Imposed Socially Responsible Pricing on HIV/AIDS Drugs in Developing Areas

Abstract

The issue of corporate social responsibility (CSR) of firms in their host community remains an unsettled academic debate. In developing states where multinational corporations (MNCs) are dominant actors, the issue is even more contested. Most importantly, MNCs’ profit motive, their support in their home country and the inability to hold them accountable to their host community/state’s aspirations present a direct clash with their innocent appearance and pretence of CSR. But why do MNCs need to be overloaded with the host community’s problems in the form of CSR when they are paying royalties, taxes, rents and other levies to their host states? Despite the fact that recent research in this field has shown how this correlates with the profit motive of these firms, contestation by state-corporations over public goods is not decided in favour of the bottom billion. This article observes attempts by the South African government to provide HIV/AIDS drugs at an affordable price based on recommendations by the World Trade Organization-Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (WTO-TRIPS) between 1997 and 2014. By January 2014, MPCs, in their bids to effectively control the production of ARV as against generic licensing accommodated in the TRIPS agreement, started a campaign of calumny against South African government. This was aimed indirectly to influence the Proposed Draft National IP Policy of September 2013 that will make ARV cheaper in the country. The campaign was described by the South African Department of Health as a genocide attempt against South Africans.