Excerpted
from Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge
Vandana Shiva
In a world characterized by diversity, globalization
can only be realized by ripping apart society’s plural fabric along with its
capacity to self-organize. At the political and cultural level, it is this
freedom to self-organize that Gandhi saw as the basis of interaction between
different societies and cultures. “I want the cultures of all lands to be blown
about as freely as possible, but I refuse to be blown off my feet by any,”
said Gandhi.
Globalization is not the cross-cultural interaction of
diverse societies; it is the imposition of a particular culture on all of the
others. Nor is globalization the search for ecological balance on a planetary
scale. It is the predation of one class, one race, and often one gender of a
single species on all of the others. The “global” in the dominant discourse is
the political space in which the dominant local seeks global control, freeing
itself of responsibility for the limits arising from the imperatives of
ecological sustainability and social justice. In this sense, the “global” does
not represent a universal human interest; it represents a particular local and
parochial interest and culture that has been globalized through its reach and
control, its irresponsibility and lack of reciprocity.
Globalization has occurred in three waves. The first
wave was the colonization of America, Africa, Asia, and Australia by European
powers over 1,500 years. The second imposed a Western idea of “development”
during the postcolonial era of the past five decades. The third wave of
globalization, unleashed approximately five years ago, is known as the era of
“free trade.” For some commentators, this implies an end to history; for the
Third World, it is a repeat of history through recolonization. The impact of
each wave of globalization is cumulative, even as it creates discontinuity in
the dominant metaphors and actors. And each time a global order has tried to
wipe out diversity and impose homogeneity, disorder and disintegration have
been induced, not removed.
Globalization I: Colonialism
When
Europe first colonized the diverse lands and cultures of the world, it also
colonized nature. The transformation of the perception of nature during the
industrial and scientific revolutions illustrates how “nature” was transformed
in the European mind from a self-organizing, living system to a mere raw
material for human exploitation, needing management and control.
“Resource” originally implied life. Its root is the
Latin resurgere, or “to rise again.”
In other words, resource means self-regeneration. The use of the term
“resource” for nature also implied a relationship of reciprocity between nature
and humans.2
With the rise of industrialism and the colonialism, a
shift in meaning took place. “Natural resources” became inputs for industrial
commodity production and colonial trade. Nature was transformed into dead and
manipulable matter. Its capacity to renew and grow had been denied.
The violence against nature, and the disruption of its
delicate interconnections, was a necessary part of denying its self-organizing
capacity. And this violence against nature, in turn, translated into violence
in society.
Anything not fully managed or controlled by European
men was seen as a threat. This included nature, non-Western societies, and
women. What was self-organized was considered wild, out of control, and
uncivilized. When self-organization is perceived as chaos, it creates a context
to impose a coercive and violent order for the betterment and improvement of
the “other,” whose intrinsic order is then disrupted and destroyed.
Most non-Western cultures have regarded the wild as sacred,
viewing its diversity as a source of inspiration for democracy and freedom.
Rabindranath Tagore, India’s national poet, writing in Tapovan at the peak of
the independence movement, saw democracy in society as derived from the
principles of diversity in nature, whose highest expression is found in the
forest. The diverse processes of renewal that are always at play in the forest
— varying from species to species, from season to season, in sight, sound, and
smell — have fueled the culture of Indian society. The unifying principle of life in diversity, of democratic pluialism,
thus became the principle of Indian civilization.3
Whenever Europeans “discovered” the native peoples of
America, Africa, or Asia, they identified them as savages in need of redemption
by a superior race. Even slavery was justified on these grounds. To carry
Africans into slavery was seen as an act of benevolence, transporting them from
the “endless night of savage barbarism” into the embrace of a “superior civilization.”
The West’s fear of the wild and its associated
diversity is closely linked to the imperative of human domination, and the
control and mastery of the natural world. Thus, Robert Boyle, the famous
scientist who was also governor of the New England Company in the 1760s, saw
the rise of mechanical philosophy as an instrument of power not just over
nature, but also over the original inhabitants of America. He explicitly
declared his intention of ridding the New England Indians of their absurd
notions about the workings of nature. Boyle attacked their perception of nature
“as a kind of goddess,” and argued that “the veneration, wherewith men are
imbued for what they call nature, has been a discouraging impediment to the
empire of man over the inferior creatures of God.’4 The concept of the “empire of man” was
thus substituted for the “earth family,” where humans are included in the
pluralism of nature’s diversity.
