Vandana Shiva - The Future of Food and Seed

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

Title:: Vandana Shiva - The Future of Food and Seed
Description:: Scientist, feminist, ecologist and author, Vandana Shiva, presenting the keynote address at the 2009 Organicology Conference in Portland, Oregon, on February 28, 2009.

pdxjustice Media Productions
Producer: William Seaman

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Video Language:: English
Duration:: 59:55

	Radical Access Mapping Project edited English subtitles for Vandana Shiva - The Future of Food and Seed
	Radical Access Mapping Project edited English subtitles for Vandana Shiva - The Future of Food and Seed
	Radical Access Mapping Project edited English subtitles for Vandana Shiva - The Future of Food and Seed
	Radical Access Mapping Project edited English subtitles for Vandana Shiva - The Future of Food and Seed
	Radical Access Mapping Project edited English subtitles for Vandana Shiva - The Future of Food and Seed
	Radical Access Mapping Project added a translation

English subtitles

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Radical Access Mapping Project

Vandana Shiva - The Future of Food and Seed

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