Tom Jaszewski www.livesoil.com 702-595-7012 Dr. Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist, activist,
editor, and author of many books. In India she has established Navdanya, a
movement for biodiversity conservation and farmers' rights. She directs the
Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy. Her
most recent book is Biopiracy: The Plunder
of Nature and Knowledge. This interview with Dr. Vandana Shiva was
conducted in St. Louis, Missouri at the First Grassroots Gathering on
Biodevastation: Genetic Engineering, on July 18, 1998. Dr. Shiva was the
keynote speaker at the conference. The interview was conducted by In Motion Magazine publisher Nic Paget-Clarke.
Dr. Vandana Shiva: Patents are a replay of colonization as it
took place 500 years ago in a number of ways. Interestingly, even at that time,
when Columbus set sail and other adventurers like him, they also set out with
pieces of paper that were called the letters patent which gave the power to the
adventurers to claim as property the territory they found anywhere in the world
that was not ruled by white Christian princes. Contemporary patents on life seem to be of a similar quality. They
are pieces of paper issued by patent offices of the world that basically are
telling corporations that if there's knowledge or living material, plants,
seeds, medicines which the white man has not known about before, claim it on
our behalf, and make profits out of it. That then has become the basis of phenomena that we call biopiracy,
where seeds such as the Basmati seed, the aromatic rice from India, which we
have grown for centuries, right in my valley is being claimed as novel
invention by RiceTec. Neem, which we have used for millennia for pest control, for
medicine, which is documented in every one of our texts, which my grandmother
and mother have used for everyday functions in the home, for protecting grain,
for protecting silks and woolens, for pest control, is treated as invention
held by Grace, the chemical company. This epidemic of
piracy is very much like the epidemic of piracy which was named colonialism 500
years ago. I think we will soon need to name this round of piracy through
patents as recolonialization as a new colonialization which differs from the
old only in this - the old colonialization only took over land, the new
colonialization is
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