Don’t allow ‘daily bread’ to become a commodity, churches challenged

by Noel Bruyns 

ACCRA, Ghana — Vandana Shiva, a prominent Indian physicist, ecologist, activist, and author of about 20 books, challenged delegates at a worldwide Protestant gathering in Ghana when she said economic reform had taken on a quasi-religious connotation.

      “The word ‘reform’ has been hijacked,” Shiva told 400 delegates at the 24th General Council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) meeting in the Ghanaian capital on July 30.  

      “Reform is no longer seen in any other place except as economic reform that is the package driven either by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund or by the World Trade Organization,” she said in her keynote address to the July 30-Aug. 12 gathering. 

      An unjust economic system which professed to be reforming the world was in fact destroying it and extinguishing “life in fullness,” she said in a reference to the theme of the church gathering, “That all may have life in fullness” (John 10:10). 

      Her message chimed in with a controversial and potentially divisive issue facing the delegates at the WARC meeting — whether the present world economic system should be rejected as sinful and heretical, as the Reformed alliance did two decades ago when it rejected the South African apartheid system. 

      Some churches are calling for a similar denunciation of the global economic system, but the issue has already created rifts between churches with different understandings of what globalization means. 

      “The right to water, food, work and livelihood — that’s an interference with free trade,” and life was not allowed to unfold in nature, Shiva said. “All kinds of rules have been created that very subtly are trying to define where creation does happen — not from the Creator. It happens in the stock market. 

      “The more life is killed, the more rivers poisoned, the more women are uprooted from productive agricultural activity, the more poisons are spread on the planet, the more growth supposedly is taking place,” Shiva said. “I think it is time for the churches to take this head-on.” 

      Shiva directs the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy. Her most recent books are Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge and Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. In India, she has established a grassroots movement for biodiversity conservation and farmers’ rights. 

       In her speech, Shiva also attacked rich multinationals and individuals from the North who would not share patent rights on life-giving drugs, or took out patent rights on traditional resources such as plants or seeds with medicinal properties, depriving grassroots communities of a livelihood. 

      “I hope the churches will join in the movements of no-patents-on-life,” she said, “because I’m sure you don’t want your wonderful prayer, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ to become a patent on life!”  

      Stories from the World Alliance of Reformed Churches about the 24th general council may be found on the WARC Web site: www.warc.ch/24gc.