The Plunder of Nature.

• Author: Shiva, Vandana
• Position: Genetic engineering, patents, biopiracy

I remember about 10 years ago there was a Sandoz representative at a meeting and during one of the discussions he said, "By the turn of the century there will just be five of us, and we have to have patents and we have to have genetic engineering." And in a way it was that one sentence that to me triggered a whole re-direction of what we needed to be addressing and I stopped working on Tropical Rainforests, which used to be my passion. I think the responsibility that this town has given the people and the Greens of St. Louis is a tremendous responsibility and I'm so glad you took it.

I've been waiting for years for some kind of organized response from this country. We all have been waiting. And I remember, that when Monsanto and the others were starting to get organized and they said, "We don't really have to worry about the greens, the ecologists have been had, you know. We'll sell BioTech as green to them. It's the consumers who will be the obstacle, let's learn to deal with the consumers." And it is true that in North America the green voice has been slow in emerging, but I'm glad it's finally here; and it might not be. I believe in Ecology in the sense that I believe every big oak tree starts with a tiny seed and the biggest of the rivers that are flowing past this town started with a trickle at their source. And this tiny group of people is a tremendous bunch of activists. As it is, they have done so much over the past decade and more and joined together in solidarity. I really feel that even though it looks like this monster's becoming bigger and bigger--the latest acquisition of t he plant breeding station of Unilever, which literally is a public gift because in Thatcher's days Cambridge University sold it off for next to nothing, the oldest plant breeding station and collection of germ plant collection to Lever at that time which is now gone. Gone on to Monsanto.

With the emergence of patents on life and genetic engineering what we are seeing is a double plunder of nature and knowledge. The first kind of plunder has been named, it's known as biopiracy. We've all, all of us who've worked on patenting issues, have worked on it and I would like to say thank you to the team at RAFI (Rural Advancement Foundation International) that has played such a tremendous role in exposing piracy after piracy. Steve Emmott, from the European Parliament, worked so hard with the Greens to bring in the amendments that would have made piracy illegal. Yet the way the world is going these days, you now have a European patent directive that legalizes biopiracy by not having introduced the amendments that would have prevented it. The idea of being able to claim other people's creativity or nature's creativity, as if it was an invention, comes so easily partly because it's been going on for more than 500 years. It was no different when Columbus arrived in this country. There were already inhab itants here. Yet it was called an empty land. It was declared a sterile land, as was Australia, as was every other part of the world that was colonized by Europeans. We today have the assumption of empty life. That every living being, every organism is empty until a hand that controls capital and happens to be white manipulates it.

The knowledge, the idea of the empty word, the empty land, or empty life is an idea of scarcity. It is an idea that creates scarcity so that it can then, given that scarcity, create growth for the colonized or for the exploited.

Monsanto is trying to put together an advertisement with signatures of third-world people to basically say that these affluent consumers of the north who want to prevent genetically engineered food are coming in the way of third-world prosperity. Here's this food abundance in the north, which is not reaching the starving south, and the caption of this ad for which they are mobilizing signatures through a company that has about 70 ex-US ambassadors and 170 ex-CIA...