basis. Some of these researchers – like the Italian MEP Mario Borghezio – belong to the extreme-right and should be denounced as racist opportunists. Yet while warnings about the Bilberbergers wanting to create a new world government might be far-fetched, there are solid reasons to be wary of what they are up to.

Any club of the wealthy and powerful which seeks to avoid scrutiny is by definition a threat to democracy. And so it is correct that questions were asked about why Herman Van Rompuy dined at a Bilderberg event near Brussels shortly before he was appointed the first full-time president of the European Council in November 2009. If nothing else, his attendance at the exclusive gathering indicates he is more eager to please Goldman Sachs and Shell than the 500 million mere mortals who live in the EU.

Van Rompuy’s behaviour since taking up office further signals that equality is not high on his list of concerns. Even though he trousers €25,000 per month – more than Barack Obama’s salary – he has the insolence to argue that the wages paid to ordinary workers should be kept under control. In a paper he prepared recently in tandem with José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission chief, Van Rompuy advocates that a system should be put in place whereby wage levels can be reduced if they are viewed as inimical to “competitiveness”. The two overpaid men also hope their system will lead to a higher retirement age.

Reading their plan, I was half expecting it to be titled “A Modest Proposal”. For it bears similarities to the thinking behind Jonathan Swift’s 1729 tract of that name, which recommended that the poor should eat their own children. The key difference, of course, is that Swift was being satirical, whereas the pair of unelected presidents are deadly serious.

It is instructive that their “modest proposal” focuses on the cost of labour. This illustrates that they are only interested in cutting the pay of the average worker, not the exorbitant salaries and bonuses offered to their Bilderberg buddies. And isn’t there something sadistic about how mainstream politicians are so fixated on raising the retirement age? The fact that people are living longer than ever before is one of Europe’s most awesome achievements. But instead of celebrating it, our rulers talk about people who manage to avoid kicking the bucket as a “pensions time-bomb”? Why shouldn’t we be able to draw down our pensions at 65 (or even earlier) and look forward to a lengthy and healthy retirement?

Visiting Budapest in December last, Van Rompuy paid a clumsy tribute to the Hungarian writer Sándor Márai. It was fitting, he said, that Márai had spent time in 1920s Frankfurt meditating on whether there were some intellectuals who identified more with Europe than with their own home countries, given that the German city now hosts the European Central Bank. According to Van Rompuy, the ECB is “the institution at the heart of Europe’s new political identity”.

Is that what Europe amounts to: a vast landmass controlled by a bank? If that’s true, then European citizens need to pay attention to the battle for labour rights in Wisconsin and start demanding back the powers we have ceded to a pin-striped cult.

Jean-Claude Trichet – the ECB head and another Bilderberger, as it happens - has been echoing Van Rompuy. Earlier this month, Trichet told EU governments that the “priority must be to enhance wage flexibility”. In layperson’s terms, that means the working poor should be made poorer.

Economics derives from the Greek term “oikonomia”, which means management of a household. No head of household would be satisfied if the price of keeping costs low was that everyone in the family was miserable. Van Rompuy should be ashamed of himself, then, for using a trip to Bucharest last month to say he is “delighted that Romania has turned the corner economically”. Under pressure from the EU and the International Monetary Fund, Romania has introduced some of the cruellest cuts in Europe recently. Public sector wages have been slashed by 25% and – contrary to the rosy picture painted by Van Rompuy – Romania remains in severe difficulty.

Nigel Farage, the idiotic MEP with the UK Independence Party, provoked an uproar in 2010 when he alleged Van Rompuy had “the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk”. Hurling insults based on how somebody looks is unbecoming of a politician. And besides, Van Rompuy is no low-grade bank clerk. He is a right-leaning ideologue with a lot of influence. And he is using that influence to cause huge pain in the real world.

·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 13-19 March 2011