Dr. Vandana Shiva recipient of Sydney Peace Prize

Dr Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist, feminist and author who has been awarded the Sydney Peace Prize after defending the developing world against the free-market system for more than three decades.


Transcript

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Now to tonight's guest. Dr Vandana Shiva is an environmental activist who's in Australia to accept this year's Sydney Peace Prize.

For three decades she's argued that the world's poor and the planet's ecosystems have suffered at the hands of the free market system.

She'll deliver a lecture tomorrow night at the Sydney Opera House titled "Making Peace with the Earth" and a short time ago she joined me in our Sydney studio.

Dr Shiva, thank you for joining us.

DR SHIVA VANDANA, ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST: My pleasure.

LEIGH SALES: You've been described as an eco feminist. What does that mean?

SHIVA VANDANA: Well, that means putting together the feminist movement and the ecology movement. In any case the oppressions of both women and nature come from the same roots - a world view that sees nature as dead, women as passive, unproductive, unintelligent - and it's time to give recognition to the life and creation and productivity of both.

LEIGH SALES: So how do you marry those two things, then?

SHIVA VANDANA: You know, I woke up to the deep connection when I got involved as a young, young volunteer in the Chipko movement - this movement of women coming out to hug trees - and whether it's Bhopal, or Chipko, or the water movements, anywhere you look - or the toxic (inaudible) - women act.

Then I realised, "You know, they've been left to look after the care economy and they've been left to look after life".

It's not in our genes but it's definitely in the social division of labour and that's what woke me up to the fact that if we have to care about nature and we have to learn how to live differently - a different relationship - we have to give up the paradigms that have come from what I have called capitalist patriarchy and start building alternatives on the basis of this convergence of feminism and ecology for all - men included.

LEIGH SALES: I'll come to some questions about capitalism in a moment but I wanted to ask, first of all you've got a lecture in Australia, in Sydney - a sell out lecture - tomorrow called Making Peace with the Earth. What will you be saying in that lecture?

SHIVA VANDANA: The first thing I'll be saying is that we have unleashed a serious war against the Earth, against her diverse species, - which is what is biodiversity extinction - against regulatory systems for maintaining a stable climate, a predictable climate. We've got climate chaos, climate change.

No matter what the climate sceptics say they can't deny extreme weather conditions, floods in Pakistan that we've never had on the scale we've had this year.

And this war has to end if humanity has to survive. It's become an imperative.

I will definitely talk about my work, which I focused increasingly on biodiversity, sustainable agriculture. Because in 1984 we had the Bhopal disaster in India, we had terrorism in Punjab. It was all linked to a violent way of producing food - totally unnecessary, because there are nonviolent ways. That's what we practice in Navdanya. And I will talk about the way forward.

LEIGH SALES: You've drawn attention to the problem of suicide among Indian farmers and linked it to genetically modified seeds. What is the connection there in your view?

SHIVA VANDANA: Well the connection is basically through debt.

Seeds used to be farmers' common property and then you get the Monsantos coming in with genetically engineered seed - in the case of India genetically engineered cotton. They claim it's their intellectual property, they collect huge royal - two thirds of the price of the seed is royalty.

Seed that used to cost 5 rupees jumps to 3,600 rupees a kilo, and the promise that this will control pests doesn't work. New pests are being created. Every season we have new pest - 13 times more increase in pesticide use. The combination is huge debt, unpayable debt.

And when the farmer who thought he'd get more production, he would get more comfortable situation in life finds that his land is now slipping out of his hands that's the day the farmer usually drinks pesticide to end his life.

And it's always the men because they're the ones who go to the market place. That's where the agents of the company say "Here's a miracle seed. It's going to make you a millionaire".

So it's a combination of false advertising, renewable seed becoming non-renewable, low cost seed becoming costly and the promise of pest control not working.

LEIGH SALES: The Indian prime minister says that genetic engineering and fertilisers and pesticides have rescued India from regular famines and reliance on food imports. The Scientific American magazine argues that modern cultural technology has allowed food production around the world to increase very substantially in recent decades. What do you say to that?

SHIVA VANDANA: Well unfortunately that's exactly the issue I looked at in 1984 when we had this eruption of violence. And the green revolution - which is chemical farming, industrial farming - was given a Nobel Peace Prize.

And I said "If this was given a Nobel Peace Prize then", I said, "why is there violence and war in Punjab?"

What I found out through a very, very in-depth study of the Green revolution in Punjab was yes, commodities increased, rice and wheat production increased but because we put more land under rice and wheat and we put more irrigation to rice and wheat.

You could have done that kind of acreage increase with organic farming. You'd still have got a lot of rice and wheat.

But other crops went down. Pulses went down and for us in a vegetarian country, pulses which are the only source of protein are very, very important.

Oil seeds went down. Oil seeds are important. It's the only way you can absorb nutrients in your diet - and today India's having to import oil seeds and pulses.

So food is not just rice and wheat and increase in commodity is not increase in food production. The manipulation is through the fact that you look at monocultures - you find more monocultures; you never calculate how much less you're growing of diversity. And - even more importantly - you never calculate how much more resources, water, energy, financial inputs you're using.

Energy terms, 10 units of input in industrial agriculture are giving you 1 output. That is a negative economy.

Water, 10 times more water in industrial agriculture than you would use in ecological agriculture and as our work, Navdanya - the movement I started in India to save seeds and promote organic farming - has shown, you can grow more nutrition per acre through intensifying biodiversity and intensifying ecological processes rather than intensifying chemical input and fossil fuels.

cont.