• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

1 The Parts of Life Agricultural Biodiversity, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Role of the Third System By Pat Roy Mooney The Parts of Life: Development Dialogue Editorial Note 2 Introduction: William Blake and the Quilting Bee 7 Of Patches, Particulars, and the Parts People Play There are no global answers. Solutions are the sum of diversity. The diversity of parts played by different actors is acknowledged. List of Abbreviations 12 1. The Whole Is No Greater than Its Parts 13 The Socio-Scientific State of the Genetic Resources Drama How much have we learnt about biodiversity? Can we halt its destruction? Losing agricultural biodiversity doesn’t just mean unplugging our television view of nature, it means unplugging our refrigerators—the whole food system. 2. Parts Past 21 From Seeds to Genes: From the 1970s to the 1990s The international debate in shifting global fora—was it progress or merely ‘ego-tourism’? 3. Parts Present 31 The Leipzig Conference, the Biodiversity Convention, and the Food Summit The theatre of battle is broadening in the 1990s but, while the plot thickens, there’s still no action on the set. 4. Parts Patrician 46 ‘Supply-side’ Science versus Farmers’ Rights A frontline account of the fight to make the Green Revolution institutes responsible to farmers. 5. First Parts 66 Putting the Particulars Together Food security as the starting premise for health, environmental, and knowledge security. We may be losing more knowledge than we are creating. Case Study: Parts Parasitic—When Crop Diversity Is Neglected 100 6. Forgotten Parts 106 Pirated Diversity in the Seas, Soils, and in Ourselves Everything from Antarctica’s algae to the Sami people in Sweden are patentable—what happens when people become micro-organisms? 7. Private Parts 134 Privatisation and the Life Industry The bits and pieces of life are becoming integrated into the new Life Industry. A new Enclosures Movement is underway and transnational enterprises are both the world’s new landlords and the mindlords. 8. The Part of the People 164 Hope for a Third System in the Midst of ‘Paradise Lost’ Real progress is a generation away. Civil society organisations must exploit their diverse talents to give that generation a fighting chance. Glossary 182 Note on the Author 184 Development Dialogue, Special Issue • The Journal of The Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation 2 Editorial Note The Parts of Life: Development Dialogu This is the third part of a trilogy on genetic resources and biodiversity, which the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation has published in the course of the past 14 years. It brings up to date the remarkable story of the contribution of the ‘Third System’—civil so- ciety and its organisations—to the struggle for control over the genetic wealth on which food security and human survival depend. It could well be argued that this contribution by Third System organisations—or Ci- vil Society Organisations (CSOs), as the author prefers to call them—is one of the best examples in today’s world of how a life-decisive issue, over a period of two decades, has been ‘discovered’, brought out of the specialist domain into public and international fora for discussion and democratic decision-making by the Third Sys- tem, and gradually been accorded its full political, social and economic importance. The issue, as we shall see in the following pages, has been and still is the cause of bit- ter political struggles, complicated intergovernmental negotiations, galloping num- bers of industrial mergers and huge investments and profits, while small farmers— key actors in the fight for global survival—and their knowledge, are still mostly neg- lected. For the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation it all started in 1983 with the publication of The Law of the Seed: Another Development and Plant Genetic Resources in Deve- lopment Dialogue (1983:1–2). The group of people with whom we have worked clo- sely since then—Pat Roy Mooney, Hope Shand and Cary Fowler, later joined by se- veral others—had, however, begun their work on plant genetic resources long before and trace the ‘founding’ of their ‘movement’ back to November 1977. We at the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation first took note of the issue of plant genetic resources when we came across Pat Roy Mooney’s book Seeds of the Earth (1979). It drew our attention to the serious threat to the diversity of nature, and particularly the species on which we depend for our food security. The concentration on small se- lections of seed varieties energetically sponsored by Western research and industry, to the detriment of the broad diversity kept alive by small farmers around the world, was one of several disturbing factors. There was also a striking imbalance in the con- trol of ownership and ‘rights’ over plant