Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge by Vandana Shiva

Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge Reviews

• 
  Andrea

  I only recently
  read her for the first time and had my giant activist-writer crush, but Biopiracy might have been even better. Another three of her books were sitting on the shelves here, happy days, so I picked this one up.
  
  Colonialism and capitalism vs life with insights into all three. I loved it, and am finding it very useful in thinking about how we arrived where we are now and just what we are up against as well as where hope lies.
  
  I'm going to be a little sneaky and start with the summation and quotes from the conclusion as an overview. Shiva is arguing that there have been three waves of globalization – the 1st through the initial colonization by European powers, the 2nd through the imposition of the ‘Western idea of ‘development’ during the postcolonial era over the past five decades, and the 3rd unleashed approximately 5 years ago through ‘free trade’ and the commodification of life itself. Biopiracy. She argues that
  

  … each time a global order has tried to wipe out diversity and impose homogeneity, disorder and disintegration have been induced, not removed. (105)

  
  This process of continuing destruction and disorder is, in many ways, all rooted in that first wave of colonisation, that initial period of destruction and violence that continues on through our present. This is one of the key transformations I think, and this environmentalist and feminist lens such an interesting angle to look at the issue from:
  

  ‘Resource’ originally implied life…regeneration…With the rise of industrialism and colonialism a shift in meaning took place. ‘Natural resources’ became inputs for industrial commodity production and colonial trade. Nature was transformed into dead and manipulable matter. Its capacity to renew and grow had been denied. The violence against nature, and the disruption of its delicate interconnections, was a necessary part of denying its self-organizing capacity. And this violence against nature, in turn, translated into violence in society.
  
  Anything not fully managed or controlled by European men was seen as a threat. This included nature, non-Western societies, and women. What was self-organized was considered wild, out of control, and uncivilized. When self-organization is perceived as chaos, it creates a context to impose a coercive and violent order for the betterment and improvement of the ‘other’, whose intrinsic order is then disrupted and destroyed.

  
  This is such a key insight on the intrinsic connection between violence and capitalism, the ways that violence against nature is mirrored by and indivisible from violence against society. The nature of this violence has changed, but has the same roots and is manifested through all three waves.
  
  I don't quite know why I am so fascinated by its beginnings, but so I am. So are many others, luckily, and the intro really gets into it-- 'Piracy Through patents: The Second Coming of Columbus':
  

  Columbus set a precedent when he treated the license to conquer non-European peoples as a natural right of European men. The land titles issued by the pope through European kings and queens were the first patents. The colonizer's freedom was built on the slavery and subjugation of the people with original rights to the land. this violent takeover was rendered 'natural' by defining the colonized people as nature, thus denying them their humanity and freedom.
  
  John Locke's treatise on property effectually legitimized this same process of theft and robbery during the enclosure movement in Europe. Locke clearly articulated capitalism's freedom to build as the freedom to steel: property is created by removing resources from nature and mixing them with labour. This 'labour' is not physical, but labour in its 'spiritual' form, as manifested in the control of capital. According to Locke, only those who own capital have the natural right to own natural resources, a right that supersedes the common rights of others with prior claims. Capital is thus defined as a source of freedom that, at the same time, denies freedom to the land, forests, rivers, and biodiversity that capital claims as its own, and to others whose rights are based on their labour. (8-9)

  
  This is well on point too:
  

  It seems that the Western powers are still driven by the colonizing impulse: to discover, conquer, own, and possess everything, every society, every culture. The colonies have now been extended to the interior spaces, the 'genetic codes' of life forms from microbes and plants to animals, including humans. (9)

  
  On to biopiracy:
  

