Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

"The Bija Satyagraha or Seed Satyagraha is the non-cooperation movement
against patents on life, genetic engineering of crops and corporate
monopolies in agriculture."
------------------

War Against Nature and the People of the South
by Dr. Vandana Shiva
excerpted from the book Views from the South:
The effects of globalization and the WTO on the Third World
edited by Sarah Anderson
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Globalization/War_Against_Nature_VFTS.html

 
Vandana Shiva is a physicist, founder and president of the Research
Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology, and one of India's leading
activists. She played a key role in the famous Chipko movement to save the
Himalayan forests and now works on behalf of India's farmers, trying to
resist the introduction of globalized industrial agriculture and
biotechnology into Indian food production. She is a member of the Board of
Directors of the International Forum on Globalization, and was a recipient
of the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the alternative Nobel Peace
Prize). Her most recent book is Biopiracy The Plunder of Nature and
Knowledge (Boston South End Press, 1997).
In this paper, Shiva describes how the transformation of peasant
agriculture in India to a globally industrialized model has reduced food
security, threatened local businesses and biodiversity, driven farmers off
their lands, and opened the door for global corporations to take over the
nation's food processing. Shiva then examines the forces driving the
globalization of agriculture, including the agribusiness giants and two of
the WTO agreements these firms have promoted the agreements on agriculture
and intellectual property rights.
---------

Supporters of globalization often claim that this process is natural,
inevitable, and evolutionary and one that is bringing prosperity and
growth, embracing us all and knitting us into a Global Village. Only by
participating in global markets, they say, can Third World people get
access to jobs and better lives. In reality, globalization is not a natural
process of inclusion. It is a planned project of exclusion that siphons the
resources and knowledge of the poor of the South into the global
marketplace, stripping people of their life-support systems, livelihoods,
and lifestyles.

Global trade rules, as enshrined in the World Trade Organization (WTO)
Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) and in the Trade Related Intellectual
Property Rights (TRIPs) agreement, are primarily rules of robbery,
camouflaged by arithmetic and legalese. In this economic hijack, the
corporations gain, and people and nature loose.

The WTO's overall goal of promoting "market competition" serves two
functions. Firstly, it transforms all aspects of life into commodities for
sale. Culture, biodiversity, food, water, livelihoods, needs, and rights
are all transformed and reduced to markets. Secondly, the destruction of
nature, culture, and livelihoods is then justified on the basis of the
rules of competition. Policy makers attack ethical and ecological rules
that sustain and maintain life, claiming that they are "protectionist"
barriers to trade. In reality, the WTO does not reduce protectionism; it
merely replaces protections for people and nature with protections for
corporations.

The global reach of corporations to take over the resources of the poor of
the Third World is made possible not just by reduction and removal of
tariffs, one of the goals of the WTO. It is facilitated by the removal of
ethical and ecological limits on what can be owned as private property and
what can be traded. In this way, globalization is completing the project of
colonization that led to the conquest and ownership of land and territory.
Biological resources and water, the very basis of life's processes, are
being colonized, privatized, and commodified.

Agriculture, which is still the primary livelihood for three-quarters of
humanity, and which is as much a cultural activity as an economic one, is
also threatened by "trade liberalization," driven both by the structural
adjustment programs of the World Bank and the IMF, and by the WTO's
Agreement on Agriculture. The globalization of food and agriculture
systems, in effect, means the corporate takeover of the food chain, the
erosion of food rights, the destruction of the cultural diversity of food
and the biological diversity of crops, and the displacement of millions
from land-based, rural livelihoods. Global free trade in food and
agriculture is the biggest refugee creation program in the world, far
exceeding the impact of Kosovo. It is equivalent to the ethnic cleansing of
the poor, the peasantry, and small farmers of the Third World.

GLOBALIZATION OF INDIA'S AGRICULTURE

Trade and investment liberalization have led to a dramatic transformation
of agriculture in India that has had a devastating impact on peasant
farmers. These policies have brought about
* a shift in production from food to export crops that has reduced food
security
* a flood of imports that have wiped out local businesses and diversity and
* an opening for global corporations to take over the control of food
processing.