This conceptual diminution was essential to the
projects of colonization and capitalism. The concept of an earth family
excluded the possibilities of exploitation and domination; a denial of the
rights of nature as well as societies that revere nature was necessary in order
to facilitate uncontrolled exploitation and profits.
Diversity, as a threat, had to be wiped out of a
worldview where European men were the measure of being human and having human
rights. As A. W. Crosby observes:
Again and again, during the centuries of European Imperialism,
the Christian view that all men are brothers was to lead to persecution of
non-Europeans — he who is my brother sins to the extent that he is unlike me.5
All brutality was sanctioned on the basis of the
assumed superiority of European men and their exclusive status as fully human.
As Basil Davidson observes, the moral justification for invading and
expropriating the territory and possessions of other peoples was the assumed
“natural” superiority of Europeans to the “tribes without law,” the “fluttered
folk and wild.”6
Denying other cultures their rights on the basis of
their difference from European culture was convenient for taking away their
resources and wealth. The church authorized European monarchs to attack,
conquer, and subdue nonbelievers, to capture their goods and theft territories,
and to transfer their lands and properties. Five hundred years ago, Columbus
carried this worldview to the New World. And millions of people and thousands
of other living species lost their right to exist under the first wave of
globalization.
Globalization II: “Development”
The
war against diversity did not end with colonialism. The definition of entire nations of people as incomplete and
defective Europeans was reincarnated in the “development” ideology, which
predicated their salvation on generous assistance and advice from the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other financial institutions,
and multinational corporations.
Development is a beautiful word, suggesting evolution
from within. Until the middle of the 20th century, it was synonymous with
evolution as self-organization. But the ideology of development has implied the
globalization of the priorities, patterns, and prejudices of the West. Instead
of being self-generated, development is imposed. Instead of coming from
within, it is externally guided. Instead of contributing to the maintenance of
diversity, development has created homogeneity and uniformity.
The Green Revolution is a prime example of the development
paradigm. It destroyed diverse agricultural systems adapted to the diverse
ecosystems of the planet, globalizing the culture and economy of an industrial
agriculture. It wiped out thousands of crops and crop varieties, substituting
them with monoculiures of rice, wheat, and maize across the Third World. It
replaced internal inputs with capital- and chemical-intensive inputs, creating
debt for farmers and death for ecosystems.
The Green Revolution did not merely unleash violence
against nature. By creating an externally managed and globally controlled
agriculture, it sowed the seeds for violence in society.
Rural development in general, and the Green Revolution
in particular, assisted by foreign capital and planned by foreign experts, were
prescribed as means for peace by politically stabilizing rural areas and
preventing areas outside of China from falling under the influence of the Red
Revolution. After two decades, however, the invisible ecological, political,
and cultural costs of the Green Revolution became apparent At the political
level, the Green Revolution turned out to produce rather than reduce conflict.
At the material level, high yields of commercial grain generated new scarcities
at the ecosystem level, in turn generating new sources of conflict. At the
cultural level, the homogenization processes of the Green Revolution led to the
resurgence of ethnic and religious identity.7
The ecological and ethnic crises in the Third World
can be viewed as arising from a basic and unresolved conflict between the
demands of diversity, decentralization, and democracy on the one hand, and
uniformity, centralization, and militarization on the other. Control over
nature and people was an essential element of the centralized and centralizing
strategy of the Green Revolution. Ecological breakdown in nature and the political
breakdown of society were the implications of a policy based on tearing apart
both nature and society.
The Green Revolution
was based on the assumption that technology is a superior substitute for
nature, and hence, a means of producing growth unconstrained by nature’s
limits. Conceptually and empirically, viewing nature as a source of scarcity
and technology as a source of abundance leads to technologies that create new
scarcities in nature through ecological destruction. Green Revolution
practices, for example, reduced the availability of fertile land and the
genetic diversity of crops, thereby creating scarcity.
The Green Revolution’s shift from cropping systems
based on diversity and internal inputs to ones based on uniformity and
external inputs did not merely change the ecological processes of agriculture.
It also changed the structure of social and political relationships, from those
based on mutual (though asymmetric) obligations—within the village—to relations
between individual cultivators and their banks, seed and fertilizer agencies,
food procurement agencies, and electricity and irrigation organizations.
Atomized and fragmented, cultivators relating directly to the state and the
market generated an erosion of cultural norms and practices. Further, since the
externally supplied inputs were scarce, it set up conflict and competition
between classes and between regions, and sowed the seeds of violence and
conflict.
