Page 42 - Rights beautiful : collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

freedom, but this freedom is based on the denial of freedom to the
land, forests, rivers and bio-diversity that capital claims as its own.” 11
And all this is emphatically and nonchalantly defined as a matter
of economic freedom and the interplay of market forces in the industrial
West! Vandana Shiva, again, so appropriately brands this as the process of
theft and robbery. It is not only the people’s freedom and collective rights
that are endangered and lost. But most importantly it is the human right
to life itself that is subject to constant threat and destruction, as everyone
knows full well how all these commons are valuable and indispensable
as the life support and sustenance base of local people and communities.
So along the process of appropriation and privatization of the commons,
the indigenous peoples and rural communities’ rights and livelihoods become
thereby marginalized and impoverished, as we are all witnessing today.
But then, again, that is of no serious concern, especially now that a remedy
has been found by way of the so-called “social safety net” as defined by
the World Bank, whereby all the expected troubles and threats to the status
quo can be contained. Needless to say, this kind of pejorative idea and
measure is well shared by many a distinguished economist and academe alike.
Nor is that all. The colonization of nature is now reaching its new
height with the all-powerful capital extending from manipulation to monopoly
of life itself, through biotechnological capabilities and the accompanied
intellectual property rights regime. This in itself explains the actual state of
science and technology in the contemporary world. It is all practically
corporate-oriented and under the same old paradigm of industrialism,
something to beware of for the common people who struggle for freedom.
As Andrew Kimbrell very well describes:
Biotechnology extends humanity’s reach over the forces of nature
as no technology in history has ever done. Bioengineers are now
manipulating life forms in much the same way as the engineers

11
Vandana Shiva, “The Enclosure of the Commons”, Third World Resurgence, Issue No 84,
1997, p. 6.
36 OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND