Читать книгу Reclaiming the Commons - Vandana Shiva - Страница 15

INDIA IS A CIVILIZATION whose knowledge, economies, and democracy are based on diversity. India possesses a unique wealth of biological diversity— from the ecosystem level to the species and genetic levels—which have been preserved, protected, and evolved by our indigenous peoples and traditional cultures over thousands of years. It is estimated that over 75,000 species of fauna and 45,000 of flora are found in India. Of the estimated 45,000 plant species, about 15,000 species of algae, 1,600 lichens, 20,000 fungi, 2,700 bryophytes, and 600 pteridophytes. The 75,000 species of animals include 50,000 insects, 4,000 mollusks, 200 fish, 140 amphibians, 420 reptiles, 1,200 birds, 340 mammals, and other invertebrates. Thus, India is a home to about two lakh species of living organisms.

In addition, our farmers have bred diversity in grains, pulses, oilseeds, vegetables, and fruits; gifting the world 200,000 varieties of rice, 1,500 varieties of wheat, 1,500 varieties of mangoes, and 4,500 varieties of brinjal (eggplant).

It is the biodiversity of our spices, our cotton, and our indigo that was the source of India’s wealth in pre-colonial times and was the reason for colonization. Today there is a new attempt to colonize our biodiversity–our seeds and medicinal plants through biopiracy and patenting.

Ancient, intricate systems of traditional indigenous knowledge for biodiversity utilization have been evolving steadily, reflecting the continuous, cumulative and collective innovation of the people. Traditionally, the knowledge has been freely available within and between communities in the commons.

Most of the people in our country derive their livelihood and meet their survival needs from the diversity of living resources; as forest dwellers, farmers, fisher folk, healers, and livestock owners. Indigenous knowledge systems existing in medicine, agriculture, and amongst fishers are the primary base for meeting the food and health needs of the majority of our people.

The immense resources of natural heritage have been protected, preserved and conserved over the years by India’s indigenous peoples, who have had a reverence for their natural heritage. Conservation and utilization have always been delicately, sensitively, and equitably combined in the indigenous knowledge system and cultures of India.

There are two paradigms of biodiversity conservation. The first is held by communities whose survival and sustenance is linked to local biodiversity utilization and conservation. The second is held by global commercial interests whose profits are linked to the utilization of global biodiversity for the production of inputs into large scale homogeneous, uniformly centralized and global production systems. For local indigenous communities, conserving biodiversity means to conserve the integrity of ecosystems and their species, the right to these resources and knowledge, and their production systems based on biodiversity. For them, biodiversity has intrinsic value as well as high use value. Where commercial interests are concerned, biodiversity itself has no value; it is merely ‘raw material’ for the production of commodities, for the ‘mining of genes’ and for the maximization of profits.

Most people in India, even today, live in the first paradigm of biodiversity utilization. According to an ethnobotanical survey, there are 7,500 species used as medicinal plants by the indigenous medical traditions of India. These traditions are kept alive by 360,740 Ayurveda practitioners, 29,701 Unani experts, and 11,644 specialists of Siddha. In addition, millions of housewives, birth attendants and herbal healers carry on village-based traditions. In the 1990s, before the impact of globalization, 70 percent of health care needs in India were still based on traditional systems which are centered around the use of medicinal plants. Eighty percent of seeds used by farmers still came from farmers’ seed supplies. Thus, India was still predominantly a biodiversity-based economy. Impacts of globalization have eroded the biodiversity and knowledge sovereignty of local communities, pushing them into deep poverty and unemployment.

The utilization of biodiversity in a people’s economy is guided by a plurality of knowledge systems. The knowledge of the properties, characteristics, and uses of this biodiversity is held by local epistemological frameworks.

Nature’s diversity and the diversity of knowledge systems is, however, undergoing a major process of destabilization with the expansion of patents and intellectual property rights as defined by corporations into the domain of biodiversity. While nationally we have taken steps to protect our biodiversity, biopiracy alongside the patenting of indigenous knowledge is growing rampantly.

As we enter the third millennium, we need to find ways to protect biological diversity, the intellectual heritage of India, and the world for future generations. On the one hand, emergent ecological concern for the conservation of biological diversity and the growing awareness of the western paradigm of reductionist mechanistic knowledge provides a new opportunity to value the indigenous knowledge of local communities. On the other hand, emergent forms of private property in knowledge and life forms threaten the continuity of biodiversity and related knowledge for the poorer two-thirds of India. This awareness also creates an opportunity to recover and reclaim the commons. The renewed incentive to conserve comes from commitments India has made in international conservation agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

The threats to our rich biological and intellectual heritage come from the expansion of western style “industrial intellectual property rights” regime to biodiversity.

The CBD recognizes that traditional knowledge, innovations, and practices are of vital importance to the conservation of biological diversity and that local, indigenous communities have a close reliance on biological resources. Their livelihood and lifestyles often depend on it and are shaped by it. As such, in accordance with Article 10(c), contracting parties are obliged to protect and encourage customary use of biological resources in line with traditional cultural practices to conserve and sustainably use these resources. Further, according to Article 18.4, the contracting parties are also obliged to develop and use indigenous and traditional technologies to conserve biological diversity and sustainably use its components.