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June 1997 Global Theft Book Review by Martin Rowe

Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge by Vandana Shiva. South End: Boston (1997). $13.00 pbk. 152 pages.

In her fiery polemic, Biopiracy, Indian ecofeminist activist Vandana Shiva describes a tree in India which has been used by villagers for over two thousand years. Known as the neem tree, it is a natural pesticide and medicine, and when chewed its shoots protect the teeth from bacteria. For the past 40 years, Indian cottage industries have been selling neem products, while Calcutta Chemicals has been selling neem toothpaste for decades. Since 1985, however, more than a dozen patents have been taken out by U.S. and Japanese companies for exclusive rights to the products of the neem tree - strong-arming Indian companies for the use of their technology or to stop them from producing their products. The motive, as Science Magazine states, is clear: "Squeezing bucks out of the neem ought to be relatively easy."

For Shiva, what makes Calcutta Chemicals or the cottage industries different from, say, W. R. Grace (which owns four of the patents) is that Grace is now operating under the Treaty on International Property Rights (TRIPs), a clause in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which aims to extend free trade principles and patents around the world. Shiva argues that the kind of common knowledge that had been known and "owned" by indigenous peoples for millennia is being usurped by international agreements where multinational companies extend control over indigenous knowledge by patenting - and thus gaining exclusive commercial rights over - products, methods of production, and even the ideas of those in the developing world.

International property rights advocates argue that it is the ability to patent one's products that unleashes creativity because there is greater incentive to find new products and ways of doing things. For Shiva, this is yet another way of blaming the developing world for its poverty and supposed lack of creativity and yet another way for the developed European-American world to colonize and steal from the two-thirds world under the guise of saving it. Bioprospecting, as Shiva notes, is hardly surprising: indigenous knowledge is a potential goldmine for multinational corporations. Seventy-five percent of the 120 active compounds isolated from plants and used in modern medicine were known to indigenous peoples - a market estimated to be valued at $43 billion.

Indigenous knowledge is not only a goldmine, it's also a landmine on the path to global market domination. If villagers in India can produce a product for free that costs you a lot to manufacture, then that's bad business. So companies around the world are trying to buy up the products of a tree like neem and homogenize and monopolize markets through GATT and TRIPs.

 Shiva argues that, fundamentally, indigenous knowledge is based in both biological and cultural diversity. It is centered in an intellectual commons where the value of an individual is not estimated solely in how he or she can be marketed; all knowledge is not defined by how much money can be made from it. By confining, commodifying, monopolizing, and homogenizing knowledge and its products, the potential for creation of new knowledge and new products is diminished. Both cultural and biological biodiversity depends on the intermingling of self-organizing systems operating in decentralized communities. The sort of globalization occurring through GATT and TRIPs - hand in hand with the ownership of genetic structures and their modification - is the imposition of one culture on another, to the exclusion of other and perhaps better values, ways of looking at things, and modes of living.

The dangers of such cultural monopolization are obvious, and Shiva spells them out. Increasing monocultures are more prone to destruction from diseases wiping out one strain of stock. Chemical pollution is more possible as genetically engineered crops resistant to herbicides and pesticides become used worldwide. Patented genetically engineered organisms pose the threat of releasing new and unknown pollutants into the atmosphere. Finally, by essentially destroying indigenous cultures' ability to "own" their own knowledge, the multinationals may destroy the very foundation of so much human knowledge and rip apart the delicate fabric of biodiversity itself.

Shiva does offer some hope. Across the world, indigenous peoples and the developing world as a whole are beginning to organize to confront globalization and the monopolization of the world's resources. In India, a network called Navdanya has been conserving native seeds, while a movement called the Seed Satyagraha was launched in 1992 - on Gandhi's birthday - to resist the diminishing of seed diversity through TRIPs. For Shiva, these local organizations are both the best hope and best defense - indeed, the only alternative - to the commodification and homogenization of all life. Indigenous and native peoples are the first and last conservationists. We destroy what they know at our peril, for we need them now more than ever.

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