In Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, it’s suggested that “any species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion” (1). In that book and its sequel, My Ishmael, Quinn refers to our “locking up the food” after the agricultural revolution. This same act went on to become Vandana Shiva’s “enclosure of the commons.” Essentially, civilization decided that man should not necessarily toil in the fields for his food but should work many varied jobs, fulfill many varied roles, and earn money to pay for his food instead. This results, as we will see, in starvation and poverty and death for those who should be making a living… or perhaps simply subsisting on their farming. This results in “food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries” (2). The market economy “proposes its own expansion as the solution to [this] ecological and social crisis it has engendered” (3); when this new system fails, the obvious solution: more of the same. This is only one aspect of what Quinn calls Mother Culture, a counter to Mother Nature that came with civilization, but it is in our modern age possibly one of the most dangerous. Nations do not simply go on expansionist, Imperialist military campaigns anymore, with overt violence, so the war on the Third-World (hereafter referred to as the Third-World War) is fought instead with neocolonial, globalist policies that bring monocultures and fatal agricultural and political policies. As Shiva puts it, “at a time when a quarter of the world’s population is threatened with starvation due to erosion of soil fertility, water, and genetic diversity, chasing the mirage of unending growth becomes a major source of genocide. Killing people through the destruction of nature is an invisible form of violence which threatens justice, peace, and survival” (4). She goes on to point out how editor and author Claude Alvares calls this destruction the Third-World War, “a war waged in peacetime, without comparison but involving the largest number of deaths and the largest number of soldiers without uniforms” (5). We have taken agriculture, fundamentally built on keeping us alive, responsible for growing the human population of the world almost exponentially, and today we use it to control the world, to control its people, to narrow the focus of power to a handful of corporations at the expense of livelihoods and lives, “those who die in the shadow of capital” (6). While Imperialism brought for the Imperialists “railways and roads, it brought new technology, and for some, it brought educational opportunities, for most people in the third-world, however, it brought oppression and poverty” (7). We control the use of seed and allow nature itself to be patented, we mandate the growing of monocultures at the expense of soil, at the expense of water, and when these things result in poverty and starvation, we ignore the Third-World individuals as long as we in the First-World have wondrous choice in the Grocery Store. Food, or the control of it, is a weapon in this new Third-World War, and Food Sovereignty, taking back the Commons, unlocking the food—that is the only way for the Third-World to have any victory.
The most obvious (lately) way we control the world’s food is not some overt action, like when Serb and Muslim sides in Bosnia would interfere with UN relief efforts to each other (8). Instead, what has become obvious—to those paying attention anyway—started quite subtly; farming gradually drifted into the hands of a small group of agribusinesses, agricultural giants pushed their way into Third-World countries—Dole and Chiquita suing their way into Jamaica’s banana market (9), for example—and some of those corporations, like Monsanto, were allowed to patent life (10), and take not only control but also ownership of seed itself. Daniel Quinn suggests that Mother Culture has taught us that “the world was made for us [so] it belongs to us, and we can do what we damn well please with it” (11). And so, when Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser’s canola crop was contaminated with Monsanto’s Round Up ready canola, it was not Schmeiser who sued the contaminator but the contaminator who sued Schmeiser, for “intellectual property theft” (12). Ultimately, Schmeiser was forced to destroy his stored seed on the chance it might all be contaminated with Monsanto’s. Shiva argues that this “robs us of our human right and human duty to be seed savers” (13). W. R. Grace claimed a patent on the use of the neem tree for controlling pests and diseases in agriculture, something that had been going on in India for over 2000 years. After a decade-long campaign, Shiva and more than 100,000 others involved, got the European Patent Office to revoke the patent (14). While this comes across as a success, the fact that it took a decade, the fact that W. R. Grace—and in other cases, Monsanto and others—could get the patent in the first place is key to understanding the trouble here. Humans managed for a long time without agriculture at all; we hunted and we gathered. Eventually, groups of us became more sedentary and started planting seeds for things we wanted to eat instead of just gathering what was around. And, with the agricultural revolution, we let farming be a specialty for some and we locked up the food, made the rest of us earn it through work. Or, as Shiva describes it—though she seems to be referring specifically to a more recent, more capitalist addition to this—we enclosed the commons; instead of