AMY GOODMAN: And you are listening to Democracy Now!, live from Seattle. I’m Amy Goodman, with my co-host Juan González. Welcome, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Good day, Amy, and to all of our listeners. And here we are at this historic — at this historic gathering here, where the — at the end of the 20th century, as the forces of global capital continue to expand and develop their control, or their attempted control. They have been surprised by an enormous international gathering of civic organizations from around the world.

And I’m amazed, as I’ve been reading, finally, in the last couple of weeks, coverage. In many of the major media in the country, you find this portrait of an attempt to marginalize the protest, an attempt to paint the protest as fringe groups, a hodgepodge of fringe groups, rather than activist leaders from around the world representing enormous sentiment around the world as to the evils of what the WTO represents.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s right, Juan. And this is happening in a city, Seattle, that knows labor activism. The Seattle General Strike of February 1919 was the first citywide strike anywhere in the United States to be proclaimed a general strike. It led off a tumultuous post-World War I-era labor conflict that saw massive strikes shut down the nation’s steel, coal and meatpacking industries and threaten civil unrest in a dozen cities. The Seattle strike began in the shipyards, which had expanded overnight with war production contracts, and where 35,000 workers expected a postwar wage hike to make up for two years of strict wage controls imposed by the federal government. It was 1919.

This is 1999. And tomorrow, on Tuesday, it’s expected that thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of workers in the city, from the longshoremen to the taxi drivers to the postal workers, are going to be on strike one day in solidarity with the issue of challenging the World Trade Organization.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, and one of the — I think one of the key aspects of these protests is this unprecedented unity that has developed between the American labor movement and labor unions around the world and other civic movements. The environmental movement, the movement against genetic engineering and a variety of other popular movements have all come together, and joining with the labor movement, something that you haven’t seen, certainly in the United States, often in the past.

AMY GOODMAN: And it’s also across generations. This weekend, one of the first things to be happening — well, there were all sorts of parallel forums and actions that have been taking place, protests, as our listeners just heard, people getting arrested, people squatting in buildings, people rappelling down onto highways. But it’s young people and old people. There are thousands of young activists, and they’re working at many different levels, above ground, legally, and also below ground, illegally. And they’re expected that there will be a lot of arrests and direct actions that we don’t even know about right now.

In fact, it’s interesting to note, if we want to look at the mainstream media and the kind of coverage that we’re going to be seeing, KOMO 4 — that’s the big network here in the Seattle area — has issued a kind of policy directive from the news director, and they have said that they will not be covering illegal actions and naming any groups, because they don’t want to encourage them. They will not name groups that are involved with illegal activities in the city. I was only thinking: What if we went back to the 1950s? Would they refuse to say Martin Luther King’s name because his actions were not approved by the city and he didn’t get the proper permits that he needed?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, once again, they’re trying to marginalize the protesters. They’re treating these protesters as if they’re flashers at a World Series baseball game running onto the field — the cameras have to get away from them, not let the public see them — rather than legitimate protests by sectors of society that are deeply concerned about the impact of these — of this secret organization, the World Trade Organization.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, that’s right. This week, and the event begins tonight, the formal event, where there will be a black-tie dinner that will kick off the WTO, the World Trade Organization, ministerial. Delegations from more than 130 countries are meeting for this historic round of trade talks. Tens of thousands activists from around the world here for the — what The Wall Street Journal has even called “the mother of all protests.” And over the course of this week, member countries of the WTO will be conducting talks on a wide range of issues that will have an enormous impact on everyday life of ordinary people. Their decisions will affect what we eat, what we breathe, what products and medications we have access to, what our rights are as workers and as citizens, and who will control our destinies. The activists are here to protest the way the WTO operates. As you were saying, Juan, this trade body, which is considered by many as the most powerful organization in the world, makes most of its decisions in almost absolute secrecy, with no input from civil society, and with, well, a lot of input from multinational corporations.

Today, we’re going to speak with a group of activists from around the world who have been working on this issue, not in the last week, not in the last few weeks, because they saw, “Well, the media spotlight is on Seattle, so we better jet in there.” These are people who have committed their lives to the issue of globalization, to fighting corporate globalization and promoting grassroots globalization. Our guests, Vandana Shiva, director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi, India. She’s internationally acclaimed as a critic of globalization. Walden Bello is with us. He is executive director of Focus on the Global South in Bangkok, Thailand, currently senior fellow at the San Francisco-based Institute for Food and Development Policy. We’re also joined by Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch, Public Citizen, based in Washington, D.C., and founder of the Citizens Trade Campaign, which is a national coalition of labor, environmental, farmers, consumers and civil rights groups, representing people in this country, as well as people around the world, also one of the key organizers of the WTO Alternative Summit.

