[applause]
It's a joy to be here with all of you.
To all the organizations that have put this event together
and made it possible for me to be here,
I'd like to say thank you.
And to the wonderful world of the seed,
I'd like to say thank you,
because, you know, I started out life thinking
the quanta was going to be my companion for life,
and I had to abandon that passionate love affair
with physics and quantam physics in particular
for a love affair with the seed.
Partly because the threat to the seed
made me realize how vital it was to continuity of life.
The word for seed in Hindi and Sanskrit is बीज.
ज means life, and बीज means that in which life
resides to arise on its own again and again and again.
And when we start a season,
lots of seed festivals with every cultivation season,
and we do because of our tropical climate have many more cultivation seasons.
Some places we have four seasons of cultivation,
especially in the area of for example Bengal;
in some places we have three, but most places we have two.
And before you sow the seed, there's a prayer:
"let the seed be exhaustless".
Let life never run out.
And the stories from around the world,
stories from my region,
I come from the Himalayan belt, um,
where during a war and a famine
people died of starvation.
But the seed which used to be kept in empty squash containers, which we call _
not one seed had been eaten.
Because every culture recognized
you cannot eat seed corn.
You've got to save it for the future.
Your life doesn't matter, but life in general does matter.
And it's that wisdom of the seed to renew, to multiply, to be shared, to be spread,
that has suddenly been seen as a problem
for those who would make money out of killing the seed.
Killing the essential nature of the seed as a reproductive renewable resource.
And every attempt has been made in the last two decades
to turn seed into a non-renewable resource.
Out of it, something that in its own nature creates abundance, you know?
Every tiny seed, I get fascinated with seeds of amaranth for example,
You know how tiny that little seed of amaranth is?
And at least in our Himalaya you get, ah!
You can't even begin to count the number of seed one seed of amaranth can give rise to.
All the millets, or even the rices and the wheats and the barleys,
one gives rise to many.
That's a problem.
One should give rise to nothing,
then you make the profits.
And during the 80's I was very involved in some of these discussions.
They used to be in the FAO at that time,
the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations
a term used called "seed wars".
The chemical industry that had moved into the seed sector,
um, had started to say it's not fair that farmers save seed. It's not equitable that they save seed,
equity is monopoly, only the corporations should have the right to seed.
And they spent a lot of time, couldn't get their way
because in the United Nations you have one vote for one country,
and the majority of the countries happen to be third world countries,
they happen to be countries which have given seed and biodivensity to the world,
and they did not like the idea of seed being reduced to private property.
So the corporations then moved to a new institution that was being created
through what was then a half institution called the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs.
And it's fascinating that for 30 years the industry had drafted laws for all kinds of monopoly,
monopoly in entertainment, if a Mickey Mouse turns up anywhere, even in a child's notebook,
they should pay royalty.
Or a t-shirt.
And then, by then, a company that had only been related to warfare, to agent orange,
very rapidly moved into the biotechnology sector,
very rapidly started to buy up both venture capital firms as well as seed companies.
And Monsanto emerged as the biggest seed monopoly in the world
in the drafting of what is today called the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement
what a mouthful.
Precisely because this is not trade related
and seed is not intellectual property,
it doesn't pop out of anyone's head.
Intellectual property is defined as property in products of the mind.
Here is a very material biological system
thst is suddenly redefined as intellectual property.
And, uh, a whole agreement was shaped around it
and TR was put there because India, my country, refused to accept patent law as a trade issue.
They said no, this is about nations deciding how far monopolies will go.
Nations deciding the balance between the public and the private.
And we had worked out a patent law over 20 years of democratic debate in society
to get rid of the British laws that had been exactly like what we are coming back to.
Total monopoly in a few companies' hands.
So the lawyers of course, vary clever,
put TR before IP and said now it's Trade Related by definition,
so now you will accept it.
After the WTO came into force,
a representative of Monsanto actually said this.
he said that what we've achieved in this agreement is something unprecedented:
we defined a problem, and in this case the problem was farmers saving seeds.
That was a problem.
