Roberto VERZOLA

Counter-productive efforts to control abundance and scarcity have occurred in other fields as well:

* Drug laws make medically-effective herbal preparations inaccessible to many. Ironically, herbs easily grown in backyards and community gardens, whose preparations would be illegal if prescribed by traditional healers, are often the basis for very expensive drugs manufactured by pharmaceutical firms.22 It is not a coincidence that many of these firms are owned by the same agrochemical companies which control the seed industry.

* Through misleading advertising and collusion with hospitals and medical professionals, formula milk companies have managed to undermine mothers' confidence in their own breast milk. This had led to a decline in breastfeeding in a number of Asian countries.23 As mothers try substitutes; their production of milk slows down and eventually stops, creating a vast new market for formula milk.

* A traditional Filipino song about plants around the hut (“Bahay Kubo”24), taught to every child in grade school, enumerates 18 food plants that include legumes, greens, root crops, seeds, nuts, and spices. The song omits many more. Filipinos have become so fixated on Western foods and diets that they overlook the great variety of indigenous food sources, many of which simply grow untended like weeds in their backyards. The monoculture mindset treats these food sources as weeds that must be suppressed. Razed by farm mechanization and the use of herbicides, most of them have now disappeared from people's backyards, from their diets, and from their consciousness, creating real food scarcity and malnutrition.

* Organic products are scarce and expensive because a system biased towards chemicals imposes on organic producers the burden of proof: detailed record-keeping, testing, inspection, certification and labelling. What if producers of chemically-treated crops and foods, not organic producers, were instead required by law, in accordance with the “polluter pays” principle, to keep-detailed records of chemical treatments; get their products regularly inspected and tested by accredited laboratories for minimum residue levels; undergo third-party certification; and follow mandatory labelling requirements to identify which chemicals and by what amounts their food products have been exposed to? If this were so, the price tags of both organic and chemically-treated foods would change dramatically in favor of organics.

* A low-power radio station that can serve a large community or a small town now costs only about as much as laptop. Yet, such stations continue to be a rarity, because most governments make it nearly impossible to meet all the legal requirements to operate one. As communications expert and president of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters Steve Buckley writes, “it is the policy, legal and regulatory framework that remains the single most persistent obstacle” to such stations.25

* Internet service providers (ISPs) continue to charge exhorbitant rates for static Internet Protocol (IP) numbers, arguing that they are running out of these numbers. Yet, by simply upgrading to IP Version 6 (IPV6), every person on Earth can be assigned hundreds of IP numbers each, with a lot more to spare.

* The sun cannot be hidden, suppressed, illegalized or otherwise made scarce. Instead, this universal source of absolute abundance has been largely ignored -- intentionally, it has been argued26 -- as energy industries focused on energy sources easier to privatize and to control, like fossil and nuclear fuels.

These examples suggest that the phenomenon of abundance in the natural world and in human societies should not be taken for granted. We need to study it, learn its dynamics, and tap it for the human good.

As copyright enforcement began in earnest, compact discs (CDs), video CDs (VCDs) and digital video discs (DVDs) were introduced in the 1990s and early 2000s. For a while, the industry managed to prevent copying and to restrict the use of DVDs by geographical region. However, this was eventually thwarted by a combination of dedicated hacking, the technical savvy of rising industrial giant China, and plain consumer freedom of choice.

The Philippine case is probably typical: When illegal CD/VCD/DVD discs began to circulate, rumors spread that these discs could damage the disc player itself. The original U.S.-, Europe- or Japan-made players were so expensive that owners would not risk damage from discs of unknown quality. So those who bought original players stuck to expensive original discs and suffered under the ridiculous geographic restrictions (e.g., DVDs sent home by U.S.- or Middle East-based relatives were unreadable, and players they sent or brought home could not play local DVDs.)

Enters China. Cheap DVD players that could play discs from any geographic region and priced at one-fifth or less of their competitors flood the Asian market, including the Philippines. Another rumor - perhaps apocryphal - circulates: that original DVDs may damage these players. Between China-made machines that played cheap unauthorized discs and branded players that played only high-priced discs that were also geographically-challenged, it was a no-contest. With the further entry of low-cost CD/DVD burners, duplicating these read-only discs became trivial.

So Asia remains a flourishing market of China-made DVD players and unauthorized CD/DVDs, creating a new abundance of cultural fare for Asians. Many of the DVDs are adult material or otherwise of doubtful cultural value. But most regular movies are available too, and, increasingly, movie classics and truly educational collections of documentaries from the Discovery, National Geographic, and similar cable channels; software, too. In some countries, the materials are made more accessible to ordinary people through translations into the local language.

