While Biopiracy was more theoretical, in this work Shiva takes us right into the homes and fields of the poor people of India. The picture that Shiva paints is a bleak one. As corporate agribusiness becomes more and more centralized, it becomes sharply apparent that genetic engineering is the technology of absolute control. Not only does the industry refuse to label genetically engineered produce in the United Sates, it punishes severely those who label their products as GE free. Centralized control of agribusiness has always spelled trouble for American farmers.
Genetic engineering is only the most recent incarnation of corporate control over agriculture.
With the rise of biotechnology, we are seeing the virtual return of tenant farming at its most basic, most insidious level. In America in the 1930's, an ecological disaster was propagated by profit-driven agricultural practices. Landowners forced the farmers to grow soil-depleting cotton year after year, despite farmers' warnings that to stop crop rotation would be devastating to the soil. In the farm crisis of the 1980's, agribusinesses effectively maintained their monopoly over farmers by selling seed, fertilizer and pesticides at inflated prices which drove farmers deeper and deeper into debt. Thousands of farmers lost their land, and the control of the banks became near-absolute.