And we defined solution: make it illegal for farmers to save seeds.
And we created the instrument, which is the TRIPS Agreement,
which forces every country now to have laws of monopoly.
And we created the institution that would ensure that these are implemented;
the institution, WTO is an interesting institution
because it's the international court,
it's an international non-parliament, non-democratic;
and it is the international executive, yeah?
As Monsanto's representative said,
in shaping this treaty we were the patient, the diagnostician, and the physician all in one.
For me, that's a description of dictatorship.
If you define the problem, you find the solution, you become the judge and the executive,
where is democracy?
And around seed, which is the most democratic experience on the planet
that spreads abundance.
The seed is as much part of the relationship of the bee and the butterfly,
as it is with the soil organisms that it ultimately sustains,
as it is with the food, the breakfast you're eating.
All these relationships are in the seed.
In 1992 was I think the first time US companies started to enter India.
'91 was when the whole new idea of globalization started to be spread
initially through the World Bank,
and '95 onwards for the World Trade Organization.
And I remember in '92 Cargill, which still owned its own seed supply,
now it's owned by Monsanto,
I don't know how many of you realize
that outside the US Cargill Seeds is now Monsanto.
At that time Cargill was still Cargill,
and they'd brought in hybrid sunflower seeds which failed miserably.
I had been working with the farmers in India and the farmers' organizations,
and I had been telling them about these corporations.
At that time of course Cargill was and still is the biggest grain trader.
And while doing workshops on the Uruguay round and the WTO and the GATT,
I used to tell them about the companies.
The farmers of , as a result of the failure of the sunflower
marched up to the Cargill...
uh...
it shouldn't be called a seed production unit,
because seeds are produced in the field and in farms,
and the seed utilities ad facilities are really only packaging units.
All they do is put a seal on it.
And again, you might not even remember,
they used to, you used to have a trade representative whose name was Carla Hills.
And Carla Hills had visited India in 1988
saying crowbar by crowbar we are going to open your economy to our companies.
This was around the time, you know, we'd had Bhopal in '84,
Dupont was sending an old nylon plant and we were saying sorry we don't want it,
And Carla Hill saying no you have it, your market is our market.
And she talked about this crowbar by crowbar and I talked to my farmer friends about it.
So they went, literally with crowbars
and pulled down this whole large prison-like utility,
and razed it to the ground and said
crowbar by crowbar we're gonna send these companies back to you.
[applause from the audience]
That's only part of the story.
The real story is at the end of it,
the Cargill head for Asia Pacific flies into India,
holds a press conference,
and says how stupid Indian farmers are
because they don't realize Cargill with its intelligence is creating seeds
which prevent the bees from usurping the pollen.
This wonderful act of creating fertility through pollenation
is now redefined as theft in a mindset where life should be owned as a monopoly.
No plant should grown without permission from the companies,
no seed should renew without permission of the company,
and of course no farmer should ever regrow a crop without paying a royalty.
In the negociations on the convention on biological diversity
a twin statement was made about about Roundup resistance.
We were basically saying we don't need negative traits
like making crops more resistant intolerant to herbicides,
we need to phase out herbicides rather than spray more of them.
And if pesticides were bad, we definitely don't need pesticide plants,
plants which produce theire own pesticide
by introducing genes for toxins into it like the [---beety---] crops.
And in the case of Roundup,
again I remember,
in the negotiations on the convention on biological diversity that the Monsanto representative -
I think it was the vice president, the chair, or --
and he says "we are now breeding crops that prevent weeds from stealing the sunshine".
Now, what is called weeds is really the biodiversity of diverse fields,
and the best sustainable agriculture, the best organic farming,
has to be rotational and mixtures.
The minute you have a monoculture I disqualify it as organic.
Organic means letting nature do the essential work of renewal,
of soil fertility [applause], moisture conservation,
and if you let nature do the work, nature needs companions,
it needs partners,
it needs helpers,
and only diversity offers the help,
and the substitutes for the poisons that have entered farming.
Only nature.
The nitrogen fixing that nature can do,
if we do the right mixing.
