Veteran denies campaign waning

Dr Shiva is rated as one of the five most powerful people in Asia

Veteran anti-globalisation campaigner Dr Vandana Shiva has said her movement is still very strong, despite much-reduced numbers of protesters at the latest G8 summit in Evian.

In comparison to demonstrations at G8 and World Trade Organization meetings in Genoa and Seattle in recent years, what protests there were in Evian were somewhat muted.

But Dr Shiva, a highly prominent Indian activist and ranked by the Hong Kong-based Asiaweek magazine as one of the five most powerful people in Asia, said that demonstrations opposing the war in Iraq had shown there was still great strength of feeling against globalisation.

"The movement has in fact gained momentum," she told BBC World Service's Agenda programme.

"If you recognise that globalisation post-Seattle is globalisation with militaristic backing, the kind of military engagement that we are seeing around the world is really the next phase of the globalisation agenda."

Alternatives

Dr Shiva, a physicist by profession, added that if anti-war marches were taken into account then there were more protesters than ever before.

"Millions were out on the streets in every country on 15 February - much, much bigger than anything that happened in Seattle or Genoa - and the concerns were the same," she said.

And she pointed out that often anti-globalisation protests do not receive coverage because they are held in third world countries, adding that half a million had attended one such protest in Bangalore in 1991.

Critics of Dr Shiva suggest that such movements offer few, if any, concrete alternatives, focusing only on stopping current policy.

But Dr Shiva said this was not so.

Protester numbers have dropped since Genoa

"These movements are not first anti - they are pro certain things," she said.

"They are first pro the rights of people - to have a livelihood, to have security, the rights of cultures to evolve on their own terms, the right of people to have democratic government and not government locked into decisions set by the World Bank and IMF.

"These are very fundamental issues about the human condition."

In recent times other leading campaigners have been anxious to avoid the term anti-globalisation for precisely this reason.

One, George Monbiot, has called for the term to be dropped altogether as it is "too fraught with baggage".

But questions have been raised as to what it should be replaced with, and whether such a broad ideology could receive meaningful support.

Dr Shiva said that she defined her work as part of an "Earth democracy movement".

"None of these movements exist only at one level. They're local, simultaneously national, simultaneously global," she said.

"When I see my engagement at these three levels of Earth democracy, I also see it as making a difference."

'Dying democracy'

She added that she felt "Earth democracy" was important in the face of what she said was the control of government by commercial organisations.

"Democracies are dying in the third world because our agendas are imposed by the global institutions," she contended.

"They are dying in the north as leaders march off to wars which their people don't want.

"Instead of governments being for the people, of the people and by the people, you've got governments of the corporations by the corporations."

Dr Shiva says anti-war marches show strength of feeling against globalisation

The anti-globalisation agenda has also come under scrutiny for its emphasis on the problems of free trade, with both Oxfam and former British International Development Secretary Claire Short publicly stressing that farmers should not be denied access to markets.

But Dr Shiva said that, because large companies are able to demand lower prices from their producers, the current system of free trade was akin to slavery.

"Access to markets is a wonderful concept, but those who blindly support that market access through free trade regimes and globalisation agendas forget that the processes through which market access happens is by a slavery system institutionalised," she said.

"It is the same as when the British forced Indian peasants to grow indigo.

"We basically say rewrite the rules of free trade."