Biopiracy

Vandana Shiva

42 annotations • Sep 2023 • data

Introduction

Over the past decade, corporations have gained control over the diversity of life on earth and people's indigenous knowledge through new property rights. There is no innovation involved in these cases; they are instruments of monopoly control over life itself. Patents on living resources and indigenous knowledge are an enclosure of the biological and intellectual commons. Life forms have been redefined as "manufacture" and "machines," robbing life of its integrity and self-organization. Traditional knowledge is being pirated and patented, unleashing a new epidemic of biopiracy.
The corporations are pirating the collective innovation of farmers in breeding crops that are resilient to droughts, floods, and salinity. The biotechnology industry is spreading the misconception that without genetic engineering, we will not be able to evolve crops with climate resilience.

Chapter 1

Creativity in the life sciences has to include three levels: 1. The creativity inherent to living organisms that allows them to evolve, recreate, and regenerate themselves. 2. The creativity of indigenous communities that have developed knowledge systems to conserve and utilize the rich biological diversity of our planet. 3. The creativity of modern scientists in university or corporate labs who find ways to use living organisms to generate profits.
Central to the ideology of IPRs is the fallacy that people are creative only if they can make profits and guarantee them through IPR protection. This negates the scientific creativity of those not spurred by the search for profits. It negates the creativity of traditional societies and the modern scientific community, in which the free exchange of ideas is the very condition for creativity, not its antithesis.
There is virtually no evidence that patents actually stimulate invention. Studies, such as Leonard Reich's 1985 "The Making of American Industrial Research," suggest that patents are used to block other firms from entry into the market. For example, partly as a result of the extension of plant variety protection and the willingness of U.S. courts to extend utility patents to organisms, the number of independent seed companies worldwide has declined markedly over the last several decades.
Patents are the strongest form of IPR protection. Wherever patents have been associated with scientific research, the result has been closure of communication

Chapter 2

Patenting living organisms encourages two forms of violence. First, life-forms are treated as if they are mere machines, thus denying their self-organizing capacity. Second, by allowing the patenting of future generations of plants and animals, the self-reproducing capacity of living organisms is denied. Living organisms, unlike machines, organize themselves. Because of this capacity, they cannot be treated as simply "biotechnological inventions," "gene constructs," or "products of the mind" that need to be protected as "intellectual property."
Self-organized systems interact with their environment, but maintain their autonomy. The environment merely triggers the structural changes; it does not specify or direct them. The living system specifies its own structural changes and which patterns in the environment will trigger them. A self-organizing system knows what it has to import and export in order to maintain and renew itself.
Living systems are also complex. The complexity of their structure allows for self-ordering and self-organization. It also allows for the emergence of new properties. One of the distinguishing properties of living systems is their ability to undergo continual structural changes while preserving their form and pattern of organization.
Chilean scientists Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela have distinguished two kinds of systems—autopoietic and allopoietic. A system is autopoietic when its function is primarily geared toward self-renewal. An autopoietic system refers to itself. In contrast, an allopoietic system, such as a machine, refers to a function given from outside, such as the production of a specific output.
Self-organizing systems grow from within, shaping themselves outwards. Externally organized mechanical systems do not grow; they are made, put together from the outside.
The more complex a dynamic structure is, the more endogenously it is driven. Change depends not only on its external compulsions, but on its internal conditions. Self-organization is the essence of health and ecological stability for living systems.
When an organism or a system is mechanically manipulated to improve a one-dimensional function, including the increase in one-dimensional productivity, either the organism's immunity decreases, and it becomes vulnerable to disease and attack by other organisms, or the organism becomes dominant in an ecosystem and displaces other species, pushing them into extinction.
Thus, there is a self-directed capacity for restoration. The faculty of repair is, in turn, related to resilience. When organisms are treated as machines and manipulated without recognition of their ability to self-organize, their capacity to heal and repair breaks down, and they need increasing inputs and controls to be maintained.
Just as the strategy of using genetic engineering for herbicide resistance fails to control weeds and instead carries the risk of creating "superweeds," the strategy of genetically engineered crops for pest resistance fails to control pests and instead carries the risk of creating "super pests."
IPR monopolies are justified on grounds that corporations are given IPRs by society so that society can benefit from their contributions. The failure of the transgenic cotton shows that the assumption that IPRs will "improve" agriculture does not always hold. Instead, what we have is an example of social and ecological costs generated for society in general and farmers in particular. IPRs on crop varieties that are creating ecological havoc is an unjust system of total privatization of benefits and total socialization of costs.
As a technique, genetic engineering is very sophisticated. But as a technology for using biodiversity sustainably to meet human needs, it is clumsy. Transgenic crops reduce biodiversity by displacing diverse crops, which provide diverse sources of nutrition.

