| |
 |
GLOBALIZATION’S
NEW WARS: SEED, WATER & LIFE
FORMS
Vandana Shiva
Rs 250 Hb 2005
81-88965-17-0
(Italian rights sold. All others available.)
|
|
In
this new age of globalisation, the world is increasingly
being drawn into new kinds of wars which are far
removed from nuclear weapons and mass destruction.
These wars have to do with ecology and the ethical
limits to profit; the “enemies” are
coercive free trade treaties, technologies of production
based on violence, genetic engineering and nano-technologies.
Seed wars, or the control of foodgrains, are being
fought through Trade Related Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPS) which impose new property rights
over seeds, thus taking them beyond the reach of
farmers. Water monopolies, sought by multinationals
like Coke and Pepsi, deny people access to water,
both by carving out private property within public
water range, and by privatizing public services,
increasing the cost of water by 200-300 per cent.
Sharing and exchanging biodiversity and its knowledge
often gets converted to piracy through process patents
by individuals or organizations, who freely appropriate
biodiversity knowledge or practice from indigenous
communities.
This major new work by the author of the best-selling
Staying Alive,
and winner of the Alternative Nobel Prize, 1993,
forcefully establishes the relationship between
globalization as an economic war, and militarism
and fundamentalism as political and cultural wars
in the project of global hegemony.
|
|
VANDANA
SHIVA
is a world-renowned
environmental thinker and activist, and a leader
in the International Forum on Globalization along
with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin. She is Director
of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology
and Ecology, and the author of many books including
Staying Alive: Women,
Ecology and Development in India
(1988), The Violence
of the Green Revolution
(1990), Ecology and
the Politics of Survival
(1991), Stolen Harvest
(2000), and Patents:
Myths and Reality
(2001). |
|
