Transformation of Culture - Indigenous Resistance

Indigenous Resistance

In many cases, however, indigenous people have not passively acceded to the penetration of extractive capitalism into their communities. The following section thus not only reviews how globalization impacts indigenous people, but also describes how indigenous communities resist or negotiate to defend their territories and cultural integrity.

Economic policy, when set on a global scale, can undermine the political gains that indigenous peoples may have made within the legal systems of nation states. Victor Menotti of the International Forum on Globalization has written of how World Trade Organization(WTO) authority is diminishing the sovereignty of nation states over their land, water, genetic material, and public services. The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), for example, favors the privatization of systems (such as those for water distribution) that serve the general public but without an equitable provision of services that is often at odds with maximization of profits. Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed as a condition of loans from global finance agencies such as the World Bank also often mandate privatization. The effects on indigenous peoples and other poor people can be devastating. World Bank-mandated SAP privatization of coal mining in the Indian state of Orissa in the 1990s, for example, resulted in contamination of rivers, increased rates of fluoride poisoning, infections, and cancer, displacement of towns, and power rates that increased by 500%. The World Bank and IMF have also made water privatization a prior condition for granting loans and debt reductions. Structural adjustment programs also weaken national-level environmental and labor laws that indigenous communities may have relied on in previous struggles to maintain control over territory and resources.

Other new international trade rules also negatively impact indigenous peoples. For example, Article I of GATT prohibits national governments from restricting imported goods specifically from any single other WTO member nation. This article thus makes it impossible for national governments to restrict imports from other WTO countries with questionable human rights, labor, or environmental records and thus disallows a potential safeguard for the rights of indigenous peoples. Article III of the GATT, together with its corollary Articles V and XI, requires governments to treat all imports "no less favorably" than locally produced goods and bans restrictions on imports. Victor Menotti writes of how this feature of GATT "prevents any government from favoring or protecting it own local industries, or farmers or cultures that might otherwise by overwhelmed by globe-spanning corporations bringing vast amounts of cheap imports that make local or indigenous economies non-viable". Similar "free trade" policies under NAFTA have already been demonstrated to undercut the livelihoods of small-scale Mexican corn farmers, many of whom are indigenous, who are unable to compete with cheap, mass-produced grain from the US.