The impact of biotechnology, intellectual property rights and NAFTA on selected economies of the Americas

This thesis engages with contemporary transnationalisation of the Americas. As such, the work brings together a number of related phenomena for examination. Specifically, the study looks at how mechanisms such as NAFTA, biotechnology and intellectual property rights operate on behalf of international capital to pry open economies in the Americas. The work focuses on selected economies to draw attention to bow appropriation of the resources of specific countries is being mediated through these instruments. Through an analysis of events occurring primarily in the South and in the South of the North, I call attention to distinct eventualities in all countries of the Americas. The central argument of the thesis is that NAFTA aims to accelerate uncontested access to the resources of the South. NAFTA seeks to transform the Americas into a vast trade zone to bolster USA hegemony. Using access to its markets as a bargaining tool, the USA has mandated that indebted countries of the South change their constitutions as a pre-condition for accession into NAFTA. These changes take it "legal" for transnationals (TNCs) to acquire large tracts of land in the South. Some of these tracts have been traditionally held and controlled by Indigenous Nations. How this transformation in land ownership is impacting on Indigenous Peoples is evidenced by the events in Chiapas, Mexico. The NAFTA agenda endows TNCs with a "corporate bill of rights". Indeed, the adoption of intellectual property rights (a concept of ownership pioneered by some of the most powerful transnationals in the USA) by economies in the Americas, illustrates this. Intellectual property rights allow for corporate ownership of the resources of the South. How this construct is being applied to claim and commercialise the genetic resources of Indigenous Nations is scrutinised within this study. The South has been forced by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (WB/IMF) to adopt biotechnology as the new paradigm of development. Biotechnology exhibits linkages with eugenics and the social control of the oppressed and "unfit". Further, the genetic paradigm, resting on the mythology of "engineering" as opposed to the more accurate tinkering, has been exposed as being flawed, imprecise and unpredictable. Yet, the "hoax" of the promise of biotechnology continues to be thrust on the South in the latest scheme to heighten and maintain the tremendous drain of resources from South to North, perhaps, in a calculated move to, in this instance, create surplus populations which may have to be "policed" through the new triangle of authority emerging between the WB/IMF and the World Trade Organisation. Biotechnology offers the promise of tremendous profits to TNCs. Moreover, biotechnology has created the possibility for TNCs to colonise elemental areas governing the survival of community--food, water and life, itself. Coincidentally, as TNCs ransack and appropriate medicines from the forests, water and food security in the South become remote in degrading environments. NAFTA is a project of conquest and territorial control. Initially, the resources of Indigenous Nations and countries of the South are the targets. To assist this realisation, further colonisation of Canada is being achieved through corporate capital domiciled in the USA. How deeper colonisation of Canada is crucial to resource appropriation in the Americas is considered in some detail within this project which engages with the agenda of the Agreement for the Americas.