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| Volume 3, Issue 13 -- June 23, 2006 |
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From the JPIC Office The Columban JPIC Office in Washington, D.C. is physically quite small. We have three offices which were formerly the nuns’ sleeping quarters who took care of the seminarians’ in the attached building. Those days are long gone and today our wing of the building is the home to a number of social justice organizations. In each office there’s enough room for a desk, a chair, and a bookcase. Considering the size, scope and complexity of the issues we work on, the space is quite disproportionate. But that really doesn’t matter. Even if we had lots of room, the issues would still be just as daunting. More challenging that the physical space is our human capacity. For over the last ten years the office has functioned essentially with two full-time staff people. After being in the office for a while I began to have dreams of developing an internship program. The primary goal of such a program would be to provide a space for students, seminarians and even returning missionaries where they could be exposed to the political machinery in Washington, D.C. and hopefully explore some of the root causes for the injustices they may have read about in text books or exposed to while abroad. Selfishly, an internship program would be a way to augment the work of the office. While we have had a few sporadic interns over the past couple of years, last week concluded our time with what I consider our first formal intern experience. As it was the pilot attempt, it was rather short, but a useful beginning. The interns were two college students from Omaha, NE who attend a parish down the street from the Columban home office. The two weeks did not pass without a few challenges. I wondered more than once if in such a short time it was possible to expose the interns to the issues in a meaningful way. I asked both interns to write a brief reflection on their time in the office. This morning when I opened my inbox I was pleasantly surprised to read one of the reflections. While I don’t expect that the internship was a life altering experience, I do hope that at least a seed was planted. With their permission, I share with you the first reflection. The second reflection will be included in the July 7th newsletter. In peace, Amy Woolam Echeverria
An Intern’s Reflection Hello. My name is Will Targy and I had the pleasure of interning for the Columban JPIC office for two weeks in June. I am an undergraduate studying both religion and philosophy at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. For the past two years, my focus has been on biblical text, global religion, and philosophical studies on ethics, human nature and ideological theory. Prior to this internship I realized that I had limited experience and understanding about the kinds of issues that are tackled in the DC office. The subjects and problems that are reported on in the Columban JPIC Office are very real. They are real in the sense that millions of lives, all around the world, are drastically affected by a handful of powerful people who confer only a few metro stops down from this office. During my time in the office, the tidal wave of information, organizations and reflection was incredibly overwhelming. My focus for the two weeks was on economic justice and free trade agreements between the U.S. and Chile, and the U.S. and Peru. Upon deeper investigation and understanding of these topics, I began trying to understand what was happening but resorting to the rhetorical utterance of "why?". I thought that maybe I could pull the emergency brake on my involvement with all of this and return home where I could rely on a false sense of security and an exit to the atrocities I had encountered. In no way was I ready or willing to walk away now and forget why I was here and what actions needed to be taken. I drew inspiration from the others around me; the people that I shared the building with and who took time out of their day to give me guidance and reassurance of my duties. These were the same individuals who fight steadily everyday for millions of people all over the world who are affected and betrayed by those who they were told to trust. Through the long hours of internet research and after many meetings with charismatic organizations, I can deduce that there are a great number of people, just in this city, who are willing to spend their entire lives and careers reaching out to those who are mistreated and silenced by corrupt world leaders. I soon realized that these ideas, this credo, are not part of a new mission. For hundreds of years, this battle has endured. Someone has always stood over the poor, the abused and the misunderstood, offering a shield from danger and a helping hand for stability. Now it is my turn to stand up and stare straight back into the eyes of the oppressor. I am not alone in this battle for there were many who came before me and many who will rise after I am gone. As long as we hold true to the ideals of justice, truth and virtue, our actions will no be in vain. God’s guiding light will never leave our backs while we keep pushing on in pursuit of all that is holy and righteous. I would like to conclude here and leave you with a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly”. Thank you for your time and may God’s peace remain in everyone.
