[Lapg] Vandana Shiva is editor of the new book, "Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed, "

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

Environmental activist and physicist Vandana 
Shiva talks global food politics with Living on 
Earth's Steve Curwood. Shiva is editor of the new 
book, "Manifestos on the Future of Food and 
Seed," which advocates local, organic and diverse food production.
http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=07-P13-00044&segmentID=6	

GELLERMAN: It's Living on Earth. I'm Bruce 
Gellerman. In India, the benefits of modern 
agriculture come with a high price. It's been 
reported as many as 150,000 Indian farmers over 
the past decade have committed suicide—many by 
drinking the pesticides they put on their crops. 
According to physicist and social activist 
Vandana Shiva, the farmers' despair is due to the 
weight of overwhelming debt. They can no longer 
afford the escalating price of chemicals and 
bio-engineered seeds, like pest-resistant Bt 
cotton. Shiva says the suicides in India are only 
part of a global problem that can be traced to the way food is produced.

SHIVA: Chemical agriculture really is a theft 
from nature. Organic ecological farming is the 
only way we will be able to address the 
ecological crisis related to farming, the 
agrarian crisis emerging from industrial 
globalized agriculture, and the public health 
crisis coming from using war chemicals to produce our food.

GELLERMAN: Vandana Shiva is editor of a new book 
called "Manifestos on the Future of Food and 
Seed." Living on Earth's Steve Curwood recently 
spoke with her about the problems, the politics, 
and the possibilities of food production.  	

Mainfestos on the Future of Food and Seed (Courtesy of South End Press)


CURWOOD: How did you first become aware of the 
relationships between the environment, the poor, and food?

SHIVA: The connections between the environment 
and agriculture, and food systems, and the issues 
of poverty really came home to me in the 80s, 
particularly 1984—and I don't why George Orwell 
picked that as the title of one of his books. It 
was the year we had the worst terrorism and 
extremism in India. Thirty thousand people were 
killed in Punjab where the Green Revolution had 
been implemented—the Green Revolution had even 
received a Nobel Peace Prize for creating 
prosperity and through prosperity creating peace. 
And yet in the 1980s, there was the worst form of 
violence you could imagine. In December of 1984, 
we had the worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, 
which killed 3,000 people in one night, 30,000 
people since then, and I was forced to wake up 
and ask the question: why are we involved in an 
agriculture that is killing hundreds of 
thousands, that is so violent, and pretends to be 
feeding the world? And I started to do scientific 
research on this. My book "The Violence of the 
Green Revolution" came out of the research that I 
was doing at that point for the United Nations. 
And increasingly, I have realized that if farmers 
in India are getting into debt and committing 
suicide, it's because of these industrially 
driven agricultural systems that are also 
destroying the environment. If children are going 
hungry today and are being denied food, it's 
because the money is being spent on buying toxic 
chemicals and costly seeds rather than being 
spent on feeding children, clothing them, and 
sending them to school. So chemical agriculture 
really is a theft from nature and a theft from the poor.

CURWOOD: In your book Vandana Shiva, you mention 
that 800 million people in the world who suffer 
from malnutrition, and the 1.7 billion who suffer 
from obesity. What is it that the underfed and the overfed have in common?

SHIVA: Both are suffering from consequences of 
corporate control over the food system, which has 
reduced food to commodities, manipulated it, got 
the farmers into debt. The farmers and farmers' 
children who are hungry today are the ones who 
have to sell what they produce in order to pay 
back credit for buying the chemicals they use to 
grow the food. The majority of the hungry in the 
world are rural people today. They could be 
growing their own food if the food system hadn't 
been converted into a market for sales of seeds 
and agrichemicals. And on the other hand, the 
obesity epidemic and other related epidemics of 
diabetes—and in Delhi, childhood diabetes, 
children with diabetes, has jumped from seven 
percent to 14 percent in the city of Dehli, as 
the staple diet of Coca-Cola and chips starts to 
enter our school system—both are victims. Three 
billion people on this planet are being denied 
their right to healthy, safe, nutritious food 
even though the planet can produce that food, and 
farmers of the world can produce that food, 
because agribusiness has turned that food into a 
place for highest returns on profits.