The centralized planning and allocation that made the
Green Revolution possible affected not only people’s lives, but it also
affected their very idea of self. With government as referee, handing down
decisions in all matters, each frustration became a political issue. In a
context of diverse communities, that centralized control led to communal and
regional conflict. Every policy decision translated into the politics of “we”
and “they”—”we” have been unjustly treated, while “they” have gained privileges
unfairly.
As Francine Frankel wrote in 1972 in The Political Challenge of the Green
Revolution:
It is not too early, moreover, to consider one major
implication of this analysis, namely that disruption is accelerated to so
rapid a rate that the time available for autonomous ieequilibrating processes,
even if such processes are operative … is critically curtailed. Thus in the
absence of countervailing initiatives, forces already in motion will push
traditional societies in rural areas to a total breakdown.8
In 1972, the prediction of breakdown seemed
farfetched; yet in 1984, two Sikh extremists assassinated Indira Gandhi. Two
thousand Sikhs were massacred in Dethi as a backlash. In 1986, 598 people were
killed in Punjab; one year later, the number was 1,544. In 1988, the number had risen to 3,000.
The rapid and large-scale introduction of Green Revolution
technologies dislocated social structures and political processes at two
levels. It created growing disparities among classes, while also increasing the
commercialization of social relations. As Frankel observed, the Green
Revolution completely eroded social norms. “In those regions where the new technology
has been most extensively applied, it has accomplished what a century of
disruption under colonial rule failed to achieve, the virtual elimination of
the stabilizing residuum of traditional society.”
While Frankel had predicted social breakdown, she had
seen it as emerging from class conflict. Yet as the Green Revolution unfolded,
communal and ethnic aspects came to the fore. Modernization and economic
development may, as in the case of Punjab, harden ethnic identifies, provoking
or intensifing conflicts on the basis of religion, culture, or race.
To a large extent, the movements for regional,
religious, and ethnic revival are movements for the recovery of diversity in
the context of homogenization. The paradox of separatism, however, is that it searches
for diversity within a framework of uniformity. It is a search for identity in
a structure based on erasure and erosion of identities. The shift from Sikh
farmers demanding their rights to the demand for a separate Sikh state comes
from the collapse of horizontally organized, diverse communities into atomized
individuals linked vertically to state power through electoral politics.
The homogenization processes of development do not
fully wipe away differences. Differences persist — not in the integrating
context of plurality, but in the fragmenting context of homogenization.
Positive pluralities give way to negative dualities, in competition with each
other, contesting for the scarce resources that define economic and political
power. Diversity is mutated into duality, into the experience of exclusion. The
intolerance of diversity becomes a new social disease, leaving communities
vulnerable to breakdown and violence, decay and destruction. The intolerance of
diversity and the persistence of cultural differences sets one community
against another in a context created by a homogenizing state, carrying out a homogenizing
project of development. Difference, instead of leading to the richness of
diversity, becomes the basis for division and an ideology of separation.
Globalization Ill: “Free Trade”
Globalization
and homogenization are now being carried out not by nation states, but by
global powers that control global markets. “Free trade” is the ruling metaphor
for globalization in our times. But far from protecting the freedom of
citizens and countries, free trade negotiations and treaties have become the
primary locations for the use of coercion and force. The Cold War era has
ended, the era of trade wars has begun.
Among the exemplars of violence in the free trade era
is the U.S. Trade Act, especially the Super and Special 301 clauses that allow
the United States to take unilateral action against any country that does not
open up its market to U.S. corporations. Super 301 forces freedom for investment;
Special 301 forces freedom for monopoly control of markets through intellectual
property rights protection. Free trade is, in fact, an asymmetric arrangement
that combines liberalization and protectionism for Western interests. As
Martin Khor has said, “Free trade and liberalization were only nice slogans
waved to move the [Uruguay] Round forward. The reality was ‘liberalization if
it benefits us, protectionism if it benefits us, what counts is our
self-interest.’”9
Third World countries had resisted the expansion of
GATT into new areas, like services, investments, and intellectual property
rights. By merely affixing “trade related” to issues that are decided
domestically, GATT, through the World Trade Organization, will not merely
regulate international trade, but, in essence, will determine domestic policy.
This brute force continued to be used against the
Third World even in the multilateral negotiations of the Uruguay Round of GATT.
