tagged w/ Vandana Shiva
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Dr. Vandana Shiva and Elizabeth Kucinich speak at Lafayette Park for the Right2Know March and Rally against GMO foods and Monsanto.Dr. Vandana Shiva and Elizabeth Kucinich speak at Lafayette Park for the Right2Know... more
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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.Dr Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist, feminist and author who has been awarded... more
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"The Earth Must Call The Shots. The Earth Will Make The Rules."
Protests rocked Copenhagen on Saturday as anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 people (depending on who you talk to) marched to the UN Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen to demand a strong climate treaty to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. Indian physicist, author, and activist Vandana Shiva spoke to the crowd before the march."The Earth Must Call The Shots. The Earth Will Make The Rules."
Protests... more
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On 7th December it will start, in Copenhagen, the Un summit on climate change. Now, Denmark has submitted a draft that could become the basis for a political agreement: 50% reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050. But there's no midterm plan and 2050 is far away.
http://www.inaltreparole.net/en/world/copenaghentra7giorni301109.htmlOn 7th December it will start, in Copenhagen, the Un summit on climate change. Now,... more
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Excerpt:
"Dupont, Monsanto, Syngenta, and Groupe Limagrain control 75 percent of the seed marketplace and this Saturday at 9:00 am pst, Michael Olson's Food Chain Radio hosts Steve Hixson from Steve's Seed Conditioning to discuss the politics of seeds. Currently, Monsanto and Dupont are going head to head for a bigger piece of the seed profit pie.
So what exactly does such dominance mean for our nation's food chain? With four massive corporations controlling the marketplace, it undoubtedly will have repercussions for the food industry. I wrote back in
September that farmers are essentially giving up the wheel to corporate entities that research, develop, and mass produce seeds. Tracts of land planted with commercial seeds are pushing out local crop varieties and erasing the knowledge gained from 10,000 years of farming."
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/11/the-politics-of-seeds.php
I will always quote this, it is so true:
" Societies and economies can be destroyed by bombs. Societies can also be destroyed by locking every aspect of life like provision of food and water through an economic war.”
By Vandana Shiva
Join Organic:
http://current.com/groups/organicgreen/Excerpt:
"Dupont, Monsanto, Syngenta, and Groupe Limagrain control 75 percent of... more
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"The War of the Empire has many faces
The 'war on terror' has become nameless since our administration changed. But it is the same war, it has the same goals and it is as unwinnable as it always was. But certainly there are other ways of conquering the planet, says Washington. And so they impose the huge industries with their humungous profits on the entire world, corporations like Monsanto, Cargill, Dow, Bunge and others, giants that impose their own laws on world-wide agriculture and their goal is to make us eat only what they profit from."
More:
"There is also another important point to make in President Obama's choice of Michael Taylor to head the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Michael Taylor is the notorious revolving-door man who, during the George W. Bush era switched jobs between a high-level post for Monsanto and working for the government agencies that are supposed to regulate the food industry, such as Monsanto."
I keep thinking and wondering about this and can't get over it, why is Obama supporting this?
Remembering Vandana Shiva's words:
" Societies and economies can be destroyed by bombs. Societies can also be destroyed by locking every aspect of life like provision of food and water through an economic war.”
Join Organic:
http://current.com/groups/organicgreen/"The War of the Empire has many faces
The 'war on terror' has become... more
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