CURWOOD: Now, anyone who goes grocery shopping 
here in the U.S. can tell you that 
organically-produced foods are more generally 
more expensive than conventional foods and yet, 
in your book you write that conventional food is 
not the key to feeding the poor. Tell me about 
what you call the 'myth' of cheap food?  	

Vandana Shiva speaking at the "Deine Stimme Gegen 
Armut" (Your Voice Against Poverty) concert in 
Rostock, Germany on June 7th, 2007.(Photo: Flickr/U2005.com)


SHIVA: The myth of cheap food is related first 
and foremost to the fact that cheap food is a 
result of our tax money being used to lure the 
prices of food that has been produced at very 
high cost financially, and in the process had 
driven farmers off the land, including the United 
States—the family farms are being destroyed 
because of this very artificial low price of 
food, the monopolies that grow with it, which 
creates a buyers market as far as farmers are 
concerned. And then, at every level, a subsidy 
given for manipulating food more and more to take 
away its nutrition and food value and to add 
hazards and risks to it. The entire food system 
is today serving corporations and not serving 
people or the planet. We need to reclaim the food system.

CURWOOD: Now, some of the companies will tell you 
that genetically modified foods help increase 
food production, making more food available. 
You've been opposed to genetically modified foods 
since they first came on the market. What do you 
see wrong with genetically modified crops?

SHIVA: Well, you know the first thing is if they 
were so productive, Indian farmers, who are using 
Bt cotton, wouldn't be the worst victims of 
farmer suicides. One scientist keeps churning out 
data about how $27 million additional income—if 
the farmers were making that additional income, 
they wouldn't be ending their lives. The recent 
Nobel Prize in biology has gone to biologists who 
have shown that the determinism on which genetic 
engineering is based doesn't work. Genes work in 
very complex interactions. This is why those of 
us who critique genetic engineering started to 
critique it as a very crude and primitive 
technology, based on very wrong assumptions of 
how life organizes itself. This idea of one gene, 
one expression doesn't work. Because of the 
crudeness of the technology, industry has so far 
managed to bring us, commercially, only two kinds 
of traits. One is herbicide-tolerant crops, which 
means spray more ground up, contaminate your 
ecosystems and food systems more. And the second 
is Bt toxin crops, where a toxin called Bt is 
engineered into the plant and now every cell is 
making that toxin every moment. It starts to kill 
nontarget species, the very big study of Cornell 
on the monarch butterflies is one example, 1,800 
sheep in India dying by eating Bt cotton is 
another example, (inaudible) studies that shows 
that genetically engineered food fed to mice 
starts to create huge damage physiologically, 
immunity systems collapse, the brains shrunk. We 
need much more research of this kind. 
Unfortunately the industry censures the research, 
pretends that everything is fine and starts to 
target the scientists, who have brought some 
level of awareness to society of the risks of 
manipulating life at the genetic level or 
assessing the consequences adequately.


Vandana Shiva (Photo: Flicr/Daniel Heaf) 	


CURWOOD: In your book you include war as one of 
the unaccounted for external costs of corporate 
agriculture. What does war have to do with the food we eat?

SHIVA: Agrichemicals that have come into farming 
were war chemicals. They're products of war. When 
30,000 people died in Bhopal, it's because those 
pesticides were designed to kill people. 
Herbicides were designed as chemical warfare. 
243D was Agent Orange of the Vietnam War. So the 
tools of agriculture have become the tools of 
warfare. Secondly, the idea of creating food 
dependency is also an idea of warfare. It came 
out of the foreign policy of the United States 
the very word and phrase 'use food as a weapon.' 
It's being used against India today in 
friendship. The interesting thing is that the 
U.S. and India are very intimate today, but the 
U.S.-India agreement on agriculture is trying to 
create dependency of India on the United States. 
Supplies of food, even though we're growing 74 
million tons. This is warfare by another means.

