Free seeds or Free trade?

In their urge to please the World Trade Organisation, major multinational corporations such as Monsanto and commodify everything (and anyone?) in the name of that holiest of holy, Free Trade, the Swedish government, through the Ministry of Agriculture, now wishes to impose even stricter regulation on so called "free seeds". The explicit aim, other than simply adopting policies decided in the EU, is to promote agricultural biodiversity by making it easier to sell seeds to "hobby farmers" within the European Union. It's interesting to note that the way to make things easier for "regular people" generally means "getting more restrictions", whereas to make things easier for "corporations" generally means "removing restrictions".

It seems obvious that what is being promoted here is not, in fact, biodiversity but rather trade and profit-making. Of course, it might be argued that free trade and unfettered profit interests would lead to increased biodiversity according to some economic law, following from the internal logic of a free market. I have a couple problems with that assumption.

In this scenario, biodiversity is not considered a goal in its own, it is simply a conditioned goal or a secondary side effect. It means that increasing (or at least not decreasing) biodiversity is worth striving for if, and only if, it can be shown to yield higher profit returns. It might be argued that this ensures increasing (or at least not decreasing) biodiversity, since it is a well-known fact that we do, in fact, need a high degree of biodiversity in order to sustain our (and other) life on Planet Earth. The problem is that biodiversity is, in fact, decreasing and at an alarming rate at that. The only conclusion I can draw from that is that corporate business practice focus only on short-term financial profit, ignoring the long-term negative effects.

A representative of, say, the WTO would probably argue that this is because of regulations, and that an entirely free and unfettered market would solve this. Obviously that won't change the basic underlying premise though. This line of thinking is, primarily, profit-driven rather than need-driven. The idea being that if it is possible to make a profit of something, people as individuals will strive for it. It then follows logically that to satisfy our needs, we need to make those needs profitable.

There is another principle at work here as well, that of people as intrinsically and fundamentally selfish. But people are not selfish by default, we learn to be selfish. By the same token, we can learn to act unselfishly. So why should we strive towards being selfish? The answer, most likely, is that it is a prerequisite for the profit-driven view. It is said that being unselfish doesn't work, and so long as we stay within a profit-driven view this might be true. However, there really is nothing to stop us from shifting to a need-driven view, and an unselfish view of people. Certainly, there will always be selfish individuals, just as there will always be unselfish individuals. The question is which of these do we hold up as an example? What values do we strive for, and what values do we base our financial and political systems on?

Also, the idea of people as selfish and the profit-driven view are closely related to the idea of the individual as the primary unit. In this view, society is simply a collection of individuals, tied together around a (figurative or literal) contract, meant to protect private ownership. Often this ownership follows from the idea that we own our own bodies (and to be fair, this idea can be found in both liberal and socialist views). But the idea of ownership is a cultural convention, one which isn't even found within all human societies. This means that the idea of ownership is a product of human societies, therefore it follows that it cannot be an underlying principle of human societies. Following Hegel, I would also argue that it is impossible to separate the individual from society, neither is primary but rather they are each others prerequisites.

A paradoxical consequence of focusing on (selfish) individuals and (private) ownership, is the oppression of the many at the hands of the few. We see this in todays neoliberal hegemony, and we saw it in the communist dictatorships of yesterday. It follows from the premises and the internal logic of either system - what we get is an ackumulation of wealth at the top, be it in the hands of corporations like Monsanto or the elite within the Communist Party. This is why, to go back to where I started, a supposedly liberal and individualistic doctrine of "free trade" result in more restrictions on "regular people" and fewer restrictions on "corporations".

I would like to address the original question of promoting biodiversity as well. The answer is not to further commodify nature - that's what got us into this mess in the first place. The answer is to shift from profit-driven exploitative economic principles of domination, to need-driven sustainable ecological principles of partnership. We need to strictly regulate corporations such as Monsanto, not the small-scale eco-farmers.