Corporate protectionism threatens people

By Vandana Shiva

In fact, the end of the centralised concept of sovereignty creates a new opportunity to reshape and reassert a concept of national sovereignty dispersed through its people and its communities.

Globalisation has rendered the relationship between the community, the state and the corporation totally fluid. It has further entrenched the powers and widened the freedoms of corporations, while further eroding the powers and freedoms of people in diverse community settings.

State protectionism which had undermined community protectionism, is now itself being undermined by corporate protectionism.

Transnational corporations (TNCs) and international institutions like the World Bank benefit from, and thus promote, an erosion of the role of the state in protecting the people through the seduction of terms like “liberalisation of the economy” and “free trade”.

As globalisation allows increasing transfer of the resources from the public domain, either under the control of communities or of the state, discontent and dissent necessarily increase, leading to law and order problems.

In such a situation, even a minimalist state, restricted only to policing and law and order, will become enormously large and all-pervasive, devouring much of the wealth of society and intruding into every aspect of citizens’ lives.

For citizens and communities, the erosion of state power implies the withdrawal of two kinds of protection. The first is the protection available through the regulation of commercial profit-seeking behaviour, to prevent the destruction of livelihoods, the environment and people’s health.

The second protection that is withdrawn is that built into traditional environmental rights and rights to knowledge and culture, rights which are often customary and not written into law, but which are at the very heart of secure livelihoods and survival options, especially of marginal communities such as women, indigenous and tribal communities, landless and small peasants, farmers, traditional fisherfolk, indigenous healers, traditional craftsmen, etc.

New concepts of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) based on the interests of corporations and the reality of social, economic and political organisation of industrialised Western countries are central to undermining and destroying the timeless protection traditional producer communities have had through their inalienable community rights to resources, knowledge, markets and livelihoods.

Traditional  communities become  vulnerable to piracy of their resources and their knowledge by commercial and corporate interests claiming exclusive IPR protection for the pirated resources and knowledge.

Even among those who talk the language of indigenous knowledge, biodiversity conservation and local rights, there are two paradigms of protectionism that emerged as a response to the process of  globalisation and the simultaneous reduction in state power.

The first paradigm, the TNC-centred, Corporate Rule paradigm, is based on the perspective that the process of economic globalisation and corporate protectionism is natural and evolutionary and corporate rule is inevitable. This inevitability perspective has also been referred to as the TINA (There Is No Alternative) Syndrome.

The second paradigm, the People-centred Self-rule paradigm, is based on the perspective that the destruction of the nation state does not imply the destruction of sovereignty, but rather affords the opportunity to create a new form of nationhood in which people’s self-rule is the backbone of sovereignty.

 1.     The TNC-centred, Corporate Rule Paradigm

There are two approaches that are contributing to support for the TNC-centred, corporate rule paradigm. In the first approach, corporate rule is treated as a natural evolutionary step in progress as World Bank-led and government-managed “development” was over the past 50 years.

Corporate-dominated society and culture is treated as more sophisticated and superior to all other forms of social organisation.  This approach arises from a conscious choice for corporate rule.  We identify it as “globalisation by choice”.

The second approach supports corporate rule not consciously, but by default. This approach is usually adopted by local communities who have only known and faced oppression by state structures in the colonial and the “development” eras. It supports globalisation to contain and limit the power of the nation state.

However, this approach results in the further undermining of the self-determination possibilities of local communities by enlarging the control of corporations over people’s lives.  We call it “globalisation by default”.

 a.     Globalisation by choice

The “globalisation by choice” approach recognises the unprotected free flow of resources and knowledge from the gene-rich South to the capital-rich North. This perspective puts TNCs at the centre of rights to biological resources and utilisation patterns of biodiversity.

The TNC-centred approach treats IPRs and patents on life as inevitable and progressive, and defines as valueless the diverse ways in which diverse communities have used biodiversity for health and nutrition.

The approach legitimises and justifies the transformation of social wealth and social creativity dispersed throughout society into the private monopolies of TNCs.

It defines this appropriation as “value addedness” at the economic level and as “innovation” at the epistemological level.

The approach that genetic resources have no value and our local and national utilisation does not “add value” is a devaluation of biodiversity and our knowledge capacity.

To define biodiversity as having no value and to describe biodiversity as “raw genetic resources” is to undermine the basis of conservation as well as benefit sharing.

Such a TNC-centred perspective sees local communities as mere caretakers of biodiversity, generating information, and passing it on to “biodiversity-based enterprises”.

This approach ignores the fact that in most societies, especially of the Third World, biodiversity has always been a common resource.  It is a living resource, being affected by and affecting communities living in harmony with it.

Knowledge of this biodiversity and its utilisation has also been freely exchanged both within and between communities. Innovations have been based on knowledge handed down over centuries and adapted for newer uses, and these innovations have, over time, been absorbed into the common pool of knowledge about the resource, which has contributed immeasurably to the vast agricultural and medicinal plant diversity that exists today.

By individualising what has essentially been the product of innovation and utilisation of communities, this approach uses the process of globalisation to also destroy the cohesiveness of communities, pitting individuals against communities and communities against one another.

 b. Globalisation by default

Localists can become default globalisers by failing to address the issue of self-determination in the context of corporate rule, assuming that it is limited to state rule.

