Spare Africa the medicine of the new colonisers
Africa at large: Spare continent the medicine of the new colonisers
Business Day (South Africa),
Business Day (South Africa),
by Temba Nolutshungu
October 8, 2007
Ever since the 19th century territorial scramble for Africa, Africans have become used to western intervention in their affairs. Decolonisation and independence was supposed to mark the end of this, and to a large extent Africans govern their countries in a sovereign way. But long after the pith helmets and starched uniforms of the colonisers have left Africa, a new breed of colonialist is emerging. These are the statist nongovernmental organisation (NGO) campaigners, who hope to save Africa from everything from genetically modified (GM) food to globalisation.
These NGOs consist of “consumer” and humanitarian groups and “development” charities, united in the belief that modern industrial civilisation, profit and competition are unethical. In their view, people, particularly those in developing countries, would be better served by the existence of comprehensive regulations and state intervention that put “equity” and the redistribution of wealth ahead of the economic dynamism that has made wealthy the west and eastern countries such as Japan and South Korea.
But despite their claims to represent the interests of the poor, only a few hundred of the several thousand NGOs registered at the United Nations (UN) come from developing countries. The vast majority are from the US. These groups have an influence that stretches way beyond their size and funding. Many poorer countries do not have the technical capacity to formulate their own policies around the provision of social services such as health, so they subcontract to bodies such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), whose mandate it is to provide impartial, scientific advice to member states.
WHO has been colonised by these NGOs, which now act as de facto policy consultants and play a big part in formulating technical and policy advice WHO gives to its member states. But despite their elevation to the policy establishment, the NGOs consistently get things, wrong. Take the example of AIDS. Health experts say the best way to tackle the pandemic is to prioritise prevention, thereby stopping the number of infections from increasing every year. Of course treatment is essential — but not to the exclusion of spending on prevention. The NGOs, however, pushed hard for most public money to be spent on drug treatment programmes for the already infected — even though the most affected countries don’t have the doctors and clinics to administer the drugs. WHO bowed to this pressure: infections continue to rise and treatment is haphazard.
A similar thing happened with malaria. For years, countries from India to SA successfully controlled malaria by spraying the insides of houses with DDT. Environmentalists and NGOs played up scientifically unsound scare stories to demonise the pesticide and pushed for WHO to stop recommending its use, which it did from the 1990s. Malaria cases soared globally. Recently, SA reintroduced DDT spraying and cases plummeted. Western NGOs have also scared European consumers away from buying GM crops grown in Africa, making it difficult for farmers exporting to the European Union to make a living.
NGOs have begun to operate at the national level, feeding statist policy advice direct to African governments. The latest frontier for this invasion of policy space is the relationship between intellectual property and public health. Activists have for many years argued that because very few drugs have been developed for a handful of tropical diseases that occur in the poorest countries, intellectual property is inherently unjust. These activists have been using this claim to push for a health research and development treaty in which bureaucrats rather than markets determine what diseases are researched. They hope that if profit is removed from the equation, we will be ushered into a magical new age in which inexpensive new blockbuster 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 in both high- and low-income countries at no cost to the taxpayer.
NGOs have now managed to initiate the beginnings of a global treaty on health research and development, which would see intellectual property standards diluted and more research done by governments. They achieved this by lobbying African governments at WHO: the similarities between the NGOs’ campaign literature and the papers of Kenya, the leading proponent of this scheme, are too many to be a coincidence.
The Kenyan government has its own reasons for promoting this scheme. It may be that it wishes to protect the interests of its own pharmaceutical industry, or it may be a politically useful way of transferring the blame for its own failures in health care provision to external bodies such as multinational pharmaceutical companies. Statist NGOs have enormous influence on public opinion, the UN, and now, it seems, on African governments, even though their proposals have been shown not to work. But before we take their medicine, we must carefully read the label. If we do not, we are likely to suffer serious and unpleasant side effects.
*Nolutshungu is a director of the Free Market Foundation.
October 8, 2007
Ever since the 19th century territorial scramble for Africa, Africans have become used to western intervention in their affairs. Decolonisation and independence was supposed to mark the end of this, and to a large extent Africans govern their countries in a sovereign way. But long after the pith helmets and starched uniforms of the colonisers have left Africa, a new breed of colonialist is emerging. These are the statist nongovernmental organisation (NGO) campaigners, who hope to save Africa from everything from genetically modified (GM) food to globalisation.
These NGOs consist of “consumer” and humanitarian groups and “development” charities, united in the belief that modern industrial civilisation, profit and competition are unethical. In their view, people, particularly those in developing countries, would be better served by the existence of comprehensive regulations and state intervention that put “equity” and the redistribution of wealth ahead of the economic dynamism that has made wealthy the west and eastern countries such as Japan and South Korea.
But despite their claims to represent the interests of the poor, only a few hundred of the several thousand NGOs registered at the United Nations (UN) come from developing countries. The vast majority are from the US. These groups have an influence that stretches way beyond their size and funding. Many poorer countries do not have the technical capacity to formulate their own policies around the provision of social services such as health, so they subcontract to bodies such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), whose mandate it is to provide impartial, scientific advice to member states.
WHO has been colonised by these NGOs, which now act as de facto policy consultants and play a big part in formulating technical and policy advice WHO gives to its member states. But despite their elevation to the policy establishment, the NGOs consistently get things, wrong. Take the example of AIDS. Health experts say the best way to tackle the pandemic is to prioritise prevention, thereby stopping the number of infections from increasing every year. Of course treatment is essential — but not to the exclusion of spending on prevention. The NGOs, however, pushed hard for most public money to be spent on drug treatment programmes for the already infected — even though the most affected countries don’t have the doctors and clinics to administer the drugs. WHO bowed to this pressure: infections continue to rise and treatment is haphazard.
A similar thing happened with malaria. For years, countries from India to SA successfully controlled malaria by spraying the insides of houses with DDT. Environmentalists and NGOs played up scientifically unsound scare stories to demonise the pesticide and pushed for WHO to stop recommending its use, which it did from the 1990s. Malaria cases soared globally. Recently, SA reintroduced DDT spraying and cases plummeted. Western NGOs have also scared European consumers away from buying GM crops grown in Africa, making it difficult for farmers exporting to the European Union to make a living.
NGOs have begun to operate at the national level, feeding statist policy advice direct to African governments. The latest frontier for this invasion of policy space is the relationship between intellectual property and public health. Activists have for many years argued that because very few drugs have been developed for a handful of tropical diseases that occur in the poorest countries, intellectual property is inherently unjust. These activists have been using this claim to push for a health research and development treaty in which bureaucrats rather than markets determine what diseases are researched. They hope that if profit is removed from the equation, we will be ushered into a magical new age in which inexpensive new blockbuster 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 in both high- and low-income countries at no cost to the taxpayer.
NGOs have now managed to initiate the beginnings of a global treaty on health research and development, which would see intellectual property standards diluted and more research done by governments. They achieved this by lobbying African governments at WHO: the similarities between the NGOs’ campaign literature and the papers of Kenya, the leading proponent of this scheme, are too many to be a coincidence.
The Kenyan government has its own reasons for promoting this scheme. It may be that it wishes to protect the interests of its own pharmaceutical industry, or it may be a politically useful way of transferring the blame for its own failures in health care provision to external bodies such as multinational pharmaceutical companies. Statist NGOs have enormous influence on public opinion, the UN, and now, it seems, on African governments, even though their proposals have been shown not to work. But before we take their medicine, we must carefully read the label. If we do not, we are likely to suffer serious and unpleasant side effects.
*Nolutshungu is a director of the Free Market Foundation.
Publicité