At first sight, the outlook for the pharmaceutical industry in Latin America is very good. Demand for medicines and proprietary drugs is set to grow strongly across the region. This reflects a series of important and underlying trends – some of them demographic – which are currently evident, and which can be expected to continue to play out over the next couple of decades.
Underlying Changes Boost Medicine Demand
One of these is the growth in obesity and NCDs (non-communicable diseases). The region has traditionally suffered under-nourishment; an insufficient food intake associated with rural poverty and related forms of exclusion (including things such as limited access to safe drinking water). However, as a result of rising living standards, particularly during the decade-long commodity export boom (running up to 2012) undernourishment, while still persistent in some areas, now affects a smaller proportion of the total population than it did before. As a proportion of the total Latin American and Caribbean population, undernourishment almost halved from 12% in 2000 to 6.6% in 2016. The region did better than the global average – where 11% of the total population remained undernourished in 2016.