Shopping on the red market - Complete report about human body parts trafficking

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Harriet Fitch Little and Vandy Muong

In 2011, the journalist and author Scott Carney popularised the evocative phrase "the red market": the sometimes legal (but more often not) trade in human body parts. It’s a business, he says, with which people feel fundamentally uncomfortable – evoking some sense that "the body should not be a mere assembly of spare parts", as Al Gore put it in a 1984 address to the US Senate.

For decades now, people have found ways to make money through simple "red market" sales in Cambodia. Common options include selling hair (legal) and blood (outlawed in 1991, and increasingly uncommon).

Last year, Cambodian courts handed down the country’s first conviction for organ trafficking, in a case which saw at least three men persuaded to cross into Thailand to have a kidney removed.

A man displays a scar from kidney removal surgery. Heng Chivoan

A US company evocatively named Ambrosia Labs in the past few months started paying 10 women in Stung Meanchey to have their breast milk pumped, packaged and shipped to the US.

And as the Kingdom’s medical facilities have improved, it’s opened even more new avenues for what some deem to be exploitation.

According to Carney, author of The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers and Child Traffickers the conditions necessary for a sophisticated "red market" to flourish are simple.

read more: http://www.phnompenhpost.com/post-weekend/shopping-red-market