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‘Homing' in on India
India is a country of diversity – both in terms of its culture and its biological resources. It has a myriad stories to tell about peoples' struggles for rights to resources. GRAIN's presence in Asia goes back to the early 1990s with the establishment of an office in the Philippines. As part of the ongoing regionalisation process, a year ago we reinforced our Asia team by adding a board and a staff member in India.
Shalini Bhutani joined the staff to keep a watchful eye on the forces that strike at the heart of the relationship between people and biodiversity. She works on issues of intellectual property rights, trade and community rights in the Asian region. The trade agenda is rewriting the rules of this relationship, with far-reaching impacts on rights to resources, particularly where access to free common property resources is the basis for living. With its vantage point in India, GRAIN is able to keep tabs on developments on these issues, not only in South Asia but also in the Asian region at large. In the midst of the legal and administrative buzz over biodiversity-related issues in the region, peoples' rights to biological resources are being ignored. GRAIN highlights the peoples' perspectives to inform the debates at the national, regional and global levels.
PV Satheesh joined us as our first Indian Board Member. Satheesh is the man behind a remarkable grassroots organisation: the Deccan Development Society (DDS), which is based in the southern Indian State of Andhra Pradesh. The Society works with more than 5,000 women farmers in the semi-arid tract of the Deccan Plateau, facilitating activities ranging from seed saving and community grain funds to setting up collective land leases. It operates against a backdrop in which the State Government sees biotechnology, mechanisation and modernisation of agriculture as the way to eradicate poverty. DDS has also been active in documenting traditional knowledge in Community Biodiversity Registers. With its commitment to agro-biodiversity, it is highly critical of genetic engineering in agriculture. The Food Rights Campaign that DDS has led in the region has resulted in the establishment of local and regional networks. DDS also functions as the country coordinator of the South Asia Network for Food Ecology and Culture (SANFEC).
GRAIN has collaborated with the Indian environmental action group Kalpavriksh (KV) on a number of activities, including briefing papers on current issues related to biodiversity, community knowledge and biodiversity-related rights. With its roots in local action, KV works on a number of local, national and global issues. It has an office in Pune and in Delhi it shares office with GRAIN. KV's activities are directed to ensuring conservation of biological diversity, challenging the current destructive path of ‘development', helping in the search for alternative forms of livelihoods and development, assisting local people in empowering themselves to manage their natural resources, and reviving a sense of oneness with nature.
Our latest publication with Kalpavriksh is a paper called Traditional Knowledge
of Biodiversity in Asia-Pacific: Problems of Piracy and Protection. Traditional
knowledge of plant genetic resources manifests the spiritual and social values
of these resources to the indigenous peoples and local communities of the region.
Today's ‘knowledge economy' favours the privatisation of genetic
resources. This stamps market value on genetic resources and related knowledge,
displacing other value systems that constitute life and livelihoods of the majority
of peoples in the region. Through intellectual property rights, and particularly
patents, control and ownership of traditional knowledge is being usurped by
commercial interests. Can the rich history of community control in Asia-Pacific
resurrect itself to protect this knowledge from biopiracy? In traversing through
the steps governments are taking, individually and collectively, and more so
the responses of the non-governmental sector and local people to these problems,
the paper gives a status of traditional knowledge of plant genetic resources
in the Asia-Pacific region.
For copies of the paper, it can be found here.