The Broken Village: Coffee, Migration, and Globalization in Honduras

[Excerpt] This book describes how people cope with rapid social change. It tells the story of the small town of La Quebrada, Honduras, which, over a five-year period from 2001-2006, transformed from a relatively isolated community of small-scale coffee farmers into a hotbed of migration from Honduras to the United States and back.1 During this time, the everyday lives of people in La Quebrada became connected to the global economy in a manner that was far different, and far more intimate, than anything they had experienced in the past. Townspeople did not generally view this transformation as a positive step toward progress or development. They saw migration as a temporary response to economic crisis, even as it became an ever more inescapable part of their livelihood. The chapters that follow trace the effects of migration across various domains of local life — including politics, religion, and family dynamics — describing how individuals in one community adapt to economic change. This is not a story about an egalitarian little Eden being corrupted by the forces of capitalist modernization. La Quebrada\u27s residents have lived with social inequality, violence, political conflict, and economic instability for generations. As coffee farmers, their fortunes have long been tied to the vicissitudes of global markets. However, the social changes wrought by migration presented qualitatively new challenges, as a functioning local economy became dependent on migrants working in distant places such as Long Island and South Dakota who lived in ways that most people in La Quebrada struggled to comprehend or explain. The new reality of migration created a sense of confusion that was especially strong in the early stages of La Quebrada\u27s migration boom, when communication between villagers and migrants was rare. The decline of coffee markets and the rise of the migration economy happened so quickly and chaotically that people struggled to understand, evaluate, and give meaning to the changes they wereexperiencing. Therefore, migration was experienced as sociocultural disintegration in 2003-2005, when the bulk of the research for this study was conducted

Compulsory Licensing of Patented Pharmaceutical Inventions: Evaluating the Options

In this Comment, the author traces the relevant legislative history pertaining to compulsory licensing of patented pharmaceuticals from the TRIPS Agreement of 1994 to the 2003 waiver to, and later proposed amendment of, article 31, which enables poor countries to obtain needed medicines from other countries that possess manufacturing capacity. The Comment then evaluates recent, controversial uses of the relevant legislative machinery as viewed from different critical perspectives. The Comment shows how developing countries seeking access to esential medicines can collaborate in ways that would avoid undermining incentives to innovation and other social costs attributed to compulsory licensing. It ends by defending the legality of recent measures taken to promote public health in developing countries, and by reminding developed countries that unilateral retaliation against such measures is demonstrably illegal under WTO foundational law and jurisprudence

Database Protection in a Global Economy

In 1996, a database treaty that the European Commission had put forward, in connection with the WIPO negotiations on transmissions in cyberspace, ultimately failed to win the support of other regional groups. Since then, the inability of the United States Congress to enact any form of database legislation has stymied further multilateral undertakings on this topic. This impasse may soon be broken, however, owing to the change of Administrations and to the appointment of new committee chairmen in the United States House of Representatives. This article will discuss the prospects for an international regulatory framework for non copyrightable databases in the light of recent developments in the United States. Part 2 will locate the database problem within the larger context of international intellectual property protection, and it will demonstrate why the European Commission’s 1996 Directive on the legal protection of databases represented a radical departure from basic tenets of the classical intellectual property system handed down from the nineteenth century. Part 3 will compare the existing E.U. model of database protection with the two proposed models currently under consideration in the United States, from which any compromise formula is likely to be drawn. It ends with some reflections on the deeper legal and economic implications of these proposals. Part 4 will then explore the implications for the international intellectual property system likely to arise if the U.S. adopts a model of database protection that differs significantly from that of the E.U. It proposes an umbrella treaty to bridge the gap between high and low protectionist models. While a low protectionist outcome in the United States is by no means certain at the time of writing, a careful consideration of ways and means to reduce friction between countries that opt to provide different levels of protection in the global marketplace seems merited at the present juncture

Compliance of Canada’s Utility Doctrine with International Minimum Standards of Patent Protection

This article analyzes the Canadian court case of Eli Lilly v. Novopharm and the utility doctrine in Canada, and international standards of patent protection including TRIPS and NAFTA. The ‘‘promise of the patent’’ doctrine in Canada seeks to ensure that firms do not obtain a legal monopoly on the basis of speculative claims about increased utility — especially claims about therapeutic efficacy — that were unsubstantiated at the time of filing. Under this test, some of Eli Lilly’s patented pharmaceutical products have been invalidated retroactively