One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  ‘These,’ she says, ‘are the WTO agreements. And this’ – she heaves another vast tome up on to the podium – ‘is NAFTA. This is a framework for corporations to sue governments in closed trade tribunals. There are people here today from all over the Americas – well, how many of your MPs or representatives know that NAFTA, and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, will declare your zoning laws illegal trade barriers? In other words, that your government could have to pay corporations for the right not to site toxic waste dumps next to your schools? How many of your MPs know that there are over 2,000 multilateral agreements in the world designed to safeguard workers and the environment – a huge body of public interest laws that put people first, from UNICEF codes, International Labour Organization laws . . . and that all of these are subjugated to NAFTA, the IMF and the WTO?’ She is talking at breakneck speed. Disturbed murmurs are coming from sections of the audience.

  ‘We don’t like it?’ says Wallach. ‘It’s not working? No problem.’ With a flourish she lobs both documents over her shoulder, where they land in a heap on the stage. The disturbed murmurs morph into laughter. But Wallach is making a serious point.

  ‘We have always been told,’ she says, ‘that what they call globalisation is an inevitable process. What we have done as a movement is to clearly demonstrate that it is not – that it is something manufactured by a specific set of interests and sold to us as something irresistible. Their problem is that all the evidence is now coming in, and we know what these agreements do, what this model does. This evidence comes as great pain, but that pain is also our strength as a movement – because more people can see what this model is doing to them. Neoliberalism doesn’t work. They tried it – it tanked. They promised a lot – they didn’t deliver. The data is in. Time to move on. What we must now do as a movement is make it move on. That means that we have to be clear what we are for – and clear that we are a positive movement.’ Chomsky was saying the same, and Wallach is getting a lot of nods from the audience.

  ‘Two things that we need,’ she races on. ‘A two-pronged strategy. We must build a demand for change across the world, and we must build a consensus about what we’re for. When I say change, I mean real change. This is not a movement for marginal reforms. This system, neoliberalism, is gangrene. It’s cancer. There is a growing recognition that corporate globalisation’s one-size-fits-all model isn’t working. We, as a movement, have the momentum. The proponents of the status quo know this, and this is why they are striking back. They have a very clear propaganda war running against us, and we can see the points they make – they have their own two-pronged approach. Their first strategy is to say this process is inevitable, it’s evolution, you can’t buck it – the ten commandments came down from Mount Sinai and included the statutes of the WTO. If that doesn’t succeed in making everyone give up, their second strategy is to say that these protesters, this movement against our system, is just a movement of people in rich countries. Trouble is that what NAFTA and the WTO are now doing to the West, the IMF and World Bank have been doing in the south for decades – which is why this movement came from the south first. They’d rather people didn’t hear that story. But they are in trouble, and they know it. But we have to be clear, too, what we are for – we can’t fall into their trap.’

  Wallach is a performer, and a convincing one. All eyes are fixed on her.

  ‘Our movement is at a turning point,’ she says. ‘They label us “anti” – we have to shake off the label. We’re for democracy, for diversity, for equity, for environmental health. They’re holding on to a failed status quo; they’re the antis. They are anti-democracy and anti-people. We must go forward as a movement for global justice. Thank you.’ She walks back to her seat without bothering to pick up the documents she threw to the floor. The applause is long and loud.

  This is brilliant, rabble-rousing stuff. It’s also clear how Wallach’s point is much the same as Chomsky’s, and how both of them are saying something that people here have been, and will be, saying all week: this is not a movement of ‘antis’ – it’s a movement of ‘pros’. We’ve been rehearsing the nos on the world stage for three years, since Seattle. Now let’s get going on the yeses. Come to that, let’s re-examine those nos and ask ourselves whether they might not be yeses too. After all, the many things this movement says no to, stands up against, tries to prevent or take apart are in themselves barriers to the sort of world it wants to see.

  This is an argument that economist Nicola Bullard, from the Thai NGO Focus on the Global South, put to me one evening during the Forum when I bumped into her in the lobby of a crowded hotel.

  ‘So many people here are rehearsing these arguments,’ she said, ‘it’s great. As a movement we’re being overwhelmingly positive. This old cry “you have no alternatives” is such a semantic trick. It turns what are actually positive arguments into negative ones. For example, unconditional cancellation of Third World debt – that’s a specific measure, you could call it “anti-debt”, but it’s actually an overwhelmingly positive alternative. If it were to happen, it would create a space for so many alternatives to flourish. Money spent on servicing that debt could be spent on basic health care, education . . . economies would be freed up from a lot of reliance on export, a lot of pressure from the Washington consensus. That’s a positive measure – a huge positive change.’

  Creating a space. Lori Wallach said that too. David Korten’s proposals for reforming the world economy were aimed at creating a space within which those many worlds could flourish. This, it seems, is what a lot of Porto Alegre is about. It’s another two-pronged strategy: remodel the global economy to allow local and specific alternatives to flourish without being destroyed from above by the steamroller of unaccountable economic power. It’s not one or the other, it’s both – maybe a Big Idea after all, but one that, this time, is premised on giving birth to a million small ones.

