Dr Vandana Shiva - How to achieve sustainable food production for increased profit and well-being

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental thinker, activist, physicist, feminist, philosopher of science, writer and science policy advocate. In 1993 she was the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, commonly known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”, and in 2010 Forbes Magazine identified Dr. Shiva as one of the Seven Most Powerful Women on the Globe. During her keynote address at the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont’s 35th annual winter conference at the University of Vermont, she challenges the dominant paradigm of non-sustainable, industrial agriculture and explains why we need an “organic” future.

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Vandana Shiva (born 5 November 1952). Based in Delhi, Dr Shiva is a philosopher, environmental activist, eco feminist and author of several books and of over 300 papers in leading scientific and technical journals. She participated in the non-violent Chipko movement during the 1970s. The movement, some of whose main participants were women, adopted the approach of forming human circles around trees to prevent their felling. She is one of the leaders of the International Forum on Globalization and a figure of the global solidarity movement known as the alter-globalization movement.

Shiva is one of the leaders and board members of the International Forum on Globalization (with Jerry Mander, Ralph Nader, and Jeremy Rifkin), and a figure of the anti-globalization movement. She has argued in favour of many traditional practices, as in her interview in the book Vedic Ecology (by Ranchor Prime). She is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundacion IDEAS, Spain’s Socialist Party’s think tank. She is also a member of the International Organization for a Participatory Society. She received the Right Livelihood Award in 1993, an award established by Swedish-German philanthropist Jakob von Uexkull, and regarded as an “Alternative Nobel Prize”.

Activism

Shiva has worked to promote biodiversity in agriculture to increase productivity, nutrition, farmer’s incomes and it is for this work she was recognised as an ‘Environmental Hero’ by Time magazine in 2003. Her work on agriculture started in 1984 after the violence in Punjab and the Bhopal disaster caused by a gas leak from Union Carbide‘s pesticide manufacturing plant. Her studies for the UN University led to the publication of her book The Violence of the Green Revolution.

In an interview with David Barsamian, Shiva argues that the seed-chemical package promoted by Green Revolution agriculture has depleted fertile soil and destroyed living ecosystems. In her work Shiva cites data allegedly demonstrating that today there are over 1400 pesticides that may enter the food system across the world.

Shiva is a Founding Councillor of the World Future Council (WFC). The WFC was formed in 2007 “to speak on behalf of policy solutions that serve the interests of future generations.” Their primary focus has been on climate security.

Seed freedom

Shiva supports the idea of seed freedom, or the rejection of corporate patents on seeds. She has campaigned against the implementation of the WTO 1994 Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, which broadens the scope of patents to include life forms. Shiva has criticised the agreement as having close ties with the corporate sector and opening the door to further patents on life. Shiva calls the patenting of life ‘biopiracy’, and has fought against attempted patents of several indigenous plants, such as basmati. In 2005, Shiva’s was one of the three organisations that won a 10-year battle in the European Patent Office against the biopiracy of Neem by the US Department of Agriculture and the corporation WR Grace. In 1998, Shiva’s organisation Navdanya began a campaign against the biopiracy of basmati rice by US corporation RiceTec Inc. In 2001, following intensive campaigning, RiceTec lost most of its claims to the patent.

Golden rice

Shiva strongly opposes golden rice, a breed of rice that has been genetically engineered to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of Vitamin A. It has the potential to assist in alleviating the vitamin A deficiency suffered by a third of preschool-aged children worldwide. Shiva claims that Golden Rice is more harmful than beneficial in her explanation of what she calls the “Golden Rice hoax”: “Unfortunately, Vitamin A rice is a hoax, and will bring further dispute to plant genetic engineering where public relations exercises seem to have replaced science in promotion of untested, unproven and unnecessary technology… This is a recipe for creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it.” Adrian Dubock says that golden rice is as cheap as other rice and vitamin A deficiency is the greatest reason for blindness and causes 28% of global preschool child mortality. Shiva has claimed that the women of Bengal grow and eat 150 greens which can do the same, though environmental consultant Patrick Moore suggests that most of these 250 million children don’t eat much else than a bowl of rice a day.^[36] In the 2013 report “The economic power of the Golden Rice opposition”, two economists, Wesseler and Zilberman from Munich University and the University of California, Berkeley respectively calculated that the absence of Golden Rice in India had caused the loss of over 1.4 million life man years in the previous ten years.

