The tag appears in red block letters on the front of this XL black T-shirt. The back of this design sports our beloved devil girl and URL one inch below the collar. The FTAA's agenda for intellectual property rights, i.e. patents, is to expand the WTO's TRIPs agreement into the entire Western Hemisphere.
TRIPs allows patents in one country to apply in another.
Absurdly enough, these patents can now cover even plants and animals. Patenting laws are used by huge pharmaceutical companies to monopolize treatments and medicines needed by many to survive. These corporations almost always hike prices to unseemly levels, making it impossible for the world's poor to get the care they need. Prior to the WTO's stranglehold of every market on the globe, many countries would disallow patents on certain vital medicines, in order to prevent epidemics and massive death tolls. However, now that megacorporations have final say over such matters, laws intended to maintain public health are outweighed by WTO-empowered corporate needs for more money than is possible to count in six lifetimes.