Vandana Shiva knows what most farmers do about our food: that it is good to save seed for the next season, it is good to diversify the genetic base of your crop so you get a sturdy harvest with more defenses against pests and the local climate. She knows that thousands of years of tradition need to be appreciated, remunerated, and acknowledged for the abundant diversity we have in India: from the 7,000 varieties of rice, to the many dozen varieties of the mango. She believes that the knowledge farmers and tribals have cultivated is for public benefit, and that corporate takeover of this knowledge would be a blow to their creativity.
When she found out that corporations are claiming intellectual property rights to plants and trees native to India, and that the World Trade Organization (WTO) encourages these corporations rather than upholding the rights and knowledge of farmers and indigenous peoples, she decided to do something about it.
Shiva did not like the mutant child of the marriage between globalization and agriculture: biotechnology and the patenting of life forms. She, along with Jeremy Rifkin and 200 organizations around the world, sued W.R. Grace, an American transnational corporation for the patents it holds on the neem tree for its pesticidal and fungicidal properties. Then she sued the European Union for allowing those patents on life. They lost the first case, since they could not prove that this patent was not novel. In an unprecedented move, the EU rescinded a patent on the neem on May 9. They won the case!
She also discovered that many of these corporations take the knowledge of the indigenous peoples of the world for free and manufacture their own products, which would are not necessarily environmentally friendly. They also tend to destroy the knowledge base that they were created from. Besides being an unfair transaction, this appropriation jeopardizes the safety of our food by creating food of dubious quality. Some genetically engineered food in the market today is considered safe for human consumption, but not safe for animal consumption. What happens if we eat an animal that ate that food?
Some of this crop comes with herbicides and pesticides inserted into the genes of the plant. We do not know how much pesticide went into it, and how safe it is for consumption. By employing biotechnology on crops, corporations have succeeded in making their seed infertile: they cannot be saved for the next season. What that translates into, is a compromise on the financial independence of indigenous farmers. They will not be able to save seed for the next harvest, forcing them to just where these corporations want them-in a vicious circle of paying these corporations whatever they demand for seed for the next season.
Shiva founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resources Policy in New Delhi. She serves as the Director of this organization. She also serves as a board member of the International Forum on Globalization, along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin, and is the Chair of International Forum on Agriculture. She also directs a seed conservation project, called Navdanya, in New Delhi. She has authored eleven books, including Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (South End Press, 1999), Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (South End Press, 1997), Monocultures of the Mind (Zed Books, 1993), and Staying Alive (St. Martin's Press, 1989).
For her tireless defense of the world's food supply against corporate takeover, she was recognized with the Right Livelihood Award, considered by many as an alternative Nobel Prize. She has a Master's degree in the philosophy of science, and a Ph.D. in particle physics.
Shiva sees globalization as a concept "put in place through control, but producing systems out of control," because of the dismantling of the regulatory capacity of nations and the disruption of societal and ecological processes. She specifically points to institutions and forces such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, multi-national corporations such as Monsanto and W.R. Grace, and within nations, the centralization of power away from local constituencies.
While the economics under the current spate of globalization provide "trade without barriers," they primarily serve to increase the gap between cost and profit for producers. By opening up trade frontiers, and actively fighting against labor and environmental regulation, multinational companies can go overseas, pay the workers less than they would get from local companies, and have those countries bear the burden of toxic pollution. The huge externalities involved in the economics of globalization are not known quantities and aren't considered by its architects.
It is a "disposable" culture characterized by wasteful consumption. As evidence, Shiva cites local wars, the Indonesian forest fires, and Western companies investing in "rape and run" industries in less developed countries. Growth in trade doesn't equate to growth in production, but often means destruction of natural resources. According to Shiva, the costs of globalization are being borne mainly by the poor of the Third World who have no buffers against exploitation. Extension of intellectual property rights to living organisms is the ultimate colonization by capital, and every crisis caused by globalization becomes an argument for more privatization.
Shiva warns against the privatization of nature in the hands of biotechnology. Current global systems of science and policy encourage biotechnology and the uniformity of production. Some of the impacts of international policies like Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) under the WTO are: the spread of monocultures as corporations with Intellectual Property Rights attempt to maximize returns on investments by increasing market shares. Monocultures reduce genetic diversity and increase the likelihood of an entire crop being felled by a single parasite; an increase in chemical pollution as biotechnology patents increase an impetus for genetically engineered crops resistant to herbicides and pesticides. There will be no going back to indigenous varieties, or organic produce; new risks of biological pollution as patented genetically engineered organisms are released into the environment; an undermining of the ethics of conservation as the intrinsic value of species is replaced by an instrumental value associated with intellectual property rights; and the undermining of traditional rights of local communities to biodiversity, and hence, a weakening of their capacity to conserve bio-diversity.
She also writes of "biopiracy," the theft of the indigenous and biological knowledge of the Third World. The contested cases include patents on the neem tree, basmati rice and turmeric. The U.S. has accused the Third World of piracy. The estimates of royalties lost are $202 million per year for agricultural chemicals and $2.5 billion annually for pharmaceuticals. Yet, as the team at the Rural Advancement Foundation International in Canada has shown, if the contributions of Third World peasants and tribals are taken into account, the roles are dramatically reversed: the U.S. would owe Third World countries $302 million in agriculture royalties and $5.1 billion for pharmaceuticals.
In applying her beliefs, Shiva is also fighting transnational biotechnological giants, such as Monsanto, for actively introducing their very controversial Terminator and Traitor Technology into the Third World, particularly India. Monsanto produces seed, which are a corporate dream come true: in-built obsolescence. Monsanto sold their seeds to Indian farmers using various marketing tactics, including showing videos of Hanuman and Guru Nanak with cotton in their hands, but failed to mention that they cannot grow them again, or that the farmers will have to come to Monsanto every season to buy seed for the next crop. But cotton not only costs farmers astronomical amounts, it has failed to do what it set out to do: deter the bollworm, a common cotton pest. The bollworm infestation on the genetically engineered crop was more than 20 to 50 times the level that typically triggers spraying!
Currently about 70 percent of processed foods in our supermarkets are genetically engineered, without being labeled as such. People all over the world are fighting the corporate takeover of the food on our plates in their own ways, by buying organic food, writing letters for labeling, or organizing campaigns, while Shiva is shaking the edifice of global science, economics and policy by its roots.
Ritu Primlani is the founder and Executive Director of Thimmakka's Resources for Environmental Education, a California-based South Asian environmental non-profit. www.thimmakka.org
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