GM, India and suicides

According to Shiva, “Soaring seed prices in India have resulted in many farmers being mired in debt and turning to suicide”. The creation of seed monopolies, the destruction of alternatives, the collection of superprofits in the form of royalties, and the increasing vulnerability of monocultures has created a context for debt, suicides, and agrarian distress. According to data from the Indian government, nearly 75 per cent rural debt is due to purchased inputs. Shiva claims that farmers’ debt grows as GMO corporation’s profits grow. According to Shiva, it is in this systemic sense that GM seeds are those of suicide.

By challenging the neo-liberalisation of Indian agriculture, Shiva has opposed multinational companies such as Monsanto and Cargill. In her book, Cargill and the Corporate Hijack of India’s Food Agriculture, Shiva examines the actions of both the U.S. and Indian governments which enabled policy shifts which have driven India to become the largest wheat importer in the world, when it already stood as the second-largest wheat producer, which would have satiated most of the nation’s needs. She also describes methodologies of food-policy decentralization in government and industry, and says that centralization has disproportionately benefited large multinationals without achieving the promised food security and nutritional requirements where Indian farmers adopted bio-technologies en masse. Under globalization, portions of arable land cultivation turn to non-food and/or non-staple agricultural production; with increasing access to food export to markets where profit margins can rise. This can lead to the aforementioned restructuring of national import economies.

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Videos

We are very happy to release this video in cooperation with Dr. Vandana Shiva and the Navdanya Organization. Seed saving is one of the important skills that has been lost of the last century, and Dr. Shiva’s work to preserve heirloom seed varieties, encourage organic farming, and create food sovereignty is some of the most important work of our time. We hope you enjoy this video and will start saving seeds at home yourself. This video was produced by members of The Growing Club. The Growing Club is a non-profit community group dedicated to helping people grow food at home and develop urban farms. Support our work and become part of the club at http://thegrowingclub.com

https://democracynow.org – New research finds at least a third of the Himalayan ice cap will melt by the end of the century due to climate change, even if the world’s most ambitious environmental reforms are implemented. A report released earlier this month by the Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment warns rising temperatures in the Himalayas could lead to mass population displacements, as well as catastrophic food and water insecurity. The glaciers are a vital water source for the 250 million people who live in the Hindu Kush Himalaya range, which spans from Afghanistan to Burma. More than a billion-and-a-half people depend on the rivers that flow from the Himalayan peaks. We speak with world-renowned environmental leader and ecologist Dr. Vandana Shiva about climate change, seed sovereignty and her new book, “Oneness vs. the 1%.” Shiva is an Indian scholar, physicist, and food sovereignty and seed freedom advocate. She was was born in Doon Valley in the Himalayan foothills.

On December 3rd, 2015 Dr. Vandana Shiva sat in a press conference to discuss the topics of climate Change being the cause of refugees and terrorism. She also references the Bill Gates jargon being fed through the media and how we can protect ourselves from their language and answer back with ours. Visit Our Website: https://www.valhallamovement.com https://www.valhallamontreal.com

October 30, 2014 | Dr. Vandana Shiva discusses how the future of the planet is intimately linked to the future of food, both because everyone must eat and because industrial agriculture has the largest impact on ecosystems and our health. Trained in physics and philosophy, Dr. Vandana Shiva is renowned for her activism against GMOs, globalization, and patents on seeds and traditional foods. She co-founded Navdanya, which promotes seed saving and organic farming and has more than 70,000 farmer-members. She is the recipient of the 1993 Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award) and has authored several bestselling books.

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Other

Publications

1981, Social Economic and Ecological Impact of Social Forestry in Kolar, Vandana Shiva, H.C. Sharatchandra, J. Banyopadhyay, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore
1986, Chipko: India’s Civilisational Response to the Forest Crisis, J. Bandopadhyay and Vandana Shiva, Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage. Pub. by INTACH
1987, The Chipko Movement Against Limestone Quarrying in Doon Valley, J. Bandopadhyay and Vandana Shiva, Lokayan Bulletin, 5: 3, 1987, pp. 19–25 online
1988, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India, Zed Press, New Delhi, ISBN 0-86232-823-3

As the agricultural systems of many countries are poised, as a result of the recent advances in biotechnology for what may soon come to be called the Second Green Revolution, this book is particularly appropriate. Vandana Shiva examines the impact of the first Green Revolution on the breadbasket of India. In a cogent empirical argument, she shows how the ‘quick fix’ promise of large gains in output pushed aside serious pursuit of an alternative agricultural strategy grounded in respect for the environmental wisdom of peasant systems and building an egalitarian, needs-prientated agriculture consistent with the village-based, endogenous political traditions of Gandhism. Dr Shiva documents the destruction of genetic diversity and soil fertility that resulted and in highly original fashion shows how the Green Revolution also contributed to the acute social and political conflicts now tearing the Punjab apart.

