Biocolonialism

Biocolonialism and bioimperialism are the terms used to refer to the phenomenon in which first-world institutions, mainly agro-chemical and pharmaceutical corporations, assault the knowledge wealth found in the Third World and erode its biodiversity threatening the livelihoods of billions of people, and also greatly damaging fragile ecosystems. The ‘colonialism’ tag in the term biocolonialism is fairly accurate, for parallels can be drawn between current issues and previous forms of formal colonialism—a spoil of the South’s wealth that asymmetrically benefits the North, but also of a convenient hegemony of a western system of value over any other possible worldviews. This article will attempt to uncover the discourses that support such practices, and cast light on how they might be seen as the continuation of an imperialist paradigm, in which the North continues to exert its grip on the South. In the final section there will be a comment on the possibility of resistance by those affected and some of the forms that resistance is taking.

In a short essay by Giorgio Agamben titled what is an apparatus? he explores the meaning and origins of Foucault’s notion of the dispositif (2009). A very interesting historical exploration of a key element in the foundation of western culture is made: the early Christian theologians, by introducing the concept of the Trinity, established a separation of the essential substance of being (God), and the oikonomia, the more mundane administration of the things of men (Christ). Here is already the break with a holistic conception of the physical world and the divine as one—something that differs substantially from other epistemologies that continue to exist around the world today. Oikonomia was in fact translated by these Latin theologians as dispositio, which is the etymological root of dispositif. The dispositif or apparatus is ‘a set of strategies of the relations of force supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge, [broadly consisting of] discourses, institutions, laws, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions’ (Foucault in Agamben 2009:2). This insight is interesting insofar as it sheds light on how firstly, the conception of a world of non-divine things to be managed economically is constitutive of a western worldview; and second, how a heterogeneous apparatus comprised of the above mentioned elements is developed for such purpose.

The history of colonialism thus can be best understood by taking a broad approach that looks at the apparatus that supported it in each phase. As we have seen with Foucault’s own definition, apparatuses are comprised of physical and economic relations of power, but also of discourses that make such relations legitimate. In fact, these legitimizing discourses are perhaps the cornerstone of any system of power, and when these are absent or undermined, no relation of domination can hold for long. The apparatuses and its array of elements are not a static set, but are constantly evolving and adapting to new situations as these require. When trying to understand how the current relations of power at a global level have come to be, it is necessary then to analyse each of these elements, both individually and as part of a whole.

Colonialism formally ended by mid-twentieth century, and one of the main causes for its downfall was the unfeasibility of the discourses—these are well known: Europeans were benefiting those they oppressed by elevating their morality with Christianity and improving their civilizations with modernity—that had legitimised it until then. Only when these discourses were identified by the oppressed and also by some Europeans at home as the façade of a system of exploitation, they lost acceptance, and the edifice of colonialism crumbled. The ‘civilising’ mission was thus left aside.

At this point there was a vacuum to be filled in terms of what was to be the ethos of the relations of the west with the former colonies; the ‘development’ agenda was thus introduced. Development was equally an apparatus, perhaps more sophisticated and pervasive even; removing force, “discourses, institutions, laws, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions” acquire the central role. The former colonies were now referred to as the poor, ueveloped countries of the ‘Third World’, but which, with the help of western expertise, held the potential to become developed. (Escobar 1995)

The development agenda sought to promote a certain type of economic development for the countries of the South so that they would eventually be on par with those in the North. The agenda was thus designed in the North (in institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank), and hence it was mostly constitutive of a western worldview. All fields of social sciences were called onto the task of carrying the poor countries of the Third World into the inevitable state of modernity, which the west had already reached—what had been done in Europe could be repeated elsewhere, it was just a matter of time (Chakrabarty 2008). A set of quantifiable variables were to measure the backwardness or advance of the countries of the Third World. These were of the “economism” type—the main metric being that of GDP growth—as Vandana Shiva (1994) calls it; which supposes the commodification of all aspects of social life and of nature.