  At the heart of Columbus's discovery was the treatment of piracy as a natural right of the colonizer, necessary for the deliverance of the colonized... Biopiracy is the Columbian 'discovery' 500 years after Columbus. Through patents and genetic engineering, new colonies are being carved out. The land, the forests, the rivers, the oceans, and the atmosphere have all been colonized, eroded, and polluted. capital now has to look for new colonies to invade and exploit for its further accumulation. These new colonies are, in my view, interior spaces of the bodies of women, plants and animals. Resistance to biopiracy is a resistance to the ultimate colonization of life itself--of the future of evolution as well as the future of non-Western traditions of relating to and knowing nature. It is a struggle to protect the freedom of diverse species to evolve. It is a struggle to protect the freedom of diverse cultures to evolve. It is a struggle to conserve both cultural and biological diversity. (11)

  
  There is so much in here specific to law and policy -- lots about the General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade (GATT), the Uruguay round in 1994 that set up the requirement of signing on to TRIPS, or Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights that brought patenting into international trade agreements. I have focused more on the broader ideas and philosophies, though I love that this a book to incite and facilitate meaningful struggle to change these terrifying and unjust world systems.
  
  She starts with a very interesting look at the nature of creativity.
  1: Knowledge, Creativity and Intellectual Property Rights
  

  What is creativity? This is at the heart of the current debates about patents on life. Patents on life enclose the creativity inherent in living systems that reproduce and multiply in self-organized freedom. They enclose the interior spaces of the bodies of women, plants, and animals. They also enclose the free spaces of intellectual creativity by transforming publicly generated knowledge into private property. Intellectual property rights on life forms are supposed to reward and stimulate creativity. their impact is actually the opposite--to stifle the creativity intrinsic to life forms and the social production of knowledge. (13)

  
  She examines three different kinds of creativity:
  

  1. The creativity inherent in living organisms that allows them to evolve, recreate and regenerate themselves.
  2. The creativity of indigenous communities that have developed knowledge systems to conserve and utilize the rich biological diversity of our planet
  3. The creativity of modern scientists in university of corporate laboratories who find ways to use living organisms to generate profits. (14)

  
  Only the third kind of creativity is acknowledged under Intellectual Property Rights systems as defined under GATT, the biodiversity convention, or the lovely U.S. Trade Act which includes the Special 301 clause – this is, she argues ‘a prescription for a monoculture of language’ (15)
  
  All of this marks the ongoing shift from common rights to private rights, as well as a world where knowledge is recognized only when it generates profits, rather than when it meets social needs. Central to this is the idea that people will only innovate if they can profit from their innovation through a system of patent protection. This is so ludicrous yet so ubiquitous.
  
  It is clear why such a lethal combination of ideas leads to the destruction cultural commons and skews research away from areas that are key in terms of importance and or social need, to focus on profit-generating studies.
  
  This is an enclosure of the intellectual commons, and I am loving the idea of commons broadened in this way.
  2: Can Life Be Made? Can Life be Owned? Redefining Biodiversity
  This describes how the patenting of genes and new strains created in laboratories have been redefined as ‘biotechnological invention’ so that they can be made proprietary. The corporate argument for the right to patent such things is that they are new, ‘invented' by human beings. For tehse same genes present in food that people are attempting to refrain from eating or demanidning that they be identified, corporate arguments are that they are perfectly natural and therefore harmless.
  
  Again to the subject of violence:
  

  Patenting living organisms encourages two forms of violence. First, life forms are treated as if they are mere machines, thus denying their self-organizing capacity. Second, by allowing the patenting of future generations of plants and animals, the self-reproducing capacity of living organisms is denied. (29)

  
  I also found this look at reductionist biology quite interesting, and a critique that is interesting to think through around other issues of diversity in relation to other kinds of positivism in the social sciences.
  

  Reductionism biology is multifaceted. At the species level, this reductionism puts value on only one species—humans—and generates an instrumental value for all others. It therefore displaces and pushes to extinction all species whose instrumental value to humans is small or non-existent. Monocultures of species and biodiversity erosion are the inevitable consequences of reductionist thought in biology, especially when applied to forestry, agriculture, and fisheries. We call this first-order reductionism.
  
  Reductionist biology is increasingly characterized by a second-order reductionism—genetic reductionism—the reduction of all behaviour of biological organisms, including humans, to genes. Second-order reductionism amplifies the ecological risks of first-order reductionism, while introducing new issues, like the patenting of life forms. (30)
  
  Epistemologically, it leads to a machine view of the world and its rich diversity of life forms. It makes us forget that living organisms organize themselves. It robs us of our capacity for the reverence of life—and without that capacity, protection of the diverse species on the planet is impossible. (35)

  
  Living systems are self-organized, complex, diverse, characterized by self-healing and repair. They are resilient (one of the latest buzzwords) and adaptable, all those things being praised by the new thinking around networks and connectivity being written about by
  Fritjof Capra,
  Nabeel Hamdi,
  permaculturists,
  transitionists, and
  slime mould enthusiasts among others.
  

  The freedom for diverse species and ecosystems to self-organize is the basis of ecology. Ecological stability derives from the ability of species and ecosystems to adapt, evolve and respond. (36)

  
  Seems like it makes sense that we do our best to think this way all the time. I like how this is as true of a smallholding such as the one I am working on now, as it is for the East End community I was in before I came here. Instead we have the likes of Monsanto with their weed killers, and scary chemical escalations. There is plenty in this chapter about such things, if you needed more ammunition for your Monsanto-driven fury.
  3. The Seed and the Earth
  

  Regeneration lies at the heart of life: it has been the central principle guiding sustainable societies. Without regeneration, there can be no sustainability. Modern industrial society, however, has no time for thinking about regeneration, and therefore no space for living regeneratively. Its devaluation of the processes of regeneration are the causes of both the ecological crisis and the crisis of sustainability. (47)

  
  Only capitalism and the placing of profit above all things, including life itself, would strive to erase the capacity to regenerate, because that is just insane. Yet Monsanto and others have been working at it for years. This is, of course, connected to power, and Shive argues it is rooted long ago when the facilitating ideas of production and value emerged.
  

  The continuity between regeneration in human and nonhuman nature that was the basis of all ancient worldviews was broken by patriarchy. People were separated from nature, and the creativity involved in processes of regeneration was denied. Creativity became the monopoly of men, who were considered to be engaged in production; women were engaged in mere reproduction or recreation…looked upon as non-productive. (47)

  
  Thus we enter the third phase of globalization and biopiracy, as organisms become the new colonies. While the colonisation of land became possible through new technologies of guns etc,
  

  ‘Biotechnology as the handmaiden of capital in the post-industrial era, makes it possible to colonize and control that which is autonomous, free, and self-regenerative. ‘
  
  ‘While ancient patriarchy used the symbol of the active seed and the passive earth, capitalist patriarchy, through the new biotechnologies, reconstitutes the seed as passive, and locates activity and creativity in the engineering mind. (49)

  
  'From Terra Mater to Terra Nullius' -- a subheading that ties all of this back to the land, back to the redefinitions of words to justify conquest and murder over centuries:
  

  All sustainable cultures, in their diversity, have viewed the earth as terra mater. The patriarchal construct of the passivity of earth and the consequent creation of the colonial category of land as terra nullius served two purposes: it denied the existence and prior rights of original inhabitants, and it negated the regenerative capacity and life processes of the earth. (50)

  
  Colonialism redefined indigenous peoples as part of natural flora and fauna, while the Green Revolution served as a second colonisation of earth defined as terra nullius through an erasing of the existence and importance of the ecological diversity of soil. It needed massive and expensive inputs for profit to take place.
  

  The commodified seed is ecologically incomplete and ruptured at two levels: First, it does not reproduce itself, whereas by definition seed is a regenerative resource…Second, it does not produce by itself: it needs the help of other purchased inputs… (54)

  
  A perfect pairing to maximise profit. Thus the patenting of seeds.
  
  Another definition I quite love, and hope to think through more are these conceptions of ideological boundaries defined and contested:
  

  The transformation of value into disvalue, labour into nonlabour, knowledge into non-knowledge, is achieved by two very powerful constructs: the production boundary and the creation boundary.
  
