The fate of a small but flourishing telecommunications R&D company in Brittany, western France, is yet one more example of a takeover where financial interests are allowed to trample over all other concerns. At the end of this month, the 170 employees of Renesas Design France are due to laid off and the company closed down after its purchase by a US semiconductor firm which is transferring all of the French company’s numerous hi-tech patents and know how abroad. “Fifteen years of investment, research and development, of collective know-how, of aid from the state and local authorities have gone up in smoke,” said one staff representative. “It is an indescribable waste. We are going to lose skills that may take decades to recover.” Martine Orange reports.
The international police cooperation organization Interpol earlier this year entered into an agreement with the world’s largest pharmaceutical firms for a joint programme to halt the circulation of counterfeit drugs, for which the firms will pay Interpol 4.5 million euros. But the backdrop to what may appear a laudable exercise to crack down on bogus drugs that yearly claim hundreds of thousands of lives is the drugs industry’s campaign against the production of low-cost generic medicines in emerging economies, and which provide a lifeline to many in poor countries. The relationship between French drugs giant Sanofi and Interpol raises further questions about the deal. Has Interpol become a tool for the pharmaceutical giants to maintain a stranglehold on access to medicines? This investigation by Mathieu Martinière and Robert Schmidt is published jointly by Mediapart, monthly magazine Lyon Capitale and German weekly Die Zeit.
In April this year, the supervisors of a strawberry farm in Greece opened fire on a group of immigrant workers who had demanded to be paid their salaries which had been withheld for six months. The shooting left 33 Bangladeshi workers wounded (picture), eight of them seriously hurt. It also revealed the dire conditions in which thousands of immigrant workers live in Greece, underpaid and often undeclared, with little or no possibility of escaping their exploitation in intensive farming businesses. Charalambos Kassimis is a professor and research director of rural sociology with the Athens University of Agriculture. In this interview with Amélie Poinssot, he explains the rural evolution which created the need for foreign labour, and details how many migrants became trapped in an organised "state of slavery" made possible by a “law of silence” enforced by politicians.