Message from the Border It is a month now since 71 of the Lomas residents went to Chihuahua to present their case to the Magistrate in the Agrarian Tribunal. The Zaragoza family has been subpoenaed by the same court to appear this July 3rd. It remains to be seen whether they will appear and, if they do, what they will try to do to delay the court's decision. Their strategy is now very clear: attrition. The longer things drag on, the more tired and hopeless people feel, the hot summer, harassment of city officials, the intimidation of the Zaragoza's guards, and so on, the fewer people there will be to tough it out to the end. So they think. In fact, the trip to Chihuahua, the constant support and teaching of law and rights by Carlos Avitia from the Agrarian Attorney General's office, the ongoing support of the NGO groups who continue to accompany the people and the constant accompaniment of the church have seen the residents grow in their self-confidence. Finishing the new house inside the grade-school compound, which was painted by Vicki Schmidt and a Lutheran group from Fargo, North Dakota, and having a young couple and their two children living there now, has also been a sign of hope to the community. On Sunday, June 11, we were delighted to celebrate First Communion with five children in our little chapel of Jesus de Nazaret. We were late starting but the place was packed and the Body of Christ was fully alive. Last week we had 10 young women and two adults from Seton High School in Cincinnati hosted by the Sisters of Charity here and supervised by Kristin Maanum who lives and works with the Sisters. The girls worked very hard mixing the straw and clay mix to stucco several houses on the mesa and then paint them. Several times Zaragoza's guards drove by looking and taking pictures. An hour later Juarez city workers from the housing authority came and tried to make us stop the work, telling us you can't build without a permit. (Obviously the city agencies are surrogates for the Zaragozas, coming when ordered and leaving when told). We explained to the city officials that we were neither building nor enlarging the structures, but were simply doing maintenance work and that it required no permit to paint or stucco one’s house. The city people eventually left and didn't return. The people whose houses we were working on were encouraged to see the work continue. The police did not accompany the city officials as they had done in the past. One of the reasons may be the letter from the State Human Rights Commission which ordered the city and state police agencies to guard the rights of the residents in Lomas de Poleo. Another may be that the people now have their cases in process at the federal level and are less susceptible to abuse. Another may simply be that when people are less afraid and more secure in their knowledge of their rights, it is harder to intimidate them. Cuco Tagle, whose father settled in Lomas thirty-six years ago, was annoyed when he saw a truck with three of Zaragoza's guards circling his property. He went out in the street, waved the truck down and began to write down the license number. One of the men got out of the truck to assault him but just then Cuco's wife and daughter pulled up and the truck sped off. Mr. Tagle went to the municipal police and they followed him back to his house where he made a formal report. He then made another complaint at the state attorney general's office. Again, refusing intimidation and letting other residents know they don't have to accept it is helping to strengthen people's sense of confidence and unity. Gladys Munoz and Fr. Wayne, Columban Companions from Traverse City, Michigan, along with 11 seminarians from the Detroit Archdiocese, and two Contemplative Sisters of the Good Shepherd from El Paso, joined us for mass on Sunday and a sharing session afterwards. They were all deeply impacted by the peoples struggle for their land against such overwhelming odds and, in turn, the people felt supported and grateful that this group had come from such a distance to visit. We remain grateful to all of you who read this e-newsletter and continue supporting us with your prayers and action when required. Genetic Engineering This article first appeared in the magazine, North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), in the March/April 2002 issue. It can be found on the internet at www.nacla.org/art_display.php?art=1891
Who Owns Knowledge? In Latin the word scientia means "knowledge––and our word "science" means, at base, "systems of knowledge" and "ways we come to know things." Who owns knowledge? Who owns science? At first glance, the questions seem ridiculous: How can anyone own the store of facts about the world and ways of doing things that people, individually and collectively, keep in their heads? It turns out that what we really mean when we ask this question is "who will have the right to control the circulation of knowledge?" and, even more importantly, "who will have the right to benefit from it?" Answering this question takes us into the seemingly arcane realm of copyright and patent law and what has come to be called "intellectual property." But, as the contributors to this issue of the NACLA Report show, questions of "intellectual property" have very real effects. The survival of individuals as well as that of whole cultures and, indeed, that of the natural world as we know it, is at stake in how the question "who owns knowledge?" is answered: Brazil, for instance, has made anti-AIDS drugs available free to anyone who needs them, a policy that has significantly slowed the spread of the disease and prolonged the lives of many who would have died without these medicines. As Carlos Passarelli and Veriano Terto Jr. report, carrying out this policy has brought the Brazilian government into confrontation with the multinational pharmaceutical companies that hold patents on the drugs—and with the U.S. government, which insists that Brazil conform with the intellectual property provisions of U.S.