In a speech, Fernando Jaramillo, Chair of the Group of 77 and Colombia’s permanent representative to the United Nations,
said, “The Uruguay Round is proof again the developing world continues to be
sidelined and rejected when it comes to defining areas of vital importance to
their survival.”10
The very process itself is undemocratic and
unilateral. Free trade treaties like GATT are forced on citizens and weaker
trading partners, such as Third World countries. In 1991, for instance, a
take-it-or-leave-it draft was prepared by GATT Secretary General Arthur Dunkel,
which, in India, has taken on the not so pleasant acronym of DDT (Dunkel Draft
Text). An even more blatant example is the last stage of GATT negotiations in
December 1993, in which two men — Micky Kantor, the U.S. trade representative,
and Leon Brittany, the negotiator for the European Community — sat behind
closed doors and then presented the world with a “free trade” treaty. Despite
insisting that the negotiations were global, the countries of the North refused
in the end to accept any discussions, even bilaterally, with the countries of
the Third World. This is neither multilateralism nor global democracy.
A new authoritarian structure emerges, as Ambassador
Jaramillo observes:
The Bretton Woods Institutions continue to be made the
center of gravity for the principal economic decisions that affect the
developing countries. We have all been witnesses to the conditionalities of
the World Bank and the IMF. We all know the nature of the decisionniaking system
in such institutions; their undemocratic character, their lack of transparency,
their dogmatic principles, their lack of pluralism in the debate of ideas, and
their impotence to influence the policies of the industrialized countries
This also seems to be applicable to the new World
Trade Organization. The terms of its creation suggest that this organization
wifi be dominated by the industrialized countries and that its fate will be to
align itself with the World Bank and IMP.
We could announce in advance the birth of a New
Institutional Trinity which would have as its specific function to control and
dominate the economic relations that commit the developing world.11
In reality, free trade has vastly expanded the freedom
and powers of transnational corporations to trade and invest in most countries
of the world, while significantly reducing the powers of national governments
in order to restrict their operations. Multinational corporations, the real
power in the Uruguay Round, have gained new rights and given up old
obligations to protect workers’ rights and the environment.
Free trade is not free; it protects the economic
interests of the powerful transnational corporations, which already control 70
percent of the world’s trade and for whom international trade is an imperative.
Transnational corporate freedom is based on the destruction of citizens’
freedom everywhere, and the little remnants of independence that the Third
World had after the last two waves of colonization. In essence, GATT cripples
the democratic institutions of individual countries—local councils, regional
governments, and parliaments—leaving them unable to carry out the will of their
citizens.
While GATT might increase the volume of
internationally traded goods and services, it will also increase unemployment
and generate scarcity for those excluded from the global economy. The Indian
commerce minister admitted in 1994 that unemployment in India will increase
dramatically as a result of GATT. In
Germany, the unemployment rate is expected to go up from 7.4 to 11.3 percent. France is moving from 9.5 to 12.1 percent,
Britain from 9.7 to 10.4 percent. The top 1,000 British companies shed 1.5
million jobs in one year. Their total work-force dropped from 8.6 million to
just over 7 million. The French Assembly anticipates that French unemployment
will rise by 3.5 million in the next 10 years. According to Jeremy Rifkin in
his book The End of Work, in the
United States, 90 million jobs out of a total of 120 million are vulnerable to
displacement by the restructuring of production.12 A recent Wall Street Journal article projects that 1.5 to 2.5 million
American jobs could be lost each year for the foreseeable future.
Countries are also reducing security benefits for
workers. France announced a pension
freeze; Germany reduced unemployment benefits. A leaked U.K. government
document suggests plans to deregulate worker health and safety regulations.
These range from ending the requirement for employers to provide toilet paper
and soap at work to partial ending of controls on industrial hazards.
Instead of protecting workers’ rights domestically,
and instead of ending the structural adjustment policies of the World Bank
that lower Third World wages, the industrialized countries now argue that low
wages in the Third World lead to “social dumping” in international trade and
that trade sanctions are necessary to protect rich countries.
Hundreds of millions of farmers’ livelihoods around
the world are under threat from GATT and the new biotechnologies. The
“producer retirement” programs in the agriculture treaty are basically a
displacement policy for farmers. In addition, monopoly control of seeds and
plant varieties further add to the displacement pressures on the small farmers
of the Third World who are the original breeders and custodians of plant
genetic resources.