We welcome you all to Democracy Now! And we wanted to begin with Walden Bello describing what the World Trade Organization exactly is.

WALDEN BELLO: Well, the World Trade Organization is, as you have mentioned, the most powerful organization in the world. And it is — its philosophy might well be one that would go corporate trade above everything else. We’ve seen in the charter of this organization, or what people have called the constitution of this organization, an attempt to subordinate so many different aspects of life, including health, welfare, the environment, to the demands of corporate trade. And this is an organization in which basic decision-making is done through backroom deals. And this is the most powerful organization at the end of the 20th century, and it is something that people should definitely be concerned about. And I guess the reason that you have so many people coming now to Seattle in the next few days is because they’ve finally realized that it’s really time to shed light on this organization, that unless it is confronted, and unless we oppose its imperial dictates, we’ll end up controlling our lives and the lives of our children and our children’s children.

AMY GOODMAN: Lori Wallach, how did the World Trade Organization get established?

LORI WALLACH: The World Trade Organization was established now almost five years ago, at the end of what was called the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations. And what it did was transform what was a really international business contract between countries that dealt with trading goods into this enormous, powerfully enforced body of international corporate deregulation. And as a result, for instance, instead of simply setting basic rules on tariffs or quotas for trade, the WTO constrains every country government about literally the level of food safety it can provide its public or whether or not poor farmers can have access to seeds, whether or not workers can be safe from asbestos. It takes away many important value judgments that have to be made in a democratic, accountable forum, and imposes in their place one uniform set of rules that corporations love, that trash the public interest, that very accurately could be called trade über alles, trade always trumps. And those rules are very powerfully enforced.

AMY GOODMAN: Lori Wallach, Vandana Shiva, Walden Bello, we have to break for stations to identify themselves around the country, and then we’ll come back and look specifically how in each country the World Trade Organization has affected the lives of everyday citizens. You are listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!, broadcasting live from Seattle.

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AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!, live from Seattle. I’m Amy Goodman, here with Juan González. Our guests are Walden Bello — Walden Bello is a well-known anti-globalization activist who speaks around the world on the issue, is known for his many books on the issue of globalization, particularly as it relates to Asia. He is executive director of Focus on the Global South in Bangkok, Thailand. Vandana Shiva is director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi, India. And Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch of Public Citizen, based in Washington, D.C. — all here in Seattle, along with thousands of other people who are here to watch the World Trade Organization. It used to operate, well, not only in secrecy, but, Juan, they didn’t think that people would be interested in trade issues, and so they rarely had to justify anything that they did. Now it is extremely different.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I noticed in one of the interviews that Michael Moore, the head of the WTO, gave recently, he talked about how transparent the work of the WTO is, that there are thousands of pages on his website that the public can access to get information about what it does. But I’d like to ask Lori Wallach — one of the other aspects of this, what’s happened is that the protests here have been portrayed as attempts to get the WTO to deal with more than just trade issues, but a range of social issues. But you’ve produced a report recently that talks about these secret arbitrations that are conducted, that shows that the WTO has, ever since it came into existence, been dealing with a range of issues beyond just trade.

LORI WALLACH: The notion that the WTO has no room for considerations of human rights or environment or food safety is a total myth. In fact, those rules are in there. And as you said, they’re in there in a way that caps public interest protection in those areas. What we’re advocating for is to prune back the WTO. What we need is an industrial pruning shears to get it back to basic tariff-quota-trade policy and get it out of the business, this unaccountable, secretive body, of trying to make decisions about the day-to-day values in our lives. It’s not appropriate, it’s not acceptable, and it’s not going to continue.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Vandana Shiva, how are some of the ways that the WTO does operate in secrecy? Could you explain a little bit about this arbitration procedure between nations that they conduct?

