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Globalization: War by other means
(Monday, May 24, 2004 -- CropChoice news) -- Ryan White, rabble.ca, 05/19/04: Ryan White: Much of the work that you have done in India has centred around
the protection of seeds. Why have seeds become a symbol of resistance? Vandana Shiva: There are two reasons why, for us, seeds have become a symbol
of resistance. The first is because we are literally within the midst of the
third industrial revolution. The first was around mechanization and the
combustion engine and that was what led to colonialism, slavery, control
over the cotton trade. The second industrial revolution was a chemical
revolution and that substituted safe products that nature gave us and had
been evolved over millennia with hazardous chemicals without assessing what
the hazards of those chemicals were. We are now into the biotech era, where life itself is being industrialized
and quite clearly life beyond the control and reach of corporate
manipulation and monopolies becomes the freedom that has to be defended.
That’s why the seed becomes the embodiment of resistance. RW: You have described intellectual property rights and the agreements that
protect them such as the Trade Rules on Intellectual Property Rights
Agreement (TRIPS) as a new colonialism. What kind of an impact have they had
on the developing world? VS: Older patent laws were around industrial innovation; they had very
clearly defined boundaries, very clearly defined exclusions, very clearly
defined limitations. The World Trade Organization (WTO) has imposed on the
world an intellectual property regime linked to trade, even though
intellectual property has nothing to do with trade. Therefore, they were
forced to put the prefix “TR” before “IP” to drive it into a free trade
treaty and thus the TRIPS agreement under article 27.3 B literally forces
countries to start patenting life beginning with genetically modified
organisms. But the floodgates are now open and this is an imposition, a coercion; it
has ended up colonizing life and the Third World in a number of ways. First,
that which belongs to us — our basmati, our neem, our wheat — is now being
patented by Ricetec for basmati, WR Grace for neem and Monsanto for an
ancient Indian wheat variety, while they push on Canada genetically
engineered wheat. The second way it colonizes us is by making the very vital needs of
production, basic needs — the seed, agriculture, biodiversity — controlled
by literally three to four gene giants. We are reaching a stage where it is
just like when the British tried to control the entire textile trade of the
world and had to destroy India's tremendous textile production in order to
sell us machine-made textiles while they controlled our land and the land in
the United States to grow cotton and they did so under slave conditions. In the very same way, under the new bio-colonialism, our genes, our seeds,
are being used to control the production, to collect royalties from us for
what belongs to us, and this has started to push thousands of Indian
peasants to suicide. The control over the seed is a genocidal act; 25,000
Indian farmers have had to take their lives because of unpayable debts — if
everything that was yours has to be bought from someone else, quite clearly
everyone's life becomes indebted. RW: A common myth is the idea that more technology equals more progress.
What's wrong with this logic? VS: More knowledge and more science would equal more progress because we
would act more responsibly, we would know much more about what our
interventions in the fragile web of life are doing. We would take steps that
would improve the well-being of all — the well-being of other species, the
well-being of the producers, of the farmers and the well-being of those who
consume the produce of agriculture. When technology becomes the optic and measure for progress, technology ends
up being defined as an end, but it is merely a means. By changing the level
of means to an end, the size, the magnitude, the complication, the bigness,
the pulling capacity of technology starts to become a measure of progress
even though on ecological and human indicators more control over people's
lives, more destruction of freedom, more destruction of the environment and
technologies that do that, would actually be assessed as regression.