A SHIFT TO EXPORT CROPS
Cotton Seeds of Suicide

Economic globalization is leading to a concentration of the seed industry,
the entry of global corporations into agriculture, the increased use of
pesticides, and, finally, increased debt, despair, and sometimes suicide
among small farmers. Capital-intensive, corporate-controlled agriculture is
being spread into regions where peasants are poor but, until now, have been
self-sufficient in food. In the regions where industrial agriculture has
been introduced through globalization, higher costs are making it virtually
impossible for small farmers to survive.

The new export-oriented policies that are part of agricultural
globalization have led to a shift in India from the production of food
crops to commodities for exports, such as cotton. Cotton cultivation has
expanded even into semiarid areas such as Warangal in Andhra Pradesh, where
farmers traditionally grew paddy, pulses, millets, oilseeds, and vegetable
crops. Enticed by promises that cotton would be like "white gold," yielding
high profits, farmers in Warangal have nearly tripled the amount of land
used for cotton production in the past decade, while slashing production of
traditional food grains like jawar and bajra.
However, what these farmers have learned is that while cash crops like
cotton may fetch higher prices, they also demand a higher level of
expenditure. Under corporate pressure, farmers have largely switched from
planting open-pollinated seeds, which can be saved by farmers, to hybrids
that need to be purchased every year at a high cost. Because hybrids are
very vulnerable to pest attacks, pesticide use has also increased.
Expenditures on pesticide in the district went up from $2.5 million for the
entire decade of the 1 980s to $50 million in t997-a 2,000 percent
increase. For poor peasants, this cost could be borne only through debts.

Because trade liberalization had also led to budget cutbacks on extension
and withdrawal of low-interest credit from cooperatives and public sector
banks, peasants have had to take high-interest loans from the same
companies that sell them hybrid seeds and pesticides. Thus, the
corporations have become money lenders, extension agents, seed suppliers,
and pesticide salesmen rolled into one. As a result, peasants have become
buried under the weight of unpayable debt. This financial stress is blamed
for an epidemic of suicides in Warangal district. More than 500 farmers
took their own lives in 1998, and the suicides have continued in 1999.

In the regions where high costs of industrial agriculture introduced
through globalization are already pushing farmers to suicide, Monsanto has
tried to introduce genetically engineered cotton seeds. While the argument
used to promote these crops in the Third World is that they will increase
yields, trials have shown a decrease in yields and an increase in the use
of pesticides. In protest, farmers in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have
uprooted the genetically engineered cotton, and the Research Foundation for
Science, Technology, and Ecology has filed a case in the Supreme Court to
stop the introduction of these genetically engineered crops in Indian
agriculture. The case is based on the belief that genetic engineering would
introduce new ecological and economic risks that Third World peasants
cannot afford.

Shrimp Factories

The shift from a "food first" to an "export first" policy is justified on
grounds of food security, because export earnings are supposed to pay for
food imports. In fact, export-oriented agriculture has reduced food
security by encouraging a shift from small-scale, sustainable production to
large-scale, non-sustainable industrial production. It also brings changes
in ownership over natural resources and means of production, from small
autonomous producer/owners to large corporate and commercial interests.
Peasants are displaced from farming, while commercial interests take over
land for industrial-scale production of export commodities such as shrimp,
flowers, vegetables, and meat. These enterprises often have negative
environmental impacts, creating further hardship for local communities.

The transformation of shrimp farming in India is a prime example of the
social and environmental costs of industrial agriculture. While
small-scale, indigenous shrimp farming has been sustainable over centuries,
shrimp exports require the establishment of factory farms for shrimp
production. Each acre of a shrimp farm needs 200 "shadow acres" for
absorbing the ecological costs of factory farming of shrimp. "Shadow acres"
are the units required to supply resources to and absorb the waste from a
particular economic activity.

Shrimp farming is so damaging because it requires enormous quantities of
fish to be caught at sea for shrimp feed, most of which is converted to
waste that is poured into the sea, polluting the water and damaging
mangroves. Shrimp farming also destroys coastal agriculture because the
shrimp factories require the pumping of seawater into the ponds for shrimp
production. This causes salinization, reducing drinking water supplies and
destroying trees and crops near the factories.

