15. GATT*, Agriculture and Third World Women
Vandana Shiva
Agriculture and related activities are the most important source of livelihood for Third World women. ‘Free-trade’ in agriculture as construed in GATT terms aims to create freedom for transnational corporations (TNCs) to invest, produce and trade in agricultural commodities without restriction, regulation or responsibility. This freedom for agribusiness is based on the denial of freedom to rural women to produce, process and consume food according to the local environmental, economic and cultural needs. What GATT aims to achieve is the replacement of women and other subsistence producers by TNCs as the main providers of food. Behind the obfuscation of such terms as ‘market access’, ‘domestic support’, ‘sanitary and phytosanitary measures’ and ‘intellectual property rights’ in the final draft of the GATT agreement, is a raw restructuring of power around food: taking it away from people and concentrating it in the hands of a handful of agro-industrial interests. The conflict is not between farmers of the North and those of the South, but between small farmers everywhere and multinationals. It is no surprise that the bulk of US, Japanese and European farmers are also opposed to the proposed GATT reforms, because these reforms are meant to drive the mass of small farmers out of business.
In the Third World, most small farmers are women, even though their role has remained invisible and has been neglected in official agriculture development programmes. By focusing on international trade in food, GATT policies are aimed at further marginalizing the household and domestic food economies in which women play a significant role. Further, since GATT is a self-executing treaty, it will automatically lead to the setting up of a Multilateral Trade Organization (MTO) which, with World Bank and IMF, will form the centre of world governance.
The negative impact of GATT will be greater on Third World women because they play a major role in food production and processing, even though this fact has remained invisible and neglected.
In India, agriculture employs 70 per cent of the working population, and about 84 per cent of all economically active women.1 For example, in the tribal economy of Orissa — shifting cultivation (bogodo) — women spend 105.4 days per year on agricultural operations compared to men’s 59.11 days.2
According to Vir Singh’s assessment in the Indian Himalaya, a pair of bullocks work for 1,064 hours, a man for 1,212 hours and a woman for 3,485 hours a year on a one hectare farm: a woman works longer than men and farm animals combined!3
K. Saradamoni’s study of women agricultural labourers and cultivators in three rice growing states — Kerala, Tamilnadu and West Bengal — shows that both groups of women make crucial contributions to production and processing.4 Joan Mencher’s studies in the Palghat region of Kerala reveal that outside ploughing, which is exclusively men’s work, women have a predominant role in all other processes. On the basis of this study, it is estimated that more than two-thirds of the labour input is female.5
Bhati and Singh in a study of the gender division of labour in hill agriculture in Himachal Pradesh show that overall women contribute 61 per cent of the total labour on farms.6 A detailed study by Jain and Chand in three villages each in Rajasthan and West Bengal, covering 127 households over 12 months, highlights the fact that women in the age group 19-70 spend longer hours than do men in a variety of activities.7
Women’s work and livelihoods in subsistence agriculture, for example, are based on multiple use and management of biomass for fodder, fertilizer, food and fuel. The collection of fodder from the forest is part of the process of transferring fertility for crop production and managing soil and water stability. The work of the women engaged in such activity tends to be discounted and made invisible for all sectors.8
When these allied activities which are ecologically and economically critical are taken into account, agriculture is revealed as the major occupation of ‘working’ women in rural India. The majority of women in India are not simply ‘housewives’, but farmers.9
GATT policies that encourage free export and import of agricultural products translate into policies for the destruction of small farmers’ local food production capacities. By locating food in the domain of international trade, these policies dislocate its production in the household and community. Policies being imposed under ‘market access’ and ‘domestic support’ on the agriculture agreement are basically policies that allow TNCs to displace the small producer. Under ‘market access’10 countries are forced to allow free import of food grain and remove all restrictions on imports and exports. ‘Market access’ is thus an instrument for the conversion of the Third World’s subsistence production of food into a ‘market’ for TNCs. Similarly, by relating domestic policy to international markets through clauses on domestic support, GATT facilitates the shifting of subsidies from poor producers and consumers to big agribusiness.