  The production boundary is a political construct that excludes regenerative, renewable production cycles from the domain of production…When economies are confined to the marketplace, self-sufficiency in the economic domain is seen as economic deficiency. The devaluation of women’s work, and of work done in subsistence economies in the Third World, is the natural outcome of a production boundary constructed by capitalist patriarchy.
  
  The creation boundary does to knowledge what the production boundary does to work: it excludes the creative contributions of women as well as Third World peasants and tribespeople, and vies them as being engaged in unthinking, repetitive, biological processes. (65)

  
  Here the importance of rebuilding connections, where salvation lies:
  

  The source of patriarchal power over women and nature lies in separation and fragmentation…Understanding and sensing connections and relationships is the ecological imperative.
  The main contribution of the ecology movement has been the awareness that there is no separation between mind and body, human and nature. Nature consists of the relationships and connections that provide the very conditions for our life and health. This politics of connection and regeneration…(66)

  
  4. Biodiversity and People’s Knowledge
  The cradle of Biodiversity is the tropics, yet it is even now being destroyed through destruction of habitat and homogenization of crops and culture. Once a commons, all of it is now being enclosed as local knowledge is displaced and devalued in favour of specialized scientific knowledge, and gift economies around seeds replaced with patents. There is lots here about ‘Bioprospecting’, and how it is given ‘legitimacy’ by the WTO or world bank through corporations paying off indigenous peoples for the knowledge they share only to find they are then refused access to it. Really it is all biopiracy.
  
  We need to recover our biodiversity commons.
  5. Tripping Over Life
  This focuses on the TRIPs agreement in GATT (get the chapter title now?), and how it: allows for the monopolization of life; promotes monocultures so destructive to biodiversity; requires more and more chemical inputs and thus causes more pollution as well as new forms of pollution through GMOs and resistant weeds and pests; undermines any ethic of conservation trough instrumentalisation of people and other species. It also alienates rights of people to the land they live on as produce sold elsewhere, cuts their connections and sense of stewardship.
  
  You want ammunition to win the argument that all these acronyms are evil? You will find it all here.
  6. Making Peace with Life
  A final paragraph on violence and monoculture -- this fascinated me perhaps more than anything else, as I have worked so much researching segregation and white obsessions with purity and homogeneity that they have defended with such everyday grassroots violence. These are so clearly associated one with the other, and there is so much more here I think to be investigated.
  

  Homogenization and monocultures introduce violence at many levels. Monocultures are always associated with political violence—the use of coercion, control, and centralization. Without centralized control and coercive force, this world filled with the richness of diversity cannot be transformed into homogenous structures, and the monocultures cannot be maintained….
  
  Monocultures are also associated with ecological violence—a declaration of war against nature’s diverse species. This violence not only pushes species toward extinction, but controls and maintains monocultures the,selves. Monocultures are non-sustainable and vulnerable to ecological breakdown. Uniformity implies that a disturbance to one part of a system is translated into a disturbance to other parts Instead of being contained, ecological destabilization tends to be amplified. (103-104)

  
  
  This book is wonderful, and I am looking forward to reading more.
• 
  Avani

  An amazing look at biopiracy through multiple lenses - scientific, economical, ethical, cultural, and historical. Vandana Shiva takes a piercing look at a key problem the Third World faces, and really brings home the richness of indigenous livelihoods that are being threatened.
  
  A must-read for anyone interested in social justice, big Pharma, and the legacy of colonialism.
• 
  Eilif

  While I subscribe to many of the arguments Shiva presents in the book I was disappointed by the lack of strongly supported arguments. That said it sets forth many important ideas which have been built upon by others. However, if you’re already familiar with this issue, skip it.
• 
  Noah Enelow

  
  Shiva writes with polemical fury about the dangers of intellectual property rights over life forms. I agree with her, but I think some of the work is too polemical to be taken seriously by people who don't share her sympathies. Like many anti-GMO/genetic engineering activists, she emphasizes what we don't know about repercussions of genetic modification of food crops. However - in coming down exclusively on the side of ecology and against molecular biology, I don't think she adequately explores the potential for the fusion of the two. Molecular biology in her world is exclusively for profit, and I think a lot of molecular biologists would be offended by that.
  