Because it is the west that has attained modernity, without putting into question the fact that the privileged situation of the west was achieved through centuries of domination of the rest of the world, and also because modernity is assumed to be the desirable end-goal of any society, only a western system of knowledge is considered valid for that purpose. This results in the effective seclusion of any alternative worldviews that have developed in the countries of the third-world for millennia and only in contemporary history have come to be considered backwards and naïve. Only that knowledge that fits the cannon of what is considered ‘scientific’ by the apparatus of mainstream science counts as valid, and indigenous and traditional knowledges are relegated to a marginal, inferior place in the hierarchy of knowledge. The argument is made by the western-scientific apparatus that indigenous communities and their non-scientific ways are stifling innovation and underscoring a huge potential for their own well-being that could be fully developed by scientific research, hence the doors should be totally open to the latter; with the help of science, they could attain development—of course this notion of ‘development’ is, as has been said, one defined within the western system of values and so has little to do with the actual quality of life of indigenous communities. However what is not accounted for is that the very richness in biological information such as in germplasm diversity that is to be found is these regions (which is what attracts the attention of first-world scientists) is the work of the very people whom they accuse of stagnating knowledge and opposing novelty (Sihva, 1994). The replacement of diversity in agriculture for the homogeneity of crops that peasants in the third world have been forced to adapt can be read analogously to the homogenising effect of capitalist-driven globalization on culture; for a techno-centric view of the world it is easier to deal with standardized nature than the complexity of alternative arrangements and worldviews. With the erosion of the diversity in nature comes the erosion of diversity of cultures: ‘monocultures of the mind generate models of production which destroy diversity and legitimise that destruction as progress, growth and improvement.’ (Shiva 1994:7)

It is in the capitalist mind-set that everything is looked at in light of its potential for profit. Nature becomes a resource waiting for monetary value to be extracted: it becomes commodified. A forest is not seen, in this light, as the ecosystem that sustains all types of lives, including human, and that is a living entity in itself, but rather as the source of raw material such as wood or timber waiting to be exploited. ‘Profit maximisation’ becomes the only true value over any other means of measuring wellbeing that are not those of monetary calculation. But the commodification does not stop with nature, or rather with physical things. It is extended to knowledge and to life-forms. The last chapter in the history of the imposition of a western system of value is the assault on ideas, genes of plants, of animals and humans.

International law is an essential way by which this Eurocentric epistemology comes to be imposed at a global level. The WTO agreement that replaced GATT in 1995, ‘dealing with the rules of trade between nations’, marked the definitive framework in which global economic interactions were to unfold. Significantly, as the hegemonic mean of capitalist accumulation shifts from the manufacture of goods to the production and guardianship of ideas, information and knowledge, this treaty was concerned with providing a legal system that protected intellectual property, and it did so with the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). This shift in the hegemonic way of capitalist accumulation from material to immaterial labour does not entail that the broader part of the working population has turned to such paradigm, but rather that, being the main locus of wealth coming from it, it becomes the driving force of capitalism—in the same way that Marx considered the manufacturing industry the hegemonic way of production at a time when it wasn’t yet occupying the majority of the world’s population (Hardt and Negri, 2006). This necessitates of an adaptation of the apparatus for accommodating it to such order, and the TRIPS agreement must be read along these lines. WTO’s justification for the need of such regulation is that:

The protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights should contribute to the promotion of technological innovation and to the transfer and dissemination of technology, to the mutual advantage of producers and users of technological knowledge and in a manner conducive to social and economic welfare, and to a balance of rights and obligations. (WTO 1994: Art. 7)

The original justification for the protection of intellectual property was that of providing a way of ensuring retribution for work to creators, such as writers and musicians, so that they would have an incentive in being compensated for their work, and that profits made from it was not enjoyed by someone else. The logical social and economic utility of such instrument however, becomes more dubious in the case of an agro-chemical corporation like Monsanto, which applies slight variations to existing seeds, patents that modified seed, and then sells it at a high price to farmers around the world. As if to further make evident how such an arrangement asymmetrically benefits one part and hurts the other, Monsanto makes their patent seeds be sterile after one crop, so farmers in the South have to buy new seeds from them each season. While WTO literature might stress that the protection of intellectual property is in the best interest of the great majority, it seems hard to see how it might directly promote wellbeing and progress in the poorest regions of the world.

