The new enclosures

Climate change is one of the most important enclosures to date, caused by the emission of greenhouse gases due to fossil fuel combustions and deforestation. The atmosphere, which was once a commons everybody could use, has now been appropriated by oil, coal, energy, steel, cement and automobile corporations, to discharge the polluting products generated by their production processes. To this end, they discharge in the atmosphere a quantity of gases greater than what the atmosphere can absorb. The amount of CO2 produced by fossil-fuel energy has deprived human beings, animals and plants of their share of clean air, giving rise to global climate changes for which poor pay the higher price even if least responsible. The market mechanism of CO2 shares, defined by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol – according to which polluters may buy pollution credits from those emitting less CO2 – creates a second level of enclosure of the atmosphere giving for free property rights on the atmosphere freely to those who pollute more than others, such as multinationals and the rich countries of the North.

The loss of biodiversity and the patents of seeds and knowledge necessary for their conservation and improvement are another important case of new enclosures, carried out at the expenses of peasants, natives and local communities, who were their keepers for centuries and millennia. Biodivesity changes and evolves through time: the genetic heritage now existing on Earth is the result of evolutionary processes spanning 3.8 billion years. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, one of the most complete and reliable study of the earth ecosystems published by the World Resources Institute in 2005, claims that human impact has fundamentally modified biodiversity to some extent irreversibly, and mostly in terms of species losses.

In the last few decades the slow decline of biodiversity has become a worrisome trend. The 2008 Living Planet Report compiled by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) indicates that in the last 35 years the world population doubled while animal populations decreased by one third and the areas covered by virgin forests (where most of biodiversity is located) shrank by 50 percent. The WWF report, which covers 1680 animal species, reveals a loss of biodiversity equal to 28 percent, with a peak of 35 percent, in freshwater ecosystems, 44 percent in the dry lands and up to 51 percent in the tropics. FAO estimates confirm that 75 percent of crop varieties are already lost and that out of 30 thousand edible species only 30 contribute to food requirements for 95 percent of the world population. It is therefore possible that thousands of other varieties will be lost in the next few decades.

Patents for seeds and traditional knowledge are the other face of the same coin. One of the most controversial steps of the enclosure process is the Papal Bull emitted in the year 1500, which allowed Cristoforo Colombo to conquer the Americas. The 1995 agreements on international trade – the World Trade Organization (WTO) and Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIP’s) – consider seeds and plants “intellectual property rights”, i.e. a product of the mind, not an important component of Nature. Agreements on international commerce have thus cancelled the common rights of peasants, natives and local communities to plant their seeds, obliging peasants to buy seeds patented by multinationals which demand royalties and forcing Africans with HIV/Aids to buy patented drugs from companies whose products ultimately come from biopiracy.

World hunger is one of the most serious and immoral problems of the last few decades. It has several causes, each one tied to one or more processes of enclosure of a common. First of all, it has to do with land enclosure in the rural economies of the South. Other structural causes are water scarcity, climate change, interferences in hydrological cycles, loss of land fertility, industrial agriculture, feed vs food competition and the monocultures of basic crops (in the South) to serve as fuel for automobiles (in the North). The 2009 FAO Report on world hunger estimates that the hungry are over one thousand million people and that a few millions – the majority of them landless peasants in the South – die from hunger each year, while the number of Northern overweight people in the North increases each year. According to the FAO, the geographical distribution of y is this: 642 million in Asia and the Pacific, 265 million in Sub-Sahara Africa, 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 42 million in the Near East and North Africa, 15 million in the developed countries.

Water privatisation has taken new connotations in the last years and decades, one of which is particularly odious – the construction of mega dams. The phenomenon is not new but is has become more serious after the Second World War thanks to the World Bank’s policy in the field of energy. The World Bank and governments are convinced that large-scale dams are necessary to produce energy and sustain industrial development. But such dams are a serious risk from the point of view of population’s security. They imply heavy and devastating environmental and social costs and the creation of large numbers of refugees for dislocated local people, who are moreover excluded from the political decision to build the dam and from the fruits of its work. The energy produced by the dams is used by big farming and manufacturing corporations, not by the displaced peasants.

The number of dams 15 meters high and above has increased from a little more than 5000 in 1950 to almost 50.000 at the end of last century, most of them located in the South (25 per cent in China). Put under trial since the 1980’s by the international public opinion and by popular movements everywhere, particularly in countries such as India where at the time the mammoth Sardar Samovar Dam was under construction on the Narmada river ((Arundhati Roy, The Greater Common Good, Delhi, IBD, 1999)) their constructions continues although at a lower pace. Part of this trend is evinced in the Three Gorges Dam – called the Great Wall of the 21^st century – built on the Yangtze river in China. Inaugurated in 2006 and not yet finished, this dam is 185 meters high and has a water reservoir 600 km long, the biggest in the world. It has taken 13 years to built at the cost of about 25 thousand million Euro. It has already submerged 13 large cities and 116 urban centres, transforming over one million people in refugees.

The privatisation of the sky is another of the new enclosures. Around Earth there is now a flood of technological tools for telephone, television, computer networks and other means of communication, and by vehicles parking in orbit over people’s heads and by military and civilian airplanes releasing heavy quantities of greenhouse gases. All these activities, sometimes illicit or covered in military secrecy, are a source of great profit for multinationals and governments, using a common good free of charge, such as space at the expense of people’s health and security. Civilian air traffic is an important aspect of this problem, since air transport has grown quickly and it could grow even more with the introduction of biofuels, wrongly considered to emit net zero CO2. This proposition is not true, however, when the entire production cycle of biofuels is taken in consideration – from the cutting of virgin forests to the growth of monocultures of soy beans, sugarcane and palm oil, to the likely additional expansion of air traffic to increasing number of new airports.

The lack of maintenance of the territory produces heavy consequences such as increased desertification and soil erosion, and therefore facilitates so-called natural catastrophes which are not natural but socially determined as in the case of landslides occurring when it rains more than expected. This lack of maintenance aggravates the consequences of natural catastrophes, as in the 2004 Southeast Asia tsunami, where almost 300000 people died, many of which could have been rescued if the sea costs had been protected by mangroves instead of having been built over. Many of the negative consequences of a catastrophe could be avoided or heavily reduced with the appropriate maintenance of a territory to protect the costs, govern rivers and the flux of water, avoid deforestation so that so that agricultural and forest biomass performs its role of countering soil erosion and landslides, and absorbing CO2 and other greenhouse gases. For all these reasons, the lack of maintenance of a territory can be included among the new enclosures, whose effect is to appropriate the means of subsistence belonging to local communities.