1 Introduction

An extensive, ongoing privatization of the public sphere has been carried out in the West for the past half millenium. Law, technology, rhetoric, and worldview have come together to mediate between people and nature and the production of their life, bringing resources into the capitalist market. The separation of commoners from the commons that traditional peoples and their ancestors intensively managed, as well as the patenting and control of plant germplasm developed over millennia by farmers, are two of the countless ways that privatization has made the market a primary force in peoples’ lives and alienated them from direct control over their own production. This paper looks at the history of enclosures, generalizing and contextualizing the role of biotechnology today in this historic process.

Several terms are useful in characterizing the transformation to be outlined here. “Enclosure” is a trope used by geographer Iain Boal, taking his queue from one of the most visible privatization movements in western history—the parliamentary enclosures of the 18^th and early 19^th century in England. (Boal, 1998) Boal’s extensive work on enclosures elucidates the extensive social problems resulting from them. But, more importantly for this paper, it highlights the salience and generality of the theme of enclosure in the transformation of western culture and economy: “what Polanyi called ‘the great transformation’ to the global market...This vast historical and worldwide process is, in its essential commodification of land and labor, one of enclosure.” (Boal, 1998; 2-3)

The enclosure trope, however, may carry unwanted rhetorical baggage. After all, enclosure means setting up borders of some kind to keep things in, perhaps eliciting vaguely positive feelings in the observer. The hedges of the English enclosures however, (and, as I shall demonstrate, many other forms of privatization), were constructed to keep things out—namely people—more than to keep things in. One may wonder to what degree this misnomer and the positive sense of the term have worked to perpetuate the phenomenon. For this reason I prefer, and make use of herein, a related term used commonly by ecologists: exclosure—a construction of boundaries to keep certain animals, perhaps people, out.

The other term most relevant to my purpose here is ‘privatization’. The exclosure is important in this analysis as a technique of privatization; privatization is the social function performed by an exclosure. It is with privatization that spaces and resources are brought into the market economy. In the case of the commons of England, it was the enclosure of the commons which allowed them to be privatized and brought to bear fruits for the market economy. An examination of the etymology of the term ‘private’ is revealing. Private, ‘from past participle of privare, to deprive’—with deprive meaning ‘to take something away from’ or ‘to withhold something from’, and with its common root in privilege—contains within it the act of taking away from others, boosting Boal’s assertion that the multiplying acts of enclosure through modern history are a form of theft. It is this “long theft” (Boal, 1998), the exclosures and privatizations of nature—non-human and human—running through our history, from lands in England to plant germplasm, microbes, cells and DNA in the contemporary world, which forms the main concern of this paper. Biotechnology has a central role in these new exclosures.[1]

2 Past Enclosures

You take my life

When you do take the means whereby I live.

(Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1)

Many thinkers have likened the worldwide privatization of lands, agriculture, plant germplasm, genetics, and so on, to the historical enclosures of commons in England. This is a strong theme in contemporary analyses of the increase in power of transnational agribusiness firms; Boal’s approach represents one of the more historically oriented among them. Other authors include, notably, Vandana Shiva, who has worked tirelessly against the loss of control of Indian and other third-world farmers in their production of their food. The works of Brian Tokar, Seth Schulman and Mitchel Cohen add new angles to this approach. Because the work in this area is extensive, the review that I provide here is but an overview of that literature, with the purpose of establishing a solid historical context for contemporary exclosures and biotechnology.

Neeson’s extensive coverage of the enclosures in Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820, (Neeson, 1993) provides a complex, detailed look at the transformations of the commons. She evokes the socially cohesive aspects of the early open-fields commons village thus: “Standing at the center of the village feels like standing at the hub of the whole system: the fields spread out around you, the decision to sow one with wheat, another with barley is written on the landscape. For all that individual men and women work their own bits of land, their economy is public and to a large degree still shared...The fields were places where people talked while they worked, and they worked together. The countryside was busy not empty. The village point was a source of constant interest.” This socialized landscape brought people together in management projects: “Before enclosure, but not after it, Midland peasant agriculture required co-operation and the protection of common interests. Sharing common pasture and working plots scattered over the length and breadth of a parish each called for collective regulation.” “The social efficiency of this common-field collectivism is overlooked by historians...common-field agriculture provided the determining framework of their social relations and their way of life.” (Neeson, 1993; 2, 319, 321, 329)

As Raymond Williams points out, the enclosures were but one aspect of a complex of change which alienated people, particularly poor people, from the land upon which they depended for their production. He asserts that “...it can be reasonably argued that as many people were driven from the land, and from some independent status in relation to it, by the continuing processes of rack-renting and short-lease policies, and by the associated need for greater capital to survive in an increasingly competitive market, as by explicit enclosure.” (Williams, 1973; 97) Yet, the legally supported parliamentary enclosures between 1700 and 1820 were a central device in the removal of people from the land, and the conversion of that land to more market production. As Neeson puts it, “It was no small event; it affected large numbers of men, women and children who lived and worked in what was still the largest sector of the economy—agriculture...Moreover, enclosure was an institutional or political intervention. No other attack on common right succeeded as well as enclosure....Enclosure, sanctioned by law, propagandized by the Board of Agriculture, and profited in by Members of Parliament, was the final blow to peasants in common-field England.” (Neeson, 1993; 330) E. P. Thompson expands this: “the ground-swell of rural grievance came back always to access to the land.” (Neeson, 1993; 329) Neeson, quoting the reactions of the commoners’ themselves, brings in the bottom line: “It promoted private not public welfare...At Atherstone commoners claimed the purpose of the enclosure was ‘to serve the Particular end of two or three Private Persons whereas Lands in Common duely consider’d are as they was first design’d a Benefit to the Publick without Exception’.” (Neeson, 1993; 322)

