Welcome to the Concrete Jungle

You could understand why the G-21 nations felt this way. There are 2 billion poor people in the world, and three-quarters of them live in communities that depend on agriculture. Yet even as their farmers are told that they should enter the “free” market, they’re competing with farmers in the developed world who receive $300 billion a year in subsidies — six times the amount those same countries spend on foreign aid. To put the issue simply, the average European cow is subsidized to the tune of $2 a day, more than the daily income of millions of Third World farmers. The suicide of Lee Kyung Hae wasn’t the random act of a disturbed man. He was embodying the anger and frustration of legions of Korean farmers who have found their whole way of life undercut by an onslaught of rice imported from subsidizing countries like the U.S.

And this may not even be the worst of it. One afternoon, I went to the Hotel Sierra to hear a panel on bio-piracy featuring Dr. Vandana Shiva, who was perhaps the Cancún meeting’s great opposition superstar. Fleshy, vain and brilliant, she never appeared without an audience hanging on her every word. (“I saw her on Bill Moyers,” a young activist breathlessly told me.)

Sitting before a sign that read “No Patents on Life” — it fell off the wall halfway through — Dr. Shiva and her fellow panelists explained how American and European corporations (with the help of their governments) are busily engaged in what one called “The Second Age of Colonialism.” Where the first age involved conquering entire countries and stealing their resources, this cunning new age simply involves taking indigenous life forms, claiming patents on all or part of them (sometimes just a microbe or specific gene) and then using intellectual-property trade agreements (known as TRIPS) to help enforce them: Monsanto sued Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser for a patent violation when a genetically modified strand of canola blew into his fields and began growing.

The patenting of living things clearly seems to violate any rational notion of intellectual property, if not of morality — a cell is not the same as a cell phone — yet hundreds of such life-patents have already been granted for things like a Peruvian worm that contains a microbe useful in killing cockroaches. Although many other patent requests have been denied — including the preposterous attempt to lay claim to the genetic makeup of traditional basmati rice — major corporations keep filing claims, in part to exhaust the money and time of groups like Greenpeace that oppose them. Indeed, at the moment, Shiva is taking a key role in fighting Monsanto’s recent European patent of a basic strand of Indian wheat called Nap-Hal.

“It’s absurd,” she said. “This wheat is the product of 10,000 years of farming by farmers and 100 years of research by scientists. All Monsanto did was buy the Lever collection of wheat. It picked wheat from the public collection and claimed it invented it.” And the absurdity doesn’t stop there. With the granting of such patents and the wealthy nations’ attempts to make such rights part of trade negotiations, we could one day reach the point where Indian farmers can be sued for planting the wheat that their families have grown for hundreds of years.

This is just one more reason why the Group of 21 — which represents well over half of the world’s population — drove a much fiercer bargain than it had in bygone years. These countries have realized that swallowing easy assurances about free trade or the glories of globalization is to drink from a poisoned chalice.

 

For a taste from that chalice,you need go no farther than Cancún City itself, which is such a perfect example of the cruel divisions of globalized capitalism that the WTO’s decision to meet there seems almost deliberately insolent. Thirty-five years ago it was just a dinky swamp town in the Yucatán. Now, after billions in government development money and foreign investment — the local water company is owned by the nice folks at Enron — it has become a terrifyingly efficient tourist destination that has made a small number of local people very rich, gotten a large number of college students very drunk, and left the majority of its nearly 700,000 residents still struggling to get by. The man who hands you the towels at your hotel can’t afford to eat at the nearby McDonald’s and isn’t permitted to go onto that beach himself — although he stares at it every day and it’s in his own country.

One morning I met up with local journalist Antonio Callejo, author of a sharp investigative book about the state’s corrupt former governor, who’d offered me a tour of the Cancún that the WTO (like most tourists) made a point of not seeing. Heading out past the seemingly inescapable signs of corporate encroachment — the Wal-Mart, the Carrefour, the Sam’s Club right across from an encampment — we soon found ourselves on the road to Merida, where Antonio briefly paused to point out Plaza 21, the local “tolerance zone,” which means exactly what you’d think. Here, at clubs like Samurai Cabaret, those with a few hundred bucks can enjoy lap dances (and more) with tall blondes imported from Eastern Europe. If you have money here, everything is negotiable.