Resisting biotechnology and global injustice.

• Author: Tokar, Brian
• Position: Biodevastation

[The article below is excerpted from the introductory chapter of Gene Traders: Biotechnology, World Trade and the Globalization of Hunger, Edited by Brian Tokar, Burlington, Vermont: Toward Freedom, May, 2004.]

In November of 1999, tens of thousands of people--union members, students, environmentalists, parents and many others--converged in Seattle to nonviolently challenge the biennial Ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO). While media accounts focused on the Seattle police's unprecedented brutality toward demonstrators--and on the actions of small numbers who chose to fight back--the importance of Seattle went far beyond the debates surrounding the police and protesters' tactics.

WTO delegates representing countries from around the world were newly emboldened by this first tangible sign that people in the US were ready to join millions of others worldwide in opposing the Brave New World of corporate globalism. The delegates were able to successfully resist US pressure to launch a new "Millennium Round" of global trade talks, aimed at greatly expanding the purview of the WTO, and the meeting ended with no substantive agreement. Similar scenarios would be played out at future meetings as well. Twenty-two countries of the global walked out of WTO negotiations in Cancun, Mexico in 2003, and the US conceded to a considerably narrowed vision of its proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas later that same year.

The Seattle protests embraced a breathtaking scope of social, economic and environmental issues, equal in breadth to the vast array of policies, affecting all the world's peoples, over which the WTO was seeking dominion. In the face of worldwide resistance to expanding global "free market" policies--also known as "neoliberalism" [1]--global elites had come to see international trade agreements as a means to impose policies that would never withstand the scrutiny of democratic debate in most countries. The most notable of these measures, codified in the founding documents of the WTO, condemned public policies aimed at protecting people and the environment as barriers to global trade--barriers that could be contested, and ultimately overturned, by a secretive body of international trade officials.

As the images of Seattle passed into history, people in Europe, Asia and other parts of the world continued as before to confront the biotechnology industry as a central manifestation of global corporate control. In the US, however, biotech and global justice activists followed rather divergent paths. US global justice campaigners, empowered by the outcome of Seattle, felt for the first time that it was possible to directly confront the core institutions of global capitalism. Economic issues rose to the forefront and environmental concerns, including genetic engineering, were seen as less central to the core mission of challenging the WTO and other global institutions.

For some US activists, GE issues were too technical and too specific, a distraction from the heady opportunity to challenge global capitalism as a whole. Others were put off, sometimes justifiably, by the common framing of genetic engineering as a consumer issue. While some campaigners continued to emphasize the fundamental links between genetic engineering and globalization, particularly around the series of "Biodevastation" events that usually coincide with the annual biotech industry conventions in various cities, [2] the two movements proceeded for some years along largely independent paths.

Meanwhile, throughout much of Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa, popular movements around global economics, genetic engineering, and local food sovereignty evolved along a far more unified course. Wherever global corporations threatened the integrity of local food cultures and agricultural practices, wherever the WTO, World Bank and International Monetary Fund were supporting policies that forced traditional food growers off their land, wherever threats to the integrity of living forests, rivers and coastlines directly impacted traditional agrarian communities, resistance to biotechnology grew hand in hand with...