Default globalisers recognise the value of indigenous knowledge, demand respect for indigenous culture and reject Western-style notions of IPR regimes.

However, they fail to see the substitution of a new corporate rule for centralised state rule.

Thus this perspective continues to state the philosophy of self-determination and self-reliance of people in the language of “freedom from the state” without seeing how such a narrow vision  and  outmoded  definition  of  self-determination  will  totally  deny  the  people and communities any mode of self-determination in the context of corporate rule in which corporate monopolies leave no freedom of production or consumption in the hands of the people.

In the absence of any national regulation to control corporate behaviour and ethics, and in the absence of the recognition of the need for solidarity of diverse communities protected through a community rights regime, TNCs are free to deal with each community in ways that provide them almost free access to resources by pitting communities against one another.

Thus bioprospecting corporations could make direct deals with representatives of local communities bypassing any national regulatory framework.

Biotechnology companies could release genetically engineered organisms without either national or global regulation.  The TNCs would like to see all regulation that protects small producers and small farmers disappear so that they can usurp resources and markets.

Default globalisation ends up directly connecting local communities to global corporate power without any restricting and regulating level in between. It therefore also pits communities against communities.

Communities, though pluralistic and often antagonistic to one another, have evolved institutions that put limits on the private commercial exploitation of resources and knowledge. Such limits on commercial interests set by community structures have generated social creativity and collective innovation.

Social good has been the underlying factor for innovations in production and utilisation in these communities and sustainability the basis of and reason for conservation of the natural biological resources.

On the other hand, market economics, where profit rather than social good is the sole motive for production, can be built only on the theory of unlimited access to natural resources.

This unlimited access in turn can only be realised when the cohesiveness of communities is shattered through the promotion of the idea of individual gain, and the potential for communities to act together is destroyed through the factionalisation of issues that affect communities as a whole.

For example, instead of proposing that gender inequality be removed in communities, and men and women defend their rights to resources and knowledge as equal partners, the perspective argues that because of gender inequality, women and men in communities can have no common interests and rights to defend.

This in turn allows the resources of the communities to be hijacked by external interests leaving both the men and the women of the communities resource-less and further marginalised.

Similarly, instead of focusing on the rights of all farming communities, which include women, indigenous groups, the landless and the small and marginal farmers, who are engaged in food production and conservation of agricultural biodiversity through the contribution of their physical and intellectual labour, this approach argues that indigenous communities and farming communities have no overlap and are in fact, antagonistic.

Hence, in this approach, the farmers’ rights issue and the indigenous rights issue must be kept separate. This fragmentation builds the ground for corporate control over seed and plant genetic resources and IPR monopolies.

The ultimate unfolding of this logic of fragmented communities with no common thread of community rights or any form of state protectionism is the epidemic of inter-religious, inter-caste, inter-ethnic, inter-race warfare that is emerging in all societies torn apart by the politics of identity and difference.

 2. The People-centred Self-rule Paradigm

The philosophy of direct democracy and democratic pluralism recognises that diverse communities have diverse interests, and in the shaping of national law and policy, they all have legitimate democratic rights of decision-making and self-determination through self-rule.

It also recognises that representative democracy is inadequate to protect people’s interest in a period of globalisation and there needs to be a rejuvenation of people’s direct decision-making in matters that affect their lives.

The demand for these democratic rights has been expressed by tribal and indigenous peoples as the self-determined right to control their natural resources and by the farming communities as their self-determined right to agricultural biodiversity through their rights to plant genetic resources, and the self-determined right to practise sustainable agriculture.

In systems characterised by patriarchal domination of women, urban areas dominating over rural areas, colonisers dominating over indigenous people, democratic pluralism necessarily requires an inclusion of communities who have been excluded.

This would necessarily transform both the communities characterised by internal inequalities as well as governance structures within countries.

The philosophy of democratic pluralism recognises the anti-democratic nature of the centralised nation state on which state protectionism of the past was founded.

But it also sees the emergence of corporate protectionism as the real threat to democratic rights and economic livelihoods.

In this perspective, countering this recolonisation requires the reinvention of national sovereignty by democratic processes, to create national systems which act in partnership with local communities to protect the natural wealth, the economic livelihoods and the cultural and intellectual heritage of the country.

This transformed state has to be based on the logic of “ever widening, never ascending circles” as Gandhi described the philosophy of decentralisation. Contrasting this with the dominant hierarchical view, his vision was:

Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom.  But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of village till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance, but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral units. Therefore, the outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle, but will give strength to all within and will derive its own strength from it.

Self-rule of communities is the basis for indigeneous self-determination, for sustainable agriculture, for democratic pluralism.

In the context of increasing concentration of power and capital in corporate hands through the process of globalisation, the space for communities to exercise their right to self-determination and self-rule is rapidly shrinking.

Communities need to use this right to self-determination to delegate to the state the function of limiting corporate power. The reinvention of the state has to be based on the reinvention of sovereignty.

Sovereignty cannot reside only in centralised state structures, nor does it disappear when the protective functions of the state with respect to its people start to wither away.  The new partnership for national sovereignty needs empowered communities which assign functions to the state for their protection.

The defence of communities and their resources and livelihoods demands such duties and obligations from state structures. — Third World Network Features