This conversion can be seen as a stage in the bootstrapping of capitalism. As Boal writes, “In order for capitalism to stand on its own legs, there has to have occurred the historical process of tearing the immediate producer from the soil.” And, quoting Marx, “The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process.” (Boal, 1998; 6) After the transformation, “Humans come to interact with nature and each other only through social mediations of property and price.” (Boal, 1998; 8) In the process of this transformation, the people most directly affected by the enclosures are often impoverished by their lack of direct access to the land. Many of them enter the system of capitalism at the very bottom. As Boal so eloquently puts it, “As the millennium approaches, what is so striking is the massive presence of a classical proletariat: those without, and those from whom much has been taken.” (Boal, 1998; 16)

Neeson devotes entire chapters to describing the extensive and intensive effects of the enclosures. Reminiscent of the reach of today’s transnational agribusiness and pharmaceutical firms, objections to the enclosures decreased with greater ownership of land. In most villages, publicly used land diminished drastically with the enclosures. “Enclosure reduced the size of holdings, extinguished common pasture and collective agriculture, reduced the scope of mutual aid, and demanded an investment of capital, and often a change of techniques, least viable or profitable on smallholdings.” The landless could no longer depend on access to a few acres of commons land to get an artisan’s family through periods of high prices when corn could not be bought. “And it is in this sense that parliamentary enclosure caused the disappearance of the English peasantry.” (Neeson, 1993; 257-58) “...sheer accumulation did not by itself lead to capitalism; concurrent dispossession and proletarianization of the peasantry was necessary.” (Boal, 1998; 5) Vandana Shiva, renowned Indian environmental thinker echoes this: “what the industrial economy calls growth is really a form of theft from nature and people.” (Shiva, 2000; 1) Boal works out additional support for the notion of this conversion as theft, through rhetoric: “The mythos of the market has bleached from our current ‘economic’ lexicon the grizzly history of the long theft: ‘purchase’ (cognate with captiare, ‘hunt’) originally meant in English ‘seizing or taking forcibly or with violence: pillage, plunder, robbery, capture’; ‘finance’ meant ‘a payment for release from captivity or punishment’; ‘pay’ derives from pacere, ‘appease, pacify’”. (Boal, 1998; 6)

These acts of enclosure and other interventions between people and the land of their production have the additional effect of forcing people further into wage labor and dependence on the market economy. This is a symmetric development which converts both land and people to components of the market. In the conversion, both can be degraded and exploited. Boal theorizes that “Private property in land is that form of ownership of the earth which excludes the rights of direct producers; it allows them contact [with the land] only on condition that they be exploited.” (Boal, 1998; 4) “Once choked off the commons,...’the laborers will work every day in the year, their children will be out early to labour’ and ‘that subordination of the lower ranks which in the present times is so much wanted would be thereby considered secured.’” (Boal, 1998; 13) “Enclosure concentrated wealth. It ruined small farming families and drove them into towns; it raised prices; it intensified labour and encouraged luxury. Above all it destroyed equality.” (Neeson, 1993; 24)

Many other examples of enclosure in the past have been documented, including many episodes in Sweden in Germany and other parts of Europe. (Neeson, 1993) In multiple ways, the European colonization of the new world can be seen as one giant exclosure of the previous inhabitants. In particular, expulsion of Native Americans from areas to be set aside for national parks in the U.S.A, into in the 20^th century, are a form of enclosure detailed by Mark David Spence and others. (Spence, 1999) Additional enclosures await us in the future, says Boal: “the further commodification of life processes, more privatization of the electromagnetic spectrum, the sequestration of the intellectual and artistic commons, of the gifts of dead generations, our human patrimony.” (Boal, 1998; 16)

3 Present and Future Exclosures

Over the past five decades, a massive number of the world’s people have been dispossessed, uprooted and displaced, ‘the means whereby they lived’ having been taken in the name of development, modernization, industrialization, growth, globalization, progress, and profit. (Araghi, 2000; 145)

Biopiracy, and patents based on it, are equivalent to enclosing the biological and intellectual commons, while dispossessing the original innovators and users (Shiva, 2001; 283)

The process of exclosure and the transformation of the world of subsistence into the world of the global market has taken many forms and continues with us into the future. This is the conclusion of many writers who criticize the role of biotechnology in divorcing people from the land and other natural resources, such as plant germplasm, upon which they depend and which they and their ancestors have developed. Biotechnology can be seen as part of a larger apparatus of exclosure and privatization which reconcentrates wealth at the expense of many people. The cases are many.

In her recent book, Stolen Harvest, Vandana Shiva contends that laws, patents and biotechnology together are stealing the production capacity of the planet and people. “...the tools of genetic engineering are designed to steal nature’s harvest by destroying biodiversity, increasing the use of herbicides and pesticides, and spreading the risk of irreversible genetic pollution.” (Shiva, 2000; 95) She asserts that as farmers become more dependent on chemicals and have less control over the seeds needed for agriculture, and as the number of plant varieties available to them is reduced through monoculture and the rationalization of the seed ownership, the harvest is stolen, coopted by the market, and taken out of their control. Farmers and others in many places are objecting. Some African governments wrote a declaration composed a declaration on behalf of the displaced: “Let the Harvest Continue!”:

We do not believe that such companies or gene technologies will help our farmers to produce the food that is needed in the 21^st century. On the contrary, we think they will destroy the diversity, the local knowledge, and the sustainable agricultural system that our farmers have developed for millennia, and that they will thus undermine our capacity to feed ourselves. (Shiva, 2000; 83; From Third World Resurgence, No. 97)

Hope Shand writes that “All parts of life—its products and processes, even its formulae—are being privatized.” (Shand, 2001; 222) In her article, “Exclusive Rights, Enclosure and the Patenting of Life”, Kimberly A. Wilson also casts the complex of patents and biotechnology into the trope of enclosure. (Wilson, 2001; 290) Mitchel Cohen sees the integration of biotechnology into a “new world order”: “The globalization of capitalism has a new weapon, about which people around the world know very little—the colonization of our genes. Genetic engineering is the ideal technology for corporatizing whole new areas of nature.” (Cohen, 2001; 306) Cohen cites the working together of patents and genetic technologies, where life forms are informaticized, as a part of the order, together with capitalism, which represents an unprecedented concentration of political power. “The new technologies constitute modes of production and reproduction that intersect capitalist relations of exploitation, shaping and, ultimately, dominating our approach to science, art and even so-called ‘pure research.’” (Cohen, 2001; 311) “Inherent in the technology of genetic engineering, as in the state, are all the relations of exploitation, domination and power over others, and over Nature...” (Cohen, 2001; 312-13)

Exclosure by the apparatus of biotechnology, law and the market has been directly responsible for the removal of third-world peoples’ ability to produce their own food, as argued widely and convincingly by Vandana Shiva. In addition, the process of agricultural development in the West which, before the last decade or so, was primarily in control of the public-sector has become increasingly privatized and simultaneously has become more difficult and less accessible, particularly to those outside of the corporations. In a recent New York Times article, scientists, even some in the private sector, complained about their ability to produce agricultural innovations because of the huge obstacles presented by privatization and profusive patenting. Forty-five percent of plant breeders at universities say that trouble getting seeds from private companies has interfered with their research. This has led Dr. Samuel H. Smith, former president of Washington State University, to conclude that “The things that give us a safe and healthy food supply are slowly eroding...it’s a slow death.” (Pollack, 2001)

The fact that the current pro-biotechnology discourse of “feeding the world” (Shiva, 2000; 96) echoes discourse used in the great enclosures of the commons in England being “vital to the national interests” (Neeson, 1993; 7) illustrates the common heritage of exclosure in the lineage of biotechnology as well as their common basis in an agenda which advantages larger institutions over the small, direct producer. The thefts have been many. A Texas company, RiceTec, has acquired a patent on a variety of rice. “The patent will allow RiceTec...to sell internationally what it claims to be a new variety of Basmatic, developed under the name of Basmati.” (Shiva, 2000; 85) “The Basmatic patent...is in fact a denial of farmers’ breeding that has gone into the embodiment of basmatic characteristics in farmers’ varieties. The patent drew outrage from the Indian farmers’ organizations...” (Shiva, 2001; 357) Other examples include patents on pepper, ginger, mustard, neem, and turmeric. (Shiva, 2000; 86)

The confluence of biotechnology and power to establish new forms of privatization has played out most frequently in the form of privatization of plant germplasm. Many third-world farmers and others protest the theft of plant genetics which have been developed over millennia by their ancestors, and which heretofore have remained available for free access. In a great irony, farmers can then be turned into criminals for simply using the resources which have been developed by and for them. Vandana Shiva talks about the 200,000 varieties of rice produced through the innovation of Indian farmers over generations. (Shiva, 2000; 7) She discusses the many mechanisms by which this diversity of varieties falls sharply when farmers become dependent on agribusiness firms for their seeds and other inputs as they are brought into the market; those firms have incentives to reduce, not to maintain, the diversity of seed types. In the process of privatization, “farmers essentially become renters of plant germplasm”, as Seth Shulman writes. (Shulman, 1999; 91)

Shiva provides an extensive history of the privatization of Neem tree products, a common resource used in India for millennia. Products from the tree have dozens of uses in Indian, particularly as biopesticides and in medicine, and retains high status in Indian culture. The Persian name for the Neem translates to “Free Tree”, making it ironic that since the 1970’s scientists in the U.S. and Japan have filed extensive patents on various properties and substances from the tree. Shiva lists thirteen among the many patents taken out in the U.S. alone for Neem-based products and processes. The patents concern mainly the production and extraction of useful products from the Neem, and applications of them; however, indigenous methods of extraction and use have existed for centuries. As Shiva points out, none of these patents would be possible without the knowledge of the material and use of the active component in the Neem (Azadirachtin), discovered by indigenous peoples. The discourse in the West surrounding this development shows a lack of acknowledgement of the original discoveries of those people at the same time that it supports the idea of patenting, or exclosure, of the Neem products: “the method of scattering ground neem seeds as a pesticide would not be a patentable process, because this process...would be deemed obvious.” Shiva proposes that the minor steps in the current acquisition, control and modification of the Neem materials are what are in fact “obvious”. (Shiva, 1993; 12, 13) Meanwhile, this privatization and commercialization of the Neem resource has led to its inaccessibility by those whose ancestors developed the first large steps in its use. Shiva talks about the increase in price/market value resulting from its commercialization:

This increase in the price of neem seeds has turned a free resource into an exorbitantly priced one, with the local user now competing with industry for the seed. As the local farmer cannot afford the price that industry can, the diversion of the seed as raw material from the community to the industry will be complete. (Shiva, 1993; 14)

Shiva claims that, although U.S. government estimates are that every 1% gain in crop productivity brings about $1 billion in benefit to the American economy, none of this benefit returns to the original donors, third world farmers. (Shiva, 1993; 16) The following is a partial list of the intellectual property owned by Western institutions founded primarily on developments by indigenous peoples, for which they have probably benefited very little:

¨ African soapberry, Endod, is the intellectual property of the University of Toledo for its ability to kill zebra mussels clogging North American water pipes. This plant has been used all over Africa as a shampoo, a detergent and a fish intoxicant. This will deprive Africans of the free use of the plant as the majority of the plants are harvested for commercial production.

¨ Peruvian potatoes are the intellectual property of Frito-Lay.

¨ Chinese medicinal plant Qing Hao is the intellectual property of Rhone-Poulenc of France.

¨ Argentinean bacteria are the intellectual property of Mitsubishi.

