Biopiracy! How Corporations gain control over Indigenous knowledge!

Noted environmentalist Vandana Shiva, who is also a Lyotard’ian alter-globalization advocate, in her wonderful book titled Biopiracy explores the ethical, ecological, and economic consequences of patents on life.

Vandana Shiva laments on how genetic engineering has seen the mushrooming of quite a lot of seeds and patents on life! 

She bemoans that, these corporations with ‘vested’ interests, and with the avowed objective of raking in the moolah - by adding just one new gene to the cell of a plant, they ironically claim they had invented! and created!! the seed, the plant, and all future seeds, which are now their ‘property.’

Shockingly, they have even declared seed to be their “invention,” their patented property.

Since a patent implies an exclusive right granted for an “invention,” and since it allows the patent holder to exclude everyone else from making, selling, distributing, and using the patented product, now, with patents even on seed, this implies that the poor farmers’ rights to save and share seed—something farmers have done for millennia—is now, shockingly, defined as “theft,” an “intellectual property crime.”

Advocating the fact that Life is NOT an invention to be patented, Vandana laments that, over the past decade, corporations have gained control over the diversity of life on earth and people’s indigenous knowledge through new property rights.

Now, this lovelyyy book by Vandana Shiva, titled, Biopiracy gives an incisive insight into the ecological, ethical and economic consequences of patents on life!

I’ve personally felt, after reading through all the chapters in this delightful little book, that the author puts forth the angst of an activist at the alarming day-light robbery of indigenous wisdom and knowledge by giant corporations, that deny the farmer the right to access his/her seeds for planting/seeding!

Just some interesting excerpts from this great environmentalist of our times, in a tri-part series for y’all!

Title of the Book: BIOPIRACY: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge

Author: VANDANA SHIVA

Over the past decade, corporations have gained control over the diversity of life on earth and people’s indigenous knowledge through new property rights.

There is no innovation involved in these cases; they are instruments of monopoly control over life itself. Patents on living resources and indigenous knowledge are an enclosure of the biological and intellectual commons.

Life forms have been redefined as “manufacture” and “machines,” robbing life of its integrity and self-organization.

Traditional knowledge is being pirated and patented, unleashing a new epidemic of biopiracy.

The six gene giants—Monsanto, Syngenta, Dupont, Dow, Bayer, and BASF —that take patents on seeds and biodiversity are also pushing genetically engineered seeds, such as Monsanto’s Bt cotton.

Genetically engineered crops are contaminating and polluting biodiversity, destroying the integrity of genetic resources.

Under pressure from World Bank, the Seed Policy of 1998 started to dismantle India’s robust public sector seed supply system.

Monsanto has pushed its Bt cotton into Indian agriculture through corruption and fraud at every step.

Bt cotton was commercialized in India during April 2002, with Monsanto being the major technology provider and operating through 60 regional biotech companies holding Bt licenses.

Under international agreement, Monsanto/Mahyco can charge a royalty of 20% for three years and 5% for another three years.

Even though Monsanto does not have a patent on Bt cotton in India, it collects royalties as fees for trait value.

During 2004, the farmer had to pay Rs 1,600 for a single 450 gm packet of Bt cotton seeds, which included a technology fee component of Rs 725. The intervention of state governments forced the company to slash the seed price.

However, Monsanto still makes about Rs 34 billion per year from Indian farmers.

Indigenous knowledge systems are by and large ecological, while the dominant model of scientific knowledge, characterized by reductionism and fragmentation, is not equipped to take the complexity of interrelationships in nature fully into account.

This inadequacy becomes most significant in the domain of life sciences, which deal with living organisms. Creativity in the life sciences has to include three levels:

1. The creativity inherent to living organisms that allows them to evolve, recreate, and regenerate themselves.

2. The creativity of indigenous communities that have developed knowledge systems to conserve and utilize the rich biological diversity of our planet.

3. The creativity of modern scientists in university or corporate labs who find ways to use living organisms to generate profits.

The recognition of these diverse creativities is essential for the conservation of biodiversity as well as for the conservation of intellectual diversity—across cultures and within the university setting.

Celebrating and Conserving Life

In the era of genetic engineering and patents, life itself is being colonized.

Ecological action in the biotechnology era involves keeping the self-organization of living systems free—free of technological manipulations that destroy the selfhealing and self-organizational capacity of organisms, and free of legal manipulations that destroy the capacities of communities to search for their own solutions to human problems from the richness of the biodiversity that we have been endowed with.

There are two strands in my current work that respond to the manipulation and monopolization of life.

Through Navdanya, a national network for setting up community seed banks to protect indigenous seed diversity, we have tried to build an alternative to the engineering view of life.

Through work to protect the intellectual commons—either in the form of Seed Satyagraha launched by the farmers’ movement or in the form of the movement for common intellectual rights that we have launched with the Third World Network—we have tried to build an alternative to the paradigm of knowledge and life itself as private property.

It is this freedom of life and freedom to live that I increasingly see as the core element of the ecology movement as we reach the end of the millennium.

And in this struggle, I frequently draw inspiration from the Palestinian poem “The Seed Keepers”:

Burn our land

burn our dreams

pour acid onto our songs

cover with sawdust

the blood of our massacred people

muffle with your technology

the screams of all that is free,

wild and indigenous.

Destroy

Destroy

our grass and soil

raze to the ground

every farm and every village

our ancestors had built

every tree, every home

every book, every law

and all the equity and harmony.

Flatten with your bombs

every valley; erase with your edits

our past,

our literature; our metaphor

Denude the forests

and the earth

till no insect,

no bird

no word

can find a place to hide.

Do that and more.

I do not fear your tyranny

I do not despair ever

for I guard one seed

a little live seed

that I shall safeguard

and plant again.

Image courtesy: dreamtimedotcom