These costs undermine the claims that shrimp exports are a major source of
economic growth. For each dollar earned by corporations through exports of
shrimp to consumers in the United States, Europe, and Japan, an estimated
$10 worth of damage is done to India's natural resources and local economic
income. This includes the destruction of mangroves, water, agriculture, and
fisheries.

Shrimp factories have met with stiff resistance in India. In December 1996,
local communities and environmental groups won a case in the Indian Supreme
Court to ban industrial shrimp farming. However, the shrimp industry
received a stay order, and continues to operate. On May 29, 1999, four
fishermen were killed when they protested against the commercial shrimp
operators called the "shrimp mafia" in the Chilka lake in Orissa.

This tragedy illustrates how the inequalities aggravated or generated by
export-oriented agriculture can also lead to violations of human rights and
subversion of law and order. Trade can only be increased by taking
resources away from people's subsistence and survival. When people attempt
to defend their human right to work and live, commercial interests that
gain from exports often work with the state apparatus to crush people's
movements. Many people lose what little they have. In the most extreme
cases, such as that of the Orissa fishermen, they pay for exports with
their lives.

Other Export Crops Costs Exceed Earnings

Like shrimp exports, flower, meat, and vegetable exports have costs that
often far exceed the earnings generated. Large scale meat exports, for
example, have an external "shadow" cost that is ten times higher than
export earnings. This is due to the former ecological contribution of
livestock in small-scale agriculture, now on the wane.
Particularly in developing countries, livestock are not just meat on legs.
Animals are the primary source of fertilizer in the form of organic manure.
They also generate energy for farm operations, by plowing, and by helping
with agro-processing; for example, with edible oil extraction via
animal-driven "ghanis." Livestock in India help produce $17 million worth
of milk, and $1.5 billion worth of food grain; they also provide $17
million worth of energy. If the animals are slaughtered, all of these
benefits are lost. In the case of one export-oriented slaughterhouse alone,
meat exports earned $45 million, whereas the estimated contribution of the
slaughtered animals to the economy if they had been allowed to live was
$230 million.

In the case of flowers, countries must import plant material, pesticides,
greenhouse equipment and pay for consultants. India spent Rs. 13.7 billion
in foreign exchange to import inputs for floriculture and earned only Rs.
0.3 billion from flower sales, thus having a net drain of Rs. 10 billion on
scarce foreign change.

If the resources used for floriculture had been allocated for food
production, India would have produced four times more food than it could
buy on global markets using earnings from flower sales. In terms of
national food security, export-oriented agriculture therefore destroys more
than it creates.

Under the pressure of so-called "liberalization" policies, food prices have
doubled and the poor have had to cut their consumption in half. Prices have
increased because food has been exported, creating domestic scarcity, at
the same time that food subsidies have been withdrawn. As a housewife in
Bombay stated "we are eating half of what we used to after food prices
doubled in the last year. Even dal is a luxury now. After milk prices
increased, I stopped buying milk as well."

Export-oriented agriculture is also creating an agricultural apartheid,
with the Third World being asked to stop growing food staples and instead
grow luxury products for the rich North. Production of food staples is now
concentrated in the United States, and in the hands of a few multinational
seed companies and grain trading companies.

B. IMPORTS: DIVERSITY DESTROYED

As countries are forced to destroy their agricultural systems to grow and
export commodities, both cultural diversity and biological diversity
disappear. Diverse cereals, oilseeds, and legumes are displaced by soybeans
from the United States. While exports destroy local food systems by
diverting resources and changing ownership patterns, imports also destroy
food systems by hijacking markets.