¨ A rice variety, CB-801 originating from South and South East Asia is the intellectual property of Farms of Texas, Co. Other rice varieties developed by Asian researchers are the intellectual property of Cornell University.

This is of course a minute and abbreviated sampling of the patents taken out on products and processes based primarily on indigenous products and processes, but it gives a notion of the types of privatization that are happening. There is dissent; large campaign to protest the patenting of Neem has been waged in India. (Shiva, 1993; 28)

In the process of backgrounding the work of indigenous peoples in producing these useful varieties and in developing the uses themselves, the historic anthropogenic landscapes from whence they come are often also backgrounded, and assumed to be “wild”. These landscapes and the products within them are now being usurped by private corporations. “What was considered to be an empty area, an empty region like Amazon, showed that it had evolved in the presence of human beings for 20 to 30 thousand years.” (Posey, 1994; 244) The landscapes themselves are often severely disrupted by the commodification of these ‘found’ useful varieties: “Plants with therapeutic potential are in some cases collected into extinction even faster than their homes—whether in the rainforest or elsewhere—are being destroyed.” (Dorsey, 2001; 275) Michael K. Dorsey also claims that local people receive virtually no compensation for the centuries of testing that they have already performed, and the associated knowledge. (Dorsey, 2001; 277) Discussing another exclosure, that of human genetics in the Human Genome Diversity Project, Brian Tokar states, “Rarely are communities informed about the full range of possible commercial uses for their [human] genetic information, nor are they party to the multimillion-dollar agreements between research institutions and pharmaceutical companies that have become routine in the world of biotechnology.” (Tokar, 2001; 218-9)

As plant germplasm becomes further privatized globally, not only are many third world people disadvantaged, impoverished and angry, but extreme distortions resulting from biotechnology have begun to appear in the industrial world. Consider the case of Percy Schmeiser, a Canadian farmer whose rapeseed crops became contaminated with (Monsanto proprietary) pollen from nearby fields, after which he has been assessed fines by the company for illegally using their (exclosed) plant germplasm. A similarly controversial incident is the marketing of John Moore’s stem cells. Without his knowledge, cells from his spleen were used by his doctor and others to profit from the development of a line of stem cells for research. Thus, the privatization of nature has extended to the human body, without consent.

The privatization/exclosure force is not limited to operations on plant germplasm, geographic spaces, and human biology. It is a phenomenon which has become generalized in the market’s interminable hunger for the exclosure of spaces of all types. Capital expropriates indiscriminately, in a rip tide of primitive accumulation. Not only are all existing spaces, such as plant germplasm privatized, but new spaces, such as spaces of dissent, are constantly created and colonized. Consider the creation of the anti-commercial, anti-MTV music movement, rage rock.[2] This space of cultural dissent, whose performers and audience joined in a mutual slamming of the commercialization of popular music, particularly MTV (because of its aggressive integration with forces of commodification and marketing) lived only a short life before being completely coopted by the very market forces against which it railed; MTV hosted a new show based on the new music, brought the members of those bands into its studios, and highly commercialized albums of the group were produced. In light of this rapid, thorough and unlimited re-colonization of spaces exhibited in our times, the cyclic, constant, incestual mergers and acquisitions of biotechnology corporations can be seen as exhibiting an additional space of colonization, with the result of an extreme concentration of biological power as the number of companies diminishes while the individual power of each grows.

4 Techniques of Privatization/Exclosure

As implied above, biotechnology is active element in a larger apparatus of exclosure/privatization, colonization and the reconcentration of power in the modern, capitalist world. The processes of exclosure and examples thereof discussed previously highlight the generalized phenomenon of exclosure/privatization and some of the results of disempowerment and impoverishment of people marginalized by the global market economy. Now, I want to look more closely at the mechanisms which constitute the processes of exclosure, to further contextualize and elucidate the role of biotechnology. The techniques I examine here include, 1) law and administration, including patents, 2) biotechnology, 3) informaticization/abstraction (capital), 4) worldview, 5) redistribution of wealth and market control, 6) discourse, 7) dispossession. Mitchel Cohen’s work in synthesizing some of these elements in “Biotechnology and the New World Order” inspires this analysis. Although these techniques and mechanisms are discussed separately, they are strongly interrelated as a cultural apparatus.

4.1 Patents, Law and Administration

Intellectual-property rights and patents reorganize relationships between the human species and other species, and within the human community. Instead of the culture of the seed’s reciprocity, mutuality, permanence, and exhaustless fertility, corporations are redefining the culture of the seed to be about piracy, predation, the termination of fertility, and the engineering of sterility. (Shiva, 2000; 90)

Mitchel Cohen’s analysis of biotechnology as part of a new world order illustrates the confluence of politics, market and technology in producing privatizations and the control of life. Genetic engineering, he says, “conquers those parts of life that have thus far stood outside of its domain: the inner workings of the living cell.” (Cohen, 2001; 306) Illustrating the power structure which enforces the new approach, he uses the September, 1998 example of the new issue of The Ecologist, the entire print run of which was shredded by the printer because of a fear of the power of Monsanto; the issue included an in-depth examination of the machinations of the company, and its patenting of living organisms and its genetic engineering for private profit. He claims that this incident is but the “tip of the civil liberties iceberg” surrounding the ascendancy of biotechnology. (Cohen, 2001; 306-7) Attesting to this is the fact that Monsanto has set up a toll-free ‘tip line’ to help farmers report violations of Monsanto’s exclosure of plant germplasm. As Hope Shand says, “Our rural communities are being turned into corporate police states, and farmers are being turned into criminals.” (Shiva, 2000; 93)

Cohen goes on to evoke the 18^th century enclosures of lands in Europe, instituted by laws which sanctioned the theft of public resources. He goes on to compare this, as do many researchers, with processes occurring today, generally under the name “structural adjustment” and “neoliberalism”. The global treaties and institutions administering this change include NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, MAI (Multilaterial Agreement on Investments), WTO (World Trade Organization), IMF (International Monetary Fund), the World Bank and USAID (US Agency for International Development). Cohen says that these treaties and institutions, through the mechanism of intellectual property rights, enforce the power of corporations over the sovereignty of existing nation-states and the basic rights of every country’s citizenry. With genetic colonialism, he says, biotech corporations “are demanding human rights for corporations, while at the same time supporting legislation curtailing the rights of actual people.” (Cohen, 2001; 307) So Europeans’ desire to keep hormone-contaminated beef out of their foodstream are countermanded by international law which gives beef exporting companies’ rights primacy over beef eaters.

