GRAIN
In November 2003, GRAIN held its annual board meeting in Barcelona. In addition to the usual responsibilities a board assumes, GRAIN's board has always played an important role in helping us to find our direction and keep our work relevant. Our current board comprises Bob Brac of Association BEDE (France), Brewster Kneen of the Rams Horn newsletter (Canada), Antonio Onorati of CROCEVIA (Italy), Silvia Ribeiro of ETC Group (Mexico), Silvia Rodríguez of the National University of Costa Rica, PV Satheesh of the Deccan Development Society (India), Lovemore Simwanda of the Zambian National Farmers' Union (Zimbabwe), and Supa Yaimuang of Alternative Agriculture Network (Thailand).
We discussed the ever-changing backdrop of GRAIN's work. The collapse
of the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) Ministerial meeting in Cancun
dealt another blow to the organisation and was important in terms of southern
governments standing up for themselves and rejecting domination by a few, influential
northern governments. The post-Cancun playing field opens up some spaces and
opportunities, but the US and the rest of its cartel will be quick to change
its strategy to meet its goals of control and domination in other ways, so
our job will not likely be any easier. Corporations have new, powerful tools
like genetic contamination to help achieve the domination they seek.
We talked about the need to look hard at our successes and failures over
the last ten years, and consider carefully how effective we can be at the
international level. Some of these fora has been at best ineffectual and
in some cases actively counter-productive. For example, the Biodiversity
Convention was hailed as a victory by the South and NGOs at the Earth Summit
in Rio in 1992, yet in its articulation it has actually facilitated the privatisation
of biodiversity.
What does all this mean for GRAIN's rights work in 2004 and beyond? We will continue to monitor the international negotiations, including the World Intellectual Property Organisation, developments at the WTO-TRIPS negotiations, and the various Free Trade Agreements at the international, regional and national levels. Our role here will be to analyse and spell out the implications of these negotiations, with the objective of informing and supporting work on new approaches that better serve people and communities. Specific areas of interest will be access regimes and new moves towards privatising things that have so far been elusive to privatisation (such as the environment and biodiversity) through approaches like ‘environmental services'.
“Convergence” will be a new, important theme, and GRAIN will be exploring the connections and common ground between groups fighting intellectual property rights in different sectors, such as information technology, seeds and health.We will also be looking to work more closely with social movements, and working on the positive agenda: on-the-ground initiatives and coaltions to strengthen the control of local communities over their livelihoods. All this will require a lot of linking – both conceptually to bring the issues together and with other organisations. We hope, through initiatives like the glossary article in this issue of Seedling, to invite Seedling readers and others to challenge current thinking and develop new approaches.