To suppress the new abundance, special government police and private detectives from the U.S. regularly conduct surprise raids not only against the disc vendors and distributors, but also against businesses, schools, computer shops and Internet cafes that use unauthorized software. These highly disruptive raids have driven CD/DVD and software copying underground, where it flourishes unabated thanks to cheap China-made disc burners.20

In the U.S., another round of efforts against unauthorized copying was launched under the banner of digital rights management (DRM), consolidating counter-productive technological and legal measures for finer-grained control of copying and access to materials in digital media and on the Internet. DRM includes content encryption, digital signatures, digital fingerprinting, digital watermarks, digital serial numbers built into CPUs and computer mother boards, and miscellaneous authentication systems. They involve such concepts as conditional access systems, remote revocation of use-rights, and other means to ensure that scarcity and abundance remain under tight corporate control. They may be aptly called digital use restriction technologies (DURTs), after their genetic counterparts for controlling seed reproduction, the GURTs.

The U.S. remains ahead in DURTs and GURTs developments, having the most corporate interests to protect, especially in the information sector. The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyrights Act (DMCA) now mandates and protects DURTs themselves, making it illegal to construct devices that bypass or disable these technologies. Citizens' groups in the U.S. like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge are concerned about the impact of DRM and the DMCA on privacy, political freedoms, and human rights.21

The increasing availability of high-quality free/open source software. however, has pulled the rug under the argument that creativity can only be encouraged by granting creators statutory monopolies through IPRs.

In the information and agriculture sectors, the see-saw between abundance and scarcity, between markets and commons, continues through skirmishes in the technology front, in the legal arena, and of course in the market.

Things began to change after the 1994 formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO). This global system adopted effective mechanisms to enforce its highly protectionist provisions on intellectual property rights (IPR). An international legal infrastructure was gradually built which, combined with strong diplomatic pressures and economic threats, started to turn the tide for copyrights holders.

In the Philippines, a turning point occurred in 1998, when Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates visited President Fidel Ramos.19 Gates offered to recognize as legal copies all Microsoft products installed in government computers. In return, Ramos promised to enforce copyright laws, now that government copies were “legal”. The U.S. still needed to direct a whole series of economic, political and diplomatic pressures at the administrations that followed Ramos', but the days of software abundance in the Philippines appeared to be numbered.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, many countries enjoyed a virtual cornucopia of software. For a very affordable fee, one could copy from computer shops almost any Apple or IBM PC software that was also available in the U.S. Students, new graduates and enthusiasts bought cheap IBM clones and practiced basic computer operations, word processing, presentation, spreadsheet, database management, and programming. There was no Internet then, but it did not matter - in the Philippines, a 64 kbps connection ushered the Internet in 1994. A de-facto software commons was maintained in computer shops and bulletin board systems which made software quickly and efficiently available to students and computer enthusiasts. Many computer professionals today - who now form the backbone of their country's computer industry or who enjoy well-paying jobs abroad as overseas workers - had regularly dipped into this cornucopia and acquired their computing skills thanks to the software abundance of that period.

Back in the U.S., software developers tried various copy-protection schemes, from non-standard disk formats to hardware dongles17. But the best minds of the U.S. software industry were no match to the resourcefulness of hackers and altruists who wanted to keep the abundance coming. Some U.S. companies even specialized in software that duplicated copy-protected software. Other software developers abandoned copy-protection to gain competitive advantage, and consumers responded favorably. Eventually, the U.S. software industry gave in and, except for some niche markets, abandoned technical copy-protection schemes altogether.

Invoking copyright laws did not help much. Though software were legally protected by copyright laws and international agreements, many countries did not take these seriously, preferring to let their citizens enjoy the abundance. People likewise knew that governments enforced laws selectively anyway, whether they were laws on minimum wage, corruption, pollution, taxes, elections, or copyrights. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the U.S. itself was a center of piracy of British books and publications. Subsequent experiences of Japan, Taiwan, Hongkong and other countries/territories likewise showed that copying was a necessary stage in national development. Furthermore, the countries which complained most loudly about piracy of their intellectual property rights were themselves most guilty in pirating intellectuals such as doctors, nurses and engineers from the Third World. The latter was deemed a more malignant case of piracy because it took away the original and left no copy behind. Finally, how can a government clamp down on its citizens when commercial software was likewise freely copied among government computers?18

Counter-productive technologies now in the pipeline are taking to higher levels the bizarre goal of attacking natural abundance to create artifical scarcity.

