Access to Medicines in Developing Countries. Implications of Pharmaceutical Industries’ Policy on the Human Right to Health and Corporate Social Responsibility. A case study on Novartis.

Companies need to make a profit to survive. However, as Michael Moore stated in the documentary movie The Corporation, the question is “how much is enough?” Not only is the pharmaceutical industry consistently one of the most profitable industries, but also those pharmaceutical firms that ranked among the Fortune 500 companies (Public citizen 2002), noting that the pharmaceutical industry ranked first in all three measures of profitability due to higher pill prices, higher levels of advertising, and less spending on R&D (Citizen n.a.).
The question is not, “how much is enough to satisfy human ambitions, not to say greed?”, because the realistic answer to this would be, “it is never enough”. The question, in my view, is how much is enough to be able to do both while making a profit, which every business needs to do, and behaving in a social responsible way, which should be as self-evident as making a profit. This is why CSR activities which really matter and which every human being and every company can be held responsible for are not philanthropic, however effective and helpful they might be. Donations, social projects (e.g., building schools and hospitals), community projects, volunteerism etc. lay within the duties of governments and NGOs, and are therefore only a social add-on for companies and used not for purposes of social responsibility but to raise the company’s reputation, etc

Arguably this is one of the reasons why CSR has its ambiguous and sometimes negative touch. Moreover, donations do not create reliable sources of supply over the long term and do not help develop domestic capacity. Both strategies allow pharmaceutical companies to maintain control of the cost, supply, profits, and manufacturing capacity of essential medicines (Lazzarini 2003).
Oxfam (2007) agrees by finding that there is still a too heavy emphasis on donations at the expense of exploring other ways to meet the access challenge. According to the NGO, these programs often target only a relatively small group of people, and sometimes, they can undermine clinical standards. Critically, donations create chaos in the market for low-cost medicines, as they prevent accurate quantification of needs. They undermine market competition because generic companies cannot compete with free drugs and are unable to predict demand (Oxfam 2007).