THUS Magazine

Somali pirate tooled up like a UK rail ticket inspector

Pirates are suddenly everywhere: Indian Navy sinks Pirate Ship, Somali Pirates Hijack Saudi Oil Tanker: Cadbury’s Old Jamaica chocolate bar futures are set to surge. Why the sudden interest? Piracy is not new. Nor is this revival of interest so ephemeral either. We have had quite a few Pirates of the Caribbean to contend with recently. We have software piracy as well as bio-piracy. What do all pirates have in common? Well, they all exist on a frontier that is being enclosed. As Lord Cutler Becket answered in ‘Pirates of the Caribbean 2‘: “Freedom. Jack Sparrow is a dying breed. The world is shrinking; the blank pages of the map filled in.”

The oceans have a special place in the imagination of a world of states. They are places in between, with a sort of lawlessness that is gradually being enclosed. The Arctic and Antarctic enjoy a similar legal status and also current fate – look at the rush for the mineral rights below the northern melting ice. Markets are in-between spaces (hence perhaps Monty Python’s Corporate Pirates sketch in ‘The Meaning of Life’), regulated as loosely as the oceans. However, they are now also facing regulation and enclosure.

But as bio-piracy illustrates, this enclosure also means that things that were once common property are being placed under private or state control. This is a bit like the process of enclosure in England between 1760 and 1820, where common lands were confiscated and people were driven from the countryside. Indeed this is the pattern with the globalisation and mechanisation of agriculture in India, although sadly the booming service and IT sectors seem not to be absorbing the excess labor as fast as it is being generated. With 50% of people effectively outside the cash economy (on below a dollar-a-day) and with the commons that these people rely upon being taken away, we face an ideological crisis.

We claim that this enclosure, within an increasingly regulated market economy framework, will make people rich. That is, to guarantee access to the horn of plenty, as a Global Consumer in a Global Economy. But the numbers say otherwise. At current levels of inequality, it takes 15 planets to lift everyone out of poverty. So the private tradeable rights that this current enclosure is being built upon will guarantee misery, if not mass poorslaughter. This raises the question of equality. If we are all humans, increasingly enclosed on one planet, increasingly under one rule, what does it mean to be a global citizen?

One glaring common denominator defines us all: We all have a footprint, we all have a niche, a space that we subsist from on this planet. Our right to life is unavoidably based on our right to livelihood. This in turn is based on our footprint. But while all men are born equal, many of us are born with enormous feet. American feet are 20 times bigger than Bangladeshi. These footprints are embodied by the Saudi Oil Tanker that the somali pirates took. Looking at this way, it is not clear who the pirates really are: who is setting sail to loot the riches of the world?

So perhaps the way out of an Age of Piracy is the idea of equal footprints. The world’s most popular response plan (amongst governments) to climate change, is Contraction and Convergence, which is based on equal entitlements to the carbon sink. But since we face enclosure and resource crunches on all fronts, why not generalise this idea? How about “We are all born equal, and with an equal entitlement to a footprint?” This would give a rights-based framework for adapting to climate change, and could move the whole ailing International Development industry out of a Victorian philanthropy model, into a modern rights-based welfare concept. If we want to stop being pirates, perhaps we should start by keeping our feet on the ground.