-promoted international trade treaties. But patents don’t merely restrict access to new drugs and other products by raising the prices of patented products higher than poor people, and poor nations, can afford—they also make the technology needed to make the products inaccessible and thus have slowed the growth of the biotechnology industry in Latin America. Increasingly, however, patented biotech products are ones that Latin Americans (and others) would like to avoid—but can’t. Latin American farmers, like farmers around the world, are being pressured to adopt genetically modified (GM) seeds produced and sold by multinational companies. Promoters of these products claim that they will make it possible to feed the world’s growing population. But agricultural expert Miguel Altieri argues that the real brake on food production in Latin America is unequal distribution of land, and that traditional crop varieties, and traditional ways of growing them, still offer the best chance for feeding the region while at the same time preserving the region’s natural resources. Altieri warns as well of the permanent damage that genetically modified crops could wreak on the region’s biological diversity via contamination of the genetic stock of indigenous plant species. Such contamination has already occurred in Mexico, where genes from GM corn have been found in native varieties. Knowledge does not always flow from the laboratories of the developed world to the people of the developing world. Often the flow goes in the other direction: "Modern" science has long looked to "primitive" peoples as a source of information about resources, especially botanical resources that could be turned into new foods and medicines. What has long been overlooked, however, is that many cultures have systematized their knowledge of local plants and other resources in ways that should rightly be called scientific; if the knowledge developed by "Western" scientists is worthy of legal protection and compensation, so should be this indigenous knowledge. But until 1992, when the Convention on Biological Diversity, approved at a UN conference in Rio de Janeiro, recognized the principle that the knowledge accumulated and developed by indigenous peoples is a form of intellectual property, this knowledge was generally regarded as the "common property of humanity." Many questions about how this principle should be put into practice remain unanswered, and what outsiders view as legitimate "bioprospecting" may still be seen by local people as a form of "biopiracy." Barbara Belejack chronicles how one such conflict led to the demise of a multimillion dollar botanical medicine research project in Chiapas, Mexico. Many of our contributors rightly stress how recent disputes over intellectual property in Latin America are tied to globalization and to U.S.-led promotion of neoliberal precepts and free trade agreements that would expand corporate power in the region. Such conflicts make it clear that it’s not possible to discuss the subject of science and technology in Latin America without placing it in the larger framework of Latin America’s role in the world economy. This is nothing new: The concept of "intellectual property"—the idea that a creator of a work or originator of a technique should be recognized as the "owner" of that work or technology and should be able to control how it is reproduced and used—is as old as capitalism itself. The notion dates back to the fifteenth century, when the first embryonic copyright and patent laws went into effect in some parts of Europe. The U.S. Constitution—written in the 1780s, a product of the first era of liberal ascendance—gives Congress the power to make copyright and patent laws in order "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." Globalization has merely highlighted the fact that, under capitalism, an economic value can be placed on knowledge: It can be bought and sold like a bolt of cloth, a machine, a piece of land, an oil well or an ore deposit. But it is only recently that knowledge about biological resources—as opposed to the resources in themselves—has been seen as "ownable." The first U.S. patent laws specifically excluded living things. In the 1930s, the laws were revised to make it possible to patent newly developed seed varieties, a change that primarily benefitted plant breeders. The advent of recombinant DNA technologies—"gene-splicing"—in the 1970s and the more recent push to "map" the genes of living things, including humans, set the stage for the explosive growth of the "biotech" industry and for the current conflicts over ownership of biological knowledge. All the same, since the Conquest, trade in biological resources and knowledge has formed a central theme in the story of Latin America’s relations with the rest of the world. Many chroniclers of this tale have borrowed Alfred Crosby’s phrase "Columbian Exchange" to describe the massive transoceanic genetic swap that began when indigenous American plants like corn and potatoes were exported to Europe, and native European plants like wheat, and animals such as horses were transplanted to the Americas. The word "exchange," though, seems to imply that the trade was a voluntary one, with benefits for both sides. Crosby himself has stressed the "imperialist" nature of the transfer, the ecological damage caused as European humans exploited American humans, plants and animals to the point of extinction and "stronger" European plant and animal species took over the ecological spaces formerly occupied by American species. "The Columbian exchange has left us with not a richer but a more impoverished genetic pool," he wrote in 1972.[1] At the same time—as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Marcos Cueto tell us in their historical overview in this issue—the European colonizers turned to indigenous Americans as a source of information about local plants and animals from the very beginning. The wave of European scientists seeking to classify, collect—and make commercial use of—the biological resources of the Americas reached a peak in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as explorers like Alexander von Humboldt tramped through the more remote parts of the continent. While we can guess that the explorers’ Indian guides and "informants" were not always as forthcoming as the outsiders might have liked, Europe’s quest to exploit New World plants provoked few open conflicts until the nineteenth century, when the newly independent nations of Latin America began seeking to commercialize their own "vegetable patrimony." Brazil, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia passed laws and took other steps aimed at preventing the export of valuable native seeds and plants. That didn’t stop the Europeans from spiriting off enough rubber and cinchona plants—source of the anti-malaria drug quinine—to start Asian plantations. Britain’s Kew Gardens played an important role in facilitating what would today be labeled acts of "biopiracy." By the mid-twentieth century, however, scientific interest in plants as a source of valuable products like rubber, drugs, pesticides and the like had almost entirely disappeared. Scientists had developed synthetic substitutes for most products formerly derived from plants, and they believed they would be able to create an infinite stream of new products merely by combining molecules in the lab. But the new age of genetic engineering and biotech has also been an era of renewed interest in plants as potential drug sources. This is not as paradoxical as it might seem: Scientists discovered, contrary to their expectations, that it is often easier to make drugs by starting with plant extracts rather than by synthesizing molecules from scratch; the new technologies have made it possible to screen many more plants for such uses. But there are many more plants in the world than can be tested by even the most efficient technology. Local experts are still the best source of knowledge about which plants should be screened: According to a World Bank report, "It has been estimated that by consulting indigenous peoples, bioprospectors can increase the success ratio in trials [of plants being tested for possible medical use] from one in 10,000 samples to one in two."[2] At the same time, over the last decade there has been increased international concern about preserving "biodiversity" in the fragile areas where both indigenous plants and indigenous peoples are often found. And indigenous peoples themselves have begun to organize internationally to protect their knowledge and their resources. But while the 1992 Convention on Biodiversity has provided the foundation for a legal framework for compensating indigenous peoples for their "intellectual property", some are not interested in commodifying knowledge that has traditionally been regarded as a social good. In any case, determining what knowledge "belongs" to a particular people or peoples and which groups or subgroups should get what share in compensation remains a knotty problem. Another thorny question involves the fate of three Latin American repositories where genetic material from thousands of varieties of indigenous food plants has been collected and stored.[3] These "gene banks"—for corn in Mexico, potatoes in Peru, and cassava and beans in Colombia—were created to preserve the genetic diversity found in "centers of origin," the regions where botanists believe the crops were first domesticated from wild varieties. The material held in the banks has no legal "owner"—it is made freely available to any researcher who is willing to certify that any new products which result will not be patented. But Miguel Altieri reports that the banks are coming under increasing pressure to patent and commercialize their holdings so that they can pay the bills in an era of shrinking support for such public institutions. Meanwhile, different Latin American nations have taken widely differing stances toward the adoption of genetically modified food crops. Argentina has become the world’s second largest producer—after the United States—of GM crops. Argentina is a major soy exporter; not surprisingly, the main GM crop grown in that nation is soybeans. But Brazil is also an important soy exporter and Brazil, in contrast to its neighbor, has placed a virtual ban on cultivation of GM crops until they are proven safe. The corporate owners of GM seed patents are, of course, lobbying hard to overturn the Brazilian restrictions, even as groups like Greenpeace continue to campaign in favor of continuing them. In these ways and others the conflicts first touched off by the "Columbian Exchange" continue into the present—they show that far from being a subject removed from conflicts over political and economic power, science brings us right into the thick of these struggles, and our answer to the question "who will we allow to own knowledge?" will shape the future of the Americas, and the rest of the world. NOTES: 1. Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., the Columbian Exchange (Westport, Ct: Greenwood Press, 1972). Excerpted in NACLA Report, XXV, No. 2, September, 1991. This special Quincentennial issue includes other articles on "The Conquest of Nature, 1492-1992."
2. World Bank, IK [Indigenous Knowledge] Notes No. 19, April, 2000. World Bank webpage on IK at www.worldbank.org/aftdr/ik/default.htm Action Alerts Make your Voice Heard on Just Immigration Legislation You probably haven’t heard a tremendous amount about immigration reform in the past week or two, and with good reason. The process for reconciling the differences between the House of Representatives and the Senate has stalled over procedural issues, and right now, it’s unclear if they’ll begin negotiations before the 4th of July recess. While Congress has been delayed in dealing with immigration reform this month, anti-immigrant organizations across the country have been extremely busy trying to send the message that they want an enforcement-only bill to come out of Congress this year. Recent news from congressional colleagues is indicating that they are getting 400 anti-immigrant letters for every 1 in favor of real reform! Anti-immigrant organizations have begun to use a potent mail campaign to get their message across. So far, they have sent over 2,000 bricks to members of Congress to show their support for building a wall across the U.S.-Mexico border. Congress is listening to this message, and we need to respond! The Border Working Group, a DC-based coalition of faith-based organizations focused on border issues, began a campaign two years ago to send empty water bottles to members of Congress in order to highlight the plight of migrants who die crossing the border. We call it our "Message on a bottle" campaign. We are removing the existing labels from the bottle and putting new ones on that convey our message. It’s an easy step to take, and it is an equally strong message to send in support of fair, humane treatment for immigrants to our country. Below is a copy of one of the many labels we have prepared. Each label contains the story of a different migrant. We’re now taking this same campaign and using it as a tool to combat the message of anti-immigrant brick-senders. We have all the materials you need to join the campaign at our website, and they include easily printable labels for your water bottles, an educational flyer to include with your water bottle, and easy instructions for how and where to send your bottles. Please take a minute to join this campaign and fight the hate coming from anti-immigrant groups during this important congressional debate. Also, I hope all of you have had a chance to sign our petition against border militarization – it’s getting a lot of attention in grassroots communities, and your signature will help to oppose the use of border communities as political fodder by anti-immigrant activists. If you haven’t yet done so, click here to go directly to the petition. These two actions are provided by our colleagues at the Latin America Working Group (LAWG). Contact Us
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