Name: The red market
ISBN: 9780061936463

The red market

A shocking tour through a macabre global underworld where organs, bones, and live people are bought and sold on the red market. Investigative journalist Scott Carney has spent five years tracing the lucrative and deeply secretive trade in human bodies and body parts. The Red Market reveals the rise, fall, and resurgence of this multibillion-dollar underground trade through history, from early medical study and modern universities to poverty-ravaged Eurasian villages and high-tech Western labs; from body snatchers and surrogate mothers to skeleton dealers and the poor who sell body parts to survive. While local and international law enforcement have cracked down on the market, advances in science have increased the demand for human tissue--ligaments, kidneys, even rented space in women's wombs--leaving little room to consider the ethical dilemmas inherent in the flesh-and-blood trade.--From publisher description.

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DoodleBuggyJan 2017

Meanwhile, low-income Indians sell their kidneys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eny6D-7f_rc

The Red Market is an interesting/disturbing book on the organ trade, here's an NPR interview with the author

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/10/136931615/blood-bones-and-orga...

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sudontJun 2011

Ideally, yes. But all that does is add to the market for human flesh, and we don't need yet another section of the impoverished being milked (this time literally). Furthermore, a large swath of mothers have been trained by Nestle to distrust their own bodies, and instead buy formula. As sorry as it makes me, at least the profiteering in this method will provide correct nutrition for children.

I bought this yesterday because the author did an AMA on Reddit:

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Market-Brokers-Thieves-Traffickers...

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jashmennJun 2011

I feel the same way. Recently I've been studying up on humanitarian and developmental aid. I'm new that field and I've heard a lot of criticism about how "aid doesn't work" and so on. I recently learned about the Poverty Action Lab [1] which focuses on using data to discover what "works" in aid.

Fwiw here are four books on my reading list:

* Making Aid Work & Poor Economics by Abhijit V. Banerjee

* More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics Is Helping to Solve Global Poverty by Dean Karlan

* Despite Good Intentions: Why Development Assistance to the Third World Has Failed by Thomas W. Dichter

* The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers

Some outstanding questions I have:

* I've read there is a "negative correlation with success" when many of the major international aid organizations get involved (world bank, etc) [2]. Is this because they only take on really hard problems or is it because the organizations actually make the situation worse?

* Everyone is going gaga over micro-credit. Is it really helpful for getting folks out of poverty or are we just bringing america's bad debt habits to the third world?

* What can I do to help reduce human suffering in the world? (e.g. How can I end human trafficking, provide clean water, protect ethnic groups from genocide [rwanda etc.])?

[1] http://www.povertyactionlab.org/

[2] http://www.globallawbooks.org/reviews/detail.asp?id=234

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