This has been India’s experience under World Bank/IMF Structural Adjustment which forced the government to reduce domestic support and to import wheat. During 1992, as a result of the structural adjustment, there was a difference of Rs. 80 between market price and government procurement price of wheat. Enough wheat was produced in the country, but government policy, distorted by structural adjustment, failed to procure it. Using this artificially created scarcity, and under World Bank pressure for import liberalization of food grain, the Indian government bought 2.5 million tonnes of wheat in 1992 at the cost of Rs. 4,800 crore (one crore = one hundred million) in hard currency.
The structural adjustment programme prescribed that food subsidies which provided cheap food for public distribution, be removed; simultaneously, the Bank recommended liberalization of farm imports. The net result has been not the removal of food subsidies, but their redistribution; the beneficiaries are no longer India’s poor but powerful transnational corporations in the US.
In 1991, India exported 672,000 tonnes of wheat at the cost of over Rs. 178 crore. Under the pressure of import liberalization and structural adjustment, however, India imported 2.5 million tonnes of wheat in 1992. Of this, one million tonnes was from the US, which gives a $30 per tonne subsidy to its exporters. Despite the US subsidy, the cost of imported wheat after adding transport and handling charges was higher than would have been the subsidy the government paid to Indian farmers — this amounted to Rs. 260 per quintal (one quintal = 100 kg) of wheat, but imported wheat from North America costs Rs. 560 per quintal. Indian farmers’ movements are therefore demanding that, rather than import wheat and subsidize multinational corporations (thereby draining foreign exchange and increasing debt), the government should raise the domestic support prices.
Neither fertilizer decontrol nor import liberalization have reduced the burden on the Indian exchequer. Public spending and foreign exchange expenditure have actually increased under the structural adjustment programme, although this is supposed to reduce both. The aim seems to be destabilization instead of stabilization of the economy, leaving India with no option but further dependence on the World Bank and TNCs. According to an ex-US Agricultural Secretary, ‘the idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products which are available, in most cases, at a lower cost.’
However, US foodgrain is cheaper not because it is produced more efficiently at less cost but because despite high costs of production, US corporations and the US government can subsidize and fix prices.
In a letter to Time magazine, Senator Rudy Boschwitz, a spokesman of the Reagan farm policy, stated quite clearly that US farm policy was aimed at putting Third World food exporters out of business. He wrote: ‘If we do not lower our farm prices to discourage these countries now, our worldwide competitive position will continue to slide and be much more difficult to regain. This discouragement should be one of the foremost goals of our agricultural policy.’11
Lowering food prices in the US is achieved by precisely those measures such as subsidies, which the World Bank, IMF and GATT want removed in Third World countries through their conditionalities. Thus in 1986, the US spent almost $10 billion to subsidize corn and wheat exports for which it received only $4.2 billion. While the World Bank uses arguments of cost effectiveness to dismantle public food distribution systems and remove food subsidies in the Third World, the US builds its food monopoly through totally subsidized and cost ineffective programmes.
Thus, the US lowered world prices of rice from around eight dollars to less than four dollars per hundredweight, not by reducing production costs, but by providing an export subsidy of $17 per hundredweight. This totally artificial price is nearly $80 per tonne below Third World costs of production, and approximately $140 per ton below the US production costs.12
The result is an overt attack on the survival of Third World farmers and Third World economies. The effect of the 50 per cent reduction in world rice prices by the US Farm Policy was so severely damaging to the four million Thai rice farmers that they were forced to demonstrate against the US Farm Bill at the US Embassy in Bangkok.
The dumping of subsidized surpluses brings business to food TNCs, but starvation to Third World peasants. During 1986, the US and the EC were selling wheat surpluses in West African countries, such as Mali and Burkina Faso, at prices as low as $60 per tonne — around one-third lower than equivalent production, transport and marketing costs for locally produced cereals such as sorghum. This was facilitated by direct and indirect subsidies and export prices.13 Subsidized TNCs are thus pitted against Third World peasants who earn less from their produce as cheap imports depress the price of staples and are finally forced to leave agriculture when earnings fall below subsistence.