The wonderful botanicals that are available for pest control.
I fought for 11 years a case on the piracy of
a wonderful tree that we have used for pest control
for as long as I remember.
I remember when I first saw the patent on neem,
and it was said this was an invention of the pesticide use.
And I said my mother and grandmother were using neem to store grain, to store clothes,
farmers of India have constantly used neem,
and when the terrible disaster of Bhopal took place in '84,
I remember I went to Bhopal and the, you know, the at the station were laughing at me
because I was carrying these sapplings of neem.
They said "why are you carrying this?"
And I told them about the disaster and said we are starting a campaign
"No More Bhopals, Plant A Neem",
and then 10 years later find neem has been patented.
For that 11 years.
But this is just one of thousands in every part of the world
has its own way of controlling weeds,
of controlling pests,
of doing everything that toxic chemicals have been introduced into farming for.
I think the big problem with how seed has moved
from being the ultimate source of renewal of life,
to becoming the ultimate non-renewable resource patented and owned,
uh, by a handful of companies,
now it's reduced to 5, very rapidly reduced to 5,
in this decade.
So fast that you can't even count,
you can't even keep up with the counting.
Partly because for us this has all happened in a very short period,
you know, for you it happened over a hundred years,
and so the generations that have passed
who saw the first disappearance of the open seed,
the free seed,
we started to see the problem with the green revolution
introduced in 1965/68, 6 in India,
and the green revolution was basically the introduction of chemical industrial farming
in peasant economy,
where the average landholdings are less than a hectare,
80% land holding are less than a hectare,
70% of India, over 1.2 billion population, lives on the land, yah?
So you can imagine how tiny our farms are.
And on this land was introduced the chemicals.
Why did the green revolution have to wait til 1965/66?
They were trying from the end of the war.
All those war chemicals including the nitrogen from explosives factories,
all the pesticides,
they needed to find a market.
But the indigenous seeds
practiced non-cooperation with chemicals,
they just _, no, don't want you.
Sot he problem was the seed had to be redesigned to adapt to chemicals.
The promotion, propaganda by the green revolution was "feeding the hungry".
No, it was just spreading chemicals and poisons around the world.
And the redesigning was done by the dwarfing technique, you know?
Taking genes from the dwarf varieties,
in the case of rice from an Indonesian variety,
in the case of wheat from a Japanese variety collected during the war, norin.
And these dwarf varieties then, could take a lot of chemicals,
but they required a lot of water.
Interestingly, the dwarfing was making the plant produce less biological matter.
And the useful biological matter for the soil, for the animals, had just disappeared overnight.
The straw was now seen as waste,
but the straw is what feeds the cattle,
the straw is what goes back into your compost,
the straw is what makes organic.
So this one change to adapt the seed to chemical
meant the disappearance of fodder for livestock,
therefore the disappearance of animals,
therefore the entry of tractors into a poor country.
And I go around the country and find some of the highest debt is for the tractors
that were bought 20 years, 30 years ago,
today, the farmers are having to pay the bills and they can't afford to.
And the cattle have disappeared.
Because truly sustainable agriculture is agriculture not just with diversity of crops,
but with an integration with livestock,
and an integration with perennials and trees,
then you have the perfect organic farm,
then nature has a way to recycle the biological systems to perfection.
And as [Albert] Howard said, writing about Indian farms in 1905 when he came to India,
and in his wonderful book The Agricultural Testament Howard said
"The farms here are as permanent as the forest and the prairie
because they work on those principles of nature".
And that's another reason why I feel there has to be a much more intimate ineraction
between the ecology movement and the organic movement,
because some ecologists still think that the day farming began, nature was assaulted.[?]
No, you can work with nature in non-violent ways to produce for human needs
while keeping space, leaving adequate ecological space for other species.
And even more importantly, a lesson we have learned,
the more space you leave for other beings,
the more food you get for human beings.
[applause]
Totally counter-intuitive .
Of course the more has to be counted in diversity.