In August 1999, there was a case of mustard oil adulteration that was
restricted to the city of Delhi, but affected all local brands of oil. In
response, the government banned mustard oil, the main cooking oil in North
India, and removed all restrictions on edible oil imports. Soybean and soy
oil imports were liberalized or deregulated. Within one growing season,
millions of oilseed-producing farmers growing mustard, groundnut, sesame,
and niger had lost the market for their diverse oil seed crops. Liberalized
imports of soybeans have destroyed the entire edible oil production and
processing in India. Millions of small mills have closed down. Prices of
oilseeds have collapsed and farmers cannot even recover what they have
spent on cultivation. Sesame, linseed, and mustard have started to
disappear from the fields as cheap, subsidized imports of soybeans are
dumped on the Indian market. These imports totaled three million tons in
one year (a 60 percent rise compared to earlier years) and cost nearly $1
billion, thus worsening the country's balance of payments situation.

U.S. soybeans are cheap not because of cheap production but because of
subsidies. The price of soybeans is $155 a ton, and this low price is
possible because the U.S. government pays $193 a ton to U.S. soybean
farmers, who would not otherwise be able to stay in production given the
low commodity prices. This government support is not really a farmer
subsidy; it is an indirect corporate subsidy. As heavily subsidized
soybeans flooded India's domestic market, prices crashed by more than two
thirds. The local oil processing industry, from the small-scale "ghanis" to
larger mills, started to close down. Domestic oilseed production declined,
and domestic edible oil prices crashed. Groundnut prices went down by 3
percent from Rs. 48 per kilogram to Rs. 37 per kilogram. Meanwhile, some
farmers protesting against the collapse of their markets were shot and
killed.
***
p114
C. TRIPs AND BIOPIRACY

... the WTO threatens Third World food and agriculture through the Trade
Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) agreement, which was
introduced during the Uruguay Round of GATT. This agreement sets
enforceable global rules on patents, copyrights, and trademarks. TRIPs
rules extend to living resources, so that genes, cells, seeds plants, and
animals can now be patented and "owned" as intellectual property. As a
result, developing countries are being forced to reorganize their
production and consumption patterns to allow monopolies by a handful of
so-called "Life Sciences" corporations that are in reality peddlers of
death

History of Intellectual Property Rights

To understand the flaws of TRIPs, it is important to know that this
agreement is essentially the globalization of western patent laws that
historically have been used as instruments of conquest. The word "patents"
derives from "letters patent"-the open letters granted by European
sovereigns to conquer foreign lands or to obtain import monopolies.
Christopher Columbus derived his right to the conquest of the Americas
through the letter patent granted to him by Queen Isabel and King
Ferdinand.

In the United States, patent laws were originally a patchwork of state laws
that did not offer protection for the patentee outside the state in which
it had been granted. This changed in 1787, when members of the
Constitutional Convention institutionalized a national statute. The
politicians were convinced that a single federal patent law would serve the
fledgling nation and its inventors far more effectively than the existing
state patents. One outcome was that broad patents were granted in the
United States for steamboats-in spite of the steam engine having been
invented and patented by James Watt in Scotland fifteen years before.

The United States has continued to ignore the pre-existence and use of
inventions in other countries when granting patents. Thus, paradoxically, a
legal system aimed at preventing "intellectual piracy" is itself based on
legitimizing piracy. This system is codified in Section 102 of the U.S.
Patent Act of 1952, which denies patents for inventions that are in use in
the United States but allows patents for inventions in use in other
countries unless they have been described in a publication. If, for
example, someone in Europe were operating a machine and you, in good faith,
independently and without knowledge of its existence, developed your own
invention that was essentially the same machine, that fact would not
prevent you from obtaining a patent in the United States.

In addition, the United States has created unilateral instruments such as
clause Special 301 in its Trade Act to force other countries to follow its
patent laws. Thus, a country that depended on borrowed knowledge for its
own development of industrial power has acted to block such transfer of
knowledge and technology to other countries.

Introduction of TRIPs

During the Uruguay Round of the GATT, the United States introduced its
flawed patent system into the WTO, and thus imposed it on the rest of the
world. U.S. corporations have admitted that they drafted and lobbied on
behalf of TRIPs. As a Monsanto spokesman said, "The industries and traders
of world commerce have played simultaneously the role of patients, the
diagnosticians, and prescribing physicians."

