Readings 169-210

The main ideas I got from the readings were:

• The Trade-Related Investment Measures attempting to reduce “performance requirements” imposed on foreign investment by host government. The point of the TRIMs is to secure investor rights at the expense of domestic development measures and also enhance conditions for transnational investment by reducing the friction of local regulation. I found two recent examples of Trade Related Investment Measure happening in Brazil and India.
• Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights is defined by the WTO as "rights given to persons over the creator an exclusive right over the use of his/her creation for a certain period of time." There is lots of arguments about this idea, specially when it comes to bio-diverse and generic. The problem is that, corporations usually patent genetic material obtained from Southern countries without any payment, and then turns it into a commodity such as a medicine, charging a fee for use of the genetic resource in local production, even to the country where the material was originated. Some people like to call this appropriation of genetic material by foreigners as biopiracy. The books case study on page 176 talks about the production of generic antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV/AIDS patients and how Brazil has been producing generic medicines even before the TRIPS agreement in 1996. I also found a very recent article on how Brazil is no longer allowed to produce and exports HIV generic medicine while India is now responsible for producing 3 different types of generic. Brazil and other countries like China, Mexico were excluded for being considered "Middle Class" countries.

• The characteristics of globalization as a project: The main ones are outsourcing, displacement, informalization and recolonization.
  

1. Outsourcing it involves the relocation of goods and services production as a cost-reduction strategy and a means to increase operational flexibility of an organization. On page 193 the author talks about how outsourcing the public health system to a private health system, which maintain the public system inefficient. Like access to health care for the poor shrinking, outsources and cutbacks in public sector budgets reducing preventing programs. Like in Brazil for example with the reemerged dengue fever epidemics. Outsourcing is not only a corporation practice, government outsource services contracts to reduce public expenditure and privilege the private sector.
2. Displacement, automation and/or outsourcing of work sheds stable jobs and where redundant workers cease rotating into new jobs. Agriculture is the main source of food and income for the majority of the world's poor, more than half of the south population is agrarian. Agricultural tends to be very important for women, who have the main responsibility for feeding their family. But what we can see today is that economic integration in agriculture does not help nations to import cheap food and solve the hunger issue. Most farmers in poor countries can not sell their own farm products on the markets because of cheap imports from Europe, Canada and the U.S..

• Labor the new export: The author talks about the circulation of labor and people looking for new opportunities weather they are legal, illegal or slave/bonded labor. The main difference between colonialism migration and today's migration is that big part of the displaced persons are women and children. In fact most of these women in migration are part of a sad reality, human trafficking which is the fastest growing form of labor in today's market and also the leading human rights violation.

Human Trafficking: Retrieving Women and Children from Modern Day Slavery from abolishslavery on Vimeo.