AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. Democracy Now!, Pacifica’s national daily grassroots election show. Coming up in a little while, we’ll be going to a Latina youth activist here in the city named Anna Maria Nieves. We very much look forward to that. But right now, sticking to the international theme on this International Women’s Day, President Clinton and Republican candidate Bob Dole, the leading presidential candidates, are strong proponents of international trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT, one of a number of reasons that many feel the two corporate parties in this country, the Democrats and Republicans, have more in common than they disagree.

On this International Women’s Day, Vandana Shiva is the leading anti-GATT activist in India, and we’re going to her in New Delhi. She’s director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy.

Vandana Shiva, why don’t you tell us: What does your group do?

VANDANA SHIVA: Well, I resigned from university teaching in 1982 to start an independent research organization to do the research for movements that wasn’t being done.

AMY GOODMAN: Why did you feel you had to leave academia to do that?

VANDANA SHIVA: I had to do that because the big elite institutions are so enslaved to big money and big political power. They don’t leave the freedom. They don’t respect the freedom of individual researchers to serve the people, to work where knowledge is not married to power but is actually married to the powerless. And I wanted that unusual path of marriage and to serve the powerless, and therefore I had to do it in a space where that was respected, allowed, and had to create that space, because it didn’t exist.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, that certainly is a way to go into today’s headlines, the merger of two mega drug companies. It’s being called one of the largest mergers in the history of the world, and that is the merger of Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz to form a mega conglomerate. What is your reaction to this?

VANDANA SHIVA: The reaction, basically, is the recognition that no matter how big the giant corporations are, they are too small for the logic of growth, and therefore they are in as much a struggle for survival as are the poor peasants and the tribals and the Indigenous people and the poor Blacks in downtown ghettos. They too are in a struggle for survival, and this is part of their struggle for survival, except that they’re surviving in the environment of greed, whereas the rest of the world has to survive in an environment of need.

AMY GOODMAN: What does this kind of merger mean for the people that you work with?

VANDANA SHIVA: The basic issue of the merger of these big companies, of course, relates to the kind of work I do, because there’s no way you can separate a Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz from agriculture, either, and I work on agriculture. The pharmaceutical giants are also becoming the chemical giants and the agricultural giants and the seed giants, requiring the new patent laws, requiring that the entire world be turned into their monopoly so that they can maximize their profits.

The merger that was announced today shows us how desperate they are in terms of grabbing larger markets and having a larger control on resources, and part of that desperation is leading them to try and basically pirate the healing systems, the medicinal plants, the living diversity of this planet, that has been the heritage of women healers, traditional Ayurvedic healers, Tibetan healers, and are just tinkering with that knowledge, prospecting for that knowledge, and rushing and patenting it. So, on the one side, you’re getting their largeness multiplied by the mergers. On the other side, you’re getting their largeness multiplied by colonizing what have been the free spaces and free economies of people’s self-reliant systems of food, nutrition and healing.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what you mean when you say they are patenting the remedies, for example, of women healers, etc.? What do you mean, “patenting,” and how does it take it away from the people who originally use it?

VANDANA SHIVA: Well, let me give you two examples of cases in which we have worked. The first, of course, is the big neem case, where neem, which is also a medicinal plant and a biopesticide, has been patented by chemical companies for its biopesticide use, by drug companies for its healing properties. There’s also a plant called Phyllanthus niruri, which has been used in India for centuries for jaundice cure by grandmothers, by mothers in the home, by the poorest of women in slums, who know how to identify the niruri, how to make home-based medicine, give it to a child with hepatitis and jaundice, and it heals the liver. There’s companies that now have patents for medicines derived from a medicinal plant, the use of which has been known for centuries.

The way it affects the original users is first by denying their knowledge and their innovation. That’s the first loss and the first piracy. The second loss is that the material that was going to heal the people by having access — by their having access to it, gets diverted through tremendously huge collection systems, in which these corporations can pay huge amounts to people to start collecting medicinal plants, so they disappear for the local community and are no more available. The third level, which is a later level, which I believe people have to fight against and not allow to be established, is the same companies will then make the drugs, based on people’s medicinal plants, package them, patent them, and flood the market with basically a solution that has come from the people themselves, and make people pay $100 for something that was absolutely freely available to them.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Vandana Shiva, who is a well-known activist and researcher in India, as we talk about what the implications of drug mergers are and what it means when people who’ve been using remedies for centuries suddenly are, quote, “discovered” by larger entities, like these corporations who want to patent this material for profit. Now, isn’t there a suit going on in India right now against companies like these?