  However, her main point is a good one. It's not fair for corporations to enter indigenous communities, take advantage of people's trust and generosity with their knowledge, and extract compounds from known medicinal plants to make billions of dollars while leaving the original sources of knowledge - the communities and their leaders and elders - in poverty. That's criminal, and it deserves a lot more attention than it's gotten. It's clear to me from this book that there need to be well-defined, intermediate forms of property rights, between private and common pool - such as a democratically governed property right held on the level of the community, or a federation of communities if the knowledge is spread over a wide range. That way the knowledge can be protected from private patenting by corporations.
  
  Thought-provoking book!
• 
  Ryan Mishap

  Next time some moron claims that you're just a dumb kid wanting to riot and don't know a thing about the WTO, IMF, or how great transnational corporations really are, take out this book and whap them upside the head!
  Well, it is kind of thin, so grab Ecofeminism instead, and then whap! away!
  
  Shiva, here, breaks down Western reductionist views of women and nature and describes how this view enables the West to plunder the "third world" and appropriate indigenous knowledge--then claim patents and intellectual property rights. How international institutions and governments promote this theft and abuse. After pushing people, like in India, off their land in the name of the "Green Revolution" (read: monocultural industrial agriculture benefitting investors and wealthy land owners), Capital now wants to take people's traditional knowledge and sell it. Essential reading.
• 
  Monica Noel Matthews

  Other reviews have referred to the left-leaning ideology of this book being its downfall; I disagree, I feel that it is Shiva’s inclination for reductionist and sometimes hyperbolic rhetoric that is problematic. Many phenomena and relationships between factors remain unexplored, mystified and ultimately for me at least, meaningless. I found myself trying to pry apart concepts that she had squished together. Maybe I’m just too tired to appreciate this. It did have quite a few interesting insights but I felt like I had to prospect for them.
• 
  Miquixote

  Diversity for democracy, for nature, to save the planet.
• 
  afternoonsunjeans

  July 17, 2020: the Native book community is currently experiencing
  huge bullshit and the tweet that talked about this and about the larger community of color but also white allies that are not nearly supportive enough, that def called my idiotic ass out and I'm very glad it did. I'll take this as an opportunity to educate myself on something I should have done already.
  
  this book dealing with colonialism of the Americas in focus on biopiracy is recommended by
  Alyssa via her IG.
• 
  Irene

  Vandana Shiva has very important things to say about the philosophy and politics of genetic modification, but if you're expecting to be in any way entertained by this book, let me disabuse you of that assumption.
  
  This is a very short book, but the text is dense, and deals mainly in Indian Constitutional Law and American patent law, citing specific legal disputes and Shiva's arguments. If you're concerned about certain billionaires who appear to be very philanthropic but are pushing for farmers to use patented seeds when the press isn't looking, this may be worth the read.
• 
  Mallee Stanley

  This non-fiction book deals with the North's greed over the last 500 years and plunder of the South beginning briefly with colonialism and globalization, but focusing mainly on "free" trade and the frightening impact of patents on genetically modified organisms affecting plants and animals. A must read for anyone wanting to know what's really going on within trade agreements.
• 
  AunFav

  I finally realized biophilia isn't referring to the form of life, but the certain understanding of reproduction. It would be interesting to include land hoarding as part of biopiracy that is not only led by capitalism but also by modern governance.
• 
  Roger Green

  Sound but dated.
• 
  Amonalurra

  Ezinbestekoa.
• 
  Luke

  The information relayed in this book is important, but I’m not exactly a fan of the redundancy. How many times do you have to say “it is viewed as raw material”? We know by the fourth chapter.
  
