[E-rundbrief] Info 101 - Vandana Shiva: The ills of the world trading system

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 101 - Vandana Shiva: The ills of the world trading 
system. 'Collective preferences' is an EU attempt to silence domestic critique.

Bad Ischl, 21.4.2004

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'Collective preferences' is an EU attempt to silence domestic critique, 
says Vandana Shiva in an interview (10/03/2004)

In short:
'Collective preferences' is an EU trade policy concept aiming to "silence 
the critique domestically while increasing the aggression against the 
South", says Vandana Shiva, development researcher, in an interview with 
EurActiv.

Brief news:
The EU's emerging concept of 'collective preferences' in international 
trade policy is viewed with scepticism by developing nations. It is an 
attempt by the EU to "survive the critiques of its own citizens while still 
managing to push free trade in the South," said Dr Vandana Shiva, Director 
of Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, Dehra Dun, India.

According to EU Trade Commissioner Lamy, 'collective preferences' would 
serve as a tool for 'good protectionism' - ie it would defend core values, 
such as social rights, public services, environmental and public health 
protection, from the excesses of free trade. The development of this new 
principle is in its infancy within DG Trade of the European Commission but 
has already triggered a significant amount of public interest following a 
leaked internal Commission document, dated November 2003.

Dr Shiva talked to EurActiv about the 'excesses' of the World Trade 
Organisation (WTO) and, in particular, its provisions relating to 
intellectual property protection which prevent Indians from following their 
long-standing tradition of saving seeds after each harvesting period to be 
planted the year after. "We will treat other life forms as our kin, as our 
family, and you are not going to force us into a relationship of property 
with them," she said.

On the issue of Corporate Social Responsibility, Dr Shiva felt that 
corporate behaviour has only changed "in terms of the language they use and 
the brochures they put out" but not "in terms of those who are impacted by 
these companies". "I think for the first time we really have corporate 
crime as an epidemic on the planet," she added.

Dr Shiva pointed out that "globalisation would start to work for people of 
the South" when agriculture and public services are "re-claimed as 
democratic, nationally determined public policy issues". Then "we will 
globalise responsibility, we will globalise compassion. Right now all that 
has been globalised is greed," said Dr Shiva.

EurActiv interviewed Dr Vandana Shiva at a conference hosted by the 
parliamentary group of the Greens/European Free Alliance on "Re-making the 
Global Trading System", on 5 March 2004.

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Date: 08/03/2004

Full interview with Vandana Shiva on the ills of the world trading system

In short:
Vandana Shiva, Director of Research Foundation for Science, Technology and 
Ecology, Dehra Dun, India, has shared her views with EurActiv on the EU's 
emerging proposal to introduce a new principle, that of 'collective 
preferences', in international trade policy.

Q.: Do you think introducing "collective preferences" as a new trade 
principle, as discussed by the EU, would serve development goals or could 
it become a barrier to trade?

VS.: I do not think becoming a barrier to trade should be the measure for 
something that is supposed to correct the distortions of free trade. Free 
trade is being seen as problematic which is why the 'collective 
preferences' discourse has been created - you cannot then measure that 
which is distorted to see whether the distortion is being removed. The 
point is that the collective preferences discussion is a symptom that those 
in power in Europe are realising that citizens of Europe are not going to 
lie. They are not going to say 'feed us GMOs', they are not going to say 
'get rid of all our environmental values'.

My worry is that the way it is being framed could satisfy European 
citizens, while creating yet another tool of domination over the South. The 
way the discourse on collective preferences has been structured, is 
extremely colonial, very eurocentric, it talks of the South not having 
cultural preferences. It talks of the South as not having interest in 
environmental protection. Just because our people have been made so poor 
that they are having to live with toxins... that does not mean that we 
prefer to die... that does not mean we love to be polluted. Poverty has 
become a block in the articulation of rights... there is a way of defining 
third world rights and people have a structure that says richness is equal 
to cultural preferences and poverty means no cultural preferences, which is 
already creating unequal rights.