The precursor of these technologies is the “Terminator Technology”, which genetically modifies plants to make their seeds sterile, ending the 350-million-year-old process of reproduction through seeds. Truly, it is the “death of birth.”13 U.S. patents have been granted, though commercial application seemed a long way off. The real question is: will farmers use them? The idea was so outrageous that its promoters backtracked for a while, trying to find a spin that would make their idea more publicly palatable.

They soon found one. Engineered seeds led to a seemingly intractable problem: genetic contamination. Engineered soya and canola, which survived despite herbicide applications, were showing up in places where they were neither expected nor wanted - in farms which had used no engineered seeds, especially organic farms where strict safety standards prohibited such seeds. So Monsanto sued. The farmers insisted that they had used no engineered varieties. Yes, some plants in their farm tested positive for Monsanto's patented genes. Many farmers, intimidated by Monsanto's legal and financial muscle, paid the fines and suffered the conseqences such as losing their organic certification. However, one celebrated case that dragged on for years, Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser stood his ground and fought the legal battle to the end. The Canadian Supreme Court issued an ambiguous decision which each side interpreted as its victory.14

Terminator Technology promoters now say that their technology can prevent genetic contamination from engineered crops, by further modifying these crops to produce sterile seeds.

New ideas in the pipeline fine-tune the concept further to allow finer-grained control of sterility. Known as genetic use restriction technologies (GURTs), these will enable the seed companies to control seed sterility in the field through external triggers like a chemical (presumably patented too). By spraying this chemical on a GURT-modified plant, the plant can be induced to turn its sterility (or fertility) on or off - scarcity and abundance marketed under full corporate control. A similar technology can also be used for turning genetically-engineered traits themselves on or off.

The common thread in these developments is the counter-productive corporate bid to control abundance in agriculture and create artificial scarcity. This opens a market for substitute products and leads to a supply system completely under corporate control through various technological and legal mechanisms.15

The use of hybrids and genetic engineering have been justified in the interest of “feeding the world”. Yet, a U.S. Department of Agriculture study in 2006 found that 10% of U.S. adults and 17% of children went occasionally hungry for lack of food.16 If they cannot even sufficiently feed all Americans, how can they feed the world?

In the early 1980s, seed companies learned to directly modify plant genomes through genetic engineering (GE).11 Then they patented the modified genes, using the patent system - originally meant for industrial inventions and designs - to claim exclusive rights over seeds and plants with the patented genes.12

This new weapon in the growing corporate arsenal of counter-productive practices was even more restrictive than plant variety protection: the novelty of the technology itself now justified excluding by law everyone from using patented seeds unless they paid some kind of royalty or technology fee.

The first commercially successful applications were soya and canola plants that incorporated herbicidal resistance and corn plants that incorporated pesticidal toxins. For the first time, seed companies held the power to sue farmers who saved the seeds of these crops and planted them in a subsequent season, simply on the strength of the patents they held over the genes incorporated in these seeds.

GE corn was also a poisoned pill, engineered to produce a modified version of a pesticidal toxin from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). Organic farmers had used Bt for decades to control corn pests, prudently spraying the cultured bacteria only if pest damage reached significant levels. When the Bt gene was inserted into the corn plant, the resulting Bt corn now expressed the toxin throughout the plant's life, making it more likely for Bt resistance to develop rapidly among the target pests and sabotaging a resource that organic farmers - the nemesis of the agrochemical/GE industry - had used for decades.

Also in the 1960s, another development would worsen this slippery slide towards seed dependence. U.S. seed companies introduced their commercial version of the F1 corn hybrid developed decades earlier in the public sector.6 (F1 means the first filial generation after crossing two different parental lines). Unlike heirloom varieties, F1 hybrids did not breed true. When their seeds were replanted, the offsprings' characteristics segregated and the desirable traits were expressed weakly or irregularly in subsequent generations. So, regardless of the benefits the current crop offered, saving seeds became pointless.

Corn farmers had to buy hybrid seeds from the seed suppliers every planting season. Obviously they still had the option to go back to traditional varieties, but government technicians promoted the hybrid varieties aggressively and extended highly subsidized credit to farmers who used them. So the use of F1 hybrids among corn farmers grew.

As more farmers abandoned their traditional corn, these varieties became scarce and gradually disappeared. Commercial hybrid corn varieties eventually dominated the seed corn market, like the HYVs did among rice farmers. But with a difference. If seed buying had been an occasional purchase in the past when seeds produced their own kind, hybrids led to repeat sales season after season, turning seeds into highly profitable commodities.

As the seed business became more profitable, giant agrochemical firms began buying up the seed companies that had established themselves in the market. A similar corporate trend towards F1 hybrids emerged in the vegetable sector and, later, in the rice sector, a trend that continues today.7 8 9

F1 hybrids mark the beginning of corporate efforts to gain full control over seeds, especially in major staple crops and vegetables. They also represent the first technology in agriculture explicitly meant to end the farmers' age-old practice of saving part of their harvest to use as seed in the next planting season. This counter-productive technology strikes at the very heart of sustainability and the seed commons.

Commercial seed breeders took care that non-hybrid varieties would remain under their control too. Their demand for exclusive rights over varieties they developed eventually gave rise to the 1961 Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants. This convention defined plant breeders' rights, mandated plant variety protection and established an international union, the UPOV, to work for plant breeders' interests. As countries acceded to UPOV agreements, they moved to adopt counter-productive national seed laws that limited the freedom of farmers to exchange seeds or to sell them. Subsequent UPOV agreements (1972, 1978, 1991) became more and more restrictive of farmers' rights.10

It was a two-pronged offensive against seed-saving and exchange: the technology of hybrids and new laws and international agreements restricting farmers' options over seeds.

After the Second World War, the chemical industries of the West shifted their attention back to civilian applications, including the large-scale production of synthetic urea, organochlorines and other fertilizers and pesticides. These agrochemicals were marketed supposedly to provide additional food for farmers' crops and to kill crop pests. However, farmers and governments did not realize that these products also killed, incapacitated, weakened, or otherwise made life difficult for very important but little-known creatures: soil organisms which turned organic matter into natural plant food, and friendly organisms like predators and parasites which kept pest populations in check. These creatures comprised a vast, largely invisible and unrecognized commons which all farmers unknowingly tapped into, every time they planted seeds and grew crops. In their defense, the chemical industry might claim that they did not know either (which would be an admission of recklessness, if not negligence). But this excuse would be untenable by the 1960s, when the chemical industry viciously attacked Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring,1 which had called attention to the harmful effects of DDT and other agrochemicals on non-target organisms, including human beings.2

In effect, the chemical industry was selling farmers and governments a deadly technological Trojan Horse, an anti-abundance poisoned pill. Agrochemicals appeared to offer more abundant harvests; in truth, their deployment would gradually weaken and take the life out of the farmers' biological support systems such as natural sources of plant food and pest enemies. As more agrochemicals were used, the diverse soil populations dwindled, the soil became less fertile and farmers' crops starved. “Food aid” for the plants came in the form of more synthetic fertilizers, which caused the living soil populations to dwindle even further. As the predator and parasite populations likewise dwindled, pest populations went up. So farmers had to spray more pesticides, which then killed even more predators and parasites. More recent studies based on the theory of trophobiosis suggest that synthetic fertilizers actually make plants more attractive to pests.3

Farmers who took the poisoned pill were caught in the trap and fell into agrochemical addiction, draining life out of the soil and around the crops.

In the 1960s, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)4 introduced IR-8, the first of a series of new “high-yielding varieties” (HYV) of rice, whose high yields partly came from their better responsiveness to chemical treatment. Farmers were wary and few were willing to let go of their traditional varieties. Drawn by aggressive government subsidies and lending programs, however, more and more farmers switched. As they did, they also stopped planting their heirloom varieties, which were soon lost as the old seeds they had saved dried up and died. As the heirloom varieties disappeared and HYV-dependence grew, farmers also lost their selection and breeding skills.

Agrochemicals and the new chemically-responsive varieties would eventually be promoted as the “Green” Revolution.5 Even today, this technological poisoned pill continues to keep millions of farmers addicted to agrochemicals, mired in poverty and debt.

Another facet in the technological substitutions of this period was the gradual replacement of work animals by farm machinery. In the Philippines, for instance, carabaos were the farmers' main source of mechanical power. Carabaos also grazed the less fertile areas around the farm, their dung enriching the soil. The animal usually recovered by itself from injury or sickness. Even more - perhaps the most amazing thing of all - the female carabao gave birth to another carabao every two years or so. Yet, through the same poisoned pill strategy, farm machinery suppliers and the government eventually managed to get many farmers to switch to a mechanical power source that was fuelled by costly imported gasoline instead of free grass, gave out noxious pollutants instead of milk and natural fertilizer, required a skilled technician and costly spare parts if it stopped working, and of course never gave birth to its own replacement.