Issue No. 611
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7 - 13 November 2002 Issue No. 611 International |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Corporate bio-terrorism
Vandana Shiva claims that the corporate hi-jacking of global agriculture and the patenting of life forms can still be halted claims, writes Faiza Rady
Dr Vandana Shiva is the internationally acclaimed author of Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, The Violence of the Green Revolution, Plunder of Nature and The Hi-Jacking of Global Food Supplies, among other works. A physicist, philosopher and feminist, she is also the director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology that she founded in Dehra Dun, Uttar Pradesh, India in 1982. Navdanya is a programme launched by the Foundation to conserve agricultural diversity. It places the farmer at the centre of conservation and empowers him to take control of the political, ecological and economic aspects of agriculture. Navdanya stands for the nine seeds that represent India's collective source of food security.
A prominent political activist, Shiva has been involved in the anti- globalisation movement since the early days of its inception and has captivated audiences from Seattle to Johannesburg.
Last weekend Shiva was in Cairo to attend a meeting on "The Impact of Liberalisation and Globalisation on Food Security and Bio-Diversity", sponsored by an environmental NGO: the Association for Health and Environmental Development. The following is a summary of Shiva's keynote address to the meeting.
Like everything else, corporate-driven globalisation is a relative term signifying different things to different nations and classes. In other words it all depends on very neat and well-established categories such as whether you are rich or poor. At the affluent end of the scale, the rich countries and their elite have redefined "development" to mean rampant globalisation and unrestricted growth of trade. At the other end of the spectrum, Vandana Shiva -- along with the leftist part of the movement -- claims that globalisation is destroying the earth's delicate eco-balance, annihilating entire species and systematically denying the survival of the poor. Shiva's definition of the term necessarily places her at the forefront of the poor people's struggle against corporate-driven globalisation.
This kind of globalisation has changed the world in a very fundamental way, says Shiva. While the capitalist class system has historically divided people into "haves" and "have-nots", the latter made up the workforce in expanding and labour-intensive economies. As a result, the have-nots were valued as an integral and essential part of the system.
With globalisation, however, the terms of the equation have changed radically, explained Shiva.
Capital-intensive, mechanised, computerised and hi-tech, the new economy can eliminate the majority of the have-nots from the workforce -- maybe as many as 90 per cent of them worldwide, she estimates. Under globalisation, the have-nots have become redundant. In order to deal with the modern version of the lumpenproletariat a new and very brutal system has emerged, directly assaulting and threatening the lives of millions.
Is Shiva dramatising? Not so, asserts the physicist -- brandishing her data. Shiva recounts how she went through her own shock therapy and woke up to the smell of the coffee in 1984. A most Orwellian year in Shiva's home state of Punjab as well as in Bhopal, home of the Indian affiliate of the infamous pesticide producer Cargill. In 1984, a highly poisonous gas leak at the Cargill plant in Bhopal killed 3,000 people instantly. Since then 60,000 deaths have occurred as a direct result of lethal residual gas effects.
Since 1984, a raging civil war has killed 30,000 people in Punjab. While the cause of the violence was presented as a result of ethnic and communal strife between two religious groups, Shiva realised that the truth lay elsewhere. Like Cargill in Bhopal, transnational corporations (spearheaded by Monsanto and Cargill) came to Punjab to decimate its traditional pattern of agricultural production.
The corporatisation of agriculture thus introduced poverty deprivation and violence to Punjab, India's richest state.
Although Bhopal and Punjab may on the surface look like two unrelated events, Shiva was quick to establish the connection -- namely through the chemical pesticide industry. Bhopal happened, Shiva recalls, because the transnational chemical industry sold their lethal toxins as agricultural pesticides, setting up unsafe production plants all over India. The violence in Punjab happened in the wake of the "Green Revolution", a US brainchild based on the alleged higher productivity of chemical- intensive agriculture. The Green Revolution promised prosperity and happiness to the people of Punjab, but ultimately delivered a vicious cycle of indebtedness, poverty and violence.
It all started with the myth of the "miracle" seeds, a concoction of the bio-genetic engineering industry. A patented product, the "miracle" seeds were good for only one harvest and had to be repurchased for good money from Monsanto. Promoted as "revolutionary" and producing a superior yield if planted in conjunction with the obligatory packet of chemical pesticides and subjected to increased irrigation, the "miracle" seeds were marketed as "high-yielding varieties" (HYVs).
A misnomer if there ever was one, explains Shiva, because there is no neutral measure of yield based on which the new HYV cropping systems can be established to be higher-yielding than the systems they replace.
The difficulty in evaluating cropping systems as high or low yielding is based on the complex interaction between soil, water and plant genetic resources, comments Shiva. In indigenous agriculture, cropping systems comprise a symbiotic relationship between soil, water, farm animals and plants. For example, traditional farming is based on mixed and rotational cropping systems of cereals, pulses and oilseeds. The nitrogen fixing capacity of pulses is an invisible ecological contribution to the yield of associated cereals and cannot be easily assessed.
Green Revolution agriculture, on the other hand, reduces this holistic integration to a minimalist equation of genetically uniform monocultures based on chemical and seed input. The problem being that the absence of mixed and rotational crops and the chemical/seed package introduce new variables which negatively affect the long-term productivity of soil and water systems. Intent on covering its tracks and using success fables as part of its sales pitch, Monsanto ignores such variables -- leaving them out of yield assessments.
Meanwhile the transnational corporation has a virtual monopoly on India's seed supply. Merger being the name of the game, Monsanto bought out the Brazilian giant Sementes Agrocerus and Asgrow in 1997, Cargill's seed operations in 1998, then Delta and Pine Land, and Dekalb. In India, Monsanto has bought Mahyco, Maharashtra Hybrid Company along with a few others.
Aided and abetted by the World Bank that proceeded to pump loans into the country, Monsanto successfully diverted the country's rich and diverse indigenous agricultural system to monocultures for cash crops. Based on the patented "miracle" seeds of the Green Revolution paradigm, riddled with inflated chemical pesticide input requirements and high- priced conversions to mechanised farming, Punjab's small farmers sank deep into the debt trap and are now being gradually wiped out in favour of agribusiness. This has already happened in the US, where small farmers barely make up one per cent of the labour force.
In actual fact, the cash crop dream barely materialised, commented Shiva. Prior to the Indian debacle, Africa had already demonstrated that monoculture cash crops do not produce much cash at the end of the day. As the export commodities sector expands, oversupply leads to diminishing returns and international prices slump. "Africa's disastrous food crisis is directly linked to its export-oriented cash crop agricultural policies and the consequent decline in food production," said Shiva.
Despite the bleak picture she paints, Shiva remains hopeful. Empowered by the militancy of the anti-globalisation movement, she believes that seed patents and the genetic engineering industry can be halted through collective Southern pressure on the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) will be up for renegotiation at the WTO, Shiva reminded her audience, "And it is up to us to reclaim our governments to ensure that patents will not be levied on life forms."
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