Billion years of wisdom

The multiplicity of ecosystems found in the tropics are the cradle of the planet's biological diversity - and they are being rapidly destroyed. It is also here that the majority of Third World countries are located. There are two primary causes for the large-scale destruction of this biodiversity. The first is habitat destruction due to internationally-financed megaprojects - such as dams, highways, mines, and aquaculture - in areas rich in biological diversity. The second cause is the technological and economic push to replace diversity with homogeneity in forestry, agriculture, fishery, and animal husbandry.

Biodiversity erosion starts a chain reaction. The disappearance of one species is related to the extinction of innumerable other species, with which it is interrelated through food webs and food chains. The crisis of biodiversity is not just a crisis of the disappearance of species, which serve as industrial raw material and have the potential of spinning dollars for corporate enterprises. It is, more basically, a crisis that threatens the life-support systems and livelihoods of millions of people in Third World countries. Biodiversity is a people's resource. While the industrialised world and affluent societies turned their backs to biodiversity, the poor in the Third World have continued to depend on biological resources for food and nutrition, for health care, for energy, for fibre, and for housing. The emergence of the new biotechnologies has changed the meaning and value of biodiversity. It has been converted from a life-support base for poor communities into the raw material base for powerful corporations.

Even though references are increasingly made to 'global biodiversity' and 'global genetic resources', biodiversity - unlike the atmosphere or the oceans - is not a global commons in the ecological sense. Biodiversity exists in specific countries and is used by specific communities. It is global only in its emerging role as raw material for global corporations.

The emergence of new intellectual property regimes (IPRs), and new and accelerated potential for exploitation of biodiversity, creates new conflicts over biodiversity - between private and common ownership, between global and local use. Biodiversity has always been a local common resource. A resource is common property when social systems exist to use it on the principles of justice and sustainability. Common property systems recognise the intrinsic worth of biodiversity; regimes governed by IPRs see value as created through commercial exploitation. Common property knowledge and resource systems recognise creativity in nature. As John Todd, a visionary biologist, has stated, biodiversity carries the intelligence of 3.5 billion years of experimentation by life-forms.

Human production is viewed as co-production and co-creativity with nature. IPR regimes, in contrast, are based on the denial of creativity in nature. Yet, they usurp the creativity of emerging indigenous knowledge and the intellectual commons. Further, since IPRs are more a protection of capital investment than a recognition of creativity per se, there is a tendency for ownership of knowledge, and the products and processes emerging from it, to move toward areas of capital concentration and away from poor people without capital. Knowledge and resources are, therefore, systematically alienated from the original custodians and donors, becoming the monopoly of the transnational corporations. Through this trend, biodiversity is converted from a local commons into an enclosed private property.

Indeed, the enclosure of the commons is the objective of IPRs in the areas of life forms and biodiversity. This enclosure is being universalised through the 1995 TRIPs treaty of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and certain interpretations of the Biodiversity Convention. Corpo-

rations are using IPR to pirate indigenous knowledge and biodiversity from Third World communities. Two such cases of privatisation and piracy have been successfully challenged: The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE) initiated a legal action at the European Patent Office (EPO) against the patent granted to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the US multi-national W.R.Grace for the "method for controlling fungi on plants by the aid of a hydrophobic extracted neem oil". Neem is a tree in the Indian sub-continent known for its fungicidal and medicinal properties. The EPO revoked the patent on the grounds of "prior art".

Regarding the patenting of basmati rice, a strain native to the Indian subcontinent, by RiceTec, RFSTE filed a case in public interest in the Supreme Court of India seeking the court's direction to urge the government of India to challenge the patent at the US Patent and Trademark Office, primarily on the grounds that it is in violation of the sovereign rights of India, which include the indigenous and inherent knowledge systems of its farmers. The US PTO mailed a 46-paged letter to RiceTec rejecting all but three of their patent claims on grounds of "prior art". Biodiversity is the poor people's natural capital and the embodiment of cultural diversity. It must remain free if societies are to be free.

Vandana Shiva, biotechnologist, science policy advocate and writer, directs the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy. She received the Alternative Nobel Prize in 1993.