It is made more complicated than it is. As I have said very honestly, I 
read in my document an attempt to substitute 'right' by 'preferences' and 
shift from universal duties of states to a system of social choices that 
have to be negotiated according to how much power you have access to. Now 
that is a very dangerous trend.

Q.: To be fair, the issue of collective preferences is only at a discussion 
stage...

VS.: I know but to me this is an attempt to say how do we survive the 
critiques of our own citizens while still managing to push free trade in 
the South. They are trying to achieve both. Silencing the critique 
domestically while increasing the aggression against the South.

Q.: Could this not be seen as a balancing act between the EU and the US?

VS.: But the thing is that whatever brings a balance between the US and 
Europe at the cost of the South will never be good enough as a human 
solution. The planetary solution means you need to include two-thirds of 
humanity in the planet. You cannot exclude two-thirds and say you are 
saving the planet.

Q.: In your view, where does globalisation come from?

VS.: Free trade and globalisation as we see it today was invented with 
colonialism. For the East India company to take over our markets in India 
and destroy our domestic production it had to bribe its way through get a 
free trade treaty in 1716. At that level, there is nothing new about the 
way free trade treaties are written in order to create privileged rights 
for external investors, traders, over and above the rights of local 
producers and ordinary citizens. That has been rehearsed before - that is 
how colonialism was entrenched.

The only difference between this round of free trade and earlier rounds of 
free trade is that this is going much further. At best they could take over 
the manufacturing of textile at that time, at best they could start 
re-writing property rights on land which was handled all the time. But now 
property rights are being written on life forms. New property rights are 
defining life itself as the property of a handful of corporations, 
especially in the biotech industry. It is also going further in terms of 
where profits are being extracted from and by defining everything as trade, 
including our ordinary lives, the way we educate ourselves, heal ourselves, 
provide our water, everything has been turned into tradeable, a commodity, 
a subject matter of trade rules, and free trade rules particularly. It has 
a much farther reaching impact.

Q.: What measures could be taken to make globalisation work for developing 
countries?

VS.: I think the first thing that has to be done is to recognise what are 
the excesses of the institution, the organisation called the WTO, the rules 
that have been written and are governed through it with its very coercive 
system of dispute settlement and also anti-democratic structure of making 
decisions because there are many areas that just do not belong to a trade 
agreement. How we handle our seeds should be dependent on the culture of 
the people. Now the European Union is talking about "cultural preferences" 
- in India we have a cultural preference to save seeds. All peasants around 
the world have always saved seeds [ie, putting aside some of the seeds 
after havesting to be planted the year after]. Now intellectual property 
rights from the WTO are making it illegal. We do not believe it is right 
for the WTO to force us. We in fact have a huge movement which basically 
tells both our government as well as the international systems what is not 
their jurisdiction. We basically repeated the same. You cannot govern over 
the way we relate to biodiversity in our life. That is our ethical 
imperative. We will treat other life forms as our kin, as our family, and 
you are not going to force us into a relationship of property with them.

Agriculture was always about livelihoods, was always about farmers, it was 
always about the land, about producing nourishment. Agriculture and food do 
not belong to a trade treaty. Services is the word for essential vital 
needs, education, health and water, these do not belong to a trade treaty. 
These need to be re-claimed as democratic, nationally determined public 
policy issues in which ordinary people have a role. That is when 
globalisation will start to work for people of the South because then we 
will globalise responsiblity, we will globalise compassion. Right now all 
that has been globalised is greed.

