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eating planet
interview whoever controls food controls democracy
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva is the founder of Navdanya, a movement for the conservation of biodiversity and to protect the rights of farmers. She is the founder and director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy, whose mission is to solve the most serious social and economic problems in collaboration with local communities and social movements. She has also served as an adviser to the Indian government and for foreign governments, as well as for such NGOs as the International Forum on Globalization, Women’s Environment and Development Organization, and Third World Network.
The one billion people starving and the two billion people sick, and the planet sick—water disappearing, biodiversity disappearing, the climate damaged—soil losing fertility—are all interconnected. And they are interconnected in a model of farming that forgets the nutrition of the soil, it forgets the nutrition of people and puts at the center profits from extraction. That means small farmers can’t feed themselves because they are now part of the new dispossessed. Or if they are farming they’re indebted and they are selling what they grow. So of the one billion people who are hungry, 500 million are producers of food. And a system that forgets that food is about nourishment then produces non-food. And non-food becomes junk food and junk food creates all kinds of diseases. That’s also the same system that is able to exploit water because it doesn’t have to bear the cost. They can push species to extinction. They can put 40% of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that gives us climate change. So profits lead to destroying food, destroying the Earth, destroying our farmers, destroying our health. Obsession with profits.
Given this, what approach should developing countries take towards agriculture, to prevent the problem getting worse? Well, I think the most important point is that so-called developing countries are called developing because we weren’t industrialized in the first industrial revolution. And the large majority of people in our countries, even China and India, are small farmers. Africa for sure, Latin America, for sure. And we need to treat our small farmers as our social capital, because small farms produce more. If we start imitating the large scale industrial corporate farming of the West, we will not only destroy our farmers, we will destroy our food security. The second thing we need to do because developing countries happen to lie in the part of the world that has higher bio-diversity, we need to recognize that nature’s capital of bio-diversity is real capital. Not financial loans from banks that are going to take away your land down the line. Not technologies that are already failing us like genetic engineering. We need to have respect for the land, for our farmers,