They are creating a system in which they would like to have total political and economic control, asserts Dr. Vandana Shiva, without a hint of melodrama. Shiva, a renowned Indian scientist, environmentalist, food security expert and philosopher, and a prolific author and lecturer knows what she s talking about. She is an acknowledged expert on economic globalisation and corporate rule, whose effects are becoming more and more apparent in all our lives.
But in creating that system, Shiva adds, they must necessarily create a system that is ecologically totally out of control. And that is what will absolutely undermine their enterprise.
Claims like this can no longer be dismissed as paranoid conspiracy theories, for, as Dr. Shiva later makes clear, the facts are there in black and white.
So welcome to the Brave New World of totalitarian control, 21st century-style.
H H H
For more than ten years, Dr Shiva has gathered and dispersed information on three key factors in the new world of corporate control: global free market economies, the genetic engineering industry, and the move by transnational companies to patent life.
This new totalitarianism, explains Dr Shiva, has come in the name of free trade. And so much of the English-speaking world doesn t differentiate between free trade and freedom. They just assume that if it s free trade, it must be freedom for people. But free trade is only freedom for capital; it s only freedom for corporations.
Because, literally, so much of what could be exploited has been exploited almost every river, every tree and consumers have been sold as much as they can buy in the western world, the next thing to do is to make the poor of the world depend upon corporate inputs for their very survival, and to have the creation, and the production by the poor and the people, and those who labour, redefined as an invention of corporate brilliance.
The concepts which Dr. Shiva deals in may seem dense at a first glance but they are both simple and fundamental. Dr Shiva refers to the phenomenon she has just described as biopiracy . It is accomplished through the patent-on-life directive, which has been lobbied for by commercial interests and passed by various governments including in part at least the European Union and which allows corporations to claim rights over what they call novel forms of life.
Follow this. Genetic-engineering means that corporations can genetically twiddle around with pretty much anything and then say that they ve created a novel life-form which they thereby own. However, the word novel seems to have a very broad definition, and stretches to life that has not been genetically engineered, including food crops and even human cell-lines of indigenous peoples in the third world. For example, in India corporations are currently trying to patent turmeric, meal and even basmati rice, staples of the Indian diet for millennia.
What do corporate patents-on-life a sort of parasite within the broader concept of intellectual property rights actually mean? Dr Shiva takes American corporation Monsanto s patent over their soya bean as an example.
Monsanto s patent on the soya covers not just the seed, but even the method of planting. When they have a patent on the seed, it is a recognition that they have made this thing and therefore they can exclude others from making it. Which means that a farmer who s growing soya bean cannot save the seed because it s the property of Monsanto. The effect of this is that the farmer saving seed on the farm is treated as stealing from Monsanto, because now every future generation of the soya bean seed is Monsanto s property.
The reason soya bean multiplies is because it makes itself but once you define soya bean, or Dolly the sheep, or any other form of life as the property of the company, every future generation, for the life of that patent which is 20 years and that means 20 generations of soya bean is Monsanto s property, and anyone saving seed or exchanging seed will be treated as a thief.
So they ve taken farmers, who are the original custodians of seed, and re-defined them into thieves, so that they who are the thieves can be defined as the owners. And the contracts that they are working out are basically giving them power to come and investigate farms three and four years after they have sold the seed. So I buy the seed, but Monsanto can step into my property at any time to find out if they can find some seed that I have saved? To me, that s nothing less than a slavery system, especially since it s a slavery system that s forcing farmers to not be doing what they should be doing, which is saving and exchanging seed.
The soya bean seed, Dr Shiva explains, is designed so that you will have to use Round Up [Monsanto s weed killer] to have it perform. The contracts with the farmers are such that if the farmer uses any other chemical from any other company, they are fined so that s a straight monopoly.
And companies like Monsanto are becoming monopoly structures. In the last year, Monsanto has bought up every major seed firm in the United States. It s bought up Brazil s biggest seed company, and it is trying to buy up India s biggest private sector seed company. So basically you have one company controlling all the seed supply of the world. By itself, that is a monopoly, but that monopoly is then reinforced by the legal monopoly of patenting and it s reinforced by the technological monopoly linked to the kind of genetic engineering they are doing.
Even the old capitalists didn t have ways to appropriate future value. You now have a system, through patenting of life, of the appropriation of value from the future. And that is literally a colonisation of the future.
H H H
Colonisation of the future. It is a concept that is heavy with threat. But we d better start getting used to it, because it is where the push towards a global market is taking us. The forcing open of global markets, achieved through the various international free trade agreements which are lobbied for by transnational corporations goes hand in hand with genetic engineering and patents on life. This combination, Dr Shiva believes, is seriously undermining democracy worldwide.
There s a myth that s used to immunise us about globalisation, and that is basically related to suggesting that just because the state is being made weaker with respect to corporations, that somehow citizens are becoming freer. But there s a decision-making system which has become freer for corporations, but far more restrictive for people.
Even now, in practice, people are finding it more and more difficult to get their will exercised. But the ultimate step in the disappearance of citizen democracy and citizen freedom, is this new step even beyond the GATT and beyond the World Trade Organisation, which is the treaty they re negotiating now called the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.
The MAI is a right to absolute investment. It would basically mean that if a company wanted to ensure that roads get built by cutting down the last remaining old oak forest, they d have an absolute right, and no government could interfere and if a government did, they could sue the governments.