The very concept of intellectual property is problematic, since it conceives the possibility that an idea can be arrived at in isolation by a single person.

First of all there’s no intellectual property; because intellectual property is defined as products of the mind—there is nothing like the creation of a product of the mind. The mind is stimulated by nature, by ancient wisdom, by community… So the working of the mind is a collective process by its very nature. It cannot take place in isolation. (Shiva, 2013)

One of the core problems comes from the ontology of knowledge. In a western light, knowledge is regarded as something that is ‘produced’, either by an individual or by a group (such as a laboratory team or a pop band). When knowledge is something that is produced, it can be traced back to its original producer, who has a just claim over its property in the form of royalties. In indigenous (non-western) cultures however, there are different understandings of knowledge; in many cases knowledge is not the product of a single mind, or a particular group of minds, which can be isolated from it and traded; knowledge is conceived as a process of circulation, a gift, crafted along the ages, by their ancestors and the ecosystem from which they learn—and this conception regards not knowledge, as the material means that sustain life are also considered in a different: natural resources are a gift from nature, which for this reason should be protected and respected. (Whitt, 1998)

The very concept of intellectual property is thus very contentious. It is, as a legal concept, a western invention; and its inclusion in the WTO is not casual, it serves the interests of western conglomerates of power comprising corporations, research centres, universities, and the countries which are home to these (in a significant number of cases the U.S.). And while it serves the demands of such institutions, it certainly doesn’t serve the demands of indigenous communities around the globe who, not having had a voice in the shaping of such law, are nonetheless bound by it. The term biopiracy was coined to make reference to the practice whereby researchers, funded by agro-chemical and pharmaceutical corporations, collect samples of seeds of plants of various qualities that have been developed thanks to traditional and indigenous knowledges in the course of thousands of years, to then register a patent on them and make huge profits by selling products that contain such plant, or the seed itself.

Edgardo Lander draws a very illustrative analogy: the same rationale that justified colonial enterprises in which the settlers appropriated land just by making a ‘legal’ claim on it, is used by corporations and their research departments (and universities funded by them) to appropriate knowledge just by applying for a patent on it. In the case of the land grab, the land was considered no-man’s-land because “given the nonexistence of legal provisions regarding individual private property—as liberal doctrine conceived them—non-European lands were unoccupied lands.” (Lander, 2002:14) In very much the same way, given the non-conformity of indigenous knowledges with the cannon of scientific knowledge, they form a kind of raw material (effectively called ‘the common heritage of humanity’) to be appropriated by whoever adapts it to that cannon, namely, by registering a patent.

Indigenous communities find themselves in a great disadvantage to protect themselves. First, the terms in which the intellectual property law is written contemplates an organisation of the world following the neoliberal model in which there are only individuals, states and corporations. Tribes, communities, clans, or any other form of social group of humans are not a possible subject for this framing—thus they don’t have any rights as such. This resonates with earlier colonialism in that the whole world was coercively fit into categories that were the west’s creation. In defining which are the elements that constitute society and the world, all other possibilities are effectively left out and receive no legal protection whatsoever, because they don’t exist. The second way in which the apparatus (of which the WTO is central) attacks other forms of conceiving social life, production and the relation to nature is what we have mentioned above; knowledge that is not produced in the western-scientific frame, is considered as the free ‘common heritage of humanity’.

