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Globalization’s New Wars: Seed, Water and Life Forms. Vandana Shiva. Women Unlimited, New Delhi. Pages 129. Rs 250. THE horror of 9/11 initiated a war on "terrorism" with global economics at base. Globalisation works on the rationale that it must have a permanent war economy. Its arsenal includes mainly coercive free-trade treaties and technologies of production. Globalisation wars are far more damaging than combat warfare because the ambit and arena of these wars is vast: the entire world is the enemy, which has to be vanquished. Vandana Shiva’s new book looks at the turn in the agricultural economy as a result of the intrusion of the US corporate giants into the third world as a kind of new generational war. Cargill and Monsanto, armed with forms of genetic engineering, nano-technologies and intellectual property rights, have invented a new form of criminalisation of agriculture, whereby farmers are prevented from using part of their own harvest as seeds for the next crop. The world’s resources are now threatened by a handful of companies who "want to sell our water, our genes, our cells, our organs, our knowledge, our cultures and our future." Shiva calls these current trends "food wars". Shiva says that treaties of the WTO take away the economic freedom of the entire third world. By creating new property rights over biodiversity and water, over which, significantly, the First World economies can have no ownership, the WTO succeeds in its mission. In this enterprise, slogans like "free trade" are bandied about, which is a mere euphemism for forced trade. The ownership of rights over seeds began in 1991 when the Dunkel Draft text offered a treaty relating to the patenting of seeds and the liberalisation of exports and imports. When the WTO was formed in 1995, there was a plethora of such treaties giving the US a complete monopoly over seed and food. Few know, for instance, that the Ganges itself has been privatised by Suez, a global water giant, resulting in the suspension of all public water supply schemes by the Government of India. At Sonia Vihar in Delhi, the Ganges water is being used by Suez to supply drinking water to Delhi’s elite at the cost of 1,00,000 persons, who will be forcefully evicted from their homes owing to the construction of the Tehri Dam, which will aid the venture. The result: more and more women have committed suicide in Uttaranchal because of the non-availability of water. Providing abundant statistics, Shiva links starvation deaths and suicides in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh with policies that control the common person’s access to food. How else can one explain the paradox that hunger is proliferating as the godowns in the country are overflowing with grain: "The rules of economic globalisation, as we see in the policies of the WTO, are rules which transform our food and water from our basic needs and fundamental rights into commodities, which are controlled, owned and sold by a handful of global corporations." Policies relating to patenting have also been responsible for poverty and poverty-related deaths. Patented commodities have to be purchased each year, which the poor of India cannot afford. Other food wars include the industrial/chemical farming that the US imposed on India in the 1960s, the much-touted Green Revolution. The Green Revolution has been an ecological disaster, resulting in the erosion of the topsoil and leading to shortage of water, contamination of soil, the neglect of small farmers and a greater susceptibility to pests. Its consequences have, paradoxically, benefited the agrochemical industry, factories producing agricultural equipment and machinery, builders of dams and petrochemical companies, all of which contribute in vitiating the environment. This chemical and capital heavy programme was intended to curb communism in Punjab, following the Partition. Twenty years later, it resulted in Punjab turning into a terrorist state. Such are Shiva’s themes discussed in five chapters: Biodiversity Wars, Seed Wars, Water Wars, Biopiracy and Earth Democracy. The greatest sacrilege that is being committed by the powers of globalization is biopiracy, ownership of intellectual rights by superpowers of the products grown indigenously by those over whom monopoly is exercised by the powerful. By making minor modifications, patents are procured by, say, botanists, who then obtain intellectual rights and claim royalties over the product. The neem plant, turmeric and basmati rice are instances whereby the US, European and Japanese firms have flagrantly obtained numerous patents, thereby usurping knowledges that were heretofore indigenous. Globalisation is an
exclusivist movement and diversity is the only alternative to its
hegemony. Shiva, in an entirely original way, suggests earth democracy,
which is a move to safeguard soil, water and biodiversity. We have to
understand a commoner’s law of ecology: everything is linked to
everything else; that nature knows best; and, "there is no such
thing as a free lunch". In other words, the Earth is borrowed; we
do not own it. We all have to hand it back. |
