The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers

Excerpt

For readers unfamiliar with the global market in human body parts, investigative journalist Scott Carney provides a shocking introduction to the world of organ brokers, child traffickers, and the many gruesome methods used to extract financial profit from the bodies of living and deceased human beings in his first book, The Red Market. Despite the growing body of academic literature on the subject of particular markets—for example, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ accounts of “transplant tourism,” Matas and Kilgour’s (2009) widely discussed report on organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners in China, and the many sensationalized media reports of organ trafficking, body “snatching,” and commercial surrogacy—more experienced readers will nevertheless be struck by the sheer variety and extent of the market that Carney describes. Unlike previous collections such as Commodifying Bodies (Scheper-Hughes and Wacquant 2002) and Body Shopping (Dickenson 2008) that have explored a variety of markets through a more complex philosophical and socio-anthropological lens, Carney’s exploration is in some ways refreshingly simple. He personally escorts readers on a journey from the back rooms of police stations and the offices of fertility clinics into the tea shops of organ brokers and the graveyards where bones rest uneasily near factories. We are invited to observe and reflect on the gritty reality of “red market supply chains” and the economies of human flesh they underpin. Unfortunately, observation and reflection are largely confined to the reader’s own efforts, as Carney offers little analysis throughout the book of the issues he so skillfully reveals and a hasty, shortsighted solution in his concluding chapter to the problem of “red” markets. …