In face of a system that, with the backing of international legal treaties, is designed to allow for a particular architecture of power, the challenge comes on how to defend and protect indigenous and traditional knowledges and alternative, non-western worldviews. The fragmentation revolting around how to properly protect indigenous and traditional knowledges against biopiracy again brings to the fore a dilemma that can be found already in Ghandi and later in Spivak. For Ghandi, it was a problem whether in order to attain Swaraj (Indian sovereignty) it was useful to use the western-made concept of nationalism or whether it was more effective to reject it altogether and develop India’s own form of Swaraj. Spivak famously asked ‘can the subaltern speak?’, throwing light on the fact that western intellectuals, even with the best intentions, actually silenced those oppressed by the colonial grip when trying to speak on their behalf about the evils of imperialism. When confronted with the issue of the protection of indigenous knowledge against the grip of a Eurocentric model of knowledge, should that protection be inscribed into that epistemological model, or should it reject it altogether and find alternative ways, even when these are not readily understandable from a western perspective? It is undeniable that international law regarding intellectual property is modelled on the western tradition of legality and scientificity; and that it is based on the protection of this Eurocentric epistemology, that biopiracy and other abuses are committed. However the risk of rejecting to ‘fight on their terms’ as it were, is failing to successfully address those from whose influence one wants to be rid.

WTO’s response to the need of protecting traditional knowledge against biopiracy goes in the wrong direction: that of acknowledging where the knowledge that is patented came from so its original owners can claim royalties for it (grain.org, 2008). This measure, while providing a fairer profit distribution along the chain of production of a patented life-form, does not contest the core issue at stake. The problem is not (only) that the profits made from such patents are not allocated fairly for those who made them possible in the first place, but rather, the commodification of the knowledge in itself. These knowledges were never meant to be conceived of as tradable commodities until the global machine of capitalism laid hands on them. The solution then is not on the monetary level, but on the philosophical and ethical level. The respect for indigenous knowledge is not bought, it is only shown by abstaining from interfering with it, or at least, to not use it in any way that the guardians of such knowledge wouldn’t.

Within WTO’s rationale, namely the naturalisation of the ‘free market’ as the only possible way of socioeconomic model, politics is non-existing. Any form of resistance that deviates from the logic of pure free market is a mere ‘distortion’, the product of an ignorant or corrupt government, which is to be corrected following the advice of a committee of economic experts—appointed by the WTO and fully compliant with the institution’s view. (Lander 2002)

Vandana Shiva, who is one of the most influential activists and academics in the field, has produced extensive literature concerning the problems of biodiversity protection, biopiracy and corporate abuse of indigenous knowledges and the threat globalisation poses for cultural diversity. She is a founder of ‘Navdanya’, an organisation that does very significant work in the protection of biodiversity through a fourfold Swaraj: Bija Swaraj—seed banks made available for Indian farmers; Anna Swaraj—promotion of the benefits of producing and consuming organic food and awareness of the harming effects on health of chemically-treated crops ; Bhu Swaraj—protection of soil health, ensuring that soil remains fertile and as free as possible from hazardous agrochemicals; and Gyan Swaraj—an educational effort to provide knowledge democracy and sovereignty. (Navadanya.org) The organisation has also had significant victories protecting the neem tree, basmati rice and wheat species against biopiracy with the revocation of patents.

Another significant example of resistance to biopiracy is India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), “a database containing 34 million pages of formatted information on some 2,260,000 medicinal formulations” that have been translated from languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Tamil to the ‘mainstream’ languages that IP offices work with. The database, which is written in the style of patent applications, allows for preventing attempts from foreign and local corporations to register patents that derive their main source from traditional knowledge, in this way also bringing down the excessive cost of litigation to reject a patent that has been already granted. (V.K. Gupta, 2011)

In a thoughtful paper by legal scholars Teubner and Fischer-Lescano (2008), they advocate that possibly the only way to end the fragmentation of the resistance and, on the side of western regulators, to work towards a framework that effectively protects traditional cultural expressions is to start acknowledging that the one we have is a polymorphous and multicultural world, hence not reducible to unique standardized legal systems.

Biocolonialism: the latest form of spoil

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