Should not a medicine (Remdesivir) that has shown lifesaving effect in certain cases of Covid-19 be made available to all those who need it without delay? Even if Big Pharma has a patent, there are provisions in the global trade treaties that allow governments to issue compulsory licenses to such a lifesaving drug, and keep people over profit. This is[Read More...]
Writing in his book “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World”, Mike Davis describes the Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877, introduced in India when it was being ravaged by a famine, by then Viceroy Lord Lytton which “prohibited at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market-fixing of grain[Read More...]
This article seeks to elaborate an argument that I had merely touched upon, at the beginning of another article. I would like to reproduce here the relevant portions of that argument first, to facilitate its elaboration here: …I would like to present my ideological and political stand on intellectual property, which, baldly put, is that it is not, and should[Read More...]
A woman works a field near the Tanzanian town of Arusha. (AP/Karel Prinsloo)
MINNEAPOLIS– A “development assistance” initiative launched five years ago by the G8, an inter-governmental political forum of the world’s most industrialized nations that consider themselves democracies, is holding Tanzania hostage to the benefit of agribusiness and the detriment of small-scale Tanzanian farmers.
President Obama returns from East Asia empty-handed after Japan rejects bilateral agreement — but if the TPP moves forward, will it be in the interest of most Americans?