And I have talked about the mono culture of the mind,
which excludes diversity,
focuses on a single commodity,
and on the yield of one part of a plant for that commodity production,
shrinks the farms biological capacity,
and talks about increasing production.
And that's because the monoculture of the mind
has left the biodiversity out.
I really think we need to shift from measuring yields to measuring output,
and we need to... yields refer to an individual commodity production,
and yields refer to what leaves the farm;
output refers to what the farm produces
including what will be used as an internal input on the farm itself.
Something that's just not calculated.
All the compost we grow,
the seeds we grow out,
they're never counted as part of what the farm is producing.
Well this green revolution
... was destroyed within 10 years of chemical agriculture.
There seems to be a habit
of, you know, if things go wrong and things are non-sustainable, just do more of it faster.
And that's what biotech has become,
it's called, in India it's called a Second Green Revolution.
And interestingly you know, when your former president Bush
signed an agreement with our Prime Minister in 19... in 2005 on the nuclear deal,
there was another piece of paper right there on the desk,
which is an agriculture agreement
to make genetic engineering _
on the board of this agreement sit Monsanto, sit Walmart, and I think ConAgra.
So our relationship now is very very intimate
because it is the same companies
that are preventing American farmers from having access to seed,
and are preventing Indian farmers from not just having access to seed,
but having access to life.
The first GM crop introduced into India was in '98,
and it's the Beattie cotton.
I just call it the pesticide cotton.
The Beattie cotton was brought in by Monsanto
and Monsanto put these arrogant ads in the newspapers
about how Indian farmers would have bulgar [wheat].
So I started to ring up the ministries, and said have they sought approval?
And of course nobody had been checked,
because Monsanto had worked at dismantling laws in this country,
so there's no regulation on genetic engineering in the U.S. at all.
It's a de-regulated sector.
And Monsanto thought you can walk into any country and assume there is no regulation,
but we do have regulation.
And so I took them to court, I sued them, took them to the Supreme Court.
And the introduction was delayed up to 2005.
Since 2005 they've started tosell Beattie cotton,
and in certain areas there's only Beattie cotton available now.
These are the areas where the farmers have the,
where we have the highest rate of farmer suicides.
In the last decade
during which seed monopolies were established,\
during which the global players started to buy up Indian companies,
or have licensing arrangements with them,
we have lost more than 200,000 farmers in suicides.
We've of course lost 8 million farmers who had to leave the land.
It's a combinatioin of seed monopolies and falling prices,
linked to the subsidies, the 4 billion dollars in the case of cotton,
and unfair trade rules.
It's a genocidal packet that must destroy farmers.
And doesn't kill farmers metaphorically.
It kills farmers biologically.
We started 2 years ago to work in this area.
And the interesting thing is, by shifting to organic
the farmers are earning 10 times more than the Beattie cotton farmers,
even though every advertisement of Monsanto
talks about how farmers earn more with GM crops.
And that's also very interesting, you know,
my mind kind of... gets very troubled every time I see a huge inconsistency.
So why should you have seed monopolies for cheap food?
Costly seed, cheap food.
Something must be going funny in the middle.
You get farmers to pay higher royalties,
and they're supposed to have higher inomes, how?
The aim of the seed industry is a trillion dollars of profits from royalties every year.
And the aim is no farmer should have access to their own seed.
The aim is every farmer should be forced into the market every year.
And you can only do that by using multiple instruments of control over the seed.
The first instrument as I mentioned is the intellectual property laws
covering both patents as well as breeders rights that have become more and more like patents.
Earlier they used to have farmers concessions,
used to have breeders concessions,
they've all gone in the new _
the of 90/91, looks just like a patent law.
And interestingly, a patent is supposed to be granted for an invention.
A seed is not an invention.
A seed exists before you can do anything with it.
All you can do with the seed is manipulate it.
Manipulation has never been treated as creation.
It's often treated as cruelty.
I would call GM cruelty to seed.
Uh, and yet, there has been this claim to invention and therefore a right to ownership.