letting the world be the world and our farms be our farms, we assigned ownership, we conquered the natural world just as we would conquer the political world in the form of various empires. We twisted the natural order around until we held godlike sway over the genetic makeup of seed and we patented it. But, that wasn’t enough. As with the Grace example above, we started allowing patents on seed varieties and methodologies that already existed. And, we made laws—in India, as Shiva describes repeatedly, in Earth Democracy, but many other places as well; for example, in Iraq, Bremer’s 100 Orders include, in Order 81, material that “deals specifically with Plant Variety Protection (PVP) because it is designed to protect the commercial interests of corporate seed companies” (15)—laws that leave the farmer in no position but to submit to agribusiness. Saving seed, a tradition older really than farming (i.e. organized agriculture) itself, has become illegal in places. In 1997, RiceTec was granted a patent on basmati rice lines and grains, which Shiva points out “has been grown for centuries on the subcontinent” (16). RiceTec’s patent included genes developed by farmers and “allowed RiceTec to collect royalties from farmers growing varieties developed by them and their forefathers” (17). This one took four years to overturn. In Ireland, seed potato growers were disallowed in the early 1990s from trading in reproductive material with other seed potato growers, merchants or farmers (18). In 1994, the Plant Variety Act here in America was amended to “eliminate farmers’ privilege to save and exchange seed and establish an absolute monarchy for the seed industry” (19). And the list goes on. We have made it illegal for farmers to save, store or even sell their own seed. And, Monsanto has even purchased the company—Delta & Pine Land—that developed the so-called “terminator” seed which will simply die after one generation, making farmers even more dependent on purchasing new seed time and time again (20). While some farmers fight—according to Shiva, some 5 million peasants in India have “taken a pledge to continue to save and exchange seed” regardless of any law that says they cannot, such as the Seed Act of 2004 (21)—in the meantime, there are further issues than just ownership.
Forcing farmers to grow certain crops (patented or not) results in monocultures, far from the variety there has been with traditional agriculture. Shiva uses the example of rice in India, how in the various climates of the subcontinent there have been many different strains of rice developed; “there are varieties to fit thousands of ecological niches all over the country, from the temperate high hills of the Himalayas to the tropical lowlands to deep-water and salt-water marshes of the sea coasts” (22). But, now, farmers are growing fewer strains and this lack of biodiversity, combined especially with no more intercropping, means less sustainability. While “genetic diversity provides security for the farmer against pests, disease, and unexpected climatic conditions” (23), this system demands that a farmer maintain a very specific, modern quality to his land to harvest his crops. This involves chemical fertilizers, the use of which “has led to the growing crisis of soil erosion and depleted soil quality” (24), and modern irrigation, both of which damage the land itself, ruining it for future generations of plants and people.
And, these chemical fertilizers cost money, as does modern irrigation, as do modern seeds. So farmers, who used to be able to save their own seeds and let nature (or intercropping) take care of much of the watering and fertilizing, are now paying out of pocket to maintain what should be a subsistence way of life. And, of course, it goes without saying, all this so they can produce far more than ever before, because this is not just subsistence farming but a support system for the whole First-World. These farmers are now producing not for themselves but for export, and putting more money into it than they ever had to before. And, so these farmers are put into debt, find themselves living impoverished lives, going hungry when they are the ones feeding the world. I deliberately have not mentioned NGOs like the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank, the organizations that often drive all of these new policies into these Third-World nations, because while they are the tools we and Mother Culture use to push new agendas, I would argue that they are not themselves the problem but yet another symptom, a self-promoting part of a destructive way of life that it is getting harder and harder to back down from. But, here I must reference the WTO in the case of Lee Kyung Hae. In 2003, the WTO held a meeting in Cancun. Lee and other farmers and peasants from around the world—Lee himself from Korea, where the WTO had forced the opening of “its rice markets to dumping by US agribusiness giants like Cargill and ConAgra” (25)—camped near the site of the meeting and marched upon it on the morning of its first day. They came to a barricade and Lee Kyung Hae, wearing a sign which read “WTO kills farmers,” climbed it and stabbed himself. He had a note with him that read, “I am taking my own life so others may live” (26). Sixteen thousand farmers in India committed suicide during 2004 alone, as “the policies of corporate-driven globalized and industrialized agriculture deliberately destroy small farms, dispossess small farmers, and render them disposable” (27).