Food imports were forced upon Costa Rica through the World Bank’s structural adjustment programme, which led to a ten per cent a year increase in imports and a sharp decline in the local production of staples. The Philippines has had a similar experience: from a position of near self-sufficiency in the mid-1980s, by 1990 the Philippines was importing some 600,000 tons of rice annually, equivalent to some 16 per cent of national consumption.14
The displacement of small farmers is a deliberate policy of GATT. The draft agreement has clauses for ‘structural adjustment’ for ‘producer retirement’ and ‘resource retirement’ which is merely a convoluted way of stating that farmers and their resources should be treated as surplus and dispensed with through ‘programmes designed to remove land or other resources, including livestock, from marketable agricultural production.’15 This includes violent mechanisms such as wasteful slaughter of livestock.
The models of agricultural production introduced by TNCs therefore necessitate the displacement of small farmers and their treatment as a ‘surplus’ population. The small peasants who produce for themselves will be threatened, because worldwide, World Bank structural adjustment loans have supported processes which are conducive to small farmers mortgaging their land and their consequent displacement. In addition, austerity measures and the liberalization of the banking sector mean that agricultural credit to small farmers is squeezed, and farm inputs and transport costs increase. Privatization of banks, and development of agribusiness also mean that land, the farmers’ most important asset will pass into the hands of corporate agribusiness and banks. This process has already taken place in the US where farm debt rose from $120 billion in the early 1970s to $225 billion in the early 1980s. Farm population dropped by 30 per cent between 1950 and 1960 and a further 26 per cent between 1960 and 1970 as small farmers were thrown off their land. Since 1981, 600,000 small farmers have been driven off their land.16 IMF/World Bank/GATT prescriptions aim at applying those same policies to Indian agriculture. Imagine the consequences if 50 per cent of Indian farmers and peasants were alienated from their land over the coming years! It cannot be argued that they can seek industrial employment because there, too, an ‘exit’ policy is under operation.
The displacement of women and other small peasants from agricultural production will also have a serious impact on food consumption since peasants’ access to food is through participation in its production. As TNCs dump subsidized surpluses on the Third World, peasants are driven out of food production into famine.
A conservative assessment of the impact of so-called liberalization on food consumption indicates that in India, by the year 2000, there will be 5.6 per cent more hungry people than would have been the case if free trade in agriculture was not introduced. Free trade will lead to 26.2 per cent reduction in human consumption of agricultural produce.17 The growth of free trade thus implies the growth of hunger.
The growth of TNC profits takes place at the cost of people’s food needs being met. Since women have been responsible for food production and provisioning, the decline in food availability has direct impact on them. Control over food is thus increasingly taken out of the hands of Third World women and put in the hands of Northern TNCs. The concentration of markets, trade and power in the hands of a few TNCs makes competition by small farmers in the Third World impossible. US grain exports account for 76 per cent of world agricultural trade. In 1921, 36 firms accounted for 85 per cent of US wheat exports. By the end of the 1970s just six companies: Cargill, Continental Grain, Luis Dreyfus, Bunge, Andre & Co and Mitsui/Cook exported 85 per cent of all US wheat, 95 per cent of its corn, 80 per cent of its sorghum. These same companies were handling 90 per cent of the EC’s trade in wheat and corn, and 90 per cent of Australia’s sorghum exports. Between them, Cargill, the largest private corporation in the US, and Continental Grain, the third largest, control 25 per cent of the market.18
When the corporate interest has been damaged the US government has retaliated politically. The threat posed to developing country food policy sovereignty in the Uruguay Round has been strengthened by the case of Nigeria — formerly sub-Sahara’s largest wheat importer. In 1988, the Nigerian government imposed a ban on wheat imports; these had depressed domestic food prices and reduced the production of domestic staples such as cassava, yams and millet. The wheat campaign by Cargill Corporation (formerly Nigeria’s main wheat supplier), has threatened trade sanctions against Nigerian textiles. It has also warned that a GATT settlement on agricultural trade liberalization will be applied to demand the restoration of free market access for US wheat. Clauses on cross retaliation in GATT are aimed at such disciplining. That this freedom will rob Nigerian farmers of freedom to produce their own staples is of little concern to Cargill or the US.19 The recent import of wheat in India portends a similar vulnerability for that country Cheap imports will not only push farmers out of agricultural production, they will also add to India’s foreign debts and balance of payment position, because food is being imported instead of locally produced. Given the cosy relationship between government and corporations it is of little surprise that ‘free trade’ as interpreted on GATT platforms allows TNCs to regulate prices, again demonstrating that ‘free trade’ for corporations is based on the denial of freedom and autonomy to Third World governments and people.
