Vandana Shiva talking:
For 30 years now, we’ve been protecting biodiversity, defending seed sovereignty, in the face of patenting of seed, ownership of seed, the declaration that seed is a creation of corporations, who can then collect royalties, pushing our farmers into debt, and then from debt into suicide. In these 30 years, what we found is intensifying biodiversity, working with nature rather than against her, we can double food production per acre. But we’ve to measure food production as food, as nourishment, as nutrition per acre. What’s normally measured is yield, which then goes off to drive cars as biofuel, goes to torture animals as animal feed. Only 10 percent of the corn and soya, largely genetically modified, is eaten by human beings. The rest is all for this corporate infrastructure. All this would collapse the day the subsidies, which is public money, stops allowing an absolutely nonviable system to be kept afloat. In agriculture, we are talking about $400 billion of subsidies to keep a wasteful agriculture going, that’s fossil fuel-intensive, chemical-intensive, toxic-intensive, and uses 10 times more inputs than it produces. It’s a net negative energy system. So we assessed the productivity of small farms and biodiverse farms, and found that we can feed two Indias. If this was done globally, we can feed two planets. Fourteen billion can be fed comfortably, while we protect species, while we regenerate soil, while through regenerating soil, we get greenhouses back out of the atmosphere, into the soil, we rejuvenate water resources, and we put an end to this addiction to fossil fuel.
We have just done a new book. It will be released by our agriculture minister on the 1st of October. We call it Wealth per Acre, because whether it’s the energy system or the food system, there’s a cheating going on about contribution to growth, about economic development. And in this, we’ve counted both the externalities, the negative externalities of the industrial system, the corporate-controlled system—and it’s trillions and trillions of dollars—and the positive externalities. When we work for the Earth, with the Earth, people become co-creators and co-producers. The most important issue about energy is we’ve forgotten the energy of people, both the political energy to bring change, the economic energy to produce sustainability. And the real sovereignty question is seed sovereignty, food sovereignty and the sovereignty of people and their knowledge and their capacity. I think this game that’s being played, where corporations are driving the extraction of resources of the planet, they’re shaping the economy, they’ve taken over the U.N. deals to make that another subsidy for themselves. And then, the countries that created the U.N. framework on climate change, like India or Canada, are now told, “You don’t be there. We’ll take over. And we’ll do a little bashing of each. You blame us, we blame you. And we continue with this fake national sovereignty, which has been destroyed by corporate globalization.” That’s why we must put the costs, responsibility, blame with the corporations which are cause—which are basically perpetuating a war against the planet.
We realized, with the Supercyclone in Orissa in 1999, when we were doing rehabilitation work—on the one hand, distributing salt-tolerant seeds that we had saved in our community seed banks, so that farmers could sow and have a crop. And then the peasants showed us these sacks and said, “They’re giving us stuff that’s inedible. Please get us rice. We are rice-eating people.” We saw the sacks. They had a U.S. handshake. They were a corn-soya blend. If it’s corn and soya, I knew even in 1999 it’s going to be genetically modified. We had it tested. It was genetically engineered. I wrote to our Health Ministry, which then basically said, “We don’t have an approval.” And this was just brought in in the name of an emergency. I was attacked, saying I’m letting people starve. But rice-eating people want rice, not a bad, inedible corn-soya blend.
So, what’s my critique of genetic engineering? It actually builds on my experience of what I saw with the Green Revolution in Punjab. There were banners in the climate march where the Sikhs were saying, “Our land of five rivers has been destroyed.” That’s what Punjab means, the land of five rivers. Abundant water, fertile soils. They took this chemical agriculture, called it the “Green Revolution”—not green, not revolutionary—built it all on subsidies, and then the subsidies started to get withdrawn. And the negative economy that industrial chemical agriculture is started to hurt the people. The peasants rose. You had a movement, that was called an extremist movement. The army was sent to Punjab. Indira Gandhi was assassinated as a consequence of the army going to the sacred shrine of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple. I realized then that the myth of the Green Revolution, where Borlaug is made a saint—Borlaug, the man who came from the DuPont defense labs—to re-engineer plants so that they could take up more chemicals, because that was the block. It was basically to sell chemicals. And they had to modify the plant and make them dwarves. But it needed more water, 10 times more water, so the huge amount of irrigation, and, of course, converting a biodiverse system of 250 species into a monoculture of rice in one season and a monoculture of wheat in the other season.