VANDANA SHIVA: Actually, the secrecy through which WTO was born is apparent in the fact that most parliaments had no idea what is the content of this treaty 'til months after it had been ratified and signed in Marrakech. The WTO wrote the rules. It sits in judgment about implementation of those rules. And it writes the inquisition. The dispute panels, which are these trade courts, are totally secret. Those are not listed in the WTO website. No citizen can find out who was selected for the trade panel and how. No influence can be made, except through the trading interest via cases and disputes brought through the governments of countries, which already narrows down the issues to commercial interests. And at this point, it really doesn't matter whether a case is U.S. versus India, as in the case of the trade-related intellectual property rights dispute, where we have been forced to implement the perverse United States patent laws that allow patenting of life and destroy the public interest and public protection, or the protection of our agriculture, the survival of our small farmers. A case was brought against India by the United States, which is forcing us to dismantle all restrictions on imports, which will just destroy our agriculture, our biodiversity and the survival of 80% of our population.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Lori Wallach, in the Public Citizen report, you list a bunch of these cases — Guatemala, for instance, one case where Guatemala was challenged over its banning of infant formula that packaged plump — that depicted plump babies on the advertising for its infant formula in Guatemala, was forced to take away that ban. Could you talk about some of the concrete cases of how countries are being affected by these decisions?

LORI WALLACH: We spent a year snooping, because this information is so secret. And we actually wrote a book, Whose Trade Organization?: Globalization and the Erosion of Democracy. And what we found was, first of all, an overall track record where in every instance that the WTO reviewed an environmental or food safety or a health law, it found it to be an illegal trade barrier — every single case. As well, we found, of the majority of cases that were done, many of them had nothing to do with trade. It had to do with public interest values that the WTO had decided weren’t going to be allowed.

Some of the other cases, for instance, if you live in a big U.S. city that was under the Clean Air Act’s top containment of smog rules, you are now breathing dirtier air, thanks to the WTO. The very first case was against the gasoline cleanliness rules under the Clean Air Act, and the WTO ruled that even though that was a neutral law — it applied to domestic and foreign oil refineries — that you couldn’t have that kind of a rule on trade. And the U.S. government implemented what the WTO said and weakened our domestic Clean Air Act rules.

Next case comes down the pike. The Europeans are challenged. By whom? The U.S. It’s a real race to the bottom, where everyone is going after every country on behalf of corporations, is going after the best laws in every other country. They attacked a ban in Europe, again, not discriminatory, on the use of beef growth hormones that are suspected to cause cancer. In the European Union, domestic farmers and imported meat can’t use those hormones. WTO said, “Sorry, you’re not allowed to have that level of food safety protection.”

The Guatemala case, I think, is one of the ugliest. Their WTO rules were used to attack Guatemala’s most vulnerable citizens, their babies, by undermining a UNICEF code, an international treaty, that contained the milk — the formula marketing rules of big corporations. Korea dumped two food safety rules. The European Union has dumped a high-levels toxics electronics recycling rule. India has been forced to rewrite its entire patenting system, thanks to a U.S. WTO challenge to patent seeds and life forms. I mean, the list just goes on and on. I mean, the book is a scary book.

AMY GOODMAN: Walden Bello, on Saturday night, you were one of the speakers, along with Vandana Shiva, at a forum put together by the International Forum on Globalization about views from the South, in the Philippines, in Asia. Lori has been giving us some examples from around the world, including places like India. But more examples, because I think these are the things that bring home this abstract secret body to people, to us in our everyday lives.

WALDEN BELLO: Well, let me just cite one very vivid example from the Philippines, where I come from. And as you know, the body of laws in a country that cover public welfare, environment, agriculture, in the constitution, are really the expression of the choice and the interests of people. And what the WTO forces countries that have ratified the agreement to do is to make their laws what they call GATT consistent, or WTO consistent, which means that you’ve got to change all those laws, strike them out, if they disagree with any of the pro-corporate free trade provisions of the 15 and more agreements that make up these thousands and thousands of pages called the WTO agreement. So, in my country, some 45 laws have had to be or will need to be changed. And in other countries, even constitutional provisions have to be changed or struck out in order to make this GATT — what they call GATT consistent. So, it reaches out to the very charter of countries, that if it does not promote corporate free trade, you’ve got to strike it out and make it consistent with this world charter. Now, the only people who should be in the position of changing these laws are voters and constitutional assemblies. This should not be something that is done just because a force from outside the country indeed pushes this change.