  The next morning my head hurts. Katharine and I bumped into a few friends the previous night and spent longer than was probably wise drinking caipirinhas in a field by the sea which has been rigged up with a stage, stalls and all the accoutrements of a mini-festival. The result is a substantial hangover.

  I’m late anyway, and was delayed even more by crossing paths, as I rushed down one of a hundred corridors, with some old friends: George Dor, Virginia Setshedi and Trevor Ngwane, heading in the other direction towards a meeting of African social movements. It’s great to see them, and we spend at least ten minutes hanging around exchanging tips. George is finding the whole thing as exciting and occasionally bewildering as I am. Trevor is having a relatively quiet time compared to last year, when he was connected up, via video link, to the World Economic Forum in Davos, to engage in an impassioned debate with global financier George Soros. Virginia keeps asking me if I’m planning to go dancing. Which I’m not.

  One snatched coffee later, and I’m in another hall (they all melded into one some time ago) listening to people focusing on another key theme of the forum: privatisation. The global corporate resource grab that is one of the defining factors of the globalisation process is a key concern here. From water to seeds to land to infrastructure, a worldwide process of privatisation of public and common resources is currently going on on an unprecedented scale. It is inherent within the globalisation process; a necessary prerequisite for the expansion of an economic system which needs private property like a fish needs water. Activists say that this resource grab – which often ends up as a redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich – is one of the major causes of the poverty and powerlessness that the globaphiles say that their system will abolish.

  In this particular meeting speakers from Russia, France, Britain, the US and Costa Rica are assailing the topic of ‘intellectual property’. Again, the WTO is in the firing line: its TRIPS agreement on ‘intellectual property’, which caused so much controversy in the case of the South African AIDS drugs, is also, say the speakers, giving a green light to the corporate
control of life itself.

  TRIPS is one of the WTO’s key agreements – and one of the most controversial. It came about as a result of lobbying by a committee of self-interested corporations, including Monsanto, DuPont and General Motors,7 and is designed to tighten the corporate noose around ownership of products, processes and information itself. It requires all WTO member countries to adopt a harsh US-style patent regime, meaning that a patent or copyright taken out in one WTO member country automatically becomes valid in them all. The agreement is used by corporations to justify everything from preventing the development of cheap software, denying affordable medicine to millions of desperately sick and poor people, selling expensive, copyrighted textbooks to ‘third world’ schools and preventing the spread of basic technologies which have traditionally been copied from industry to industry and country to country as part of the development process.

  The motivation, as ever, is simple: monopolies over information, as over products, resources or markets, mean fat and virtually guaranteed profits. They also mean control. Information shared, on the other hand, is information wasted, as far as the market is concerned; no profit, no point. Curiously, the one thing that neoliberals are supposed to be firmly set against is monopolies, which break every rule in the free market handbook. But, as I have learned over and over again on my travels, market theory and market reality are rarely the same thing.

  The most controversial aspect of TRIPS, though, and the one that is exercising the delegates today, is its role in the ‘patenting of life’. TRIPS allows the patenting of not just products and information, but living things: seeds, new strains of plant, even genetic information. Corporations, arguing that under patent law a discovery is the same thing as an ‘invention’, have in recent years slapped patents on plants, medicines and foods used for thousands of years by Amazonian Indians, varieties of Mexican corn grown in Chiapas for centuries, seeds developed and used by entire Indian villages and even strands of human DNA. There is a name for this, and today everyone is using it: ‘biopiracy’.

  In 1997, in perhaps the notorious example of biopiracy to date, a Texas-based corporation, RiceTec, Inc., claimed ‘ownership’ of basmati rice. The patent on basmati, a staple of the rural economies and national cuisines of India and Pakistan for centuries before Europeans even got there, officially granted RiceTec control of twenty-two varieties of the rice, developed in India and Pakistan by local farmers. RiceTec apparently had no intention of informing those farmers, let alone paying them, for their work, and every intention of selling its own ‘basmati’ all over the USA and elsewhere. An appeal by the Indian government later led to a modifying, but not a withdrawing, of the patent.

  Biopiracy’s potential for harm is huge: it could lead, as it already has in some cases, to widespread patenting of traditional seeds and crop varieties by multinational corporations, which farmers will then have to buy back from them. A profitable game, but one of which this conference is having none. People here, at the very least, want all life-forms removed from the TRIPS agreement. More want TRIPS trashed altogether. Speakers are calling, as a matter of principle, for every country to be able to develop its own patent laws as it sees fit. The patenting of life is firmly rejected, and calls go up for global rules to ensure that certain areas of life, knowledge, technology and information remain permanently free from corporate buccaneering.

  ‘TRIPS,’ says one speaker, ‘is about transferring resources and knowledge from south to north, from rich to poor. It is the privatisation of everything left that remains, and it must be fought. It is against everything that we value.’

  Here, again, I am seeing a clash not just of viewpoints but of values. TRIPS outrages so many people because its effect – and probably its intent – is to help eliminate the existence, and perhaps even the very concept, of something that has been at the heart of the vast majority of human societies through history and, for many, still is: the commons.