Of course it's very interesting
because it reflects a fundamental split, a fundamental schizophrenia
When it comes to owning seeds and owning plants through patents,
the same corporations go around saying
"we've created something new, it's novel".
The word used in the European laws is "novel foods".
GM foods is not called GM foods, it's called "novel foods".
And when it comes to people being concerned about the environmental risks, the health risks,
the same industry comes around and says "just like nature made it".
You're doing nothing new.
This is like the bacteria in your yogurt, and...
that's why they picked the word "biotechnology",
and shed the word genetic engineering,
because biotechnology was grandmother making cheese and yogurt,
And SynGen and Monsanto were doing exactly what your grandmother did, nothing new.
Except grandmother never took a patent, and you are taking a patent.
[laughter]
Now the legal term that has been created in the U.S. and has been spread around the world,
a highly unscientific term that's used to make GM look natural,
is "substantial equivalence".
Treat the genetically engineered seed
as equal to the parent.
So don't look, don't see, don't find, declare safety.
And anytime a scientist comes up with looking at what has happened,
you make sure you hound that scientist out of their lab and their work.
Especially with the new intimate relationship between universities and the companies,
it's not that difficult.
Over the last 20 years I've seen some of the top scientists with whom I worked
been forced out of their university system
just because they did an independent piece of research.
Árpád Pusztai,
Mae-Wan Ho.
Ignacio Chapela, they tried with the Berkeley scientists,
couldn't work it out because he just brought his chair in front of the Dean's office
and said I won't move til you give me my tenure.
And they were forced.
Elaine Ingham from the University of Oregon
did this amazing work on the impact of GM wheat,
with the, with the soil bacterium, genes from a soil bacterium added to it,
and that led in fact to the company, the German company, withdrawing that product;
but it also led to the International Biosafety Protocol.
She is now an independent scientist,
but does not have a lab in the university.
Um, so every time independent science is done,
it's defined as "junk science",
and "junk science" is institutionalized as real science, as good science.
And these days you know the "good bank" thing?
"Good bank", "bad bank" after they've created all this toxic assets, yah?
Suddenly they're supposed to be a bad bank that'll take up all this corruption of the financial world.
And again, interesting concept, yah?
Concentrate toxicity, and it'll become neutralized.
[laughter]
The work we've been doing on suicides of farmers
has started to have government response
In the early days the government used to say
"oh, they must have been alcoholics" or "they must have committed adultry",
and I said "that's a large number of farmers suddenly becoming adulterers and alcoholics
[laughter]
and eventually the Prime Minister had to go down to these areas
and recognize that farmer suicides linked to economic distress is a real phenomenon.
So what does Monsanto do?
Start using institutions to say there's no link between suicides and the Beattie cotton.
The interesting thing is, the papers they generate,
as one from IFPRI, which has been used a lot against me,
the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington has put out a paper,
goes round about the virtues of Beattie,
as if everything is built into the seed;
and then when it comes to the failure, or when it comes to the farmers going into distress,
then it is no more about the seed itself,
it's about the farmer who was stupid,
it's about the soil that was wrong,
and it's about the climate that didn't fit.
And here again you have schizophrenia.
Good performance -- in the GM seed.
Bad performance -- you're to blame.
So always there's a perpetuation of a mythology of the perfect seed.
And interestingly the green revolution, when it was spread to India,
they didn't just say "we're bringing you seeds that are more responsive to chemicals",
which would have been the more honest way to describe it,
rather than "high-yielding varieties".
This [Norman Ernest] Borlaug, who was the scientist who did that dwarfing,
interestingly he came out of the Dupont defence labs,
knew about the chemicals,
reworked the plants to be able to take mroe chemicals,
just as genetic engineering is re-working the plants once more at a deeper genetic level,
to be even more adaptive to chemicals,
Borlaug said, of the 12 scientists he had trained, he called them his apostles.
They were his wheat apostles distributing miracle seeds.
So you do have a whole structure of seed monopolies
enshrined within a new mythology,
a new religion,
where we are asked to be blind[sic] and not think any more.
Interestingly, in the case of Indian sales, Monsanto actually recruits our gods as salesmen.