Set in the context of a sophisticated critique of the privileged epistemological position achieved by modern science, whereby it both aspires to provide technological solutions for social and political problems while at the same time disclaiming responsibility for the new problems which it creates in its wake, the author looks to the future in an analysis of a new project to apply the latest Gene Revolution technology to India and warns of the further environmental and social damage which will ensue.

1989, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Ecological degradation and political conflict in Punjab, Natraj Publishers, New Delhi, ISBN 0-86232-964-7 hb, ISBN 0-86232-965-5 pb
1991, Ecology and the Politics of Survival: Conflicts Over Natural Resources in India, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, California, ISBN 0-8039-9672-1
1992, Biodiversity: Social and Ecological Perspectives (editor); Zed Press, United Kingdom
1993, Women, Ecology and Health: Rebuilding Connections (editor), Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation and Kali for Women, New Delhi
1993, Monocultures of the Mind: Biodiversity, Biotechnology and Agriculture, Zed Press, New Delhi
1993, Ecofeminism, Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Fernwood Publications, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, ISBN 1-895686-28-8
1994, Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development Worldwide, Earthscan, London, ISBN 0-86571-264-6
1995, Biopolitics (with Ingunn Moser), Zed Books, United Kingdom
1997, Biopiracy: the Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, South End Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, I ISBN 1-896357-11-3

For the farmer, the seed is not merely the source of future plants and food; it is a vehicle through which culture and history can be preserved and spread to future generations. For centuries, farmers have evolved crops and produced an incredible diversity of plants that provide life-sustaining nutrition. In India alone, the ingenuity of farmers has produced over 200,000 varieties of rice, many of which now line store shelves around the world. This productive tradition, however, is under attack as globalized, corporate regimes increasingly exploit intellectual property laws to annex these sustaining seeds and remove them from the public sphere.

In *Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply*, **Shiva explores the devastating effects of commercial agriculture and genetic engineering on the food we eat, the farmers who grow it, and the soil that sustains i**t. This prescient critique and call to action covers some of the most pressing topics of this ongoing dialogue, **from the destruction of local food cultures and the privatization of plant life, to unsustainable industrial fish farming and safety concerns about corporately engineered food**s. The preeminent agricultural activist and scientist of a generation, Shiva implores the farmers and consumers of the world to make a united stand against the genetically modified crops and untenable farming practices that endanger the seeds and plants that give us life.

2000, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, South End Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, ISBN 0-89608-608-9
2000, Tomorrow’s Biodiversity, Thames and Hudson, London, ISBN 0-500-28239-0
2001, Patents, Myths and Reality, Penguin India
2002, Water Wars; Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, South End Press, Cambridge Massachusetts
2005, India Divided, Seven Stories Press,
2005, Globalization’s New Wars: Seed, Water and Life Forms, Women Unlimited, New Delhi, ISBN 81-88965-17-0
2005, Earth Democracy; Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, South End Press, ISBN 0-89608-745-X
2007, Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed, editor, South End Press ISBN 978-0-89608-777-4
2007, Democratizing Biology: Reinventing Biology from a Feminist, Ecological and Third World Perspective, author, Paradigm Publishers ISBN 978-1-59451-204-9

2007, Cargill and the Corporate Hijack of India’s Food and Agriculture, Navdanya/RFSTE, New Delhi
2008, Soil Not Oil, South End Press ISBN 978-0-89608-782-8
2010, Staying Alive, South End Press ISBN 978-0-89608-793-4

2011, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature & Knowledge, Natraj Publishers, ISBN 978-8-18158-160-0
2011, Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity, Natraj Publishers, ISBN 978-8-18158-151-8
2013, Making Peace with the Earth Pluto Press ISBN 978-0-7453-33762
2016, “Who Really Feeds the World”, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California ISBN 978-1623170622
2018, Oneness Vs. The 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom, Women Unlimited, ISBN 978-93-85606-18-2
2019, Vandana Shiva (2019). “Foreword”. In Extinction Rebellion (ed.). This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook. Penguin Books. pp. 5–8. ISBN 9780141991443.