In response to the violence of free trade, its victims
will react. For example, the January 1, 1994 revolt of the Zapatistas in the
Chiapas region of Mexico, in the year that coincided with the beginning of the
North American Free Trade Agreement, cost 107 lives. According to a rebel
leader, “The free trade agreement is a death certificate for the Indian peoples
of Mexico.” Inspired by the Chiapas rebellion, other groups in Mexico are
coming out in protest. As the leader of the National Coalition of Indigenous
Peoples said, “Don’t test us, because Zapatistas could appear all over the
country.”
The structural adjustment programs of the IMF and
World Bank, which tried to establish free trade in the pie-GATT era, indicate
the three levels of violence created by the third wave of globalization.
First, there is the violence of the structural
adjustment programs themselves, which rob people of food, health care, and
education.
When people’s very survival is threatened, they
protest to protect their rights. These protests, in turn, face repression from
regimes committed to the structural adjustment conditionalities of the World
Bank and IMF. A Peruvian economist has estimated that in the several outbreaks
of protest against structural adjustment programs, nearly 3,000 people have
died, 7,000 have been wounded, and 15,000 have been arrested.
Finally, the economic and political vulnerability
created by robbing people of their self-organizing, self-governing, and self-provisioning
capacities also creates conditions for engineered violence, in which vested
interests organize vulnerable groups along ethnic and religious lines to
declare war on each other. No continent is free of such civil wars, engineered
along the fractures of racial, religious, or ethnic differences. The end of the
Cold War has, in fact, seen war introduced on a global scale in civil society.
Diversity has been transformed into a problem in a globalizing and homogenizing
world.
The experiences of Somalia and Rwanda are vivid illustrations
of the manifold violence of globalization.
The Somalian crisis has been interpreted as a residue
of “tribalism.” According to Michel Chossudovsky, however, the civil war in
Somalia is more intimately connected to the effects of globalization in the
form of structural adjustment programs. Somalia had a pastoral economy based on
exchange between nomadic herdsmen and small peasants; it remained virtually
self-sufficient in terms of food. Livestock made up 80 percent of Somalia’s
export earnings until 1983.
The IMF-World Bank adjustment programs in the 1980s
destroyed Somalia’s economic and social fabric. Devaluation and liberalization
of imports led to an erosion of domestic agricultural production. Food aid
increased 15-fold between the mid-’70s arid mid-’80s, leading to the
displacement of farmers. Privatization of veterinary services and water
resources led to a collapse of the livestock sector. As Chossudovsky reports:
The IMF-World Bank program has led the Somali economy
into a vicious circle: the decimation of the herds pushed the nomadic
pastoralists into starvation which in turn backlashed on grain producers who
sold or bartered their grain for cattle. The entire social fabric of the pastoralist
economy was undone. The collapse in foreign exchange earnings from declining
cattle exports and remittances backlashed on the balance of payments and the
state’s public finances leading to the breakdown of the government’s economic
and social program.t3
The Rwandan genocide had similar links to the
globalization processes of structural adjustment In 1989, the International
Coffee Agreement reached a deadlock, and worldwide coffee prices plunged by
more than 50 percent. Rwanda’s export earnings from coffee declined by 50
percent between 1987 and 1991.
In November 1990, a 50 percent devaluation of the Rwandan
franc was carried out under the World Bank-JMF adjustment program. The balance
of payments situation deteriorated dramatically, and the outstanding external
debt, which had already doubled since 1985, increased by another 34 percent between
1989 and 1992. In June 1992, another devaluation was ordered, leading to a 25
percent decrease in coffee production. Chossudovsky explains:
The crisis of the coffee economy backlashed on the production
of cassava, beans and sorghum. The system of savings and loan cooperatives
which provided credit to small farmers had also disintegrated. Moreover, with
the liberalization of trade and the deregulation of grain markets as recommended
by the Bretton Woods Institutions, heavily subsidized cheap food imports and
food aid from the rich countries were entering Rwanda with the effect of
destabilizing local markets.14
Everywhere, globalization leads to the destruction of
local economies and social organization, pushing people into insecurity, fear,
and civil strife. The violence against people’s livelihoods builds up into the
violence of war.
There is only one way to contain these epidemics of
violence. We must, with sensitivity and responsibility, wherever and whoever
we are, once again make peace with diversity. We have to learn that diversity
is not a recipe for conflict or chaos, but is our only chance for a more
sustainable and just future — in social, political, economic, and environmental
terms. It is our only means to survival.