Cohen’s argument is further supported by the slew of anti-slander actions against individuals critical of industry, in which the state enforces the primacy of the corporation over people. “Food disparagement” laws allow corporations to silence the opposition, maintaining their power advantage. Small dairies, who refused to use the biotechnology product recombinant bovine growth hormone, were strong-armed and intimidating by Monsanto. The same company has also gone after media personnel who would attempt to expose any linkage between their product and cancer. This domination by industry in the space of politics is both a result of and mechanism of exclosure.

Most critics of the role of biotechnology cite patent law as a pivotal technique in enabling the exclosure of common plant germplasm resources around the globe. In First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492-2000, Jack Kloppenburg, Jr. details the historical role of the patent office in the development of plant germplasm for the growing U.S. in the mid- to late-19^th century. The federal government, with the patent office and navy, were actively engaged in the development of plant germplasm to secure the food supply of the country. He also details the massive exchange of biological materials between the old world and the new beginning with the “Colombian Exchange”, Alfred Crosby’s analysis and trope of the exchange of biota between the old world and the new world. Quoting Marx, “the Treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there.” He asks the question, “What is it about the germplasm in commercial varieties as opposed to the germplasm in land races that justifies classification of the former as a commodity and latter as a free good?” (Kloppenburg, 1988; 154)

Patents figure broadly in the European relationship to the new world. Columbus carried “letters patent” from the monarchy of Spain when he stumbled on land new to him, helping his “discoveries” to be possible, legal and rewarding. (Burrows, 2001; 238) In its early years, the U.S.A. allowed the violation of many European patents, however. (Burrows, 2001; 240) By the 1980’s the biotechnology industry together with the U.S. government “successfully rewrote property laws to allow for exclusive monopoly control over all biological products and processes.” (Shand, 2001; 225) During that same decade, the infamous Chakbrabaty case, presided over by the U.S. Supreme Court, set the precedent which allowed the “patenting of life”. There is much support for the role of patents in innovation and for the creation of solutions to society’s problems. However, it should be noted that such developments have always occurred, and probably were more sensitively to social and environmental needs. As Burrows notes, there have forever been inventions made in communities throughout the world and throughout all time without the incentives of patents. (Burrows, 2001; 243) I would attest that patents, an exclosing technology, are not needed by people or society as a whole, but rather are an ideological necessity of the market.

Another possible indication of the importance of patents in of the agenda of acquisition of control is the fact that U.S. patent clerks are paid according to the number of approvals that they make.[3] In the context of the new world order of corporate power, the free flow of patents, particularly those for products and processes based heavily on earlier developments by indigenous people, can be seen an important state support for the concentration of power. A similarly surprising aspect of patenting comes from its history in the U.S. In the early days of the industrial revolution, England excelled in innovation and the creation of new patents for industrial technology. The U.S., then relatively less developed technologically, freely violated many of those English patents. (Burrows, 2001; 240) In an ironic twist of fate, it is the U.S. which now strenuously attempts to enforce patents through international treaties and institutions such as the WTO to protect its own industry and gain advantage. It argues against its former position of relative freedom from patents.

4.2 Biotechnology

The globalization of capitalism has a new weapon, about which people around the world know very little—the colonization of our genes. Genetic engineering is the ideal technology for corporatizing whole new areas of nature. (Mitchel, 2001; 306)

Biotechnology interfaces with patent law by providing a new avenue for the creation of modifications from traditional plant germplasm and other resources which can then be patented. This technique has been implied in many of the forgoing discussions and much of the literature of opposition to biotechnology. The biotechnology industry is seen to be at the center of the effort, as Brian Tokar puts it, to commodify all of life, “to absorb all that is alive into the sphere of products to be bought, sold and traded in the commercial marketplace.” (Tokar, 2001; 218) Hope Shand says that the fast pace of discovery in genomics is reflected in the large, and growing, number of pending patent claims related to partial gene sequences or expressed sequence tags. This number has gone from 4,000 in 1991, to 350,000 in 1996, to 500,000 in 1998. It would seem that the patent office is working overtime for the biotechnology industry.

Terminator technology, which allows biotechnology firms to produce plants which produce sterile seeds, thus preventing the propagation of their inventions, is one particularly dramatic example of the use of biotechnology to exclose other people from resources. This technology has been central to much of the resistance to biotechnology because it so overtly usurps control. Some of the other avenues of control with biotechnology have been mentioned above. The novelty and absurdity of the effects of this new degree of acquisition and control have played out in several other arenas, such as the fact that DNA technologies have allowed the U.S. National Institutes of Health to patent the DNA of an indigenous man of the Hagahai people of the highlands of Papua New Guinea on March 14, 1995. Such actions have been the subject of much controversy in indigenous communities. (Tauli-Corpuz, 2001; 264)

4.3 Informaticization/abstraction

’What we’re seeing,’ Shand says, ‘is nothing short of a new kind of ‘bioserfdom.’ Only this time, instead of controlling the land, the new feudal lords—the large agrochemical firms—gain their power and wealth by owning the information contained within the new high-tech seed varieties. (Shulman, 1999; 91)