RW: How is ecology linked to other social justice movements? VS: Both women and nature have been “the subjugated others.” They have been
rendered invisible, they have been rendered inert, they have been rendered
into purely raw materials to be extracted. Creation and production have been
located somewhere else, largely in capital controlled by men. That is why I call the system that simultaneously dominates over nature and
women the “capitalist patriarchy.” The connection between feminism and
ecology is basically reclaiming the creativity of nature, reclaiming the
creativity and productivity of women. Even today, 70 per cent of the food
production in the world is taking place through women's labour. I would
imagine that 90 per cent of food processing in the world, where there is
good food still and not the industrial non-food and industrial waste
products that are sold as if they are food, is in the hands of women. That creativity is being ignored. A lot of reports on globalization talk
about how societies like India have only one per cent processing, as if we
are all living in forests collecting beautiful, nourishing fruits. No, we
are engaged in creating tremendous diversity in our crops and in our food
culture, but that is all an invisible domain of nature and women. We want to
reclaim that creativity and that productivity because society needs it. We
don't want to do it purely as our own liberation, because we believe the
liberation of other species, the liberation of men, the liberation of
society across the board and of nature is tied to being able to notice those
amazing zones and spaces of creativity. RW: You have described globalization as war by other means. This coming
January will be the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the World
Trade Organization (WTO). What kind of an impact has globalization had on
the world? VS: In Cancun [at the most recent meetings of the WTO], a fellow farmer from
Korea, Mr. Lee [Kyang Hae], took his life and on the placard that he was
carrying when he stabbed himself was written, “WTO kills farmers.” I am undertaking for the National Commission of Women in India a government
status report, a study on the impact of globalization on women and one of my
field workers has just sent me a report with an interview with a woman
totally unconnected to me. She hasn't read anything that I have written. She
is living in a remote farm in Karnataka, in an area where people were
prosperous growing spices, prosperous growing tea and coffee, and this woman
has said “the WTO is killing us.” The reason the WTO is becoming genocidal and globalization is war by other
means is because honest, hard working people are being robbed of their very
option to live and all their options of livelihood. We are not talking about
a metaphorical denial of life, we are talking about real genocide. There are
25, 000 Indian farmers who have lost their lives in the last couple of
years. That's just the tip of the iceberg. In these public hearings that I
am doing for the National Commission in village after village, women come up
to me and talk about how the new trade regime has distorted prices and wages
so much that you can't make a living. Women are being pushed into
prostitution. To me this is war. RW: Much of your work has been done on a local level, working with farmers
in India. What is the importance of local democracy and economic
sovereignty? VS: There are a number of reasons why local resistance is the most important
resistance; after all, our embodied lives, the places where we live and die
and love and cry is the local level. It is in the webs of relationships with
nature, with a particular place on earth, with particular trees and streams
and groundwater and wells with particular communities. That is where the consequences of globalization are felt and that is where
ordinances are best shaped. Globalization allowed a myth to be created that
there was a global world through which new growth and new progress could
happen. You could ignore who controls that global marketplace —l that it was
a global corporation; you could ignore the institutions that they were
making for themselves — the WTO, the World Bank and IMF. That they were
neutral, that they were really about benefiting the south, the poor. But the most important part about globalization was that it has robbed the
very life of the local. It robbed democracy from the local. For example, in
the issue of water, a local stream can best be protected by a local
community. It had to be the local women of Plachimada, and Kerala who had
the courage and guts to stand in front of Coca Cola for two whole years.
April 22 will always be an anniversary for me. It was when I gave my
commitment to help them every day of my life until we threw that company
out. It was that local resistance of women which called Coca Cola a thief because
it was stealing five million litres daily and leaving a water famine in a
region that had never had water scarcity. That is why we need local
resistance. We need creation and a reclaiming of democracy at the local
level. That is the change that is happening, that is the other world that is
being built. RW: What challenges lie ahead and are you optimistic for the future? VS: You know the reason that I am really optimistic about the changes that
are being made? It's not just because the states of the south have decided
not to be collectively bullied by Europe and the United States and the
corporations that back those two major power blocs. But they were able to
say no more bullying, no more lying, no more deceitful imposition of false
prices, dumping, convoluted trade systems and call it free trade. They
called the bluff on free trade, especially on agriculture. I think even more important in my view, is the fact that across the world,
no matter where you are, you can be in Canada, you can be in India, citizens
are coming to the same common conclusion. Everywhere people are saying our
world is ours to shape and make. Our world is not for sale. We will not have
five companies controlling water. We will not have three gene giants
controlling seeds and pharmaceuticals and medicine and killing us for their
profits. We will not have two or three grain traders destroying the rightful
livelihood and earnings of hard working farmers around the world and selling
junk food and hazardous food to the consumers. I think this common consensus is amazing. You add it up, it is 15
corporations against six billion people. That is the real optimism. Ryan White is a volunteer journalist with the Ontarion, the University of
Guelph's Independent Student Newspaper. | |
