100 Notizen - 100 Gedanken (100 Notes – 100 Thoughts): No. 012, Vandana Shiva

As a prelude to the 2012 exhibition, dOCUMENTA (13) and Hatje Cantz are publishing a series of notebooks, 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, that is comprised of facsimiles of existing notebooks, commissioned essays, collaborations, and conversations. The series is edited by Bettina Funcke.

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The Corporate Control of Life, by Vandana Shiva

Indian physicist and activist Vandana Shiva (*1952) demonstrates in a matter-of-fact way how corporations gain control over our lives. The patenting of life—from bacteria and plants to cloned animals with certain genetic characteristics—implies the reification and commercialization of life. An agreement of the World Trade Organization allows corporations to patent nearly everything we can imagine. One of the repercussions is biopiracy, the reclaiming of ancient traditional use and breeding of plants as the corporations’ own “invention,” as Shiva shows through the examples of the neem tree and basmati rice. The monopolization of seeds has forced farmers in large parts of India into dependence on corporations, which undermines the farmers’ basis of living.