Every poster, every video has a god.
In northern state of Punjab, where the Sikhs are the most important religion,
and Guru Nanak was the founder of that religion,
Guru Nanak is used as a salesman.
In south India out of the you get Hanuman who brought this herb to save the life of Hanuman's brother,
you have Hanuman bringing you this life-saving seed,
which is really the killing seed.
That's another way in which seed monopolies are established.
Seed monopolies are also established by introducing seed replacement.
And whenever I debate with our government, I always tell them, I say
"you know, seeds are not like dirty socks. When your socks start to stink, you'd better change them.
And wash them.
But seeds are perrennia, they don't get replaced,
you evolve them, you breed them, you adapt them, but you don't throw them out."
They're not like a new model of a car either.
Seeds are life itself,
and therefore, seed replacement is wrong.
Now, you can only have a monopoly on seed through patenet
if you have had a closure on the alternative supply,
because why on earth would farmers pay royalties every year
if they could have free seed they can save year in and year out?
To create that closure,
the industry has evolved compulsory licensing and registration laws,
compulsory registration, compulsory licensing laws,\
which basically mean farmers can't have their own seed,
they must only grow seeds that are licensed,
they must have approval from the state.
But an indigenous seed evolved and bred by farmers,
an open for pollenated variety seed has never done harm to anyone.
GM seeds can cause genetic contamination,
but an open pollenated variety has no harm,
and since it has no harm,
there is absolutely no need for state regulation.
The state regulates the harmful.
It should not invade into the harmless zones of life.
The interesting thing is, they tried to introduce this law in 2004 in India,
it's called the New Seed Law.
It's not that we don't have a seed law, we have a seed law,
but it doesn't prevent farmers from having their own seed,
it merely regulated the industry.
Now they want to have farmers regulated,
and the seed industry, now the biotech industry, de-regulated.
So we did what Gandhi had done in 1930.
You might remember the British had tried to monopolize salt,
just so they could buy bigger guns so they could control us better,
and the Salt Laws were meant to make salt-making illegal by Indians.
Only the British could make the salt.\
And Gandhi walked to the beach and picked up the salt,
and said (not verbatim) "nature gives this for free. We need it for our survival.
We will continue to make salt. We are forced to disobey your laws."
And, uh, the Salt Laws never worked in India.
People went to jail, people were killed, but the Salt Laws never worked in India.
So we took inspiration from that,
and have been doing what we call the seed सत्य के लिए लड़ाई.
The सत्य के लिए लड़ाई means "the fight for truth".
Beginning '91 when these monopolies were created,
we've had rally after rally,
half a million farmers, 2 million farmers,
basically declaring that seed is a common resource,
we have received it from our ancestors,
we have to protect it for future generations,
of all species, because seed doesn't just belong to humans,
it belongs to allt he species who are nourished by any species of plant.
We will therefore not obey a law
that makes it illegal for us to perform our highest ecological duty on earth,
which is to save seeds for the future.
[applause]
So in 2004 we stopped this law from coming into force.
I gave I don't know how many millions of signatures I gave to our Prime Minister,
and said you can do what the British did with teh Salt Law.
We are not going to obey, because we have to obey a higher law.
Monsanto law is a low law, degraded law,
and any law restricting farmers rights is in today's world a Monsanto law.
Even when governments write it,
an invisible hand of Monsanto is behind that writing.
So how do we create seed freedom
in this time of seed imperialism, seed colonialism, seed closure?
We do it by creating community seedbanks,
that's how I started Navdanya 21 years ago,
just saving every seed available,and distributing it widely,
keeping it as an open access system.
Every farmer of Navdanya, and we have about 400,000 members,
every farmer, the only yhing they have to do is take a pledge
that seed will never be used as an exclusive right.
Not by them, not by anyone else.
They will continue to share seed, and they will continue to save seed.
In the area of the suicides, we have managed to save seeds and bring farmers organic options back.
We've also just finished some research
to show that Beattie cotton has destroyed in 3 years of planting,
26% of vital micro organisms in the soil.