Besides manipulating prices, TNCs also control exports and imports through the manipulation of food safety standards. The Dunkel draft clearly states that sanitary and phytosanitary measures will be ‘harmonized’ in order to minimize their negative effects on trade. The draft also states that standards will be set by international agencies such as Codex Alimentarius, Dupont, Chevron, Monsanto, Merck, American Gnanud, Mitsubishi, Shell or advisors to Codex, which are strongly influenced by TNCs. In addition, according to the draft, ‘contracting parties shall ensure that sanitary and phytosanitary measures based on scientific principles are not maintained against available scientific evidence’. Together, these principles mean that GATT can apply standards to regulate import and export for the convenience of TNCs. On such criteria, tailored to fit TNCs’ interests, genetically-engineered organisms introduced by TNCs can be treated as ‘safe’, and organic food exported by the Third World can be treated as ‘unsafe’.20
The removal of state controls over agriculture at the national level through GATT does not mean an absence of control over Third World farmers. But instead of being controlled by Third World governments, Third World farmers’ fate is under the control of international bureaucracies (the IMF, World Bank and the MTO) which serve TNC interests. This does not imply any measure of freedom for farmers, but new and less accountable forms of control and regulation. Freedom at the small farmer level can be based only on freedom from state as well as transnational corporate sector control.
Intellectual Property Rights and ownership of seeds
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) are another instrument in the GATT agreement which will dispossess rural women of their power, control, and knowledge. IPRs in GATT and other international platforms aim to take seed out of peasant women’s custody and make it the private property of TNCs. By adding ‘trade related’ to IPRs, GATT has forced issues of the ownership of genetic resources and life forms on to the agenda of international trade through TRIPs.
At the conceptual level, Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) are restrictive, being by definition weighted in favour of transnational corporations, and against citizens in general, and particularly Third World peasants and forest-dwellers. People everywhere innovate and create. In fact, the poorest have to be the most innovative, since they have to create their means of survival while it is daily threatened. Women have been important innovators and protectors of seeds and genetic resources.
Limitations to the ownership of intellectual property rights, as construed in the trade negotiations, operate on a number of levels. The first is the shift from common to private rights: the preamble of the TRIPs agreement states that intellectual property rights are recognized only as private rights. This excludes all kinds of knowledge, ideas, and innovations that take place in the ‘intellectual commons’, in villages among farmers, in forests among tribals and even in universities among scientists. TRIPs is therefore a mechanism to privatize the intellectual commons and de-intelletualize civil society, so that in effect, the mind becomes a corporate monopoly.
The second limitation is that intellectual property rights are recognized only when knowledge and innovation generate profits, not when they meet social needs. According to Article 27.1,21 to be recognized as an IPR, innovation must be capable of industrial application. Only profits and capital accumulation are recognized as viable uses of creativity. Under corporate control and the ‘de-industrialization’ of small-scale informal sector production, the social good is discounted.
The most significant limitation of IPRs is achieved by way of the prefix ‘trade-related’. Most innovation by women is for domestic, local and public use, not for international trade; MNCs innovate for the sole purpose of increasing their share in global markets and international trade; and TRIPs in GATT will only enforce MNCs’ rights to monopolize all production, distribution and profits at the cost of all citizens and small producers worldwide.