genetic resources between the South, from which over 90 per cent of these resources originated, and the North, which bred them, patented them and sold them on the world market for good profits under mo- nopoly-like conditions. Clearly, the emerging situation was not consonant with what was stated in the 1975 Dag Hammarskjöld Report, What Now: Another Development (Development Dialogue 1975:1–2)—still the Foundation’s major policy document—about the strengthening of the South’s capacity for self-reliant development. More particularly, the Report had emphasised that the South should exercise ‘the right of national eco- nomic sovereignty over resources and production’ and should seek to bring to an end ‘the drain of resources from the Third World to the industrialised countries’ by, inter alia, reviewing ‘contracts, leases and concessions entered into with transnational cor- Editorial Note 3 porations under conditions of inequality’ and ‘regulations of conditions governing trade in technology including the revision of the present patent system’. This quote seems as relevant today as it was in 1975, while the political and economic power structures, unfortunately, seem to have changed considerably in favour of the North. The central argument put forward by Pat Roy Mooney in The Law of the Seed, and one deserving serious concern, is the simple fact that seeds are the first link in the food chain and that it is totally unacceptable for these to be subject to exclusive con- trol, monopoly patenting and genetically uniform breeding which limits diversity. ‘There can be no true land reform—no true agrarian justice of any kind—and cer- tainly no national self-reliance’, he emphasised, if these fundamental questions are not given proper attention and solved in a just and democratic way. The Law of the Seed was presented to the world’s food politicians under dramatic cir- cumstances. With the printing ink and binding glue still damp, the first 500 copies were delivered to Stockholm airport by our indefatigable printer and highly valued collaborator for over 20 years, Gunnar Stenmark of Motala Grafiska, just in time for them to be taken to Rome for the opening of the FAO General Conference in Novem- ber 1983. We managed to distribute all the copies during the first few days of the Conference, although we were not allowed to bring copies within the walls of the FAO building. The interest among delegates was remarkable. In the second part of the trilogy, The Laws of Life: Another Development and the New Biotechnologies (Development Dialogue 1988:1–2), Pat Roy Mooney was joined as author by three colleagues and friends: Cary Fowler, Eva Lachkovics and Hope Shand. In The Laws of Life the aim of the authors was to make intelligible to the in- terested lay person and development worker the complicated subject matter of the new biotechnologies, a matter which was—and is—of great social and economic im- portance, but at the time was the almost exclusive preserve of technical specialists. The 350-page volume first gave an overview of the basic technical aspects of bio- technology and then addressed its economic and political dimensions in two com- prehensive major sections. The authors of The Laws of Life realised that biotechnology would affect all of us but feared that its most profound impact would be felt in the South. It was therefore im- portant, they emphasised, that ‘before we can reach an understanding of the proper role of the new biotechnologies, we should consider what the needs of the world are and what genuine development should be—development for whom and of what, by whom and how,’ as the questions were put in What Now: Another Development (1975). The choice of technology should be guided by its safety and ability to func- tion under different cultural conditions, it was argued, and conventional technologies should be used before biotechnological solutions are tried. The Laws of Life rapidly became a great success and was widely read by members of civil society organisa- tions as well as by representatives of government and industry. 4 The Parts of Life: Development Dialogu The present special issue of Development Dialogue, The Parts of Life: Agricultural Biodiversity, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Role of the Third System is the third vo- lume in the trilogy. It is authored by Pat Roy Mooney with the assistance of the RAFI team. It carries, for technical reasons, the number 1996:1–2 but was actually com- pleted in the middle of November 1997 with the last amendments inserted in early December 1997. We apologise for the delay in the publishing process but are con- vinced that the publication you now hold in your hands provides much better reading than we would have been able to offer you a year ago. The Parts of Life begins with an overview of the political developments around the issue of genetic resources during the past 20 years.

Load more

  184

Copy Link