The suicide of the farmers is the biggest tragedy of the current rules of 
globalisation which I call the rules of genocide. My institute started 
monitoring and analysing what is going on since the first reported suicide. 
The people who push trade liberalisation say there will always be winners, 
there will always be losers, that is the first mantra. The second mantra is 
that everything that is going wrong has always been around. But I can tell 
you about farmer suicides - no Indian farmer had committed suicide. This is 
the first time, a globalised, liberalised agriculture, creating corporate 
monopolies, is forcing farmers to become dependent on purchased inputs, 
seeds and chemicals from Monsanto on the one hand, which are raising the 
cost of production and pushing farmers into debt, and on the other hand, 
those rules are also pushing down the prices. We have done studies over the 
years - we are talking about rates of suicide that have become 
unimaginable. Every place where the suicides are the worst are the states 
which globalised their agriculture fastest, where companies got in at a 
more rapid rate. Indebtedness is very clearly the reason why farmers are 
committing suicide. Farmer suicides based on our calculations are at 25,000 
in the last four or five years.

Farmers' suicides in India are related very much to the 'new slavery' 
showing up in terms of farmers' dependency on purchased seeds and purchased 
chemicals. I can just tell you the example of the company that controls the 
maximum of seed supply in the world now under the freedom globalisation 
gave it. This is the company that sprayed agent orange on Vietnam. Agent 
orange is a herbicide it is the company which controls the seed supply of 
the world.

We are now preparing cases. We already have companies in courts for public 
interest but now we will be working with individual farmers who have been 
victims of this fraud to create a kind of precedent. We know it will not be 
easy because these are not corporate citizens, these are corporate mafias.

Q.: Could you please give your assessment of the reform of the EU's Common 
Agricultural Policy - is it going in the right direction?

VS.: No it is not. CAP was a wasteful system, I agree with that, it 
promoted industrial agriculture and it did end up supporting the larger 
proprietors and marginalised the family farmers. The two big changes in CAP 
are de-coupled income support and an attempt to make it look like the green 
box subsidies are going to start protecting the environment. As far as 
de-coupled income support is concerned it is not a collective preference of 
European farmers or European citizens. It is a 'Cargill' invention. Cargill 
is the world's biggest 'green trader'. Cargill first put it into US policy, 
Cargill then it put it into WTO policy and CAP is merely re-writing 
Europe's policy in accordance with global agribusiness. So while it is true 
that the small farmer was hurt and the big farmer gained, now the new 
reform of CAP is going to make Cargill gain.

De-coupling is basically saying the cost of production will not be 
reflected in the price of the commodity, the two things will be de-coupled. 
This is a ready-made recipe for dumping on the one hand, but it is also a 
ready-made recipe for these companies to buy cheap because as long as your 
cost of production reflects in the product you have some way of keeping 
track of how much they are getting farmers into debt. Because then public 
policy is measuring the costs and is ensuring that farmers stay afloat. 
Normally, subsidies in agriculture works cost of production this year, 
farmers will get this much. De-coupled income support means that you will 
get two thousand dollars, no matter how much you produce, which looks 
wonderful, but in the meantime you could get into two million dollars of 
debt. So I would say CAP reform is a reform to rip off the peasants and 
farmers and the small family farmers even more. It's a pro agri-business 
reform it is not a pro-environment reform, it is not a pro small family 
farmer reform.

Q.: Could organic farming be the solution?

VS.: Organic farming is the only way is the only way we can produce enough 
to feed the world given the fact that we are not short of people but we are 
very short of resources. We are very short of water and we are very short 
of fertile land. The only things that need to be maximised for productivity 
are not labour; what we have to do is reduce the waste of resources in 
agriculture. Only organic farming and sustainable agriculture uses 
resources efficiently in order to use less to produce more. Let me give you 
just two examples. There are now studies that show that intensive 
industrial agriculture uses 300 units to produce 100 units of food. Whereas 
ecological agriculture and sustainable farming uses 5 units to produce 100 
units. So you are wasting 295 units of very scarce resources. The reason we 
have a water crisis is because industrial agriculture led to us using ten 
times more water to produce the same amount of food. If you look at the 
water efficiency of all agricultural innovations and industrialism they 
have been water wasteful. We have done calculations that if you shift to 
diversity, you could increase food production five times and nutritional 
availability 20 times.

