Globalisation of agricultural and food production will lead to further hunger and malnutrition in the world and represents the most important health hazard of our time, Dr Vandana Shiva, founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, told a London audience this week.
The foundation, which is based in New Delhi, is dedicated to independent research, and, in partnership with local communities and social movements, tries to tackle current ecological and social issues.
Dr Shiva, whose talk was entitled "Biodiversity, biotechnology and intellectual property: globalisation and the changing determinants of health," was delivering the annual lecture organised jointly by the International Health and Medical Education Centre (which is based at University College London) and the Lancet .
Dr Shiva has long campaigned against the globalisation and corporate control of agriculture. Her talk explored the political and economic conditions that have led to changes in agriculture and food production but concentrated on three main areas—intellectual property rights, a development she termed "biopiracy," and the commercial controls and manipulation of research.
Large corporations are using intellectual property rights to patent indigenous medicinal plants, seeds, genetic resources, and medicines and are depriving local communities of food, resources, and livelihoods. Through the use of such rights, she said, "biopiracy" was occurring, whereby biological resources were being taken without permission from one country to build up global economies in another. She cited the examples of the transfer of basmati varieties of rice from India to build up the rice economy of the United States, and the free flow of neem seeds from the farms of India to large corporations who export them.
"Biopiracy" deprived indigenous communities by not only excluding them from global markets but also allowing corporations to have monopoly control over scarce biological resources and what was once their traditional knowledge, she said. All these factors were pushing the poor to starvation.
Dr Shiva also discussed the commercial control of research and presented data, suggesting that private sector research did not give high enough priority to safety issues and presented a health hazard in itself.
She said: "Health is a human right. Research is no longer in the public domain, and so this increases the health hazard and decreases people’s capacity to respond."