VANDANA SHIVA: Not in India, because under our existing patent laws — and we have managed to ensure that those laws are not changed in a hurry. We have won major parliamentary battles on attempts at amending laws in favor of the transnationals and the corporations. According to our present laws, we cannot have products patented in the medicinal field. You can only have what are called process patents, which means methods of making medicines can be patented, but medicines themselves cannot be patented, so that you cannot exclude others from making the medicine in a different kind of way.

These patents exist in other countries where they talk about stronger IPR systems, but there’s no absolute way in which the intellectual property systems are strong or weak. They might be strong for the corporations, but then they’re weak for the people. And when they’re strong for the people, they’re weak for the corporations. So the language and the adjectives “strong” and “weak” systems, that have been globalized, have really been globalized from the perspective and interests of these giant corporations.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s very interesting. I would think — and you are a well-known activist against GATT and these world trade agreements — that that kind of legal system you have in India would be considered, quote, ”GATT illegal.” Is that true?

VANDANA SHIVA: Absolutely, it would be considered GATT illegal. And we are basically committed to building a large enough national movement — and I think we’ve made some difference — that shows that GATT is morally illegal, economically illegal, health illegal, illegal in all the things that make life work.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Vandana Shiva, the show that you’re speaking on now, Democracy Now!, is a grassroots daily election show that goes out around the United States. President Clinton, who is also presidential candidate, is extremely pro-GATT, pro-NAFTA, pro these world trade agreements. And so, you explaining to us what GATT is and what it does for your country is very helpful in terms of people, you know, gaining information about what their candidates believe in, since it’s often very tough to get that from corporate television here in the United States. Tell us about GATT.

VANDANA SHIVA: The main thing about the new GATT, the Uruguay round of GATT, is that it converted everything into trade. The agriculture was not predominantly international trade. Intellectual property rights were not part of international trade. Services were not part of trade. Investment was not part of trade. And by enlarging the definition of trade and the scope of trade regimes, what has basically been done is a treaty has been made that, on the one hand, wipes out all public interest protection in all laws of every country. On the other hand, what it basically does is creates a world constitution based on the logic of commerce, which can impose and intrude into domestic governance and basically make democracy impossible.

Our struggles in India have been at the level of implementation of legislation that comes out of GATT. And every time GATT has to be implemented, something of our national constitution that is very fundamental to our survival, things like fundamental rights, the rights of farmers to have rights, nonalienable rights, to their land, to their seed, to their resources, the issue of self-reliance and food, all these basic national constitutional elements are dismantled to make the global commercial corporate constitution work. The GATT is basically the constitution of transnational corporations. And we are being asked, all of us are being asked, to subject ourselves to it, give up our freedoms, give up our struggle for democracy. And I think at the end of the 20th century, that is too much to require of people. We cannot enter the next millennium as citizens enslaved to a handful of corporations.

AMY GOODMAN: How are you organizing against the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade?

VANDANA SHIVA: Well, we started organizing when the draft treaty was getting completed. It was called the Dunkel Draft Text, abbreviated as DDT, and we used to call it the toxic that is entering our system and is going to poison us. Dunkel’s name was so prevalent in every village because of the movements that were built. We started movements against patents.

Just yesterday, I have had a huge democratic decision. We call them panchayats. Local democratic units in India are called panchayats, local decision-making on the basis of consensus. We had what we call a mahapanchayat with about 100,000 farmers gathered in Delhi from across the country.

And the two things we addressed were, firstly, how the transnationalized economy, the globalized economy in which corporations control the world and impoverish the local economy and the domestic economy, must necessarily create a politics, a political structure and politicians who are dependent on corporate kickbacks to make the electoral machinery run. And therefore we have in India right now a massive corruption scandal linked to foreign companies trying to get deals in India, investments in power plants, Cargill, Continental trying to sell wheat. Just touch all the big names of the world, they have been responsible for inflating the corruption that already existed. And we’ve had about 15 ministers resign in the last two weeks because one citizen went to the Supreme Court with evidence to say that they had received kickbacks. And the entire system is now building towards a questioning by the people, saying, “If representative democracy under transnationalized economies leads to this kind of corruption, we must take power back into the hands and rule locally, govern locally, have what we call swaraj, our own rule.”

