Dispossession by production : the pharmaceutical industry and COVID-19 resource shortages in India and Puerto Rico

The COVID-19 pandemic severely affected India and Puerto Rico despite their crucial roles in the global pharmaceutical supply chain. This article identifies the core issue behind the pandemic's mismanagement as dispossession by production, a form of value extraction rooted in global capitalist practices supported by colonial-legal arrangements involving local states, pharmaceutical corporations, and transnational organisations. Existing scholarship has focused on the roles of the WTO, COVAX, and WHO, as well as vaccine apartheid between the Global North and South. This article examines the socio-spatial dynamics that led to the paradoxical situation where India and Puerto Rico – two key nodes of global pharmaceutical production – lacked access to essential medical equipment needed to address the pandemic. The article demonstrates how the pharmaceutical industry undermines the Global South's public health systems by engaging in extreme value extraction while denying local populations access to the very products their states manufacture.