Thumbs up to Vandana Shiva!

I’ve just been reading about Vandana Shiva. The author of eleven books, Vandana Shiva holds a master's degree in particle physics and a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science. In 1993 she won the prestigious Right Livelihood Award, known as "the alternative Nobel Prize".

She is a brilliant talker – I’ve been reading her speech on the BBC, on the Reith lecture series. Then I found this wonderful 45 minute audio piece, http://www.abc.net.au/specials/shiva/audio.htm, (you'll need RealPlayer) on ABC radio from Australia. She tells a fascinating story about a Texan company that has patented the aromatic rice Basmati. You can hear the incredulity in her voice as she says ‘that’s the rice from MY valley! We’ve grown it for hundreds of years!’ She laughing goes on to say that the heritage of colonialism mean that’s for some people discovery = creation. Under today’s intellectual property rights, where genomes are owned by corporations, creation means ownership. Shiva calls this theft.

Shiva goes on to attack one of the most important issues associated to the whole concept of genetic engineering. The world has rejected genetically engineered food; we just don’t want wheat crossed with scorpion genes, or fish genes in our tomatos!

“This is yesterday’s — ‘Divided over a diet for the world’s poor’. It’s got Africans on this side all with distended bellies and hungry and starving, and then it’s got these banners saying “No GM”, and it’s got food on this side, which means everyone of us who’s saying no to risks of genetic engineering is creating starvation.

And that guilt trip is what they’re manufacturing in the latest round of selling genetic engineering after consumers have rejected it.
Of course it’s not the case that there’s no food on that side, women in Africa are some of the most productive farmers. The productivity of African farms when left to women’s indigenous knowledge is much higher than the Green Revolution could ever achieve, as long as you assess productivity in terms of a hundred crops on the field, rather than one monoculture of maize, or a monoculture of rice.

And if people are starving in Africa it’s because of the way subsidised food has been dumped on Africa, destroying people’s livelihoods and therefore making them starve.

Hunger as a multi-censored [?] has nothing to do with the quantity of food floating around. It has everything to do with ability of people to have entitlements and rights to food, either by growing it themselves, or by being able to grow it and sell parts of it on the market, or to have enough jobs and livelihoods to be able to buy it.

Now this kind of idea of empty eco-systems, empty earth, empty life, empty agriculture as long as it’s not run by corporations, is the entire assumption of globalisation: that there’s nothing till the corporations enter; they create food, they create water.”

Find out more about Vandana Shiva