Article 27 on patentable matter is a clear indication that national decisions made on grounds of public interest are overruled. Article 27(1) states that ‘patents shall be available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology, provided that they are new, involve an inventive step, and are capable of industrial application.’ This nullifies the exclusions built into national patent laws for the protection of the public and the national interest. For example, in the Patent Act of India, 1970, methods of agriculture and horticulture were excluded, were not patentable, whereas the TRIPs text includes these as patentable. Under the Indian Patent Act, only process patents can be granted to food, medicines, drugs and chemical products, but under the MTO, the Third World will have to grant product patents also in this area. Article 27 calls for a review of the scope of patentability and subject matter of patents four years after signing the text. Within an MTO with no democratic structure, however, such a review will only be used by MNCs to expand the domain of their monopoly control. The worldwide movement against patents on life has rejected TRIPs in GATT, while Sustainable Agriculture Movements and biodiversity conservation movements have expressed concern about the universalization of patent regimes. Article 27(3) states that ‘parties shall provide for the protection of plant varieties either by patents or by an effective in generis system or by any combination thereof.’22
Under the impact of this enforcement, farmers will not be allowed to save their own seed. The International Convention of the Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) had maintained farmers’ rights to save seed, but in a March 1991 amendment this clause was removed. The new clause in UPOV (and TRIPs) can be used to enforce royalty payments on farmers if they save their own seed. With the stronger intellectual property rights regime being conceived under MTO, the transfer of extra funds as royalty payments from the poor to the rich countries would exacerbate the current Third World debt crisis tenfold. This is ironical, since most plant diversity originates in the Third World, and seeds and plant materials that today are under the control of the industrialized world, were originally taken freely from the farmers to whom they will now be sold back as patented material. As a result, seed companies will reap monopoly profits, while the genius of Third World farmers will go unrewarded and they will be banned from saving and using their own seeds.
IPRs in the area of seeds and plant material are in any case not easy to demarcate, since the genetic resources used by multinational corporations for claiming patents are the product of centuries of innovation and selection by Third World farmers, especially women. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has recognized these contributions in the form of ‘Farmers’ Rights’; and the Biodiversity Convention signed at the 1992 Earth Summit also recognizes them, and accepts the need to make IPRs subservient to the objectives of biodiversity conservation.
The TRIPs text, however, biased as it is in favour of acknowledging only MNC rights, goes against these agreements reached on other international platforms. The negative impact on farmers and other Third World citizens will be increased due to the extension of the working and the terms of the patent, and the reversal of the burden of proof. Article 34 of the draft text reverses the burden of proof in the area of process patents. In normal law, the accused is innocent unless proven guilty. Under the reversal in the MTO regime, however, it is the accused who must demonstrate their innocence; if they cannot do so, then they are deemed guilty of having infringed upon the right of the patent holder.23
In the area of agriculture this can have absurd and highly unjust consequences. MNCs are now taking out broad patents on plant varieties, covering ownership of traits and characteristics. With the reversal of the burden of proof clauses, it becomes legally possible for a corporation to accuse the farmers who originally contributed the seeds with a particular trait, of patent infringement. There is no clause in TRIPs to offer protection to farmers in such cases.
When this situation is combined with possibilities of cross-retaliation that the MTO will institutionalize, MNCs will have a very powerful tool to subsume all agriculture and all production under their monopoly control. This monopolization of the entire economy is the main motive for setting up an MTO with a TRIPs council.
The Third World has consistently maintained that IPRs have no place in international trade negotiations, furthermore, the relevance of applying IPRs to agriculture — biodiversity and biotechnology in particular — is a seriously contested issue. These are debates that need to evolve and be resolved democratically in order to protect people’s health, and their environmental rights. To set up an MTO with the central issue of IPRs still unresolved, implies that only MNCs have rights, citizens have none. This regime is based not on free trade but corporations’ freedom to engage in restrictive business practices thus providing a scenario for a global command economy based on coercion and non-accountable power.
Seeds will be at the centre of this conflict. Patented seed varieties linked to agrochemicals and agroprocessing are central to the creation of new dependencies. The New Seed Policy has already allowed the entry of multinationals in the seed sector; Trade Related Investments Measures (TRIMs) in GATT will make such investment even freer. TNCs, as we have noted, will thus take farmers’ seeds, process them, and sell them back as patented varieties.