TRIPs not only made intellectual property rights (IPR) laws global
geographically, but also removed ethical boundaries by including life forms
and biodiversity into patentable subject matter. Living organisms and life
forms that are self-creating were thus redefined as machines and artifacts
made and invented by the patentee. Intellectual property rights and patents
then give the patent holder a monopolistic right to prevent others from
making, using, or selling seeds. Seed saving by farmers has now been
redefined from a sacred duty to a criminal offence of stealing "property."
Article 27.3 (b) of the TRIPs agreement, which relates to patents on living
resources, was basically pushed by the "Life Science" companies to
establish themselves as Lords of Life.

The chemical companies of the world have bought up seed and biotechnology
companies and reorganized themselves as Life Science corporations, claiming
patents on genes, seeds, plants and animals. Ciba Geigy and Sandoz have
combined to form Novartis; Hoechst has joined with Rhone Poulenc to form
Aventis; Zeneca has merged with Astia; Dupont has bought up Pioneer HiBred;
and Monsanto now owns Cargill seeds, DeKalb, Calgene, Agracetus, Delta and
Pine Land, Holden, and Asgrow. Eighty percent of all genetically engineered
seeds planted are Monsanto's "intellectual property." And Monsanto owns
broad species patents on cotton, mustard, soybean- crops that were not
"invented" or "created" by Monsanto but have been evolved over centuries of
innovation by farmers of India and East Asia working in close partnership
with biodiversity gifted by nature.

There are three perversions inherent in patents on living material:

1. Ethical perversion
This refers to the claim that seeds, plants, sheep, cows, or human cell
lines are nothing but "products of the mind" "created" by Monsanto,
Novartis, lan Wilmut or PPL. Living organisms have their intrinsic
self-organization, they make themselves, and hence cannot be reduced to the
status of "inventions" and "creations" of patent holders. They cannot be
"owned" as private property because they are our ecological kin, not just
"genetic mines."

2. Criminalization of Saving and Sharing Seeds
The recognition of corporations as "owners" of seed through intellectual
property rights converts farmers into "thieves" when they save seed or
share it with neighbors. Monsanto hires detectives to chase farmers who
might be engaging in such "theft."

3. Encourages Biopiracy "Biopiracy" is the theft of biodiversity and
indigenous knowledge through patents. Biopiracy deprives the South in three
ways
* It creates a false claim to novelty and invention, even though the
knowledge has evolved since ancient times. Thus, biopiracy is intellectual
theft, which robs Third World people of their creativity and their
intellectual resources.
* It diverts scarce biological resources to monopoly control of
corporations, depriving local communities and indigenous practitioners.
Thus, biopiracy is resource theft from the poorest two thirds of humanity
who depend on biodiversity for their livelihoods and basic needs.
* It creates market monopolies and excludes the original innovators from
their rightful share of local, national, and inter-national markets.
Instead of preventing this organized economic theft, WTO rules protect the
powerful and punish the victims. In a dispute initiated by the United
States against India, the WTO forced India to change its patent laws and
grant exclusive marketing rights to foreign corporations on the basis of
foreign patents. Since many of these patents are based on biopiracy, the
WTO is in fact promoting piracy through patents.

Over time, the consequences of TRIPs for the South's biodiversity and
southern people's rights to their diversity will be severe. No one will be
able to produce or reproduce patented agricultural, medicinal, or animal
products freely, thus eroding livelihoods of small producers and preventing
the poor from using their own resources and knowledge to meet their basic
needs of health and nutrition. Royalties for their use will have to be paid
to the patentees and unauthorized production will be penalized, thus
increasing the debt burden.

Indian farmers, traditional practitioners, and traders will lose their
market share in local, national and global markets. For example, recently
the U.S. government granted a patent for the anti-diabetic properties of
karela, jamun, and brinjal to two nonresident Indians, Onkar S. Tomer and
Kripanath Borah, and their colleague Peter Gloniski. The use of these
substances for control of diabetes is everyday knowledge and practice in
India. Their medical use is documented in authoritative treatises like the
"Wealth of India," the "Compendium of Indian Medicinal Plants" and the
"Treatise on Indian Medicinal Plants."
If there were only one or two cases of such false claims to invention on
the basis of biopiracy, they could be called an error.