Chapter 3

Creativity became the monopoly of men, who were considered to be engaged in production; women were engaged in mere reproduction or recreation, which, rather than being treated as renewable production, was looked upon as nonproductive.
Central to the patriarchal assumption of men's superiority over women is the social construct of passivity/materiality as female and animal, and activity/spirituality as male and distinctly human. This is reflected in dualisms like mind/body, with the mind being nonmaterial, male, and active, and the body physical, female, and passive. It is also reflected in the dualism of culture/nature, with the assumption that men alone have access to culture while women are bound up with the earth that bears all things. What these artificial dichotomies obscure is that activity, not passivity, is nature's forte. The new biotechnologies reproduce the old patriarchal divisions of activity/passivity, culture/nature. These dichotomies are then used as instruments of capitalist patriarchy to colonize the regeneration of plants and human beings. Only by decolonizing regeneration can the activity and creativity of women and nature in a nonpatriarchal mold be reclaimed.
Technological development under capitalist patriarchy proceeds steadily from what it has already transformed and used up, driven by its predatory appetite, toward that which has still not been consumed. It is in this sense that the seed and women's bodies as sites of regenerative power are, in the eyes of capitalist patriarchy, among the last colonies.
Scientific missions colluded with religious missions to deny rights to nature. The rise of mechanical philosophy with the emergence of the scientific revolution was based on the destruction of concepts of a self-regenerative, self-organizing nature, which sustained all life. For Francis Bacon, who is called the father of modern science, nature was no longer a mother, but rather, a female to be conquered by an aggressive masculine mind. As Carolyn Merchant points out, this transformation of nature from a living, nurturing mother to inert, dead, and manipulable matter was eminently suited to the exploitation imperative of growing capitalism.
To use Jack Kloppenburg's description of the seed: it is both a means of production and a product. Whether they are tribespeople engaged in shifting cultivation or peasants practicing settled agriculture, in planting each year's crop, farmers also reproduce the necessary element of their means of production.
The seed wars, trade wars, patent protection, and intellectual property rights at the GATT are claims to ownership through separation and fragmentation. If the regime of rights being demanded by the United States is implemented, the transfer of funds from poor to rich countries will exacerbate the Third World crisis 10 times over.
The new reproductive technologies have provided contemporary scientific rhetoric for the reassertion of an enduring set of deeply patriarchal beliefs. The idea of women as vessels, and the fetus as created by the father's seed and owned by patriarchal right, leads logically to the breaking of organic links between the mother and the fetus.
Medical specialists, falsely believing that they produce and create babies, force their knowledge on knowing mothers. They treat their own knowledge as infallible, and women's knowledge as wild hysteria. And through their fragmented and invasive knowledge, they create a maternal-fetal conflict in which life is only seen in the fetus, and the mother is reduced to a potential criminal threatening her baby's life.
This is exemplified in the famous 1986 Baby M. case, in which Mary Beth agreed to lend her uterus, but after experiencing what having a baby meant, wanted to return the money and keep the child. A New Jersey judge ruled that a man's contract with a woman concerning his sperm is sacred, and that pregnancy and childbirth are not. Commenting on this notion of justice, in her book Sacred Bond, Phyllis Chesler says, "It's as if these experts were 19th century missionaries and Mary Beth a particularly stubborn native who refused to convert to civilization, and what's more, refused to let them plunder her natural resources without a fight."
Biotechnology is today's dominant cultural instrument for carving out the boundary between nature and culture through intellectual property rights, and for defining women's and farmers' knowledge and work as nature. These patriarchal constructs are projected as natural, although there is nothing natural about them. As Claudia Von Werlhof has pointed out, from the dominant standpoint, nature is everything that should be available free or as cheaply as possible.
The patriarchal creation boundary allows ecological destruction to be perceived as creation, and ecological regeneration as underlying the breakdown of ecological cycles and the crisis of sustainability. To sustain life means, above all, to regenerate life; but according to the patriarchal view, to regenerate is not to create, it is merely to repeat.