Q.: What are your views on 'Corporate Social Responsibility'? Has corporate 
behaviour changed in recent years?

VS.: Yes, there has been a change in terms of the language they use and the 
brochures they put out. So if you look at Coca-Cola's brochure, it is 
wonderful. But if you look at how Coca-Cola operates on the ground, they 
are more criminal than ever before. Because trade liberalisation has 
basically meant that what little fragile systems there were to hold 
corporations to account have been dismantled. Trade liberalisation is 
nothing more than removing the regulatory apparatus for capital and putting 
in its place regulation over citizens. Coca-Cola is behaving like a 
criminal in a small village where I have had to go repeatedly because the 
tribal women have lost their drinking water. 1.5 million litres a day is 
being mined. It has tried its 'very best' to terrorise our women, to 
corrupt our courts, to bribe officials, it is just that we have continued 
and persisted and have won some battles against coke. So Corporate Social 
Responsibility is only showing up at the level of shareholders and the 
brochures they receive but in terms of those who are impacted by these 
companies, I think for the first time we really have corporate crime as an 
epidemic on the planet. Corporate crime against the planet and against 
people. And we need a much higher level of response.

Q.: But how about European corporations? Are they doing any better?

VS.: Shell in Nigeria, you just have to talk to the Nigerians and I have 
lost friends, a fellow-environmentalist, who was killed. The partnership 
between the Nigerian army, the Nigerian system and Shell to oppress those 
whose lands were destroyed and polluted. So Shell is very European and yet 
it has not really been different in terms of its criminal activity.

Q.: Would you have a comment on the access to medicines arrangements in the 
WTO and their impact on India?

VS.: India happens to be the country that both has the highest amount of 
indigenous medicine used by people as a living tradition (ajurveda) - 70 
per cent of our health system is indigenous medicine. 30 percent is 
allopathic. That 30 percent has become available because in the 1970s we 
wrote a law through huge debate which under the colonial laws that allowed 
people to innovate with new processes to make medicine. So you could have a 
different way of making the same medicine and a patent holder could not 
prevent you from making it. These were called process patents. The company 
could at best could control the method of making a medicine but not the 
medicine itself. That is what the WTO has undone. As a result of which AIDS 
medicines which our companies could make for 200 dollars but the patented 
version is sold for 20 thousand dollars, on average, Indian medicine is a 
thousand times cheaper.

Last December, the final changes were made in our patent laws which will 
make it impossible for Indian companies to make low-cost drugs. Just like 
Indian farmers have committed suicide because of high debts, we are already 
seeing the trends that medicine, which used to be affordable in India, is 
going to be changed to a system where people will get into debt for health. 
So we are going to see affordable medicine disappear and if it disappears 
in India, it disappears from the world because India supplies Africa, India 
has just got an order from Malaysia. If it was not for Indian medicines, 
AIDS victims in the South would not have had healthcare.

As far as the jugglery in the WTO on public health and right to medicine is 
concerned it was a non-delivery. It tied up the whole thing into such knots 
that it is as good as not having the possibility.

Q.: Will it be beneficial to India to be able to export more to the least 
developed countries?

VS.: India exports right now but it will be prevented from exporting. 
Because those agreements that have been made are so complicated because you 
have to have a separate line. You cannot make it for domestic production. 
The patent holder will come and guarantee that you are only sending the 
amount ordered. You will make it in a different packaging. The costs will 
therefore increase. A small unit making the medicines will not be able to 
bear the costs. You can export low-cost medicine but for the domestic 
market we will not be able to produce. And the export will be tied to the 
UN system of subsidies. But this is a system that denies the domestic 
access and therefore means that Indians, the majority of whom are so poor, 
will be condemned to not having health rights.

Aus der homepage: 
http://www.euractiv.com/cgi-bin/cgint.exe/1042022-641?714&1015=10&1014=in_shiva

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Matthias Reichl
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e-mail: mareichl at ping.at
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