Dr. Vandana Shiva: Who Feeds The World? Celebrate the Small Farmer

Vandana Shiva Who Feeds The World?
Dr. Vandana Shiva, Navdanya

Who Feeds The World? Celebrate the Small Farmer.
Oct 6, 2013
(Video & Full Transcript)

There is such an intense debate about who feeds the world. There is one myth that without the Green Revolution India wouldn’t have been fed. But the Green Revolution was only rice and wheat, and it transformed bio-diverse systems with very high productivity into monocultures of rice, monocultures of wheat, pumped with high doses of chemicals, ten times more water. Today, our water has disappeared, our soils are polluted, a cancer train leaves Punjab because the toxics and pesticides have created a cancer epidemic.

The reality of who feeds the world is the biodiversity that we are growing here at Navdanya. These amazing millets, the forgotten foods that have disappeared from our fields and from our tables. The diversity of crops grown in cooperation. The amazing intensification of biodiversity where the beans grow with the cereals, where millets that produce forty times more nutrition and use next to no water give us food security in the worst of times. But because we’ve had an arrogance and a racism, assuming that only globally traded commodities are food and a racism that treats everything dark as inferior, we’ve driven out healthy food, we’ve driven out biodiversity, and we’ve replaced it with monocultures and industrial foods, and industrial agriculture.

Industrial agriculture accounts for only 28% of the world’s food production. It is using up 75% of the world’s resources. This is a highly inefficient system. If they were to reach 100% of the resources and destroy our soil, destroy our water, destroy the biodiversity and mess up the climate they could at best get to about 40% food supply, but with the collapse of the entire ecological base that gets food to us.

We are made repeatedly to believe that replacing monocultures of rice and wheat with monocultures of corn and soya that are genetically modified is feeding the world. Only 10% of corn and soya that is grown worldwide is going to people’s table. The rest is biofuel and animal feed. Why are we accepting a 10% myth as the basis of food security? When we have eaten 8,500 species of plants, when small farmers are still 72% of the food base. The 72% must become 100%. And we can make it 100% by defending our small farms, promoting diverse agriculture, promoting ecological intensification of the kind we see in these fields with beans and millets co-existing, with an amazing cooperation of the stalks of the cereals giving the support to the bean and the bean gives the free nitrogen to the soil and free protein to human beings.

These cooperative, intensive, biodiverse ecological systems are the source of food security. Small farms are also the source of food security. Gardens growing intensively like this are the source of food security. Making peace with the earth is the source of food security.

Industrial agriculture—whether it’s the Green Revolution or as GMOs—is a war against the planet. And it’s an inefficient system. It’s going to leave us with neither bread nor freedom, whereas cooperative arrangements between plants and humans and within the plant system, this beautiful pearl millet giving the support to a beautiful pearl bean, this is where the food of the world comes from, and the future food must all be like this, a garden of abundance, rather than a green desert full of poisons.

On World Food Day celebrate small farms, small farmers & local produce. Celebrate the real food heroes.

More information at Navdanya.

Dr. Vandana Shiva March Against Monsanto

Dr. Vandana Shiva, Navdanya

Dr. Vandana Shiva, Navdanya

Global Alliance For Seed Freedom / Navdanya
Call for a March Against Monsanto
On 25th May 2013
(Video and Full Transcript)

A March Against Monsanto Is A March For Life and Freedom – 25th May 2013

On 25th of May, people across the world, wherever they are, whatever they do, will be standing up to march against Monsanto. The March Against Monsanto is inspired by the love for freedom and democracy, the love for the Earth, the soil, the seed. And it is our deep love for life on Earth in freedom that makes all of us march against Monsanto and we stand in solidarity with everyone from the seed freedom movement catalyzed by Navdanya.

Monsanto has become the center stage for the destruction of our seeds, our diversity, our food, and our freedom. Beginning with the 1980s, when Monsanto drafted the laws imposing patents on life, even though life can’t be invented, and therefore is not patentable. More recently, the Supreme Court of the United States has upheld Monsanto’s totally illegitimate patent right on seed in the Bowman v. Monsanto case. And Monsanto writes into the U.S. budget law a Monsanto Protection Act, making it immune from any court action to protect diversity, to prevent contamination of the kind that the OSGATA case is fighting to defend the rights of organic seed producers.

In India, we have a very strong and very good law under the Environment Protection Act. It predates the Earth Summit, it predates the Convention on Biodiversity, it predates the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol, and it’s meant to regulate GMOs. Because we used the law to stop the Bt gene, the Bt brinjal, there’s been attempts by Monsanto to write a Monsanto Protection Act. It is called the Biotechnology Regulatory Act of India. It’s a deregulation act, but in typical Monsanto double speak, it’s called a regulatory act. It would throw citizens into jail for challenging GMOs. It is taking away the federal rights of our state governments who were a major player in stopping the Bt eggplant.

And in Europe, the European Commission, which as become an extension of Monsanto through the hundreds of lobbyists that work on a daily basis, there’s another Monsanto Protection Act being shaped to make it illegitimate and illegal for gardeners and farmers to have their own seeds. This is a new form of fascism. It’s a new form of dictatorship.

When Hitler came to power and the Nazis came to power with their kind of genocide, people created resistance movements everywhere. Today this new fascism is over life itself in all its diversity. It’s not just controlling one religion and one race. It’s wanting to outlaw all diversity of all life on Earth, and the rights of the producers as well as the eaters of food. After all, the huge onslaught against any attempt for labeling GMO foods in the United States is part of this Monsanto dictatorship. That is why the March Against Monsanto is a march for freedom. And this march is not just for the 25th of May. We will have to carry it on everyday of our lives as we plant our seeds and save our seeds, and we stand up in resistance with our gardens of resistance, growing healthy food, nurturing the soil and the seed, thanking the ancestors of those seeds and the future generations, handing over to our future generations the care and custody of our precious diversity.

Let us plant gardens of resistance against this new form of fascism. We will set the Earth in her diversity and people with their diversities free.

This dictatorship must end. The March Against Monsanto is a call to end the dictatorship over seed, over life, over our food, and over our freedom.

www.navdanya.org
www.seedfreedom.in

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