Martin Khor: Leading voice of South for equity and justice Vandana Shiv

I first met Martin in the early 1980’s, when I was in Penang, at the invitation of S M Mohamed Idris head of the Consumers Association of Penang (CAP), for a meeting on tropical forests. Mr Idris invited me because of the study (Ecological Audit of Eucalyptus Cultivation, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore) we had done in 1981 on the World Bank Funded Social Forestry project in Karnataka, promoting Eucalyptus monocultures on farms.

Mr Idris had founded many institutions – CAP, Sahabat Alam Malaysia, and later Third World Network – and inspired brilliant young scholars like Martin to return to Malaysia.

By the end of the Tropical Forest meeting, we had launched the World Rainforest Movement to stop the World Bank’s US$8 billion global tropical forestry project which we realised was a deforestation project. That movement continues to work in defence of the world’s forests.

Martin was quick to pick up important emerging issues and throw his weight behind them. He was a brilliant organiser. No issue was too big for him to take on for people’s rights and Third World Rights. Martin thought big and his canvas was big. And we built many movements together on emerging issues of our times.

In 1984, after the violence in the Punjab (India), I had done a study on the Green Revolution in Punjab for the United Nations University for the Conflicts over Resources project of the programme on Peace and Global Transformation, and wrote a book titled “The Violence of the Green Revolution” on the basis of the Punjab study. Martin immediately published it as a Third World Network publication along with Zed Books. This study opened me to the issues of Biotechnology.

In 1987, at a press conference at the UN in Geneva, Chakravarthi Raghavan, Editor of SUNS, woke me to GATT and Intellectual Property Negotiations in the Uruguay Round of GATT trade negotiations. After Raghavan’s book, “Recolonisation: GATT, the Uruguay Round and the Third World,” was published by TWN and Zed Books in 1990, we started to connect issues of sustainability, trade and the environment. The TWN emerged as the leading voice of the Third World on issues of trade. And Martin was clearly the leader on trade issues on the global stage.

In 1991, when the Dunkel Draft Text was leaked (we jokingly called it DDT in India), we started to organise to defend the rights of the Third World. My focus was on Seeds and Intellectual Property. Others focussed on patents on medicine including the Working Group on Patent Laws in India. And we made a difference to national laws and the paradigm of intellectual property.

During a Penang Conference on Alternative Approaches to Science and Technology we drafted a declaration on the new Biotechnologies. We went to the UN Conference on Environment and Development as the only group that connected global environmental issues of climate change and Biodiversity erosion with trade issues, GATT & Intellectual Property. We were therefore able to preempt the corporate re-colonisation agenda that Raghavan had warned us about, and succeeded in introducing articles in the Climate Convention and the Biodiversity Convention that protected the integrity of the planet, diverse species, diverse cultures and the Third World.

Biodiversity, Biosafety and Biotechnology emerged as the big issue that we raised in the process leading to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development and the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. At many Prep Coms for the Rio Summit, we worked to ensure Article 19.3 on Biosafety was introduced in the Convention on Biological Diversity. I was later appointed as an expert in the group framing the Biosafety protocol which later became the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, the international law that shaped national laws to protect Biodiversity and Public Health in the age on Genetic Engineering.

When GMOs started to be commercially released, at my suggestion, Martin worked to bring the world’s activists and scientists together to evolve a long term strategy to protect biodiversity, people’s heath, and farmers livelihoods and rights.

I realised that activism without science can be attacked, and science disconnected from activism lies hidden in publications.

Martin came to Schumacher College in Totnes (UK) where I was teaching a course , and we got together with Brian Goodwin, a leading biologist, and Tewolde Egziabher, the lead negotiator for Africa at the CBD negotiations, and planned the major conference, held in Penang (1994) on “Beyond Reductionist Biology”, on Biotechnology and Biosafety, which changed the nature of the debate and gave new strength to the movements and scientists.

Since then the independent science of living systems has been pitted against corporate Public Relations presented as science. We did change the course of history from the linear corporate path of continued colonisation, to the now colonisation of life itself.

Martin and I were both founding Board members of the “International Forum on Globalisation, “a global network of intellectuals and activists,” in 1999 at the time of the WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle. Martin delivered the keynote speech at the IFG meet and its mega teach-in. (See (https://ratical.org/co-globalize/ifg112699MK.html). The WTO Seattle Conference collapsed.

But it was not just global issues that preoccupied Martin. When there was a plan to destroy Penang Hill, the watershed of Penang, at the instance of Martin and Mr Idris, I did an ecological impact study, that resulted in stopping the Penang Hill project.\Mr Idris is no more with us. Nor is Martin. But they will stay with us as inspirations.

And when the history of our times is written, Martin’s contributions to struggles for justice and sustainability, from the local to the global levels, will stand out.

(Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, and anti-globalization author.)