In India, the pharmaceutical giant, Sandoz (India), has entered into an agreement with Northup King of the US, subsidiary of its multinational parent company, and with the Dutch vegetable king, Zaaduine. ITC is tying up with Pacific Seeds, a subsidiary of Australia’s Continental Grains; the US seed giant Cargill has tied up with Gill and Company, retaining a controlling interest in the company. Two other US companies, Seedtec International and Dehlgien, have entered into agreements with Maharashtra Hybrid and Nath Seed Company, respectively. Pioneer Hibred has started an Indian subsidiary Pioneer Seed Company. Apart from these, Hindustan Lever is negotiating with a Belgian firm, while Hoechst, Ciba-Geigy are reportedly moving in with other tie-ups.24
In addition to loss of control over genetic resources is a new threat of loss of control over ownership of land. As banks become privatized and contract farming is introduced, the farmer will risk losing his/her land. Protection of rights to land, water and genetic resources are central to the freedom of farmers. GATT, however, defines legal protection only in terms of the interests of the corporate sector and freedom of TNCs. Whose rights to resources need protection from the viewpoint of sustainability and justice? This question will move centre stage as farmers’ and environmental movements begin to address the emerging control over natural resources by global interests for global profits.
Local control over natural resources is an essential precondition for farmers’ freedom. But free trade which, as we have seen, implies a relocation of control over natural resources for farmers and Third World governments to global institutions has serious environmental consequences.
Corporations use land, water and genetic resources in non-renewable, non-sustainable ways, being mainly concerned to maximize profits rather than to conserve local resources. Local laws and regulations for limiting environmental degradation will be treated as barriers to free trade. Local communities’ democratic decisions on resource conservation are thus excluded by GATT. The GATT draft by Dunkel requires that central governments adopt measures to ensure that state governments comply with GATT rules, which further reduces farmers’ influence in decision-making. Thus farmers’ organizations will be weakened, as will state legislators and parliament: all power will be concentrated in the hands of GATT and TNCs.
TNCs vs freedom for subsistence producers
The freedom that transnational corporations are claiming through intellectual property rights protection in the GATT agreement on TRIPs is the freedom that European colonizers have claimed since 1492 when Columbus set precedence in treating the licence to conquer non-European peoples as a natural right of European men. The land titles issued by the Pope through European kings and queens were the first patents. Charters and patents issued to merchant adventurers were authorizations to ‘discover, find, search out and view such remote heathen and barbarous lands, countries and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people.’25 The colonizers’ freedom was built on the slavery and subjugation of the people with original rights to the land. This violent take-over was rendered ‘natural’ by defining the colonized people into nature, thus denying them their humanity and freedom.
Locke’s treatise on property26 effectually legitimized this same process of theft and robbery during the enclosure movement in Europe. Locke clearly articulates capitalism’s freedom to build on the freedom to steal; he states that property is created by removing resources from nature through mixing with labour. But this labour’ is not physical labour, but labour in its ‘spiritual’ form as manifested in the control of capital. According to Locke, only capital can add value to appropriated nature, and hence only those who own capital have the natural right to own natural resources; a right that supersedes the common rights of others with prior claims. Capital is thus defined as a source of freedom, but this freedom is based on the denial of freedom to the land, forests, rivers and biodiversity that capital claims as its own. Because property obtained through privatization of commons is equated with freedom, those commoners laying claim to it are perceived to be depriving the owner of capital of freedom. Thus peasants and tribals who demand the return of their rights and access to resources are regarded as thieves.
Within the ambit of IPRs, the Lockean concept of property merges with the Cartesian concept of knowledge, to give shape to a perverted world which appears ‘natural’ in the eyes of capitalist patriarchy. During the scientific revolution, Descartes fashioned a new intellectual world order in which mind and body were deemed to be totally separate, and only the male, European mind was considered capable of complete intellectual transcendence of the body. Intellectual and manual labour were thus pronounced to be ‘unrelated’, even though all human labour, however simple, requires a degree of unity of ‘head and hand’. But capitalist patriarchy denies the ‘head’, the mind, to women and Third World peoples. The application of IPRs to agriculture is the ultimate denial of the intellectual creativity and contribution of Third World peasants, women and men who have saved and used seed over millennia.
