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Dr. Vandana Shiva, a leading ecological agricultural specialist, environmentalist and rights activist from India delivered a lecture on ‘Right for Seed and Water; A Campaign for an alternative development model’ recently. The event was organised by the Movement for Land and Agricultural Reform (MONLAR). At a time where there is a huge opposition building among farmers on the efforts of privatisation of seed and water resources in Sri Lanka, Dr. Shiva shared her experiences in India and in other parts of the World about the struggles of farmers, women and other social groups against neo – colonial economic agendas and corporate agriculture. The following are excerpt from her speech:
At a moment that marks so many things we also mark, twenty years since the signing of the GATT Agreement which led to the formation of the WTO (World Trade Organisation). So we have 20 years to see what that promise of globalization brought us. And what it has brought us, has collapsed at every level; collapsed at the level of moral values that have guided societies to sustain themselves, because greed does not sustain societies. Greed has existed but greed has always been contained.
Globalization basically means ‘greed is good.’ The more you can rob, the more you can steal and the more you can grab, the more you will have freedom. The word Free Trade is in fact freedom for those who want to exploit the earth and society. It is not the freedom of society to protect the earth and serve the people.
For the last two days I was at the Metta Convention organized by the Sarvodhya Movement. And repeatedly, in every talk, in every meditation, the words that came were ‘may all beings be happy and well.’ In India we say ‘sarve bhavnathu sukuna.’ And the Buddha of course has repeatedly talked about all beings being happy – and therefore, the need to have a conscious inclusion in a circle of wide and deep compassion.
"If Human Rights make us equal, then the right to these basic services is a basic to Human Rights. Our need for water like our need for light makes us all equal. I would add to this the need for food. And food begins with seed. That is why the Seed Law is being discussed and in Sri Lanka it is so important."
I was just reading in today’s newspaper a statement made at the G77 meeting that took place recently in Bolivia (where the President of Sri Lanka was right there in the front row) It said that the wellbeing of everyone and the provision of basic services has a human right. It says the worst tyranny faced by humankind is allowing basic services to be under the control of transnational cooperations (TNCs). This practice subjugates humanity to the specific interests and the commercial aims of a minority who become rich and powerful at the expense of the life and security of other people. That is why we claim that basic services are inherent to the human conditions. How can a human being live without portable water? If Human Rights make us equal, then the right to these basic services is a basic to Human Rights.
Our need for water like our need for light makes us all equal. I would add to this the need for food. And food begins with seed. That is why the Seed Law is being discussed and in Sri Lanka it is so important.
I started life as a physicist. I dared to look at agriculture because of the violence I saw; in 1984 the rise of extremism in the state of Punjab in India which is celebrated as the place where the Green Revolution was first implemented and successfully implemented. It was success for a model of development but failure for the people and the earth. Punjab is among states with the highest rate of farmer suicides. A cancer train leaves the state of Punjab loaded with cancer victims to go for treatment at a charitable hospital set up by the Jain community in Rajasthan. The water of Punjab is disappearing so fast because the chemicals for the green revolution requires ten times more water to produce the same amount of food. And Punjab means the ‘land of the five rivers’.
Today the land of the five rivers is drying up because of the excessive use of water – water mining from the ground. And the prediction is that at the rate of which the water is being mined, by 2020 agriculture might become impossible in Punjab. Half of the water sources of Punjab are dead or dying – you don’t see diversity. We don’t see the kind of diversity growing in the beautiful farms of Sri Lanka.
Twenty years of globalization have shown us that a model based on corporate greed cannot sustain society and it cannot sustain the earth. It cannot sustain society even in rich countries. In 2008, a world in which the economy of real people producing real food, real nutrition was transformed into the fictitious economy with finance moving around the world 60 times more than the real wealth in the world, three trillion dollars of speculation, clicks of buttons and computer screens brought the world down. And money was defined as bad.
Economy is supposed to be the management and the science of that home. Economia as the art of living which means the art of living is how you live with the earth’s family. And the term money making - which is what we define the economy as today - is defined as the art of money making. The art of money making is not the art of living. And today, all of development, all of growth is defined only in terms of one measure – the art of money making.
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It is easy to create growth for five or ten years by chopping off the forests if you don’t know the ecological services they provide. You don’t know the real worth those forests provide including food, the water function, the bio diversity. It used to be that value of nature did not measure. Those who want to exploit nature are giving a price to it but price is not value. Value asks you to protect what is valuable. Price calls you to exploit to make money out of it.