However, biopiracy is an epidemic. Neem, haldi, pepper, harar, bahera,
amla, mustard, basmati, ginger, castor, jaramla, amaltas and new karela and
jamun have all been patented. The problem is not, as was made out to be in
the case of turmeric, an error made by a patent clerk. The problem is deep
and systemic. And it calls for a systemic change, not case-by-case
challenges.

Some have suggested that biopiracy happens because Indian knowledge is not
documented. That is far from true. Indigenous knowledge in India has been
systematically documented, and this in fact has made piracy easier. And
even the folk knowledge orally held by local communities deserves to be
recognized as collective, cumulative innovation. The ignorance of such
knowledge in the United States should not be allowed to treat piracy as
invention.

The potential costs of biopiracy to the Third World poor are very high
since two thirds of the people in the South depend on free access to
biodiversity for their livelihoods and needs. Seventy percent of seed in
India is saved or shared farmers' seed; 70 percent of healing is based on
indigenous medicine using local plants.

If a patent system that is supposed to reward inventiveness and creativity
systematically rewards piracy, if a patent system fails to honestly apply
criteria of novelty and non-obviousness in the granting of patents related
to indigenous knowledge, then the system is flawed, and it needs to change.
It cannot be the basis of granting patents or establishing exclusive
marketing rights. The problem of biopiracy is a result of Western-style IPR
systems, not the absence of such IPR systems in India. Therefore, the
implementation of TRIPs, which is based on the U.S.-style patent regimes,
should be immediately stopped and its review started.

The survival of the anachronistic Art. 102 of the U.S. Patent Law thus
enables the United States to pirate knowledge freely from other countries,
patent it, and then fiercely protect this stolen knowledge as "intellectual
property." Knowledge flows freely into the United States but is prevented
from flowing freely out of the United States. If biopiracy is to stop, then
the U.S. patent laws must change, and Article 102 must be redrafted to
recognize prior art of other countries. This is especially important given
that U.S. patent laws have been globalized through the TRIPs agreement of
the WTO.

Upcoming Review of TRIPs

In 1999, Article 27.3 (b) of the TRIPs agreement is scheduled to come up
for review. This is the article that most directly impacts indigenous
knowledge because it relates to living resources and biodiversity. In the
year 2000, countries can also call for an amendment of TRIPs as a whole.

The review and amendment of TRIPs should begin with an examination of the
deficiencies and weakness of western-style IPS systems. Instead of being
pressured, as India has been, to implement a perverse IPR system through
TRIPs, developing countries should lead a campaign in the WTO for review
and amendment of the system. In the meantime, these countries should freeze
the implementation of TRIPs. While TRIPs implementation is frozen, they
should make domestic laws that protect indigenous knowledge as the common
property of the people, and as a national heritage.
The implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) enables
us to do this. Because CBD is also an international treaty, protecting
indigenous knowledge via a Biodiversity Act does not violate international
obligations. In fact, removing the inconsistencies between TRIPs and CBD
should be an important part of the international campaign for the review
and amendment of TRIPs.

Piracy of indigenous knowledge will continue until patent laws directly
address this issue, exclude patents on indigenous knowledge and trivial
modifications of it, and create sui generis systems for the protection of
collective, cumulative innovation.

The protection of diverse knowledge systems requires a diversity of IPR
systems, including systems that do not reduce knowledge and innovation to
private property for monopolistic profits. Systems of common property in
knowledge need to be evolved for preserving the integrity of indigenous
knowledge systems on the basis of which our everyday survival is based.

Neither TRIPs nor the U.S. patent law recognize knowledge as a "commons,"
nor do they recognize the collective, cumulative innovation embodied in
indigenous knowledge systems. Thus, if indigenous knowledge is to be
protected, then TRIPs and U.S. patent laws must change. Nothing less than
an overhaul of western-style IPR systems with their intrinsic weaknesses
will stop the epidemic of biopiracy. And if biopiracy is not stopped, the
every day survival of ordinary Indians will be threatened, as over time our
indigenous knowledge and resources will be used to make patented
commodities for global trade. Global corporate profits will grow at the
cost of the food rights, health rights, and knowledge rights of one billion
Indians, two thirds of whom are too poor to meet their needs through the
global market place.

Patents on indigenous knowledge and uses of plants is an "enclosure" of the
intellectual and biological commons on which the poor depend. Robbed of
their rights and entitlements to freely use nature's capital because that
is the only capital they have access to, the poor in the Third World will
be pushed to extinction. Like the diverse species on which they depend,
they too are a threatened species.

Citizens' Movements

"No patents on life" movements and movements against biopiracy are already
strong in the North and South. These citizens initiatives need to be the
basis of the TRIPs to exclude life from patents and IPR monopolies. In
India, Navdanya (the movement for conservation of native seeds) has
catalyzed broad-based alliances for food freedom and seed freedom with
farmers' groups, women's groups, and environmental groups. The Bija
Satyagraha or Seed Satyagraha is the non-cooperation movement against
patents on life, genetic engineering of crops and corporate monopolies in
agriculture. The "Jaiv Panchayat" movement or the Living Democracy movement
focuses on the protection of all species and for local democratic control
on biodiversity and indigenous knowledge.
During Freedom Week, August 9-15, 1999, the Living Democracy movement from
more than 500 village communities sent notices to biopirates such as W.R.
Grace, which has claimed the use of neem as pesticide as its invention;
Monsanto, whose subsidiary Calgene has patents on mustard and castor; and
RiceTec, which has a patent on basmati. Notices have also been sent to the
WTO for overstepping its jurisdiction because under traditional legal
systems and under the Indian Constitution, the local community (gram sabha)
is the highest competent authority on matters related to biodiversity.

Another peoples' organization, Hamara Roti, Hamara Azadi (Our Bread, Our
Freedom), brings together environmentalists, women farmers, workers, and
students. The coalition is increasing awareness of corporations such as
Monsanto and Cargill, which are trying to control Indian agriculture and
are destroying millions of livelihoods in food production and food
processing destroying the rich biological and cultural diversity of our
agricultural and food systems, and destroying the ecologically sustainable
consumption patterns. On August 13, 1999, protestors at the Delhi offices
of Monsanto and Cargill demanded that the corporations divest from India
and stop their ecocide and genocide.

The TRIPs agreement has an impact on biodiversity and thus subverts our
democratic rights to our biodiversity and indigenous knowledge.
Biodiversity should stay in the hands of local communities. This is a right
recognized in our traditions and enshrined in our Constitution. The WTO is
destroying our democratic decision-making structures by forcing the
government to undo the Panchayati rights of the people in decentralized
democratic structures through the implementation of TRIPs. Our campaign for
the review of TRIPs will be to designate the gram sabha, or local
community, as the competent authority for the defense of biodiversity and
the protection of indigenous knowledge as collective and cumulative
innovation.

CONCLUSION

The real millennium round for the WTO is the beginning of a new democratic
debate about the future of the earth and the future of its people. The
centralized, undemocratic rules and structures of the WTO that are
establishing global corporate rule based on monopolies and monocultures
need to give way to an earth democracy supported by decentralization and
diversity. The rights of all species and the rights of all peoples must
come before the rights of corporations to make limitless profits through
limitless destruction.

Free trade is not leading to freedom. It is leading to slavery. Diverse
life forms are being enslaved through patents on life, farmers are being
enslaved into high-tech slavery, and countries are being enslaved into debt
and dependence and destruction of their domestic economies.

We want a new millennium based on economic democracy, not economic
totalitarianism. The future is possible for humans and other species only
if the principles of competition, organized greed, commodification of all
life, monocultures and monopolies, and centralized global corporate control
of our daily lives enshrined in the WTO are replaced by the principles of
protection of people and nature, the obligation of giving and sharing
diversity, and the decentralization and self-organization enshrined in our
diverse cultures and national constitutions.

The WTO rules violate principles of human rights and ecological survival.
They violate rules of justice and sustainability. They are rules of warfare
against the people and the planet. t Changing these rules is the most
important democratic and human rights struggle of our times. It is a matter
of survival.