The implication of a world-view that assumes the possession of an intellect to be limited to only one class of human beings is that they are entitled to claim all products of intellectual labour as their private property, even when they have appropriated it from others — the Third World. Intellectual property rights and patents on life are the ultimate expression of capitalist patriarchy’s impulse to control all that is living and free.
GATT is the platform where capitalist patriarchy’s notion of freedom as the unrestrained right of men with economic power to own, control and destroy life is articulated as ‘free-trade’. But for the Third World, and for women, freedom has different meanings. In what seems the remote domain of international trade, these different meanings of freedom are a focus of contest and conflict. Free trade in food and agriculture is the concrete location of the most fundamental ethical and economic issues of human existence of the present times. It is here that Third World women have a unique contribution to make, because in their daily lives they embody the three colonizations on which modern patriarchy is based; the colonization of nature, of women and of the Third World.
Notes
1. National Sample Survey, 38th Round, Report No. 341.
2. Fernandes, Walter, and Geeta Menon, Tribal Women and Forest Economy’, Indian Social Institute, New Delhi, 1987.
3. Singh, Vir, ‘Hills of Hardship’, The Hindustan Times Weekly, 18 January 1987.
4. Saradamoni, K., ‘Labour, Land and Rice Production: Women’s Involvement in their States’, Economic and Political Weekly, 22 (17) 1987.
5. Mencher, Joan, ‘Women’s Work and Poverty: Women’s Contribution to Household Maintenance in Two Regions of South India’, in Droyer, D. and J. Bruce (eds) A Home Divided: Women and Income Control in the Third World, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1987.
6. Bhati, J. B. and D. V. Singh, ‘Women’s Contribution to Agricultural Economy in Hill Regions of North West India’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 22, No. 17, 1987.
7. Jain, Devaki and Malini Chand Seth, ‘Domestic Work: Its Implication for Enumeration of Workers’, in Saradamoni (ed.) Women, Work and Society, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi 1985.
8. Shiva, Vandana, Staying Alive.Women, Ecology and Survival. Kali, New Delhi, 1988 and Zed Books, 1990, London.
9. Shiva, Vandana, ‘Women’s Knowledge and Work in Mountain Agriculture’. Paper presented at Conference on Women in Mountain Development, ICIMOD, Kathmandu, 1988.
10. Draft Final Agreement on GATT, GATT Secretariat, Geneva, December 1991.
11. Shiva, Vandana, ‘Structural Reforms and Agriculture’, Observer, November 1992.
12. Ritchie, Mark and Kevin Ristau, ‘Crisis by Design: A Brief Review of U.S. Farm Policy’, League of Rural Voters Education Project, Minneapolis, 1987.
13. Watkins, Kevin, ‘GATT and the Third World’ in Race and Class, ‘The New Conquistadors’, Vol. 34, No. 1, July-September 1992.
14. Ibid.
15. GATT Draft Agreement
16. Ritchie, Mark and Kevin Ristau, op. cit.
17. Frohberg, K., G. Fischer and K. Parikh, ‘Would Developing Countries Benefit from Agricultural Trade Liberalisation in OECD Countries’ in Goldin, I. and Knudsen Odin (eds) Agricultural Trade Liberalisation — Implications for Developing Countries, OECD, Paris, 1990.
18. Morgan, Dan Merchants of Grain. New York, Viking, 1979.
19. Ritchie, Mark, ‘GATT, Agriculture and the Environment, the US Double Zero Plan.’ Ecologist Vol. 20, No. 6, November-December 1990.
20. Lang, Tim, ‘Food Fit for the World? How the GATT Food Trade Talks Challenge Public Health, the Environment and the Citizen’, Sustainable Agriculture, Food and the Environment (SAFE) Alliance, London, March 1992.
21. Draft Agreement, GATT.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. ‘Seeds — A Hard Row to Hoe’, India Today, 15 February 1989.
25. Kadir, Djelal, Columbus and the Ends of the Earth. University of California Press, 1992, p. 90.
26. Locke, John, Peter Caslett (ed) Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge University Press, 1967.
*General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade