
Intellectual Property Rights block technology transfer and TRIPS (trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights) promote monopolies on seeds and medicines and piracy of Third World biodiversity and indigenous knowledge.
That is why we had to fight WR Grace and USDA to revoke the Neem Patent, we had to fight Ricetec to prevent them claiming our basmati as their invention. And we have successfully fought
The rules of The World Trade Organization were designed to impoverish poor people and poor countries, transform their biodiversity and water commons into corporate property so that seed multi-national corporations like Monsanto could sell us our seeds for $1 tr. per year and water giants like Suez and Bechtel could sell us our water for another trillion. And the free trade rules of agriculture are robbing Indian peasants of $1 trillion per year through falling prices because of $400 billion subsidies in rich countries distorting trade by distorting prices.
This is not just a recipe for poverty, it is a recipe for genocide. In the free trade world that Bhagwati upholds, peasants sell kidneys to pay debt for poisons, displaced rural women sell their bodies to feed their children, hospitals become centers of organ theft, and India which sold the finest fabrics and tastiest spices to the world becomes the dumping ground for the toxic wste of 9/11 and the exploded and unexploded shells from the war in Afganistan and Iraq.
Free trade is becoming a mechanism to take our wealth, our biodiversity, our minerals, our brains and give us trash and toxic in exchange. It is an exchange of "bads" for "goods". This is not comparative advantage, it is loot. Which is why we say, "Our World is not for sale".
You should see...
You should see the crap he's trying to post now! He really DOES seem to believe in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and he is getting increasingly personal. Of course I am simply deleting his stuff, but I am imagining his computer screen getting increasingly covered with his spittle as he rants and raves in a more and more frantic frenzy of hatred.
I would feel sorry for him because I know he really is simply an insecure, pathetic little fool. But I also know the damage his kind of hatred can cause. It is precisely people like him who feed into the skinhead movements around the world and it wouldn't surprise me if he has vandalized synagogues or mosques to make himself feel more like a man. He isn't just pathetic. He is dangerous as well.