Transformation into a pure informational form facilitates the direct control and domination of resources. Information can be controlled more easily since there are fewer constraints in space and time, for example in storage and transportation. The conversion of plant germplasm to its informational content allows for more direct patenting—of the code itself. This plays out in the enormous number of EST patents being applied for above. Slight variations in content are easier to produce when worked out in the domain of information. As Hope Shand says, “the new feudal lords—large agrochemical firms—gain their power and wealth by owning the information contained within the new high-tech seed varieties.” (Shulman, 1999; 91)

Lily Kay’s analysis of the transformation of cell biology into informational form, “A Book of Life? How the Genome Became an Information System and DNA a Language”, provides a detailed history of this evolution, going back to postwar technoculture and a metadisciplinary shift in representation which occurred simultaneously in several fields. (Kay, 1998; 506) This led to an extensive informaticization of biology, particularly in genomics, around the time of the “discovery” of DNA. Kay writes of codes and sense and missense, delineating the extent to which the content of cell biology moved in the direction of language, which could then be read, written, copied and edited. In this state, biology could be bought, controlled and stored. When companies own the information of the seed, with the help of patents and laws, rather than the seed itself, future generations of the germplasm are more easily controlled. Hence, the Winterboers of Clay County, Iowa, sued by Asgrow for selling to their farmer neighbors soybean seeds that they had grown, are just two of many farmers worldwide shocked to learn that they are no longer dealing in materials, but rather in information.

Another aspect of this informaticization is the market economy’s reduction of all value dimensions to market value, representable in simple, one-dimensional monetary terms. As Seth Shulman writes, “Viewed for millennia as the means to a crop, seed is gradually coming to be seen as an embodiment of intellectual property, as a blueprint, in other words, that carries value of its own.” (Shulman, 1999; 85) As we can see, this is producing revolutionary new methods of association into the market. Whereas in the past, patents allowed for the exclosure of products and processes, the new informatic transformation of biology is allowing unprecedented control over vast new areas, together with great new opportunities for the accumulation of wealth: “...the broad means of controlling knowledge assets is proving far more lucrative than a new machine or tool.” (Shulman, 1999; 95)

4.4 Worldview

Information-based biology, together with the triumphal stance of science, are just two parts of an overall worldview which lends itself to the exclosure of resources from people who have depended on them and managed them. The culture of pervasive market logic, where policy makers place faith in the market’s ability to provide for the people, certainly provides significant justification for the theft of land and plant germplasm. Added to this is a thoroughly instrumental view of nature. Brian Tokar evokes “the hegemony of a thoroughly profit-centered social agenda.” Comparing the central role of biotechnology to that of nuclear technology in decades past, he writes, “Just as nuclear technology a generation ago was a definitive symbol of the increasing militarization of society during the peak years of the Cold War, biotechnology is today the product of a post-Cold War society that is thoroughly enslaved to commercial interests.” Thus, “to oppose biotechnology effectively, it is necessary to expose the social, economic and ideological underpinnings of the global capitalist world-view that today’s biotechnology is an expression of.” (Tokar, 2001; 218)

4.5 Redistribution of Wealth and Market Control

Just five multinational conglomerate companies now control virtually all trade in seed throughout the world. (Shiva, 2000; 9) Unlimited capital accumulation brings with it the possibility of unlimited power accumulation because of the direct relation between material wealth and power, particularly in a market-oriented society. As land and germplasm are converted to capital through exclosures and their divorce from the meanings essential to peoples’ direct relations to them, further accumulation is enabled. Since market power begets market power, differentials of power are generally unstable toward an increase. As biotechnology firms race to expropriate more and more communally developed resources, their market power increases and fluctuates, with the winners buying out the losers in a continual distillation of power. This plays out in fewer and fewer companies controlling more and more germplasm resources in a downward spiral of monopolization, as demonstrated by William Boyd’s research on the structure of the agricultural biotechnology industry.[4] Thus, as I claimed previously, the companies themselves become spaces of colonization by the logic of the market.

4.6 Discourse

Jeannette Neeson writes that the parliamentary enclosures of 18^th and 19^th century England were promoted as “vital to the national interests”. There has been a proliferation of similar statements about the importance of biotechnology to contemporary society. Among the more frequent is the claim that biotechnology is needed to “feed the world”—a claim roundly refuted by many authors who rightly point out that enough food is already produced, and that the problem lies in the uneven distribution of food. Says Farshad Araghi, “Currently there is a global surplus of food...it is therefore people’s inability to purchase food as a market commodity and the loss of their direct access to the production of their means of subsistence (i.e., depeasantization) that explains the global character of hunger today.” (Araghi, 2000; 155) Indeed, many authors support this idea that the market figures as problem, rather than solution, to the problem of hunger. “The contemporary food problem is rooted in the increasing global commodification of food.” (Araghi, 2000; 155) Vandana Shiva also blames hunger on the byproducts of large-scale, commercial agriculture and biotechnology; reduction of biodiversity, monocultures, exposure to unstable markets, and the removal of free access to land and plant germplasm steal the harvest from the people. (Shiva, 2000)

Other well-refuted phrases behind biotechnology’s proliferation are that it will help protect the environment, reduce poverty and that there is “so substantial difference” between the products of genetic engineering and traditional breeding. The threats of gene flow from genetically engineered crops to wild varieties creating superweeds constitute just one class of problems with those products, refuting the claim of equivalence. Poverty is first created by exclosures when people’s livelihoods are redefined in market terms without automatic participation in the form of guaranteed access to work or wages. The claim that there is “no substantial difference” is belied by the fact that flounder genes would otherwise have no path into tomato germplasm. These and other glib claims have been routinely dispatched by nuanced, in-depth analysis by concerned scientists and other thinkers.

4.7 Dispossession

A central component of exclosure, dispossession of people from resources is central to the great transformation to the market, as discussed extensively above. In a discussion of the relation of profit-seeking culture and hunger, Farshad Araghi has identified to primary forms of dispossession which constitute this process of the annihilation of the peasantry: 1) dispossession through differentiation, and 2) dispossession through displacement. (Araghi, 2000; 146) The former occurs when peasants gradually are exposed to further and further dependence on the market and are thus differentiated progressively into capitalists and proletarians. When state policies promote the “mobilization of agricultural land” (en/exclosure), peasants are dispossessed physically, through displacement. Araghi blames these developments for most of the world’s hunger: “With the rapid, massive, and global incorporation of formerly self-sufficient agricultural peoples into market relations, and with millions of people having lost their nonmarket access to the production of their means of subsistence, hunger has assumed a uniquely global character. Hunger amidst scarcity has given way to hunger amidst abundance.” (Araghi, 2000; 155) Araghi describes this as a process of global restructuring which has two interrelated components: 1) the reorganization of labor to the advantage of transnational corporations, 2) a radical redistribution of wealth from the global poor to the global rich. The author states the grim results of this restructuring and reinterpretation of humanity: “...a recent estimate that two billion people will become redundant worldwide if the neoliberal trade regime is fully implemented.” (Araghi, 2000; 150-51)

5 Historical and Philosophical Bases of Privatization/Exclosure

In view of what seems to be such an extensive and global tranformational process, one might wonder what historical and philosophical underpinnings may be at work. At this point, we enter the realm of speculation, since such inferences are hard to draw with precision. However, with a little indulgence, compelling threads can be drawn out of the past and our inherited philosophical groundings. These speculations are to lesser or greater extent grounded in work done by previous thinkers. Besides the well-drawn precedent of the English and other actual landscape enclosures, I see elements of the current situation in ancient Greek ideas of human/nature dualism and individualism, Descartes’ and others’ reconceptualizations of nature and master/slave, colonist/colonized dualistic conceptualizations as exposed by feminist environmental philosopher Val Plumwood. These have all contributed to an instrumental, reductionist approach to human and non-human nature.

In his work on the enclosures, Professor Boal supports the idea of decline in the commoners’ life after the enclosures, and perhaps the condition of the enclosed lands themselves, by criticizing Garret Hardin’s claims that the commons represents a tragedy due to each individual person’s temptation to extract more than a fair share; commons life required and was met by, cooperation and collective regulation. Further laying into Hardin, Boal points out that “the tragedy itself, as a dramatic form, was a repines to the rise of business individualism in classical Greece. The loss of ‘primitive-collectivist’ sanction against ambitious self-aggrandizement struck the tragedians of Athens as poignant, since they were themselves pious, conservative, even ‘reactionary’, and fearful of the tendencies of strongly individualizing commercial society to hubristic accumulation.” (Boal, 1998; 5) Thus, we have the commons tied analytically back to ancient Greece and acts of privatization which, we recall, evokes the taking away of something. Our individualism can surely be traced back to those times in classical Greece where debate flourished as did men’s rights; it comes as less surprise then that exclosures have ancient antecedents. Indeed the general idea of the breaking of common bonds and relations, reduction and the atomizations, inherent in acts of individualism and privatization, can be traced back to that period.

Carolyn Merchant has extensively analyzed the significant transformations in European philosophy of nature around the time of the Scientific Revolution of Francis Bacon, Réné Descartes, Sir Isaac Newton, et. al. in her landmark book The Death of Nature. Merchant discusses Descartes’ ideas of investigating nature so that humanity could “render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature”. Similarly, Francis Bacon asserted that nature must be “bound into service”, made a “slave”, put “in constraint” and “molded” by the mechanical arts. (Merchant, 1980; 188, 169) This type of imagery and language was pervasive in scientific thought of the period, and has remained operational in our instrumental approach to non-human, and perhaps human, nature. Nature in modernity, argues Merchant, has become mechanized and instrumentalized in conception. It is perhaps reflected in the idea today that nature must stand naked, as informatics, available for unconstrained manipulation. The far reaches of biotechnology into the interior of life, the representation of life in informatic (objective, rational) terms, and the resultant proliferation of manipulation at that level all point out the instrumental, mechanized path, in the service of Bacon and Descartes, being followed by biotechnology.

Val Plumwood’s extensive analysis of western rationality exposes the pervasiveness of dualistic thought in the West. In her book, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, she relates the dualistic mind/body, reason/nature, male/female thinking of ancient Greece with the subject/object conceptualization of Descartes. She then relates this pervasive dualistic conceptualization to the power differentials inherent in the parallel master/slave dualism. I conjecture that the reason/nature and human/nature dualistic thought is an enabling factor in the rampant dispossession of people from land and resources. Also, the master/slave, colonist/colonized dualism is inherent in the thinking that devalues millennia of indigenous work in developing the plant germplasm pools that all humans depend on. Plumwood’s feminist-originating discussion of the backgrounding of the work and characteristics of the colonized Other applies wholly to the case of the ‘master’ capitalist’s exclosure of that work of the colonized (and the landscape) in the form of plant germplasm and landscapes.