So organic is the only way to rebuild it. 40:35
We have created climate resilient seed banks.
Banks where seeds for high drought tolerance, hight flood tolerance, salt tolerance are available
And we've distributed every time there's a disaster,
a drought in central India,
even after the tsunami, the salt tolerant rices, we took two truckloads of these things.
Interestingly, Monsanto, which has beena leader in biopiracy and SynGen and the biotech industry,
is now trying to patent the climate-resilient traits,
which they can't create because genetic engineering is a very linear, single-gene expression technology.
Climate resilience is a multi-genetic trait,but all they're doing is genetic mapping.
And these days, computers do it, you don't even need a human being.
In fact, if there's a property right, they should give it to that machine
[laughter]
because they're not doing the thinking, they're not doing the creation,
it's an assemby line of doing the genome mapping.
The map is being used to claim ownership,
and we are going to start a big campaign
to not just keep seeds in the open domain,
but especially seeds required for climate adaption
as a common resource for our common defence in these vilnerable times.
We will of course have to make very rapid and radical shifts very fast,
from breeding for responding to chemicals,
to breeding for resilience, adaption.
From breeding for a single yield trait,
to breeding for nutrition and taste and quality.
We've done a lot of research with native varieties,
they always have higher nitritional quality.
So we should be measuring nutrition per crop,
and nutrition per acre,
not just the mass produced.
What's the point of empty mass?
Empty mass doesnt nourish our bodies.
Empty mass doesn't nourish the soil.
We need to go back, seriously,
to the issue of quality, the issue of nutrition, the issue of life itself.
Saving seed, for me, is defending life,
and saving seeds in these vulnerable times
is making sure we can imagine with hope
that life will continue in all its vibrance, in all its diversity, in all its beauty.
Thank you.
[applause]
[narrator] You've been listening to physicist, ecologist, and author Vandana Shiva,
speaking at the organic ecology conference in Portland Oregon of February 28, 2009.
In a moment we'll return to the question and answer session from the presentation.
Vandana Shiva, a physicist, feminist, philosopher of science, and science policy advocate,
is the director of the research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy.
She is the 1993 recipient of the Right Livelihood Award,
and serves as ecology advisor to several organizations,
including the Third World Network, and the Asia Pacific Peoples Environment Network.
Her books include
Her latest book is
To find out more about Vandana Shiva and her work, please visit the Navdanya website at
And now we return to the question and answer session from the program.
[question] Good morning, I just had a question that relates to the speaker that we had yesterday,
Paul Roberts,
and, um, he mentioned, someone asked a question about local food,
and the possibilities of around the world being able to raise our own food,
enough food for ourselves where we live right now with climate change,
and our expectaitons of what we should be able to eat, um, seasonality and that kind of thing.
And in response to this, one of the things that he said was that
in many of the Asian countries
that at the rate of population growth, um,
they will not be able to sustain themselves using sustainable agriculture practices,
um, and be able to feed themselves.
And one thing that we can do here in the United States and North America
is to be able to, using sustainable practices, grow enough food
so that we will be able to ship food to Asian countries, um, preventing starvation.
And I was just wondering if you could address this idea
of local food and with population raising all the time,
being able to feed, everyone being able to feed themselves where they are, for themselves.
[Vandana Shiva]
The first thing about local food is that the tropics lend themselves better to producing mroe food..
And for anyone who thinks a temperate climate and cultivation in deserts
based on mining aquifers,
has to be the basis of providing food to the world,
and Asian countries, most of which are tropical countries,
a little bit of China is outside the tropics,
but I mean you go from India into Indonesia, and Malaysia, should see the abundance.
We have a report, you can get this from our website, Navdanya.org,
and it's on biodiversity based productivity.
We've done survey after survey of hundreds of farms, including our organic farms.
The food production is double, sometimes five fold more.
The reason it's not seen is because
the agricultural paradigm has been reduced to a monoculture of commodities,
then you focus on the commodities
and say they can't produce more commodities,
but we can produce mroe food.