Plantations: Western Profits, African and Asian Conflicts

On Wednesday 27 May, Socfin is holding its general meeting with its two main shareholders present, the Fabri family and the Bolloré group. At the same time, from Cambodia to Côte d’Ivoire, local communities deprived of their lands by the Socfin plantations are mobilised, demanding their rights.

Peasant assemblies oppose the shareholders' assembly in Luxembourg. 

Today, 27 May, 300 people from six affected villages are gathering to protest Socfin's failure to respect its commitments in Mondulkiri, Cambodia, while 250 representatives of 13 villages affected by the Socfin plantation in Côte d’Ivoire are also mobilising. At the same time, in the Bel-Air Hotel in Luxembourg, the shareholders of Socfin are holding their annual general meeting. The communities are counting their losses, while the shareholders tally their profits. 
Recently, on 16 May, 300 people gathered at the LAC plantation headquarters in Liberia, while 400 mobilised to blockade the Dibombarri plantation in Mbongo from 23 to 28 April. Everywhere, communities forming the International Alliance of Plantation Communities have the same demands: that Socfin give back the rights to use lands that the communities consider essential to their livelihoods, and that it stick to its commitments to compensate people according to different agreements it has signed on to.
The Luxemburgish NGOs SOS Faim with civil society platform Meng Landwirtschaft are mobilising in front of the hotel where the general meeting is taking place tomorrow, to transmit the demands of the local communities.

Socfin does not recognise the legitimacy of these movements and their representatives. 

In their official statement of 12 May the company leaders deny that these conflicts exist and insist that their plantations are «vanguards of social progress» and that they «have always acted in peaceful coexistence with the communities surrounding their facilities.» A major shareholder of Socfin (39%), Bolloré initiated a negotiation process in October 2014 but then backtracked. In a statement released 23 April, the company disavowed its responsibility stating that «we are only a non-managing minority shareholder of Socfin Group which, since more than 70 years, is majority-controlled and managed by the Belgian Fabri family».

«A model of socially and environmentally irresponsible investment»

«Bolloré cashes in its Socfin dividends all the while denying its responsability», bemoans Emmanuel Elong, spokesperson for the Alliance. «Socfin with its headquarters in Luxembourg, its offices in Switzerland, its shareholders in Liechtenchtein and its refusal to respond to plantation communities is the model of irresponsible capitalism. Against this, we have no choice but to organise ourselves, build alliances and take action to force these business leaders to respect the rights of local communities. We demand an international negotiation with Socfin and Bolloré to draw up a roadmap to resolve the conflicts.» Following the recent mobilisations, Socfin subsidiaries in Cameroon, Cambodia and Liberia have started to recognise the local communities' organisations. But corporate headquarters in Europe continue to deny their legitimacy”.

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Ebola: Big Pharma "Indifferent To Collateral Damage"

Margaret Chan, director of the World Health Organization, nailed it when she blasted the pharmaceutical industry's failure to develop an Ebola vaccine. "A profit-driven industry does not invest in products for markets that cannot pay," Chan said at a press conference last month.

Since it first surfaced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 1976, there have been 22 outbreaks, all of them in western and central Africa. Incidentally, viruses like Ebola and HIV first jumped from animals to humans in the DRC during a period of rapid deforestation at the hands of rapacious multinational timber and mining companies. Habitat loss pushed chimpanzees and bats into closer contact with humans and, eventually, became vectors for HIV and Ebola, respectively. From the perspective of free market capitalists, ecological devastation and disease epidemics are simply collateral damage with no impact on the bottom line.

A number of commentators have speculated that, had Ebola landed on US shores sooner, a vaccine would already be available. Big Pharma executives, driven by fear of contagion, would have invested in vaccine research even if it wouldn't be profitable. After a handful of domestic Ebola cases, we now see a rush to start human trials of a vaccine that was created 10 years ago, tested successfully on monkeys, then shelved for lack of a profitable market.
Clinical trials are finally on the fast track not simply owning to fear. The industry's decision to move forward was a response to intense public pressure, and, notably, financial sponsorship of clinical trials courtesy of the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies. Now that Ebola has crossed the Atlantic, Big Pharma surely sees dollar signs; in the event of an epidemic, 316 million petrified Americans will promptly roll up their sleeves. It's a great deal for Big Pharma - government foots the bill for clinical trials, and Big Pharma pockets the profits.

In short, the lack of an Ebola vaccine - and the wildfire spread of the virus - are a direct result of private-sector control over vaccine development and the absence of public health infrastructure that could have contained the outbreak.
Western Africa, like much of the developing world, has little by way of public services to compensate for the looting of its forests and mountains by multinational corporations. Those same corporations, along with Big Pharma, are indifferent to the public health catastrophe (aka "collateral damage") now unfolding.

Ebola makes for a tragic case study in the perils of profit-driven medicine, but there are other more ordinary diseases that Big Pharma has chosen to write off. For example, I have an uncommon, stubborn gastrointestinal infection that requires several rounds of a drug called Yodoxin to cure. After one course of Yodoxin, my little friends are still in residence, and I require additional rounds to permanently evict them. Alas, the drug has been discontinued for unspecified "business reasons." That leaves thousands of us to make do with less effective medications and/or cope with lifelong nausea, abdominal pain and fatigue.
The FDA explains: "FDA can't require a firm to keep making a drug it wants to discontinue. Sometimes these older drugs are discontinued by companies in favor of newer, more profitable drugs . . . FDA works to . . . mitigate drug shortages; however, there are a number of factors that can cause or contribute to drug shortages that are outside of the control of FDA." 