  In rural areas all over the world, and in many urban ones too, the commons are still the foundation stone of community life. Common land, shared seed, common access to water, genetic reserves, forest land, public space in village and town: all this, under the rule of global capital, is up for sale. Seeds are to be genetically altered, patented, then sold back to farmers. Land is to be enclosed, divided, titled and then charged for. Public water is to be bought up, forests fenced off, animals, plants, even gene lines laid claim to by those who have the money and the reach to do so.

  This is the commodification of everything, and it is an issue at the heart of the clash between the proponents of globalisation and those who resist it. The stance of those here – and there are many of them – who are doing that resisting is a fundamental one: common resources are the natural heritage of mankind, and communities have the right to decide what is done with them. There are certain areas of life, say most of the delegates at Porto Alegre – from the world’s biological heritage to its airwaves, from seeds to water, from the atmosphere to public services like health and education – that cannot and should not ever be privatised or commodified. It’s not a bargaining chip, it’s a principle, a line in the sand, a rallying point – and one which, in coming years, may come to define this movement more and more.

  Applying it on the ground, of course, is less straightforward, but the conference on intellectual property is only one of the Forum’s attempts to translate principle into proposals. Throughout the week, there are others. Later that day there’s one entitled ‘Water: our common heritage’, in which delegates, including a representative of Cochabamba’s Coordinadora, insist that ‘water is a fundamental resource for life, and therefore is the common heritage of all . . . it cannot be privatised, nor converted into a market product’. A declaration is issued, signed by twenty-four NGOs from across the world, proposing a moratorium on destructive dam-building, an end to water privatisation, bans on certain chemical pollutants and new, strict legal obligations on corporations to protect any water sources they use. To oversee all this, they suggest the creation of a ‘world water parliament’ which would oversee the promotion of locally managed, sustainable water delivery systems, accessible to all.

  Meanwhile, in yet another small, overcrowded university back room, a group of scientists, farmers, economists and biotechnology campaigners from more than fifty countries is launching the Porto Alegre Treaty on the Genetic Commons. It calls for an international treaty to ban biopiracy and patents on living things and recognise the Earth’s gene pool as a ‘shared legacy’ which cannot be privatised, in perpetuity. It will be introduced, say its proponents, into national parliaments around the world in coming years, in an attempt to get it a footing in law. One of its proponents is the Indian physicist, environmentalist and writer Vandana Shiva, another of the movement’s big hitters. ‘Biopiracy is morally repugnant,’ she insists, to widespread agreement. ‘It is theft, the rich stealing from the poor. Genetic resources, plants, the fruits of the land – all these are basic, common goods, and they must be protected as such. Corporations have no right to any of this, and we have to say so loud and clear. It is quite simple: the commons are ours.’

  For the next few days, the Forum’s main events follow the same pattern. Workshops, conferences and seminars (am I the only one who hasn’t worked out the difference?) provide a huge intellectual menu of proposed solutions, alternatives and ideas – some of them ever-so-slightly mad, some of them unconvincing, but the majority well thought-through and potentially workable. Filipino economist Walden Bello, another globally recognisable dissident intellectual, who can never resist a bit of rabble-rousing, tells audiences that ‘Davos and the World Economic Forum are on their way down’ and that ‘we are seeing a crisis of legitimacy for the global elite’. He suggests that the world should accept this fact and follow it up with a restructuring of its economy – abolition of the WTO, new regulations on the behaviour and influence of corporations, a reworking of the global financial architecture to prevent destructive currency speculation.


  Arguments are held about how to rein in corporations: with laws or consumer pressure or both? The idea of a tax on international financial speculation, which has been around for years, gains more ground. Everyone agrees on the abolition of Third World debt. Environmentalists argue that ‘sustainable development’ is an oxymoron: a meaningless term used widely by corporations and governments to avoid for as long as possible the fact of how un-‘sustainable’ our economic model is. Farmers and indigenous people agree with some NGOs that radical land reform is a prerequisite for social justice. A group of hopeful peace campaigners are promoting the idea of a ‘war budget’. They are holding a ‘World Assembly’ to debate better ways of using the $800 billion that the world spends on arms every year.

  Elsewhere, economists are reworking an idea that has been kicking around in the environmental movement for decades – redefining Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the standard measure of economic growth, and thus, wealth. GDP, they point out, simply measures the amount of goods and services a nation produces in any given year – not whether producing them actually improves society as a whole. Chopping down a rainforest and turning it into toilet paper boosts GDP. So does cleaning up an oil spill, or an increase in the sale of rape alarms. So did the epidemic of panic-buying of weapons, gas masks and ‘self-defence kits’ in post-September 11 USA (Wal-Mart alone saw its gun sales rise by 70 per cent8). All this is ‘growth’, but hardly progress. Measure development by other means, they say, including environmental health, social cohesion, income equality, poverty rates, employment and so on, and the picture worldwide – and particularly in the ‘developed’ countries – is not one of endless progress, but increasing decline since the 1970s. It could be a metaphor for what made people come here in the first place.