Below is an excerpt of an interview, conducted on March 4, with Dr VANDANA SHIVA by REBECCA GORDON and BOB WING. It appeared in the August 16 issue of the United States magazine ColorLines.
The mainstream press in the US treats globalisation as the golden door to a future of prosperity for everyone. How do you see it?
There's enough of a physicist in me to see future systems evolving out of what we experience in the present. But, at present, globalisation disenfranchises the large majority of people, robs them of their democratic rights and replaces even what little "fig leaf democracy" we have with corporate totalitarianism.
Do you mean that the WTO [World Trade Organisation] makes it impossible for countries to erect tariff barriers to prevent imports from threatening local industries?
The very language "create tariff barriers" sounds as if something nasty were being done. The entire language of free trade has been shaped by changing the meaning of basic concepts that are understandable by ordinary people, couching them in a new language that makes some things that are good from the perspective of people look like nasty things. They are only nasty from the perspective of the market.
Take "protection" for example. Protecting your community, making sure that your children have enough food, ensuring that your small farmers are not robbed of their livelihood, ensuring that your old-growth forests, rivers, soils and biodiversity are protected — these are not just legitimate protection, they are obligations. It is absolutely essential that we protect our families, our communities, our environment, our livelihoods.
But that "protection" — which comes from a political and social imperative, I would even go so far as to say moral imperative — has been redefined by the corporate culture as an economic category called "protectionism", which is to be opposed and dismantled. Protection is not protectionism, because protection cannot be reduced to a phenomenon of the marketplace.
The giant agricultural multinationals have taken a lot of heat for creating genetically modified food. One example is "RoundupReady" soy, which can withstand massive doses of pesticides. Now they're talking about introducing "golden rice", which they claim will add vitamin A to people's diets and protect the world's poor from blindness. What's wrong with this new kind of rice?
I've had too much experience with the "miracles" that come out of the Rockefeller Foundation. Let me give you just a few reasons why the golden rice will not be a miracle but a disaster.
The Rockefeller Foundation financed the "Green Revolution" in the 1960s, which shifted agriculture worldwide from sustainable, organic bases to totally non-sustainable chemical farming. It did not produce more food; it displaced more peasants. It bonded Third World countries into permanent debt. India had a threefold leap in borrowing from the World Bank, just for loans related to chemical agriculture in the 1960s.
The later cycles of debt and structural adjustment are all hooked to that recipe of addiction to agrichemicals through World Bank and Rockefeller financing. Each year, the Green Revolution would introduce one rice variety that would last for one or two years, until it collapsed because of a disease outbreak. Then they would introduce a new monoculture.
Collapsing monocultures are not diversity! They are a wonderful treadmill that the big corporations would like us to get on. First they sold us chemicals. Then they sell us seeds that require the chemicals. That is why they introduced genetic engineering. That is why they created herbicide-resistant varieties like "RoundupReady" soy. The golden rice is part of that same package.
My response to the Rockefeller Foundation is: "Why don't you talk about the organic sources of vitamin A that are in the hands of women in the Third World — the 200 varieties of greens that we grow in our fields, the hundreds of wild herbs we collect for vitamin A sources? Just go to the African bush; just because they don't have vitamin A tablets doesn't mean they don't have vitamin A. Just look at nature's biodiversity and count the sources of vitamin A. If you can't do it, we'll hold grassroots peasant women's literacy classes for you!".
If they push the golden rice the way they pushed the Green Revolution, all the subsidies from the Rockefeller Foundation, USAID, and the World Bank will wipe out our millet, will wipe out our greens, and destroy vitamin A sources while pretending to create them.
Can you talk a little bit about how globalisation affects people of colour in the US and people in the Third World?
Through patenting, indigenous knowledge is being pirated in the name of protecting knowledge and preventing piracy. The knowledge of our ancestors, of our peasants about seeds is being claimed as an invention of US corporations and US scientists, and patented by them.
The only reason that can work is because underlying it is a racist framework that says the knowledge of the Third World and the knowledge of people of colour is not knowledge. When that knowledge is taken by white men who have capital, suddenly creativity begins. Seeds such as the basmati seed, the aromatic rice from India, which we have grown for centuries, right in my valley, are being claimed as a novel invention by RiceTec. The corporations are stealing the last resources of the poor, their seeds.
Bio-piracy functions under a racist assumption — exactly as when Europeans colonised the rest of the world 500 years ago. They defined all land that didn't contain white Europeans as "empty land". Just as in the earlier period of colonisation, people's knowledge creation and their wealth creation is being negated, even while their knowledge and their wealth is taken over.
Who creates wealth? In my view, it's the workers who create wealth. It's women working in the factories in the US who create wealth, women peasants in India create wealth. But who is creating wealth in the racist worldview? The corporations who steal from us and those young white fellows on Wall Street who speculate on currencies.
Patents are a replay of colonialism, which is now called globalisation and free trade. The intellectual property rights laws of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) set the stage for foreign corporations to gain a total monopoly control of our food production by displacing traditional seed varieties with patented hybrids.
Here in the US, progressives were deeply encouraged to see the outpouring of well organised and creative opposition to the WTO's meeting in Seattle. What do you think was accomplished?
The big corporations and the powerful institutions that engineer globalisation keep talking about it as if it were a natural phenomenon. The exercise of power by ordinary citizens in Seattle to block that round of talks informed the whole world that there's nothing inevitable or natural about it. The WTO is a political project where powerful people get together. If ordinary people get together, if we organise enough, we can stall that project.
The second thing achieved in Seattle was cross-issue, cross-sector organising, and organising across borders. The early part of this past century was the age of revolutions. We had grand revolutions. All those revolutions have in a way faded out and everything they built is now in ruins.
The last 50 years of citizen activism was really issue based activism — women worked on women's issues, environmentalists on environmental issues and workers worked on workers' rights. There was no synergy, even though everyone was acting. It wasn't adding up to a political challenge.
Each separate issue-based movement was having to negotiate separately, from its narrow ground, with highly coordinated and powerful institutions on the other side, which were coordinating how they handled labour, the environment, the Third World and women. They had a very well worked out scheme and we were all fragmented.
In Seattle, we got together. Even if there were only a handful of Third World peasants there, and even if Third World women were only there in small numbers, the issues were shaped by them.
How did that coalescence come about?
Because of at least a decade of work before. There was a lot of groundwork, fed by three major movements: there was the movement of the Third World against structural adjustment, the World Bank, and IMF; movements confronting free trade, GATT and the WTO; and issue-based movements that had already started to build alliances to deal with structural adjustment and free trade.
In Seattle, the puzzle started to come together. We saw the emergence of a citizen-based alternative paradigm of how we need to organise the economy, how we need to govern markets, what should be the powers of citizens, what should be the powers of governments and what limits should be placed on corporate greed.
And a sense of how that coalescence could be transformed into enforceable policies?
Absolutely. That is what the follow-up work after Seattle has become. For example, in India we are working to put together a solidarity convention, bringing together every movement in the country — every trade union, farmers' groups, women's groups, environmental groups, groups that work with children, the groups that work on peace. That has partly been possible because of Seattle — people are able to refer back to it as a watershed and say, "Yes, it's doable".
[Rebecca Gordon is senior research associate at the Applied Research Center in Oakland, California. Bob Wing is editor of ColorLines. Subscriptions to ColorLines can be obtained at .]