But let me just take it more broadly, if I may have time. We in the Third World are impacted in all sorts of ways by all of these agreements. For instance, the agricultural agreement, this is the most iniquitous agreement around in so many years, because what it does really is just legitimizes the monopolistic competition between the EU and the United States to be able to dump grain and other agricultural products on Third World countries, provoking and deepening the crisis of our farmers at this point of time, the small farmers in our different countries. The trade-related investment measures, TRIMs, as they call it, is really, in many ways, just an effort to be able to prevent other successful cases of industrialization by saying that many of the measures by which countries protect their local markets and promote their industries are illegal under GATT. You’ve got to strike down all of those laws and measures and allow unrestricted entry of corporate investments.

Lastly, the trade-related intellectual property rights, that Vandana might speak on, regarding the way that it promotes biopiracy by corporations. Another aspect of it is that it so tightens up and prevents the free flow, or a wide flow, of technology to our countries, which is necessary for development processes to take place. And what is therefore technological diffusion to our countries to be able to get the sort of level of technology that that would allow some aspects of our economy to develop, that is now called piracy. So, what this does, really, is, if you look at the trade-related intellectual property rights agreement, it’s clear this was written for corporations like Monsanto and for Seattle’s Bill Gates.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, we should mention that we are here in Seattle, which is home of some of the major multinational corporations, including Microsoft, which is in Redmond, Washington, just outside of Seattle, and also Boeing. And the chairman of Boeing, the head of Boeing, is also the head of the Seattle host committee for the World Trade Organization.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Lori, what happens to a nation that is ruled — that loses a dispute? What kind of sanctions occur, can occur, against the nation?

LORI WALLACH: In the WTO, unlike any other international body, there are panels that are able, number one, to decide, and then, number two, to enforce their decisions with trade sanctions, so that at the end of one of these WTO tribunals, a country is put in a position of either dumping their domestic law or facing, literally, perpetual, continuing trade sanctions. You can think of it as having to pay ransom every year to keep your basic health or safety or food security law. And the sanctions can come in the form of cash payments or, as is more typical, trade sanctions, where one country decides what’s the most sensitive part of the other country’s economy and slaps it with additional barriers.

Now, what frequently has been happening is, before these cases even happen now, after a few formal cases and countries like the U.S. just giving up and changing the law, now a lot of countries change their law with the mere threat of a case, because it’s very expensive to defend, and in the end, if they lose, not only have they spent two years and millions of dollars trying to defend, now they owe millions more.

So, for instance, the U.S. just implemented a rule, which will turn everyone’s stomach, which is, they’ve just automatically allowed company-inspected meat from Australia — not government-inspected, but company-inspected — to come in declared equivalent — this is a required WTO food rule — to our government-inspected meat. It’s all going to be stamped ”USDA prime.” And under the WTO rules, you’re not allowed, for instance, to even maintain food inspection rules. Instead of getting into a fight about it, the U.S. just declared them equivalent, and the food comes in. We’ll be eating it, and we won’t even know.

Or, the U.S., to avoid a challenge, the Gore-Clinton administration sacked one of our longtime dolphin protection laws. There is a threat of an enforcement case of an earlier trade challenge. For the first time in 15 years, right now the tuna fish in those cans with the dolphin-safe labels, it’s not dolphin-safe anymore. It’s being caught with the encirclement nets that drowned all the dolphins. It was a WTO threat that got the U.S. to rewrite its huge Marine Mammal Protection Act environmental law.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Vandana Shiva, one of the things that we’re seeing in the press in this country a lot now is that the Clinton administration would like to reform the WTO and introduce labor rights and environmental rights, but that it’s being constrained by poorer countries, Third World countries, that want to maintain the regulations and, therefore, protect the right to get more investment into their countries.

VANDANA SHIVA: I think this drama is probably the best-staged drama, that here is the U.S. trying to protect workers around the world and the environment around the world, and the Third World is blocking it. First of all, the way these elements would be even introduced into the trade treaties would actually further facilitate free trade and increase the inequalities between North and South, because these would be one-sided instruments. The U.S. has systematically avoided the demand that citizens are making, which are saying, “Let us do an ecological assessment of the impact of the Uruguay Round, every treaty in that agreement, and impact on the livelihoods and work of people.” Only then can you start to think of where to go next, and, meantime, of the impact. And we, as citizens with no resources, are doing those impacts. We are doing the impact of the forced import of soya bean, including genetically engineered soya bean into India, wiping out more than 10 million livelihoods of the small millers and farmers, more than 100 million farmers, processors, flour mill operators being wiped out as the Cargills are given freedom to come and take over our wheat economy, which they call the wheat opportunity of India. We are counting the environmental costs. We are counting the social costs. If the U.S. was serious, the first thing it would commit itself was to say, “Full stop to this round. Let’s look at the social and ecological impact. And if the impacts are as the citizens are saying, and they will turn out to be, then let’s have a turnaround.” That is the slogan of the citizens who have gathered in Seattle.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to break for stations to identify themselves, and we’re going to be talking about alternatives, as well. What is an alternative model that people are proposing? Because so often we’re just talking about breaking down, but citizens around the world have been organizing to come up with alternative models, and also to look more at biotechnology in the next segment, to look at this issue of biopiracy that Vandana Shiva has focused on and written so much about. Our guests are Vandana Shiva, director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi, India, has flown in to be one of the thousands of, perhaps tens of thousands of, protesters that are descending on Seattle. Tonight, the World Trade Organization meetings will kick off with a black-tie event. We’re also joined by Walden Bello, executive director of Focus on the Global South in Bangkok, Thailand, has also come in, like so many others, to make his views heard and his organization and the activists of his country. And Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch, part of Public Citizen, which is based in Washington, D.C. You’re listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!, live from Seattle. We’ll be back in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! We are Resistance Radio, here in Seattle, Washington. It is the first meeting of the World Trade Organization in the United States. And I think it is the first time that people from around the world — the governments from around the world are beginning to appreciate just how much their people understand about the issue of globalization.

There are dozens of events that are taking place every single day, hundreds of events throughout the week. Tomorrow, here in Seattle, the entire city is expected to be shut down. There will be no taxi drivers on the streets, or very few. The longshoremen are expected not to work. The postmen won’t be working. These thousands of labor unionists, these thousands of workers will be out for — along with the thousands who will be marching in the streets, who have come from around the world, young and old, to protest the World Trade Organization. The question is: Will they be able to launch their, what they’re calling the millennium round of talks? It’s still not clear. It depends on just what happens tomorrow. Also, civil disobediences are expected around the city, as they have been this weekend, with a closing down of the actual convention center where the World Trade Organization ministers are expected to be meeting.

I also want to clue people in about our website at www.democracynow.org, where you’ll be able to link to many of the events that are taking place, see a number of the articles that have been written on what is happening here, a primer analysis of what is taking place in the World Trade Organization behind our backs. In the next few days, we’ll be going inside the WTO, as well as out. Yesterday, actually, I went to a meeting of John Sweeney, the head of the AFL-CIO, and the head of the World Trade Organization, a leader of New Zealand, Michael Moore, not to be confused with the media Michael Moore, who will be leading a people’s gala tonight of thousands of people, this after people of faith, thousands of people, will join hands around the convention center to show their solidarity, not with the ministers inside, but with the issue of grassroots globalization. So, there is a lot happening. You can find a lot of it on our website, as well as a number of websites that are following this on a almost minute-by-minute basis.

I also want to add that there are hundreds of media activists here. There is something called the Independent Media Center, the Indy Center, where you now — and we haven’t seen this before — see dozens of videographers. In fact, some are right here in our studios this morning, from Paper Tiger and Deep Dish Television. They’ll be doing an hour broadcast every day that people can call their PBS stations and ask for, and also their community access stations, their cable access stations, to ask for the documentary and the daily half-hour wrap-up of what is happening. These videographers are all over the city, and they are as much there as the actual accredited journalists, and causing the WTO, I think, a lot of grief.

But our guests right now, Vandana Shiva, who is one of the leaders in the anti-globalization — that is, corporate globalization — effort. She has written, among other books, Ecofeminism and Biopiracy. Walden Bello is with us, who is well known in these ranks, executive director of Focus on the Global South in Bangkok, Thailand. And Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch, Public Citizen, also the author of a booklet that’s just being put out right now, a pamphlet on what is the World Trade Organization.

Vandana Shiva, biopiracy, this is something I think that concerns a lot of people, the idea of the patenting of life.

VANDANA SHIVA: If there’s one thing that the WTO has achieved that no other international instrument and no other international institution could have achieved, it is the patenting of life, enforced brutally across the world, turning what is an immoral order into the only legal order, and making ethics and morality illegal. This doesn’t merely turn other species into property, declared as inventions of the corporate giants like Monsanto, like Novartis. It is also facilitating the theft of the resources of the poorest people of the world, the theft of the knowledge of the people across the world, which is now being treated as the patented property of the global corporations. Grace patenting neem, RiceTec patenting basmati basically means they can collect revenues and force the poor, from whom they’ve stolen, to pay debts, a permanent source of new debt creation. Even while this evening we will walk for the cancelation of old debt through the Jubilee 2000, there are new instruments being created through the WTO to force the creation of permanent debt by making the poor pay for seeds annually, pay for their medicines annually, resources that have been theirs, knowledge that has been theirs.

Interestingly, there’s been a case against India, rather than a case against the United States, and the WTO ruled against us for having laws that protect the public, that protect our Indigenous knowledge, that prevent patenting of seed, that prevent the patenting of medicine. These essential basic needs can only be accessible if they are outside the kind of monopolies that the Microsofts and the Monsantos are generating. At this point in India, we have thousands of villages sending letters to Mike Moore, saying, “You have overstepped your jurisdiction. Our relationship with other species is basic to our culture. It’s part of our fundamental rights guaranteed by our constitution. You are overstepping your boundaries by writing the laws about how we should relate to our knowledge, who will own our resources and our knowledge.” And all that Mr. Mike Moore could reply was absolutely the identical input that has come from the United States government in the negotiation around the changes in TRIPS, in the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement, where all of Africa, India, Central American countries were saying, “Exclude life forms from patentability, and stop the biopiracy of Indigenous knowledge.” And the United States basically said, “No, patenting of life forms is essential, because it has created this amazing biotech industry for us, and the best that other countries should do is follow our example to build biotech empires.” The second thing they said is, “And if there’s piracy, why don’t you just write a contract with the pirates?” It’s like asking the burglar to write contracts with the people they’ve burgled, or the rapist to work on the basis of a contract for rape.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I think if there is any issue that strikes a chord among average Americans, even more than some of the actual labor rights and loss of jobs in this country, it is this issue of biopiracy and how it is — it’s one that frightens so many people in terms of the enormous power that it will provide to corporations around the world, that if only enough information and the specifics of how it is occurring gets out to the American public, I’m sure that there’s going to be enormous, enormous resistance. The problem is being able to get the information out.

VANDANA SHIVA: In fact, the American public was the last to know what was happening in patent regimes through WTO. They were the last to know that it was the WTO that was being used to deny people the right to have safe food and not be force-fed with genetically engineered products. Most Americans didn’t have the democratic rights.

AMY GOODMAN: But can you explain, Vandana Shiva? Because I don’t think people really understand what goes into this patenting process. When you say Indigenous knowledge is stolen, what does a company actually do? Let’s say Monsanto or Novartis, these biotech companies. They come to India, and what do they do?

VANDANA SHIVA: Well, the thing is, knowledge can’t really be stolen, because knowledge shared is knowledge grown. It’s when the knowledge taken is then turned into a monopoly through a claim, which is a patent claim, which basically states that this knowledge, which was stolen, is an invention of the company that has stolen it, and therefore, being an invention, can now be treated as a right to exclude others from the use of that knowledge.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Lori Wallach, they have a scientist, for example, go to — whether it’s India or Ecuador, and they go into the forest, they talk to local people, local doctors, and then
what?

LORI WALLACH: They literally take a sample of whatever it is. For instance, let’s use the example of neem. It’s a tree often called the village pharmacy in India. It’s a tree that produces both a natural pesticide, but also has medicinal purposes when the oil of the tree is emulsified. It’s been knowledge in India for thousands and thousands of years. Everyone uses it. The corporation Grace goes into a village, says, “Hmm, look at that. Great. This new product” — new product that’s been there for thousands of years. They take it back to the U.S., a sample. They go to the U.S. Patent Office and say, “Hi, here’s a new thing we found. It’s ours. It’s a new property. We’re going to make it ours. It’s new. It’s ours. Please give us a license. It’s ours.” They literally show up with a sample, file at the U.S. Patent Office, can be obviously not original, it can be used forever, but the first time it’s been filed in the U.S., it’s by this corporation that’s heisted it from the people who have been using it forever. They then get a license, a right. They own that. And under WTO rules, once you have a patent in any country, you have a monopoly for 20 years, 20 years to be the only person, company to profit from it, to sell it. You can set a monopoly price. It is a trade restriction. It stops competition. You now own that, even though you’ve heisted it.

And in fact, in the case of seeds, which is perhaps the most horrific, the same incidence, company goes into a village, finds the perfect rice seed that some village has worked on breeding over thousands of years. They go back to the U.S., patent it, and under WTO rules, India or wherever country it came from is required to make its own farmers pay an annual royalty to replant their own great-great-great-great-grandfather’s rice, and/or the government is required to root it up, starving people, or they face trade sanctions.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Lori Wallach of Global Trade Watch, Vandana Shiva, author of Ecofeminism and Biopiracy and other books, and Walden Bello, who is now a fellow at the Institute for Food — exactly the title of the San Francisco-based organization, Walden?

WALDEN BELLO: Food First.

AMY GOODMAN: Food First.

WALDEN BELLO: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: The short term of it, and author and activist, as well, from the Philippines.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I’d like to ask Walden Bello — especially in this area of biopiracy and also genetic engineering, there seem to be sharp divisions among the most powerful economies in the world, because, obviously, the WTO functions to service the major corporations and countries in the world, over some of these issues — in other words, breaks within the wall of corporate society over some of these issues, genetic engineering, biopiracy, Japan on the one hand, Europe on the other, United States on the other, and many of the popular movements may very well be able to use some of these divisions among them to weaken the WTO overall. Could you talk about some of those divisions?

WALDEN BELLO: Well, I think the most — the most — the divisions that have been most highlighted has been the divisions over genetically modified organisms, genetically modified food, which has been exported by Monsanto and other U.S. firms, which has been refused by the European Union. We’ve also had the case of hormone-treated beef from the United States, which also has elicited resistance from the EU.

Now, the important thing, I think, as you had mentioned, is that it was people’s resistance, popular concern, people’s common sense, that this was — this was the introduction of products that were — potentially had dangerous effects in the future, that people’s common sense, which is translated into the environmental principle of the precautionary principle, that unless there is beyond any shadow of doubt that an innovation is safe, you don’t market it this widely. And this is the corporate — corporations have been trying to smash this principle.

Now, I think that what has happened in the European Union is that people’s resistance has forced governments to act against these imports. And I think what it has also done is that, as Vandana has told us the other night, it has highlighted to the Americans themselves something that they had not really known widely, that they were being fed genetically modified food. And now what has happened is that it has increased awareness in this country that, my god, we never knew what was happening to our food supplies, that they were being genetically manipulated by irresponsible corporations. So, I think what we see here, therefore, is that the overreach of the corporations and the way they work through the WTO dispute settlement mechanisms, with the U.S. sort of acting as the enforcer, is creating popular consciousness.

AMY GOODMAN: The alternative?

WALDEN BELLO: Well, the alternative for us is definitely that we have to first dismantle this institution that seeks to be a world government for corporations. I think until we push back the imperial ambitions of the WTO, and the forces that lie behind it, which is corporations, it is going to be very hard to create that space, because the WTO represents so much that is very much against the interests of people, like this corporate globalization and the way that production now is being organized and reorganized worldwide, away from communities, disempowering people. That is the ultimate aim of the WTO. What we really want is for people to be able to control production, exchange and distribution at sustainable levels again, and I think that we have to create that space.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to get some websites that people can follow what’s happening this week. I want to recommend to people the Independent Media Center, www.indymedia.org, and you can link to that at our website. It’s just being unveiled today, www.democracynow.org, which will let you know a lot of what’s happening. Lori Wallach?

LORI WALLACH: Well, Public Citizen has a website, www.tradewatch.org, that has, substantively, all of the reviews of WTO, NAFTA, etc., and it’s updated regularly. For a running commentary on what’s happening scheduling-wise, and then photographs of it afterwards, we’ve put up a special WTO ministerial, Seattle99.org.

AMY GOODMAN: And that does it for today’s program. Vandana Shiva, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Vandana Shiva, who has just come in from India for this event, Vandana Shiva, director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi. Walden Bello, executive director of Focus on the Global South. And Lori Wallach, who is the director of Global Trade Watch.

We have a lot of people to thank. Mansour, Shane and Craig of the Independent Media Center and all the people there. Thank you to Mike Ortlieb, as well as Chris Agee and Mark Cook, for our new website. Democracy Now! produced by María Carrión and David Love, Jeremy Scahill, our reporter on the street, Errol Maitland and Mark Torres, our engineers. From the studios of the United Methodist Church, a center of activism in Seattle, I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Thanks for listening.