I am privileged because I was invited to a meeting in 1987 called the Laws of Life in Geneva because of the work I have done on the green revolution. It was on the implications of new biotechnologies, the new tools of taking genes from one organism and transferring to another.
The tools were created in universities in USA but they were patronized by companies that sold us chemicals. The roots of all agro chemicals were in the war. The entire age of chemicals was developed tools of killing. Explosive factories were making bombs, all the chemical industries made harmful gases that were used in the concentration camps to kill people. And in fact the chemical industry for the war had created a cartel – at that time it was called IG Farben. IG Farben was tried in the trials after the war and they were recognized as war criminals. But they modified themselves after the war and turned exactly those chemicals that kill life into chemicals for agriculture and they changed the entire paradigm of agriculture.
From knowing the ecological processes of how to use the soil, how the pollinators work, how diversity controls , how diversity increases productivity into a very crude paradigm of introducing chemicals of warfare into agriculture. If I take a gun and I shoot that is a technology of killing; I don’t have to know who you are. So in fact technologies of violence are blind technologies. The fact that they are efficient at killing does not mean they are efficient at maintaining life support systems on this planet. And that is the confusion that has been maintained.
The latest generation of technologies is genetic engineering. And at that meeting in 1987 they were only planning the world of GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms). They also said very honestly that it wasn’t enough to implement these laws of ownership on seeds and ownership of life in USA and Europe. The war chemical companies are now the controllers of life and seed on earth. That is why I say when they define GMO they are saying ‘God (or creation), Move Over. We are the creators and we will collect royalty for life on earth’. Their problem was how to criminalise farmers selling seeds. So in the 1987 meeting they said, by the year 2000 all seeds in the earth will be genetically engineered and patented.
And I took a pledge inside my heart and I said from now onwards all I do is protect seed to protect life on earth. I started Navdaniya the movement for seed saving. But also to the commitment that we won’t let the obscenity of patenting life around the world. Those who have created wars and made money from wars, those who have colonized society and made money out of colonization have this illusion that they can keep telling lies and everyone will believe them. And the illusion of our times is intellectual property rights on living systems.
Mechanical systems we have no problem. Artificially created manufacture no problem. But life is continuity of creation. Life makes itself. Creation makes itself, in a network of relationships. If company adds a gene and this is usually a toxic gene only to application but BT crops that add bacterial toxin into the plants so that the plant is producing toxic in every cell all the time. So basically toxic producing plants are poison producing plants.
The second is a Herbicide resistance gene. Herbicide resistance to chemicals like round up. This too is a toxic gene that’s all we have got. In 20 years Navdaniya prepared a report of what have GMOs done across the world and we got scientists, communities and movements to do their own research in their own countries because we found this is beneficial in two ways because people who are suffering will tell about their suffering but you do it without no cost because those who are struggling want to tell their story. We pulled it together.This is a syntheses of our sitting and holding my hands. I thought Argentina, Brazil and the US were doing well. People arnt doing well. The farmers aren’t doing well.
TNCs were doing very well because everywhere genetically modified corn and genetically modified soya were bringing them royalties. And the reason these crops are spreading is because for every increased acre planted a royalty comes back. I had a wonderful dinner in Sri Lanka and there were eight plants I don’t know. We built a movement for bio-diversity but your bio-diversity is so rich, you are so priviledged.
For all of those wonderful dishes I had no one collecting royalty. But everyone is getting nutrition because these are trees, shrubs in everyone’s backyard. But as the industrialists say these are just seeds. If they are not traded globally under globalization and they are not the commodities that go back and forth. Rice and bean, corn and soya, palm oil now they are not food. They have defined our food as non-food and they have defined non-food as food, because no one is supposed to eat genetically modified corn and soya. Anyway at the end of writing the report I kept thinking to myself what do we call this.
Originally I was going to call it a assessment of GM crops and then I decided we are going to call it ‘GM emperor has no clothes’. Remember the Hans Christian story ‘Emperor’s New Clothe’ where these weavers who pretend to be weaving a beautiful clothe and they say to the emperor that those who are intelligent will see your dress. Now the king knew that he was wearing nothing but he didn’t want to sound stupid so he said it was a beautiful dress, courteries did not want to sound stupid, they said what a wonderful dress and its only a little child who had not being brain washed who said the emperor is naked. And we are in that kind of situation. We need to recognise that the emperor of globalization, the emperor of Genetically modified Crops is absolutely naked. We should not be clapping for the naked emperor. We should be protecting our indigenous wealth in biodiversity.
(to be continued)