6 Conclusion

The market’s usurping of human and non-human resources through privatizations and exclosures of all types is an ongoing process with historic and philosophical roots in the West. New political conditions and technological structures create new spaces for colonization, for the increasing implementation of market logic across the landscape, and now, internally in human and plant genomes. The exclosure of plant germplasm was accelerated in the age of discovery with the global collection and redeployment of seeds and a net enrichment of the North, as documented by Jack Kloppenburg; biotechnology, in conjunction with other factors in the apparatus outlined above, such as patent law and discourse, has broadened the space of plant germplasm privatization by transforming plant germplasm to its informational content and allowing for a finer degree of control in the modification of the germplasm through genetic engineering. This has allowed for a deeper and more thorough exclosure of a space traditionally accessed and managed by indigenous farmers, some of whom are now killing themselves for having been alienated from the resources which supported them and their families. (Shiva, 2000; 101)

Authors such as Vandana Shiva, Farshad Araghi, and Mitchel Cohen expose the links between biotechnology and other political, social and cultural elements which constitute an apparatus of control and domination, with the violation of the traditional rights of millions of people. Mitchel Cohen sees biotechnology as a pillar of the new world order, allowing the “plunder of new dimensions”, taking power out of the hands of ordinary people and concentrating it in the corporate elite, which continually reconfigures itself in acts of reconcentration and self-colonization; thus, this logic is not only pervasive, but totalizing.

If we accept that the roots of the current privatizations and exclosures lie in individualist, dualistic, reductionist thought in ancient Greece or beyond, and that the current transformation of society is totalizing and global, new implications for resistance arise. Demands for disclosure of ownership by academic researchers in biotechnology companies, for instance, will seem inadequate when we understand that the project of transformation is larger than anyone’s personal interest, and is rather the fulfillment of traditional Western philosophical ideas, a pervasive worldview, and the currents of historic norms.

Certainly the progress of the apparatus of exclosure and privatization—the right arm of the market—can be slowed down with resistances aimed at its particular effects, such as genetic pollution from genetically modified organisms or the theft of ancient developments of rice germplasm. But, this raises the question of whether partial, temporary setbacks to the process represent a satisfactory goal, and it perhaps circumvents deeper examination of the cultural origins of these developments, this transformation. Greater oversight and control by a democratic public is important, but may involve a pipe dream if we assume that the (informed?) public would object to the implementation of the norms which pervade our worldview. Underlying the exclosures of poor, third-world farmers from their inherited plant germplasm is the implicit (sometimes explicit) idea that they will be better off participating in the global capitalist market.

The experience of exclosure takes on the role of an initiation into the market; Indian laws which divorce people from land for shrimp aquaculture and outlaw some forms of small-scale production, such as that of mustard oil, attest to this. (Shiva, 2000; 10) The logic of the market and privatization guides these actions; biotechnology is a tool in the transformation. From this angle, the demonization of corporate and governmental elite appears to be based on a fantasy, the motivation for which is to locate all of the agency for the transformation externally to ourselves, ironically playing out the mighty western subject/object dualism. Meanwhile, those in power simply implement the logic of the ideology of privatization and exclosure central to our culture.

References

Farshad Araghi, “The Great Global Enclosure of Our Times: Peasants and the Agrarian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century”, in Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment, ed. Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2000.

Iain A. Boal, “The Long Theft: Enclosures and Planetary Capitalism in Historical Perspective”, ms. 1998.

Beth Burrows, “Patents, Ethics and Spin”, in Redesigning Life: The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering, ed. Brian Tokar, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal & Kingston, 2001.

Mitchel Cohen, “Biotechnology and the New World Order”, in Redesigning Life: The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering, ed. Brian Tokar, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal & Kingston, 2001.

Michael K. Dorsey, “Shams, Shamans and the Commercialization of Biodiversity”, in Redesigning Life: The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering, ed. Brian Tokar, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal & Kingston, 2001.

Lily E. Kay, “A Book of Life? How the Genome Became an Information System and DNA a Language”, in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 41, 4. Summer, 1998.

Jack Kloppenburg, “The Genetic Foundation of American Agriculture”, and “Seeds of Struggle: Plant Genetic Resources in the World System”, in First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998.

Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. Harper and Row, 1980.

J. M. Neeson, Commoners: common right, enclosure and social change in England, 1700-1820 Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993.

Andrew Pollack, “The Green Revolution Yields to the Bottom Line.”, in The New York Times, May 15, 2001.

Hope Shand, “Gene Giants: Understanding the ‘Life Industry’”, in Redesigning Life: The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering, ed. Brian Tokar, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal & Kingston, 2001.

Vandana Shiva and Radha Holla-Bhar, Intellectual Piracy & the Neem Patents, The Research Foundation for Science, Technology & Natural Resource Policy, New Dehli, 1993.

Vandana Shiva, “Biopiracy: The Theft of Knowledge and Resources”, in Redesigning Life: The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering, ed. Brian Tokar, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal & Kingston, 2001.

Vandana Shiva, “Tripping Over Life”, ch. 5 in Biopiracy, Green Books, 1998.

Vandana Shiva, ed., Biodiversity Conservation: Whose Resource? Whose Knowledge?, Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, New Delhi, 1994.

Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, South End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000.

Seth Shulman, “Soybean Dreams”, ch. 6 in Owning the Future, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1999.

Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, Oxford University Press, New York, 1999.

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, “Biotechnology and Indigenous People”, in Redesigning Life: The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering, ed. Brian Tokar, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal & Kingston, 2001.

Brian Tokar, “PART III: PATENTS, CORPORATE POWER AND THE THEFT OF KNOWLDGE AND RESOURCES”, in Redesigning Life: The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering, ed. Brian Tokar, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal & Kingston, 2001.

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, Oxford University Press, New York, 1973.

Kimberly A. Wilson, “Exclusive Rights, Enclosure and the Patenting of Life”, in Redesigning Life: The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering, ed. Brian Tokar, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal & Kingston, 2001.

[1] Merriam-Webster's Collegiate® Dictionary & Thesaurus, 2001, http://www.mydictionary.com.

[2] A Public Broadcasting System television documentary, “The Merchants of Cool.”. See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/.

[3] William Boyd, 4 May 2001, at a workshop on agricultural biotechnology and the life sciences at the Institute for International Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

[4] William Boyd, 4 May 2001, at a workshop on agricultural biotechnology and the life sciences at the Institute for International Studies, University of California, Berkeley.