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How is it that drug companies can make huge profits from vaccines while people in the global South die from lack of access to medical care? How does the global regime of intellectual property rights enable this inequality? And what is the role of Bill Gates in defending this system?
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Dear reader,
Between 13 - 17 March, a TNI delegation participated at the 66th session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in Vienna, the UN’s principal forum on drug policy.
TNI side-event with TNI staff Martin Jelsma, Sylvia Kay, and Pien Metaal, et al.
We organised a side-event together with several other NGOs and the governments of Brazil and Colombia on ‘Aligning Drug Policy with Environmental Protection’. During the event, panellists spoke about the negative consequences of drug control policies for the environment, biodiversity, and people, and put forward recommendations for an environmental harm reduction approach.
Read more about this issue in TNI’s report Prohibited Plants.
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By Tom Blickman, Martin Jelsma, John Walsh, David Bewley-Taylor
In its report for 2022, the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), the “independent, quasi-judicial expert body ” that monitors the implementation of the UN drug control conventions, focuses on the legalisation of cannabis. Each year, in the first chapter of its annual report, the Board addresses a specific issue it deems important for drug policy discussions and the functioning of the international drug control system. This year, because as many have noticed, a decade after the first state legally regulated adult recreational cannabis “a growing number of States have adopted policies that permit the use of cannabis for non-medical and non-scientific purposes”.
Read more
By Jun Borras
This essay by Jun Borras is written as a laudatio for La Via Campesina (LVC) on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary. LVC was formally organized as a transnational agrarian movement organization in 1993 – exactly thirty years ago this year. Today, in 2023, it has 182 member organizations in 81 countries, and claims to represent more or less 200 million poor peasants, small and medium size farmers and landless rural laborers.
Read more
By Phyllis Bennis
February 15th, 2003, saw the largest peace demonstration the world had ever witnessed. 14 million people stood up against the Iraq war. Twenty years on, Phyllis Bennis shares her personal memories of the protest. What were the successes and struggles of the organisers, and what can today’s peace movement learn from them?
Watch video
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How is it that drug companies can make huge profits from vaccines while people in the global South die from lack of access to medical care? How does the global regime of intellectual property rights enable this inequality? And what is the role of Bill Gates in defending this system?
In this interview, Dr. Mohga Kamal-Yanni argues that vaccine inequality is not a market but a policy failure. From the HIV crisis in the early 2000s to the recent pandemic, the public has repeatedly shouldered the risk for the development of live-saving medicines while private corporations have reaped obscene profits. How can we break Big Pharma's power and develop an alternative health system?
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Date 13 April 2023 , 18:00 - 20:00 CET, Location: ZOOM
A panel with Cat Boyd, Daniel Chavez and Vivek Chibber.
Register here
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Tom Nairn, 1932-2023
Tom Nairn was one of TNI’s earliest fellows in the 1970s. Tom passed away on 21 January 2023 at the age of 90. Our comrades at openDemocracy, where he frequently published, have an oversight of this recent works. Nairn was one of the world's most important theorists of nationalism; British and Scottish nationalism in particular. His 1977 book 'The Break-Up of Britain' was described by openDemoracy's founder Anthony Barnett as "the most important book on British politics in the last half century". In the essay below, first published in 2020, Adam Ramsay drew on Nairn's ideas to argue for a radical rethinking of the British state. It contains what we believe to be Nairn's last interview. You can also read two decades of Nairn's writing for oD here.
And you can find two other posts on Tom Nairn by Ronald Young here and here.
With the deaths of Mike Davis and Tom Nairn, the international left has lost two of its most original and far-sighted thinkers—and NLR, two outstanding contributors, whose signature theses profoundly enriched the thought-worlds of the journal. As prologue to fuller commemoration of each, Perry Anderson reflects on what both have meant for the Review.
According to data on global military spending published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), global military expenditure continued to grow in 2021, reaching an all-time high of two-point-one trillion US dollars after seven years of spending growth. In the second year of the pandemic, world military spending increased by zero-point-seven percent in real terms.
Read more about these appalling figures, and how Western leaders have justified them.
'It is so important to push for a negotiated solution in the Ukraine: things can easily run out of control, and a limited war can turn into an unlimited war'
Corporations are using trade and investment treaties to handcuff global and national efforts to save the planet.
Commodity Frontiers is the Journal of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative (CFI). Edited by a group of scholars and researchers from various disciplines and organizations in the CFI Network, the Journal explores the history and present of capitalism, contestation, and ecological transformation in the global countryside. The point of departure is the commodity frontier concept, which describes sites and processes of the incorporation of resources into the expanding capitalist world economy; resources like land, raw materials, knowledge, and labor. In the past 600 years, commodity frontier expansion has been characterized by ecological and distributional conflicts; the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous peoples and other groups; racialization and othering across colonial, settler colonial, and postcolonial geographies; and the production of class, gender, race, and other inequalities.
Read their latest journal: Waste Frontiers – Issue 4
New Lines is an American magazine for the best ideas and writing from around the world. They specialize in long-form essays and reportage that aim to make the past relevant and the present grounded in history.
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