  Still a great wealth of information on the legacy of colonialism and anti-neoliberal “food security” shit. Food sovereignty is incredibly important, and you have to love Shiva’s passion.
• 
  Melissa

  There is a problem with the logic and structure of the argument made by an author when a book opens with an exaggeration. In Shiva's case, she equates colonialism with biopiracy. While wild analogies are common for postmodern cultural critiques, it is unnerving to read them, especially when authors are making useful and much needed arguments. This is the case with this book as well. The privatization of life is disturbing and unethical and more attention should have been paid at the time of the precedent-setting case on the first patented issued for a living organism, and from then on. But arguments that end up looking like caricatures are not the best way of informing the public or fighting the types of trends that hurt us all. I wish this book was better grounded in the valuable work Shiva is engaged in (i.e., the seed bank project working with farmers) and that she would use a more precise logic. It is a useful book and I am glad she wrote it and I read it, but it is hard to ignore the messy argument based on loose comparisons, including where women's bodies are discussed in the same way as agricultural activities that in some ways draw parallels between women and the land in terms of fecundity. Feminists spent years fighting these types of connections between women and "Nature" only to have to contend with social critics on the same side use them as well in unfortunate ways.
• 
  Leila T.

  Vandana Shiva is an incredibly strong, intelligent, passionate, and awesome woman, and when I read her stuff I get swept up in her ideas, in her point of view. Now that I'm married to a science geek and we argue about genetic engineering, I realise that the stuff that I learned (in, for instance, Shiva's writings), doesn't necessarily correspond to hard-evidence, fact-basey stuff that sounds convincing to someone who values efficiency and empiricism highly. And that is valid, just as important as the ethical stuff. I want to come back to this book in particular to see whether she grounds her anecdotes in replicable science.
• 
  Isaac

  If you are interested, or better yet, concerned about what lab science means for the freedom of nature, read this. Shiva is definitely a great source on the subject and does a beautiful job of interrelating the feminist struggle with the subjugation of our earth.
  
  Unfortunately, as it happens with many works of such political controversy, Shiva may just be preaching to the choir. And her anti-genetic engineering sentiments may come off as purely being anti-molecular biology. So the message may be lost on those who perhaps would do best to listen to her.
• 
  Brian

  It has some redeeming qualities. I found some of the points brought up to be too Leftist even for my tastes. But it was not just the politics bothered me. I think she had some of her facts wrong. After some research into this author's background I will not be reading any more of her books. Too many plain wrong facts to support unstable arguments.
• 
  Jessica Laine

  Good Shiva read. She always has an effective argument. This was redundant from some of her previous books that I have read, none the less I enjoyed it and it is an excellent introduction to who (corporations) controls our seeds and our foods.
• 
  Dr. Robin M. Chandler

  Fast read. Scathing indictment of the exploitation of nature and indigenous societies by powerful states and multinationals. Shiva's informed eco-feminism and intellectual grasp of the issues always impresses. Assigned reading in one of my courses.
• 
  Matteo

  Vandana Shiva always has interesting things to say. i read this too long ago to remember the details, but i remember that it's valuable
• 
  Emma

  Very interesting and fierce book about patriarchy, ownership (of land, resources, genetic codes and so on), monocultures, and diversity by a leading writer in the environmental movement.
• 
  Evgenia

  Clear, provocative and simply inspiring. Should be read by everyone, since the issue does concern all of us.
• 
  Zrinka

  Vandana Shiva proves her point with eloquence. An inspirational text. Read this book!
• 
  B

  i tend to lean left, but this book is too far left for me. while i agree with some of her arguments... there are holes in them and some of it seems "sensational" rather than academic.
• 
  Jayakumar Baradwaj

  An Amazing work by Dr. Vandana Shiva. The book clearly brings out the facts that how our country is letting the corporate world from US & Europe to steal our traditional knowledge.
• 
  Nic Paget-Clarke

  Important in understanding how patents are being used to privatize the world's living resources - biodiversity.
• 
  Henri

  Valuable insights, but the book is mainly preaching to the converted