States were created to regulate commerce. Governments haven t been very good they haven t been very honest, they haven t been very democratic but at least they were there as instruments of regulation. But the Multilateral Agreement on Investment is basically stating that governments will no longer control corporations. Corporations will be absolutely free to do what they want where they want. And neither citizens nor governments can interfere in that right to free investment.
The financial figures and perceived benefits from free trade are, Dr Shiva explains, rooted in this wonderful fiction that if you produce what you consume, you don t produce.
That s the definition, she explains. And that s why women have never been workers, no matter how much they slog, farmers have never produced until they start growing cash crops, and nature of course has been absolutely dead and inert, because it maintains itself. What happens in the home is not production, what happens on the farm is not production, what happens in the eco-system is not production. And if you can move that boundary, then you get production, then you get growth. If you can sell your labour to someone else you get growth; if women stop doing their own dishwashing and start becoming domestics for someone else, it s growth.
In a way that production boundary which used to bind off household and village productivity, the boundary that rendered that invisible, has now been moved all the way to national boundaries, and now every country has been treated as the household in this century. And I often joke and tell my feminist friends, we know what it s like to be sidelined but in a way the governments of the world have become like the housewives of the world. For the first time they re being treated that way you produce what your people consume, then you re not producing. Everything you produce must be sold somewhere else, and everything you need must be bought, then you are doing the right economic activity, otherwise you are being protectionist. And what could be a worse crime than being a protectionist in today s world of globalisation!
Vandana Shiva s scepticism is well-founded. But it is in the Promethern scale of the corporation s ambitions that she ultimately sees their potential weakness.
What we are going through is not merely a shift in economy, it is a political shift too, but it s even deeper than a political shift it s a cosmological shift. And it s a cosmological shift that s basically saying: the creator is the corporation, the saviour is the corporation. What we are living through is the idea that you can own other people, you can own all of life, and you can absolutely without shame say you have created it, and because you have created it you are its rightful owners, and if that is the case, then the bee that pollinates is stealing the pollen.
So when these huge corporations reach the stage where every bee, and every grass, and every farmer is viewed as a threat, I think they ve really got themselves into a corner.
H H H
All this may sound bleak, but Vandana Shiva believes that the possibility exists for people for citizens to effectively regain control.
When Gandhi came back to India with a clear view of fighting the British, he quickly recognised that at the heart of the colonial enterprise was the control over manufacture and production, and making Indians who were the prime producers of cloth dependent on buying British textiles. So he looked for a spinning wheel, and found an old woman to teach him.
Then he started holding classes, and he made the spinning wheel central to our independence movement, and he said it very clearly: he said, the spinning wheel by itself is nothing. It s a dead piece of wood. But put it in the hands of millions of people, and you empower them to do their own thing, and look after themselves. That is the source of freedom, that is the source of independence.
I thought if Gandhi could do that with the spinning wheel, what the spinning wheel was to the industrial revolution, seed has to be to the biotech revolution. Gandhi used the spinning wheel to become economically free. Similarly, we have to have seeds that are not under their control, we have to have agriculture that is not under their control, as a way of becoming economically free. Because you have to become economically free to be politically free.
Vandana Shiva believes that non-violent direct action so frequently used in India is integral to the practice of democracy today.
It s not just in India, asserts Dr Shiva. The French farmers tore down the Novartis seed company, and I was in the trial to support them, because I think they re doing what Indian farmers are doing, and what Gandhi did. In a way when Irish people sabotaged the field trials of Monsanto, they were doing what Gandhi did. I don t agree with the Monsanto person who said that these are criminals, these are extremists. No: they are non-violent peaceful activists who are destroying what is a threat to humanity and the future. They are not acting against the interests of society; they are expressing the deep anxieties of society at large.
They can have all the GATTS, and all the European Union treaties, and all the Multilateral Agreements on Investment, but if people withdraw their support, these systems will not be able to run.
And I think that really is the challenge withdrawing our support, not co-operating. And the first step of not co-operating is to realise that it s not the corporations that are creating the wealth of the world; nature has given it and we build on it. That wealth today that they re shoving around the $7.5 billion dollars that the seed companies are making they re doing it by stealing that $7.5 billion dollars of decentralised wealth held in every farm and every rural family, and claiming it to be of their creation, just by a direct theft and usurpation of function.
We really need to strengthen our non-violent actions while also repeatedly announcing, to ourselves first and to the world at large, that we do not give permission, we do not give support. We will not co-operate with patents on life, we will not co-operate with their MAI, and that this is not just our right even more than that, it is our highest moral duty.
The battle-lines drawn, Vandana Shiva is, finally, defiantly optimistic. Confronted with the possibility of the new corporate totalitarianism, she believes that people may begin to reclaim the freedom that is their birthright.
We ve had 500 years of colonianism. We ve had women being re-defined as second-class citizens, we ve had nature, of course, made to disappear, and I think we have a wonderful opportunity under this new pressure of corporate rule and corporate totalitarianism, where we can for the first time exercise a new freedom that is inclusive. A new citizenship where it is not just the white male property-owning class that has the right to citizenship, but all people irrespective of gender and colour, and all life.
That freedom of the earth family is coming into final collision with the freedom of capital. And I do feel very deeply that the life-force of this planet, connected with our life-force, is much more powerful than all the corrupting power of that few hundred billion dollars of fictitious money. n