Good news for guinea pigs! Just hours ago, the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) ordered a ban on the testing of cosmetic products or ingredients to cosmetic products on non-human animals. This comes on the heels on similar phase outs commencing in the European Union and Israel.
As countries like India and China continue to build robust and diversified economies, this kind of international standard becomes ever more important. Since Bill Clinton’s broad deregulation of international trade in the 1990s, we’ve seen a recurring pattern where corporations outsource production to countries where there are few labor or environmental laws. There has not been a similar pattern of biomedical outsourcing simply because the work is more “skilled” (i.e. you need to purchase more degrees to enter the guild system and they’re mostly for sale in the U.S.). However, as more international families with the means send their children to get educated in the U.S. while their home countries’ university systems are built up, we can expect the outsourcing trend to reach all sectors of the economy. This is to say that any rights won ultimately mean very little as long as they are constrained by national borders.
Source: ThinkProgress
What happened in India today is a great victory in the ongoing struggle against vivisection, yet it remains a single piece in a much greater puzzle. We need international solidarity around issues of human, animal and Earth rights such that there are no safe harbors for their violation. A key component of establishing such solidarity is ending the horrendous poverty, much of it an enduring colonial legacy, that forces people to take on jobs that they know to be exploitative and wrong. And if that wasn’t explicit enough, let me be clear that I am speaking of the expropriation of wealth that has become centralized in the coffers of the offensively rich and its summary redistribution amongst the impoverished.
Capitalism went global before humanity did and it’s taken us some time to catch up. But we can coordinate an international refusal to participate in its most brutal machinations. We can refuse to be pitted against each other and instead recognize that the system of organization under which we toil does not serve the cause of peace and ecological harmony. We can stand up for animals, the Earth and each other and we do it by standing against capitalism.
Posted by Alex C. 
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