What's outside of the FDA's control is the same things that's outside of all of our control: capitalism.
There is no vaccine for Ebola because our economic system vests virtually all decision making in the private sector. We do so knowing that for-profit companies exist to maximize profits. It doesn't matter if they're selling medicine, gasoline, soda pop or credit default swaps - the corporations that make these products do so for one and the same reason.

Big Pharma's greed isn't some kind of aberration; it's an inherent feature of free-market capitalism: A capitalist system, by design, puts profits over people. The handful of sectors that remain under government control, such as water, highways and public schools, anticipate and deliver services that meet the public's needs (or, at least, used to). Not just wealthy people's needs or white people's needs or able-bodied people's needs but, assuming the government has not been crippled by austerity measures, everybody's needs.

On the other hand, sectors controlled by the free market serve only certain people (i.e. those who can pay) and only under certain circumstances. If market research projects insufficient demand for a product or service to meet corporate profit goals, that product or service doesn't come to be, regardless of the fact that it's vital for the health of people or the environment.

Capitalism is inimical to human health and well-being because it rolls like this: If you fit into the right market demographic and can afford to pay, you get the goods. If not, tough luck. Tough luck for you, tough luck for your community, tough luck for the planet.

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Global Malaria Fight Hampered By Profit At Any Cost

Some 60 percent of countries where malaria is endemic lack solid information about the quality of available drugs to treat the deadly disease, according to a new study.

The study, published in the Malaria Journal in April, looked at 251 reports from 104-malaria endemic countries since 1946. It found that of the 43 countries that had some information about anti-malarial quality, more than half of these, 25, had only one or two published reports available.
“Estimates of anti-malarial quality vary widely depending on the sampling methodology used, with most reports not employing rigorous scientific techniques, potentially biasing results,” said the authors of the report. “Although there are clear foci of poor quality anti-malarials, the current global situation remains unclear, poorly documented; and their impact on public health uncertain.”
This means that when attempting to reduce the number of poor quality and illicit medicines in the market, individual states are often unable to quantify the extent of the problem in their country. The report found that globally, of the nearly 10,000 anti-malarial drugs sampled, 30 percent failed quality tests.

According to the International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce (IMPACT), preparations sold as effective antimalarials often in fact contain substances such as rat poison, mercury, lead, boric acid, paint, brick dust and floor wax. Such poisons can cause kidney failure, cancer, developmental defects, strokes, high blood pressure and other health complications.
According to the Worldwide Antimalarial Resistance Network (WWARN), poor-quality antimalarial containing lower quantities of the required active ingredient increase the risk of malaria drug resistance, compounding the problem.
While it has been known for some time that there are a large number of fake and poor quality drugs on the market, “the efforts put into addressing the quality have had little tangible impact in comparison to the size of the problem” say the authors of the study, “because the programmes have mostly been slow, under-funded and fragmented.”

Challenges with jargon, patenting

Challenges related to terminology and patenting have also hampered progress in reducing poor quality antimalarial medications.
“The controversy over definitions has disabled much that could be done and the use of the unwieldy term ‘substandard/spurious/falsely labeled/falsified/counterfeit medical products (SSFFCs)’ has not helped,” noted the authors of the study, because medicine quality reports don’t standardize their terminology or use the same metrics for calculating poor quality drugs.

A member state mechanism on SSFFCs was established in 2010 to seek global solutions to tackle the distribution and trade of poor quality and illegal medications, but has so far made little progress.
“Although drug companies, nongovernmental organizations, and governments all want reliable access to safe and effective medicines, and deplore unsafe fake medicines, it is difficult to achieve agreement on action because discussions too often trespass into conflict-prone areas such as pharmaceutical pricing or intellectual property,” said Amir Attaran, professor at the University of Ottawa and one of a group of health professionals, who came together to advocate for better action against illicit medications in 2012.
As a result, in places like Kenya, ‘‘unlicensed salesmen have taken advantage of country’s post-marketing survey that has given room to smuggling and sale of drugs through porous borders to non-licensed pharmacy kiosks and clinics operated by non-professionals,’’ said Charles Maitai of the University of Nairobi’s Department of Pharmacy.
‘‘We advocate for the standardization of terminology about poor-quality medicines in order to ensure comparability of antimalarial quality findings,’’ Worldwide Antimalarial Resistance Network (WWARN), said in a statement published online.

Some progress

By lowering the cost of anti-malarial drugs, and distributing information about the quality of medications, it is possible to reduce the number of SSFFCs, and lower malaria mortality rates.
In Kenya, anti-malarial drugs are currently being provided freely in public hospitals, while in pharmacies, they are being sold at a subsidized price Sh100 (US$1.1) as opposed to the market price of Sh800 (US$9.4).
Following concerted efforts by the government to tackle the disease, the prevalence has dropped from 34 percent to 20 percent in the last five years.

To make sure the drugs meet the required standards, the government conducts periodical quality checks on the drugs stocked in various institutions. It has been training health professionals on malaria treatment to ensure that they are giving out the correct dosages to patients.
‘‘We are advocating health workers to ensure correct use of anti-malarials to minimise episodes of drug resistance. This will ensure that the drugs in use remain effective,’’ Kenya's cabinet secretary for health, James Macharia, told IRIN.

The disease accounts for 30-50 percent of all outpatient visits and 20 percent of all admissions to health facilities.
Custodia Mandlhate, the World Health Organisation (WHO) Kenya Representative, told IRIN during this year’s World Malaria Day that the gains so far realized are fragile and there is need to make them sustainable.
‘‘Should the funding stop, the gains made would be drawn back,’’ she said. ‘‘There is need for more investment by the government and donor agencies to properly combat the disease.’’


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