Daniel Quinn argues that we “believe profoundly that, however bad things are now, they’re still infinitely preferable to what came before” (28). We have conquered the natural world, mandated that we work for our food, and we are consistently destroying the means by which we get it, but still, we take the Whiggish approach; this is what history has been leading us to, so it must be the right way of doing things. As long as we in the First-World can go to our local grocery store and find a great variety of choices, we don’t take the time to care whose lives were destroyed in getting those choices to us. Vandana Shiva argues that “patents on life and the rhetoric of the ‘ownership society’ in which everything—water, biodiversity, cells, genes, animals, plants—is property express a worldview in which life forms have no intrinsic worth, no integrity, and no subjecthood” (29). I would add humans to that list. This worldview devalues and essentially dehumanizes the Third-World individual, and small farmers, even here in the First-World, are losing the Third-World War. There are those who stand up against the patents, those who still trade seed (like Via Campesina, which states that “food sovereignty is the right of peoples to develop and maintain their own food systems” (30)) even where it has been made illegal, and there are those like the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) (31) who are demanding their legal right to have land and have the use of it, without being dictated to by NGOs or agribusiness corporations. Shiva suggests that “liberation in our genocidal times is, first and foremost, the freedom to stay alive” (32). But, we cannot simply be content with ourselves being alive. We must support the Third-World in this war; when the MST marches onto a piece of land, chanting “Occupy! Resist! Produce!” the individuals must know that they have support around the world. When an Indian or a Korean or even an American farmer, impoverished by debt growing our food, is at the point where taking his own life seems like his only viable option, he needs to believe that we will make it better, that we can take back food sovereignty for farmers, that we can give the commons back to the people, that we will not let life itself be patented and owned by corporations who care more about the bottom line than the lives of billions of individuals the world over. We need to reject Mother Culture, reject the dark recesses dug into our world by globalization, as “the discussion on ‘food power’ consequently not an exception but a symptom of a general global situation” (33). We must demand sustainability over overconsumption, demand a right to sustenance, demand biodiversity, demand nourishment over destruction, peace and life over war and death, demand democracy over corporate greed.
(1) Quinn, Daniel, Ishmael, New York: Bantam, 1992, 138.
(2) Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review, 2000, 43.
(3) Shiva, Vandana, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Cambridge: South End, 2005, 50.
(4) Ibid, 52.
(5) Ibid, citing Alvares’ “Deadly Development,” Development Forum 11:7 (1973), 3. Alvares and Shiva, of course, do not use my hyphenated “Third-World War.”
(6) Chatterjee, Piya, “Teas’s Fortunes and Famines: Global Capital, Women Workers, and Survival in Indian Plantation Country,” The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression, and Women’s Poverty, edited by Amalia L. Cabexas, Ellen Reese, and Marguerite Waller, Boulder: Paradigm, 2007, 58.
(7) Isbister, John, Promises Not Kept: Poverty and the Betrayal of Third World Development, 6th ed, Bloomfield: Kumarian, 2003, 99. The hyphen, again, is mine.
(8) Maass, Peter, “Bosnian Factions Using Food as a Weapon; Serb, Muslim Sides Interfere With U.N. Relief Deliveries but for Different Reasons,” The Washington Post 17 February 1993.
(9) Life and Debt, Stephanie Black, director, 2001.
(10) Interestingly, Monsanto points out on its own blog that, “in actuality the first patent on a living organism dates back to 1873 when Monsieur Louis Pasteur was awarded U.S. Patent #141,072 with a claim to yeast. This was actually one of the first food production related patents–the yeast was for beer production to reduce spoilage of the beer.” (http://www.monsantoblog.com/2009/06/19/seed-patent-history/)
(11) Quinn, 63.
(12) Shiva, 94. The Schmeiser case is also a big part of the documentary The Future of Food, Deborah Koons Garcia, director, 2004.
(13) Ibid.
(14) Ibid, 146.
(15) Truong Sun Traveler, “Food as a Weapon – The Rape of Iraq,” Daily Kos 9 April 2008. Citing Global Research (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1447).
(16) Shiva, 147.
(17) Ibid, 148.
(18) Shiva, 149.
(19) Ibid, 150.
(20) F. William Engdahl, “Monsanto buys ‘Terminator’ Seeds Company,” Geopolitics – Geoeconomics 27 August 2006. (http://www.oilgeopolitics.net/GMO/Monsanto/monsanto.html)
(21) Shiva, 151.
(22) Ibid, 98.
(23) Ibid, 100.
(24) Shiva, 100.
(25) Ibid, 77.
(26) Shiva, 76.
(27) Ibid, 120.
(28) Quinn, 221.
(29) Shiva, 3.
(30) Camila Montecinos, “The Seeds of Sovereignty,” New International September 2010, 13.
(31) Raiz Forte (Strong Roots), Global Exchange, producer, 2001.
(32) Shiva, 185.
(33) Peter Wallensteen, “Scarce Goods as Political Weapons: The Case of Food,” Journal of Peace Research 13:4 (1976), 277.
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