Chapter 4

Patents, in the ultimate analysis, are systems of protection for capital investment, without the ability to control capital. As such, they protect neither people nor knowledge systems.

Chapter 5

Diversity is the key to sustainability. It is the basis of mutuality and reciprocity—the "law of return" based on the recognition of the right of all species to happiness and freedom from suffering. Yet the law of return based on freedom and diversity is being replaced by the logic of return on investments. Genetic engineering, even while preying on the world's biological diversity, threatens to aggravate the ecological crisis through the expansion of monocultures and monopolies.
Some of these impacts are: 1. The spread of monocultures as corporations with IPRs attempt to maximize returns on investments by increasing market shares. 2. An increase in chemical pollution as biotechnology patents create an impetus for genetically engineered crops resistant to herbicides and pesticides. 3. New risks of biological pollution as patented genetically engineered organisms are released into the environment. 4. An undermining of the ethics of conservation as the intrinsic value of species is replaced by an instrumental value associated with intellectual property rights. 5. The undermining of traditional rights of local communities to biodiversity and, hence, a weakening of their capacity to conserve biodiversity.

Chapter 6

This war against diversity is not entirely new. Diversity has been threatened whenever it has been seen as an obstacle. Violence and war are rooted in treating diversity as a threat, a perversion, a source of disorder. Globalization transforms diversity into a disease and deficiency because it cannot be brought under centralized control.
Self-organized and decentralized communities and ecosystems give rise to diversity. Globalization gives rise to co-ercively controlled monocultures.
Uniformity implies that a disturbance to one part of a system is translated into a disturbance to other parts. Instead of being contained, ecological destabilization tends to be amplified. Sustainability is ecologically linked to diversity, which offers the self-regulation and multiplicity of interactions that can heal ecological disturbance to any part of a system.
What happens in nature also happens in society. When homogenization is imposed on diverse social systems through global integration, region after region starts to disintegrate. The violence inherent to centralized global integration, in turn, breeds violence among its victims. As conditions of everyday life become increasingly controlled by outside forces and systems of local governance decay, people cling to their diverse identities as a source of security in a period of insecurity. Tragically, when the source of their insecurity is so remote that it cannot be identified, diverse peoples who have lived peacefully together start to look at each other with fear. Markings of diversity become cracks of fragmentation; diversity then becomes the justification for violence and war, as we have seen in Lebanon, India, Sri Lanka, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Los Angeles, Germany, Italy, and France. As local and national systems of governance break down due to the pressures of globalization, local elites attempt to cling to power by manipulating the ethnic or religious feelings that emerge as a backlash.
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.
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 their 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.
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 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.
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.

Chapter 7

An intolerance of diversity is the biggest threat to peace in our times; conversely, the cultivation of diversity is the most significant contribution to peace—peace with nature and between diverse peoples. The cultivation of diversity has to be a conscious and creative act, intellectually and in practice. It demands more than mere tolerance of diversity, because tolerance alone is not enough to contain the wars unleashed by the intolerance of difference.
Diversity is intimately linked to the possibility of self-organization. Decentralization and local democratic control are political corollaries of the cultivation of diversity. Peace is also derived from conditions in which diverse species and communities have the freedom to self-organize and evolve according to their own needs, structures, and priorities.