CURWOOD: You want to build a new paradigm for 
food. What does that mean exactly?

SHIVA: I think the first element of the paradigm 
is that food is not a commodity. It's the very 
basis of life. Secondly, food production is not 
industrial activity. It is nurturing the land. It 
is conserving resources. It is giving 
livelihoods. It is shaping a culture. And it is 
much more than bringing corn and soya bean and 
wheat and cotton to the marketplace. We have to 
recognize that biodiversity is the real capital 
of food and farming and linked to it is cultural 
diversity—that we are richer to the extent we 
have diversified food cultures in the world. We 
are poorer as the biodiversity of our farms 
disappears and the cultural diversity of our food systems disappears.

CURWOOD: So what should the average person do in 
terms of a response to your call?

SHIVA: I think the average person should 
recognize that even though they are in cities 
they are connected to the land. That somewhere, 
somebody produced the food they're eating. And we 
will all be freer, if around every city are rural 
communities where small farmers are able to 
produce food of quality, make a living doing 
that, and there is a more intimate connection 
between the food people eat and the land it comes 
from and the producers who have made an effort to 
bring it. I think every city should have its own 
food shed. The creation of farmers' markets is a 
beginning. But I don't think we can leave the 
farmers' markers to be token symbols. We need to 
move the money of taxpayers from subsidizing 
corporations to bring us junk and poison, to 
bringing farmers' markets everywhere, to helping 
small producers everywhere connect to those who 
are looking for more secure food, more safe food, 
more tasty food, more quality food. The most 
important issue is to break the myth that safe, 
ecological, local, is a luxury only the rich can 
afford. This planet cannot afford the additional 
burden of more carbon dioxide, more nitrogen 
oxide, more toxins in our food. Our farmers 
cannot afford the economic burden of these 
useless toxic chemicals. And our bodies cannot 
afford the bombardment of these chemicals anymore.

CURWOOD: Dr. Vandana Shiva is a physicist and 
environmental activist. Thank you so much.

SHIVA: Thank you, Steve.

GELLERMAN: Vandana Shiva is also the editor of a 
new book called, "Manifestos on the Future of 
Food and Seed." She spoke with Living on Earth 
Executive Producer Steve Curwood.


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Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed
Vandana Shiva (Editor), Carlo Petrini 
(Contributor), and Michael Pollan (Contributor)
Pages: 136
ISBN: 978-0-89608-777-4
Format: paperback original
Release Date: 2007-10-01

Purchase for $10.00

Description of Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed.


How are seeds cultivated and saved?
How far must food travel before reaching our plate?
Who gets paid for the food we eat?
Why does our food taste like this?


We live in a world where of the 80,000 edible 
plants used for food only about 150 are being 
cultivated, and just 8 are traded globally. A 
world where we produce food for 12 billion people 
when there are only 6.3 billion people living, 
and, still, 800 million suffer from hunger and 
malnutrition and many more suffer diseases that 
could be eliminated easily with better food. A 
world where food is modified to travel long 
distances rather than to be nutritious and flavorful.


Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed lays 
out, with practical steps and far reaching 
concepts, a program to ensure food and 
agriculture become more socially and ecologically 
sustainable. It harvests the work and ideas 
produced by thousands of communities around the 
world. Emerging from the historic gatherings at 
Terra Madre, farmers, traders, and activists 
diagnose and offer prescriptions to reverse 
perhaps the worst food crisis faced in human history.

There is a growing realization that food politics 
is vital to the health of our bodies, economies, 
and environment—in other words, a matter of life 
or death. Featuring contributions by Michael 
Pollan, Prince Charles, Vandana Shiva, the 
International Commission on the Future of Food 
and Agriculture, and more, this pocket-sized and 
galvanizing collection grapples with these 
enormous costs, daring to imagine a food system—a 
world—that is sustainable, healthy, and ultimately, just.


A world-renowned environmental leader and 
thinker, Vandana Shiva is the author of many 
books, including Earth Democracy, Water Wars, and Staying Alive.