So then, when they come with the next miracle of genetic engineering, which is often called the Second Green Revolution—and there’s a huge push on Africa in the name of the Alliance of the Green Revolution in Africa, through the Gates Foundation—I know three things. One, that this is part of the industrial agriculture system, so all the problems of industrial agriculture will intensify, whether it’s emissions of greenhouse gases, the 40 percent problem of climate change, whether it’s abuse of water, 75 percent of the problem of water, the soil degradation, and the species extinction, because this model of agriculture can only be a monoculture, and the U.N. has recognized that we’ve lost 75 percent species due to monocultures in industrial farming.
But there is a new problem that is over and above the typical Green Revolution industrial agriculture. And that is that genetic engineering, unlike all conventional breeding, is producing species with traits that don’t belong to that species. Wheat breeds with wheat, rice breeds with rice. For the first time, we can put into rice or cotton a Bt toxin from a soil organism.
Bt is a soil organism name called Bacillus thuringiensis. And so, you have Bt crops and HT crops. The Bt crops have a toxin. They say it will control pests. The herbicide-tolerant crops, like the Roundup Ready crops, are supposed to control weeds. Interestingly in the U.S., the genetically engineered Bt crops have been approved as a pesticide, not as a food. And as a pesticide, I think we need to recognize that the same industry are producing a pesticide. They should be honestly called pesticide-producing plants. Now, it’s the same industry that created the chemicals for the concentration camps and the wars, that then produced agrichemicals that came from inside, that’s now doing genetic engineering to produce the poisons from inside the plant. It’s a continuum. That’s why I call it a continuum of war. But it’s such an unreliable technology. Even though it is working with the genes, it’s not accurate at the genetic level. So, most of the time, when you shoot—the only way to introduce a bacterial gene into a plant cell is through shooting with a gene gun or infecting with a plant cancer, called agrobacteria. When you shoot with a gene gun, you don’t know if the cell has absorbed it. So you add another gene, which is an antibiotic resistance marker. You could have TB, and there’s a concanamycin-resistant gene. What is the purpose? To pour an antibiotic on a Petri dish to decide which cell absorbed the new gene and which cell didn’t. But in the process, forever in our food system, we are putting in antibiotic resistance, and we know there’s horizontal gene transfer in our gut. So, the bacteria in our gut could pick up this, and then we can’t be treated. As it is, antibiotic resistance is a major problem.
But that’s not all. There’s a third gene added, and that gene is a viral promoter that pumps up the expression. That viral promoter also hybridizes with viruses in our gut. A lot of people said the SARS epidemic that spread from China was superviruses that had come out of hybridization, and then they leaped species’ boundaries.
And then, of course, the most important issue is: Why is all this being done? It’s insane. It’s not controlling pests. It’s not controlling weeds. We’ve got superpests and superweeds. Why would humanity take a technology with externalities and risks, and deploy it worldwide, twisting every law, subverting every democracy, and destroying every sovereignty? Because through genetic engineering, the entry is made to patent life forms and seeds. And it’s the royalties that come, the rent collection that come, from the process by which seed renews itself, which now is made to look like a manufacturing process. And thank goodness my country put in a clause that says, “But biological systems don’t get invented. They are not an invention, therefore not patentable.” In this country, there has never been a discussion in Congress about what’s patentable and what’s not patentable. There’s never been an ethical discussion about all this. And the fact that 300,000—nearly 300, it was 294, when the government released the data for last year, and the farmer suicide data is official statistics, it comes from the government. Most of the suicides in the cotton belt, 95 percent of the cotton is controlled for royalty collection by one company. And we are talking of royalty extraction that is killing farmers.
