ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 shows how the life and value of living beings has been reframed in recent decades in global political conventions. As were plants, animals used to be valuable as far as they could produce or provide physical goods or labour to humans. Today all living beings are seen as fleshly ‘function libraries’ for valuable jobs (immunity, chemical secretion, greater productivity, etc.) easily accessed via bio-informatics and to be appropriated and used for new organisms and purposes. These ideas are codified in the widely recognised Convention on Biological Diversity and Nagoya Protocol, signed by most countries in the world. Together, these global conventions have created a new and globally binding regime for ‘labour contracts’ affecting all (non-human) living beings. The chapter again foregrounds how today’s nature and non-human life are reduced to their coding components, such as ‘genetic resources’ to be globally indexed, stored, and ultimately put to work for the desired ends. In addition, however, it pinpoints how territorial sovereignty is performed in the context of these powerful global forces that are at play in transforming the materiality and information of genetic resources into objects of a new global nature politics.
