Indian View of Globalization: an Analysis of the Bioethical Ideas of Vandana Shiva

Abstract

The article analyzes the views of Vandana Shiva, an Indian researcher, philosopher and prominent social and political figure, who is critical of the modern processes of globalization. Shiva insists that for countries of the Third World, globalization is unfair and contrasts it with alter-globalism. In its analysis of the situation, it relies on a bioethical tradition associated with the name of Van Potter, and widely uses the views of the classics of Indian social and political thought. For Shiva, bioethics is the science of survival, which expresses the interests of the masses and allows one to resist the intervention of global Western capitalism and its immediate agents — transnational corporations. In her scientific works, she shows what forms this intervention takes during history and very critically evaluates international development programs for India and other developing countries. Shiva focuses on the problems of using moist tropical forests, modernizing agriculture, the use of biotechnology. From her point of view, the development programs that are imposed on India by international organizations do not benefit it. They neglect local cultural traditions of using natural resources — forest, land, water, seeds, which, on the contrary, are an example of the developed ecological thinking of the peoples of the Third World. As before, the capitalist West continues to impose India on its economic, technical and cultural backwardness, while at the same time plundering its natural resources and causing irreparable damage to its biodiversity. Recently, this robbery took sophisticated forms related to the use of patents and the sale of genetically modified seeds. Shiva calls them biopiracy. Participating in the fight against this phenomenon, she created the Navdanya Foundation, which became an organizational, educational and resource center for resisting the biopiracy of transnational corporations.