What a
complicated and fascinating world we live in today! Here, as our neighbors
struggle to rescue crops and seeds from two consecutive years of excessive
rains and early frosts, the issue of seeds has become symbolic of the national
and international fight to block the efforts of business and governmental
elites to control the world’s commons to feed their collective greed. From Wall
Street to Yucuyoco normal people who have a more realistic understanding of our
place on the planet and among the community of living things are standing up
against blind avarice.
Of course one
of the most ingenious tools of avarice ever developed is the genetically
modified seed whose genes float silently on the wind making corporate property
of every plant with which they interbreed. Recently, a number of efforts to
protect the rich wealth of native corn seeds from this tool of greed in this
center of origin of the world´s most important grain have resulted in proposed
and actual state laws declaring transgenic free zones. But indigenous groups
who have analyzed the laws conclude that, in the context of Mexican federal laws and the national
economic and political climate, such laws will only serve the interest of the
corporate and political conglomerates and validate their right to decide the future of the
indigenous seeds that our communities consider a patrimony of humanity. Indigenous
communities here, since the Zapatista uprising of 1994, have realized what
angry protesters from Greece to Wall Street have also understood, that supposed
democratic laws and legal and economic
structures cease to serve the common good when controlled by political
and corporate money, by political and corporate greed. A democracy controlled by
professional politicians beholden to unlimited corporate money is no longer a
democracy.
Leo Tolstoy once wrote a revealing and entertaining
short treatise on poverty entitled “What is to be Done?”. Today, faced with a greed that is not
only undermining the common good but the sustainability of life on the planet,
that is our question, too. Here CEDICAM, the Mixtec organization with which we
work, is developing strategies to turn to the local democratic structures that
still exist in the indigenous communal villages to protect it´s native seed
heritage. Here, where the exaggerated
greed of the western political and economic reality is less dominant, we are
working to develop legal processes that can exclude GMO´s from indigenous
territories. These processes can find legal support in the international
treaties to which Mexico is bound and which dictate indigenous rights over
resources found in indigenous territories. If no where else, here in democratic
indigenous communities Monsanto can be stopped!
Fortunately,
there are other places in the world, primarily in Latin America, where today
indigenous majorities are making democracy work for the common good. Newly freed from control by
international financial institutions that promote the agenda of avarice that
has increased the wealth of the 1% by 275% in the past 30 years, countries like
Bolivia, and Ecuador are once again prioritizing the common good and national visions based on an indigenous
understanding of the world.
What is to be
done? Surely the creativity that the anger of the world is generating in
indigenous communities and in urban streets across the globe will yield
strategies. Study how Argentina has created a healthy economy by refusing to
pay international loans and escaping from the straitjacket of trade and
financial liberalization. Try to understand why Bolivian indigenous scholars
think that the principles of the indigenous Vivir
Bien, living well, provide answers to the crises of our times. Meditate on
the vital importance of the indigenous
understanding that the Mother Earth is a living being, generous but
demanding respect. Question
“development”, financialization of the economy, patents, and privatization of
what we hold in common and of our common needs, the Market!
There are
growing cracks in the edifice of avarice to take advantage of.