The second major issue we’ve been organizing around, and yesterday we had major resolutions passed on it, is we will not allow the entry of agribusiness into Indian agriculture. Indian agriculture employs 70% of India’s large population. We are a small farmer-based agriculture. And we will not allow Cargill and PepsiCo to destroy the livelihoods of millions of farmers and turn them into GATT refugees. We will not allow Cargill and PepsiCo to desertify Indian soils. We will not allow KFC and McDonald’s to convert every sacred cow of India into meat for the global market.

AMY GOODMAN: Today is International Women’s Day, Vandana Shiva, as I’m sure you well know.

VANDANA SHIVA: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: How does what you do, this work, relate specifically to women?

VANDANA SHIVA: Actually, when I talk about agriculture, as far as talking goes, a lot of people have a misconception that — in which case it’s about men. Most farmers in India are women. And by the time you really get to working at the village level, whether it’s seed conservation, a program I run now as a response of a very interesting meeting I attended 10 years ago in France, where the corporations were meeting with activists. And at that point, I think it was the Ciba-Geigy representative who had said, “By the turn of the century, there will only be five of us surviving.” And, in fact, this morning’s merger signifies what they were foreseeing at that point. As a result of that meeting, I started a national program to conserve native seeds. And by the time you actually work on conserving native seeds, you do it with village women. You do it with peasant women. And peasant women are the biggest fighters against globalization in India. They are the ones fighting against the export of shrimp, the export of flowers. They are the ones who are setting up local resistance. And in my world, if you had to simplify the global politics right now, what we have is Third World women producers pitted against the giant corporations with our capitalist, patriarchal institutions.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, that certainly sums it up. We’re going to have to wrap up. But I did want to ask: If people are interested in finding out more about your organization and the work that you’re doing, how can they get in touch with you?

VANDANA SHIVA: Well, they can fax us at 685-6795 at Delhi.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me just clarify for our listeners, the number, the fax number in New Delhi, is 011-9111-685-6795. That’s 011-9111-685-6795.

VANDANA SHIVA: And for your women listeners, I would suggest that if they want to know more about GATT, and if they want to see how it undermines the local democracy, and if they want to ensure that that informed knowledge feeds into the forthcoming elections, which I believe, no matter where in the world, they are being fought, in India in April, in your country later in the year, they are a vote for a global corporate constitution versus national constitutions based on local democracy. Then, ring up WEDO, the WEDO offices in New York. I think you can get the name very easily, because we prepared primers for WEDO to take to the Beijing conference for women. And I think that’s the best International Women’s Day gift that I could suggest to some of your listeners, to order these booklets and primers on GATT and world trade organizations and transnational corporations, take them home and start the debates on democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, we just finished speaking with Bella Abzug, so we will give out that number again. I wanted to ask one last question, which is: Are you at all concerned about the U.S. presidential elections? Are you watching them from your vantage point in India?

VANDANA SHIVA: We are definitely watching them very, very carefully. And I think it’s only the women who will be able to see that either the option of the Democrats, that says World Trade Organization to be used in opportunistic ways by U.S. corporations, which is the Clinton stand, or no to the World Trade Organization by Buchanan, who otherwise is willing to put the Blacks and the women and the Mexicans behind, you know, locked into all kinds of ghettos, that we know that neither of those options is an option of democracy for us.

For us, the option of democracy is local empowerment politically, options for livelihoods locally, equality in the race and the gender and the class level and in religious sense. In India, your debate is very important, because as a result of the movements we have created, we actually got a right-wing economist to write that Swadeshi, which means in India an economy based on India’s strength, our local skills and knowledge, that Swadeshi is equal to Buchanan. And I have to — I have to do this on Sunday. I have to write a response and say, “No, Swadeshi is equal to Gandhi.”

AMY GOODMAN: Vandana Shiva, happy International Women’s Day.

VANDANA SHIVA: The same to you.

AMY GOODMAN: Vandana Shiva is the leading anti-GATT activist in India. She is director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy. We were just speaking to her in New Delhi, India. You’re listening to Democracy Now!

Coming up next, a Latina youth activist from Harlem and the Bronx, after this.