That company is Monsanto. Monsanto is 98 percent of the GM problem. Monsanto has bought up the Climate Corporation, which is the biggest climate data corporation, hoping that they’ll sell climate data to farmers and say, you know, “The climate will be like this, so buy this seed,” from which they’ll collect royalty. More interestingly, as the work on the soil starts to grow where we realize 100 percent, they’re trying to take control of the soil. And they bought up the biggest soil data corporation. They’ve, of course, bought up the biggest bee research institute of this country. And now they’re giving a donation to the climate, to the Global Clinton Initiative, to protect the bees. Bt toxins in the corn kill bees through the pollen. There was a Cornell study done on the monarch butterfly, that the larvae died when they ate Bt toxin. We know that Roundup spraying is killing the milkweed, which is the single biggest habitat for the monarch butterfly. So we are losing bees, we’re losing butterflies, which are the pollinators accounting for one-third of the food production, $169 billion worth of contribution through ecological system. So we are talking about a total control system, beginning with owning the seed, owning climate data, owning soil data, owning research, owning our governments. That’s why this climate march was so important, to make us realize that people need to act before we have a dictatorship to extinction.
I just want to mention that so many people who are pushing GMOs on the world themselves eat organic food. So the test should be something that’s been in every ethical system: Do unto others as you would have them do to you. So if you want to eat organic, let the Africans not be forced to eat GMOs. If you want to have renewable energy and a solar panel on your rooftop, let the world have that advantage.
And I want to make just one little observation. Here, we’re all Indians. How is Winona an Indian? Because Christopher Columbus thought he had discovered America, but he was coming for the spices to India.
And how are the Indians in South Africa? Because they were taken as indentured labor. And the deep connection on issue of freedom that Des just mentioned is Gandhi learned his freedom struggles in South Africa trying to fight the early stages of an apartheid regime based on separation. And he, right in Desmond’s town, the Phoenix Farm, is what was an inspiration to create communities that bring freedom, prosperity and sustainability. Those were real experiments more than a hundred years ago. And at the time, in 1906, in a nonviolent way, he said, “I will not cooperate with unjust law.” It was 9/11, the other 9/11, which was based not on the war mentality, what is based on love and the fierce resistance that comes from the deepest love. And that’s the other connection that we have. And there’s so much that connected at the climate march, where there was no movement that wasn’t present. Everything was connected, because it was about the planet.
keep the coal in the hole, the oil in the soil
the beauty of it is, so much of the thinking is in terms of the old Newtonian kind of mechanistic physics. The plants are the most important process through which photosynthesis allows carbon dioxide to be pulled out of the air, and putting carbon into the soil and giving us oxygen. That miracle reverses entropy. It’s the only process by which we can avoid the waste of energy. That is the process by which we not just put carbon back, we rejuvenate the carbon. And as all our data, including Navdanya’s research on comparison of chemically farmed soils and organic soils, is we have the possibility of taking out more than 110 percent of the greenhouse gases, because not only is the biological, ecological process recycling carbon, which it should be doing, more importantly, we’re making a shift in our economic system, we’re making a shift in our political system, so that this inevitability of the extreme extractive industry is put aside, because we can grow food without fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers, we can have renewable energies, we need local living economies rather than this globalized economy controlled by corporations, and more jobs, more welfare, more democracy. Everything hangs together in a beautiful way. That’s what I’ve called “Earth democracy.” And I really feel the currents, that was on the streets of New York during the climate march, is the currents that is building in the minds and hearts of people, and that’s going to be the unstoppable transition to a world which is not a scorched Earth, but an abundant, beautiful, providing Earth, of which we are members of the Earth family.
— source democracynow.org
Vandana Shiva, executive director of the Navdanya Trust in India, which promotes biodiversity conservation, organic farming, the rights of farmers, and the process of seed saving. She is the author of many books, including Making Peace with the Earth and Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis.