Whether someone is a "winner" or a "loser" in the biotechnology race depends on where she or he is in a web of both social relations and ecosystems. Some will be relieved of pain and suffering through medical biotechnology; others will have pain and suffering thrust upon them in the form of disruptive industrialized agriculture. Some will reap huge profits; others will starve and die.

What should be clear is the direction in which biotechnology is evolving. It bears all the hallmarks of neo-liberalism. It permits use of new resources and expansion of markets--"growth." It is capital-intensive and cuts costs, even at the expense of livelihoods. It assists the restructuring of industrial production and of the work place--it is "dynamic." However, we should not let ourselves be beguiled by the robust logic of neo-liberal model, so that we become economically reductionistic in our determination of who the winners and losers in the "game" are.

Of great significance, Shiva (1991) has argued that the perpetual-growth model of the economy necessarily has no respect for ecology. In its relentless pursuit of profit, it must commoditize everything it encounters. This means that what was once self-sustaining and self-reproducing--life itself--must be made contingent on the economy's form of production. It also means that what was once unique and diverse, must be made uniform and widely distributed. "Commodity diversification," she warns, should never be confused with biological diversity.

Karl Marx, who had a few things to say about the "world market," wrote of the "festishism of commodities": the pervasive inability to see social and productive relations in all the glamour of the marketplace. We should harken, since the WTO and other tools of global capital are expressly instituting commodity fetishism: The GATT 1994, explicitly separates "like products" from the means by which they are produced. We can easily be deluded into thinking that a rose is just a rose, be it genetically engineered or not.

We should also recognize that the "rules" of neo-liberalism are meant mainly for the weak, and that the rich nations feel free to break them when they see an advantage in doing so. The U.S., for example, currently has the greatest number of "unfair trade" complaints lodged against it through the WTO (WTO 1995). Cooperation among economic competitors extends only as far as the bottom line.

Recommendation

Randy David, professor of Third World Studies at the University of the Philippines, has some advice:

"We are now confronted with Western fundamentalism. Do we need an alternative faith to deal with it?... If you are an activist, confronted by a powerful state, supported in turn by a world system that appears almost invincible, you have no choice but to operate in the sphere over which you have some control. Think globally, act locally has a powerful resonance in the Third World. While you operate act the micro-level, you also have to think of the macro-forms, local, regional, national, global" (in Seabrook 1993: 229).