The global political agenda is steaming ahead, driven by corporate interests, while social movements and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are being left in the dust.

And then there’s the U.N. and their bloody summits…

That was the harsh assessment Canadian biotechnology expert Pat Mooney delivered to a World Social Forum panel “Life after Johannesburg.”

Mooney, who says he spent the last year travelling from U.N. summit to U.N. summit, none of which had any appreciable result, has a simple message for the U.N. The short version: “No more summits.” The long? “No more fucking summits.”

Addressing himself to NGOs and civil society movements, he was almost as blunt: “It is time we stop being the entertainment at U.N. meetings.”

The process of co-optation of civil society by the U.N., he said, goes back more than thirty years to the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Environment. That was the same year that a hostage-taking incident in that city gave rise to the term “Stockholm syndrome.” Civil society has been taken hostage by the U.N. agenda, said Mooney, and is suffering from the Stockholm syndrome.

Meanwhile, he said, industry has moved far beyond the U.N. agenda. While civil society and the U.N. discuss TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights), multinationals have started to discard patent protection in favour of less costly means of protecting intellectual capital, such as modified contract laws and new technologies for monitoring use of technology.

While civil society continues to argue that there should be no patents on life forms, industry has moved on to patent elements in the periodic table. “Transgenics” — the use of genes from specific plants and animals in newly-developed species — is becoming less relevant now that science is learning how to rearrange genes within strands of DNA.

And, he says, biotechnology itself is being replaced by nanotechnology, a field that could completely change the global economy within only a few years and that brings with it new dangers and new mechanisms of corporate control. Reading the list of patent holders in nanotechnology, he said, is like reading the Fortune 500, except that the first and third places on the list are held by the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army.

“We’ve got to get ahead of the U.N. agenda,” he said. “The issues we’re dealing with are generational issues. They are not going to be resolved in one or two years.”