Sustainable biotech is built on biopiracy in the third world – kills biodiversity

Sustaining Colonial Control of Biodiversity: The Role of Biotechnology and Intellectual Property Rights The globalization of industrialized agriculture has been under attack for more than twenty years. Increased production per hectare was achieved at significant environmental costs including the use of greater chemical and non-renewable energy inputs. The practice of monoculture, involving the transformation of centuries old traditions of self-sustaining crop rotational practices into cash crop agriculture, had serious ecological, biological and economic consequences for peasant farmers in the Third World. Modern agricultural methods may have created bumper harvests, however it also replaced biological diversity with uniformity making crops more vulnerable to attack from pests, leading to a greater dependence on chemical pesticides. The focus on the technologies involved in the production of chemical pesticides also served to marginalize existing indigenous knowledge about plant and seed varieties. The chemical revolution depended on the genetic resources that were cared for and sustained for thousands of years by peasant farmers, these were obtained free of charge by corporations and scientific institutions to develop high-yielding varieties that were dependent on chemical fertilizers for their yield levels and subsequently sold to the farmers as a package, complete with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Thus, these production techniques determined what kinds of crops could be grown in order to recoup investments on modern agricultural techniques. While economic value was placed on cash crops bought and sold through international markets, there was no evaluation, economic or otherwise, on the loss of agricultural biodiversity and its effects (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997). For instance, there were more than 30,000 varieties of rice grown in India at the turn of the last century, today there are less than 50 varieties and is expected to diminish to ten in the next five years (Shiva 1993; Wilson 1992). Measuring output per hectare is an easy task but it is virtually impossible to construct indicators that measure genetic erosion. More importantly, it is impossible to forecast the ecological and economic consequences of such a loss. However, science has once again come to the rescue, with a new revolution: biotechnology. As we shall see, this new revolution of biotechnology is simply a logical continuation from the “chemical revolution” of the 1950’s and not only serves to sustain corporate and scientific structures of power but also threatens to colonize life forms and recolonize spaces in the Third World, a region that contains two-thirds of the world’s plant species. If the success of development was based on transforming “untamed” nature into a more manageable environmental resource, it should not come as a surprise that advances in science and technology would ultimately lead to the control and ownership of life itself, via the transformation of genetic material in plants and animals into “knowledge” and “intellectual property” belonging to corporations. The fact that this “knowledge” existed and has been used by indigenous communities for thousands of years is somehow not relevant: it is either dismissed as a “philosophical” issue or incorporated into the Western environmental discourse as “traditional ecological knowledge” that needs protection because of its “world heritage” value. Laws governing protection of intellectual property are governed by Western technocentric notions that are biased against indigenous communities (Blakeney 1997). Under existing laws, patents are granted for inventions that must be “novel” and the rights of the creator of this novelty are protected. Novelty is assessed by reference to prior technological use. There are millions of people in the world who do not fit this model, indigenous custodians of medical knowledge and peasant cultivators of seeds for example, and who are denied intellectual property protection. Patents and intellectual property laws on genetic resources such as seeds, protect and serve corporate and institutional interests of developed countries while violating peasant and farmers’ rights in the Third World. Medicinal plants, cared for and sustained by indigenous cultures, were appropriated by pharmaceutical companies without any payment and later used to develop profitable drugs that were protected by patents and trademarks. The knowledge of indigenous cultures in recognizing and using the medicinal properties of these plants is positioned as “traditional” and not “novel” and hence can be obtained without payment, while the “knowledge” of pharmaceutical companies requires protection. Indigenous knowledge does not fit into the current intellectual property framework and their knowledge by itself has no “economic value” unless it is commodified for the purposes of the market. Only then can it be assigned “value” and be eligible for protection, which explains the current alacrity at which chemical and pharmaceutical corporations are investing in genetic engineering and biotechnology. Biotechnology, touted as a champion of sustainable development, simply sustains a more sophisticated mode of colonial control that continues to inscribe its violence on peasant communities. Peasant struggles to control seeds and medicinal plants are being fought in many countries and several social movements in Mexico, Latin America and Asia have raised these issues at international conventions of the United Nations Economic Program. The International Convention on Biodiversity was established at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to address the implications of biodiversity conservation and use. However, as Shiva (1993: 151) argues, the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) was primarily “an initiative of the North to ‘globalize’ the control, management and ownership of biological diversity… so as to ensure free access to the biological resources which are needed as ‘raw material’ for the biotechnology industry”. The biodiversity “crisis” arose because of rampant industrialization and unbridled economic growth resulting in habitat destruction and the replacement of diversity with homogeneity in agriculture and forestry (Shiva 1993). This crisis is almost always represented as a Third World phenomena and the solution developed and applied by the North is to conserve biodiversity in the South. Evidence of this can be seen in policy documents of the World Bank and United Nations Environmental Program as well as in scientific texts. For instance, in his popular book The Diversity of Life, Edward Wilson describes in detail the biological history of the planet and the negative human impact on biodiversity. While acknowledging that richer countries dictate the rules of international trade, Wilson claims that it is their responsibility to “use this power wisely”. In providing some solutions to the biodiversity problem, Wilson advocates promoting sustainable development – for the “striving billions of rural poor in the Third World”. Almost nothing is said about the corresponding responsibility of the striving millions of urban rich in the First World. A similar slippage can be observed in the Agenda 21 document: the “action plan” for sustainability involves “enabling the poor to achieve sustainable livelihoods” (Hawken 1995: 216) without any mention of the unsustainable livelihoods of the rich that do not allow the poor to achieve sustainable livelihoods. Thus, sustainable development proceeds the way as development did – the problems are located in the South, the solutions in the North - and continues to obscure how the political economy of the process destroys biological diversity (Shiva 1991). Despite using the right phrases – “sustainable”, “inclusiveness”, “local custodians”, the CBD is very much a top down process imposed on local communities, similar to the way the “Green Revolution” was orchestrated. The CBD negotiations took place after years of North-South conflicts over resources and rising environmental concern. The initial position was that genetic resources were a “common heritage to man” (Downes 1996: 171) and “biodiversity information belonged to no one and could be exchanged freely among the countries of the world”. Developing countries, justifiably suspicious of the price they will pay for this “free exchange” of information supported the current view as expressed in Article 15 of the CBD that provided national sovereignty over genetic resources, “combined with an obligation to facilitate access by other countries” (Bugge and Tvedt 2000). This “obligation” is to be operationalized through granting of individual permits to interested parties, raising an interesting question: while “sovereignty” over genetic resources is now clearly established, there is no mention in the CBD about ownership of the resources, whether by the state, private landowners or indigenous communities through common property rights. Conflicting interests over resources between nation states probably resulted in the “constructed ambiguity” of many of the articles in the CBD that do not provide legal rights to any party in particular. The CBD is essentially a comprise agreement between conflicting North-South interests. While 172 countries have ratified the CBD, the United States, not unsurprisingly, refused to ratify the convention on the grounds that it would pose a threat to the U.S. biotechnology industry. Although the CBD was a first step in addressing issues of biodiversity and conservation, it did very little in real terms for indigenous and peasant communities who were protesting the violation of their rights. Technocentric notions strongly informed strategies of biodiversity conservation and the CBD concentrated too heavily on issues of financing, access of business corporations to genetic diversity, and technology transfer than on peasant and indigenous peoples’ rights. Critics point out that the CBD placed too much faith on biotechnology and technological fixes to prevent loss of biodiversity, creating “a reliance on the diversity created through technology which would replace the respect for the diversity found in nature” (Munson 1995). Article 2 of the CBD gives states the “sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental and developmental policies” along with the responsibility to ensure that these activities “do not cause damage to the environment beyond the areas of national jurisdiction” (Hallman, 1995). While this might appear to be a victory for Third World nations over the developed countries, there are grave doubts whether the ownership of genetic resources by states will help the rural poor or indigenous communities (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997). The imposition of market economies on transactions that were out of the market, such as the “subsistence” economies of peasant populations or genetic resources used by them, confers a value and a price based on an external political economy, a price that is bound to be very low because these communities are poor to begin with. As McAfee (1999) argues, if the distribution of the benefits of biodiversity is to be determined by market forces, then the world’s economic elites will benefit disproportionately. Compensation based on market mechanisms will simply serve to further disempower and impoverish the rural poor. Several farmers’ organizations, indigenous groups and NGO’s are fighting this battle at different levels and the fight to maintain possession of land and resources is not just an economic struggle, it is a cultural struggle fought by communities to ensure their survival. While their efforts have contributed to the recognition at the Rio Convention that indigenous peoples have used and conserved genetic resources for thousands of years, the CBD does not ensure their ownership and management rights to these resources. Allowing these rights to be legislated by nation states is also problematic given the nexus between governments, corporations and international trade institutions, none of which represents interests of indigenous or peasant communities.