The Enclosure of the Commons

[Orwellian_Ghost]

The destruction of commons was essential for the industrial revolution, to provide a supply of natural resources for raw material to industry. A life-support system can be shared, it cannot be owned as private property or exploited for private profit. The commons, therefore, had to be privatised, and people's sustenance base in these commons had to be appropriated, to feed the engine of industrial progress and capital accumulation.

The enclosure of the commons has been called the revolution of the rich against the poor. However, enclosures are not just a historical episode that occurred in 16th century in England. The enclosure of the commons can be a guiding metaphor for understanding conflicts being generated by the expansion of IPR systems to biodiversity.

The policy of deforestation and the enclosure of commons which started in England, was later replicated in the colonies in India. The first Indian Forest Act was passed in 1865 by the Supreme Legislative Council, which authorised the government to declare forests and wastelands ('benap' or unmeasured lands) as reserved forests. The introduction of this legislation marks the beginning of what is called the 'scientific management' of forests; it amounted basically to the formalisation of the erosion both of forests and of the rights of local people to forest produce. Though the forests were converted into state property, forest reservation was in fact an enclosure because it converted a common resource into a commercial one. The state merely mediated in the privatisation.

In the colonial period peasants were forced to grow indigo instead of food, salt was taxed to provide revenues for the British military, and meanwhile, forests were being enclosed to transform them into state monopolies for commercial exploitation. In the rural areas, the effects on the peasants were the gradual erosion of usufruct rights (nistar rights) of access, of food, fuel, and livestock grazing from the community's common lands. The marginalisation of peasant communities' rights over their forests, sacred groves and 'wastelands' has been the prime cause of their impoverishment.



http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/com-cn.htm