Articles by Vandana Shiva

Trends in Indian Seed Industry Vandana Shiva Tom Crompton The Indian seed industry is expected to grow very rapidly in the coming years. There are several grounds for expecting that the seed industry wilt coalesce under the control of a few large companies with foreign interests. Firstly hybrid seed is produced principally by large companies and its use is set to increase following the decline of the public sector for various reasons. Secondly, smaller companies will find it increasingly difficult to compete because the market is fickle. Moreover, the plant variety protection regulations will scotch a market in second and subsequent generations. Thirdly, there will be increased use of transgenic crops which are produced only by those companies which can meet the high development costs.

In India's conditions of peasant agriculture, farmers are still the major suppliers of seeds. The real basis of farmers rights is in the recognition of the collective innovation by farming communities embodied in farmers varieties, and evolving a jurisprudence that protects and rewards this collective wisdom.

Farmers' Rights, Biodiversity and International Treaties Vandana Shiva Who owns biodiversity? Can intellectual contributions that modify or record biodiversity be the instruments to establish rights to ownership over these resources? What are the modes for just and fair compensation to contributors of knowledge and genetic resources? These are questions that are central to debates surrounding the conservation and use of biodiversity and genetic resources and are directly related to implementation of the Biodiversity Convention. These questions have also been raised at negotiations on intellectual property rights (IPRs) taking place in GATT and in the FAO.

Biotechnology Development and Conservation of Biodiversity Vandana Shiva All technological transformation of biodiversity is justified in the language of 'improvement' and increase of 'economic value'. However, 'improvement' and 'value' are not neutral terms. They are contextual and value laden. What is improvement in one context is often regression in another. What is value added from one perspective is value lost from another IN the dominant paradigm, technology is seen as being above society both in its structure and its evolution, in its offering technological fixes, and in its technological determinism. It is seen as a source of solution to problems that lie in society, and is rarely perceived as a source of new social problems. Us course is viewed as being self-determined. In periods of rapid technological transformation, it is assumed that society and people must adjust to that change, instead of technological change adjusting to the social values of equity, sustainability and participation.

which further social advance will be much more possible, than under the present imperialist-comprador-bureaucratic- feudal dispensation.
Coming back to the question of the reasons for an organisation of industry to demand a more favourable situation for the peasants, this is to the obvious benefit of those sections of industry that are suppliers of consumer and input commodities to the countryside. Their market depends very much on the surplus left over after meeting input costs. This surplus would affect both the consumer demand of the peasants and their ability to carry out investment, which would mean a larger purchase of inputs. But the immediate and obvious benefit would be for those industries supplying commodities other than agricultural inputs. The Punjab Haryana-Delhi-west UP region has the growth of a considerable rural market both for agricultural inputs and for con- sumer goods. But in the recent past this market has not grown as rapidly as it did in the seventies.