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
Image courtesy: dreamtimedotcom
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