The quiet Indian: Vandana Shiva

Dr. Vandana Shiva

Chances are that if Vandana Shiva had been a mass killer, you’d all have heard of her by now because she’d have received the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour evidently reserved for that august category of people—think Henry Kissinger, Barack Obama. Being only a preserver of life, and not a warmonger and dispatcher of machines that incinerate children in the night, she is less likely to have come to your attention. It is always dull to work for life; to work for death attracts so much more attention and infinitely more sound-bites.

But if you really want to hear someone speak with passion and conviction, hear words enriched with meaning and glowing with purpose, ablaze with courage and originality instead of impoverished with insincerity and rendered lifeless by hypocrisy, that come forth from the mouths of the “heroes” the mainstream press holds up for our admiration, you can do no better than to watch one of the numerous videos of Vandana Shiva available online—here, here, and here. Hearing her, knowing what she stands for and what she is attempting to do is a welcome reminder that courage and passion still exist, that cynicism and despair are not the only possible responses.

Vandana Shiva holds a Ph. D in Physics, but left academia once she realized how knowledge and resources were being used to serve the interests of the powerful rather than the disenfranchised. When she began her work in the late eighties, India was still under the spell of the fertilizer-intensive Green Revolution, where farming was carried on with heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers, in order to increase crop yield within a short time and attain food security in a starving nation. Whatever the short-term benefits of the Revolution, the long-term effects have been ruinous, both for farmers and consumers.

Over-use of chemicals depletes the water table and renders the use of more and more chemical inputs necessary to maintain yield. Now with the entry into agriculture of transnational companies like Monsanto, farmers get into huge debt through purchasing fertilizers and pesticides, and most importantly, seeds, from such companies. These transnational companies supply farmers with genetically modified (GMO) seeds, and farmers are then prevented from saving and using their own seed, as they have done for millennia, for the next sowing season. They are forced to buy the GMO seeds and fertilizers from the company. Big businesses like Monsanto destroy in one fell swoop thousands of years of indigenous knowledge and crop adaptation, carefully developed by farmers over the years, and replace them with a cycle of debt and poverty that has caused tens of thousands of farmer suicides over the last two decades in India.

Shiva is a pioneer in the movement that is working to change this cycle of debt and destruction. As she puts it, “Seed is the source of life,” and “Seed sovereignty is food sovereignty.” For over a quarter of a century Shiva has waged a tireless campaign against the attempts of Big Business to patent indigenous knowledge and indigenous seed for superprofits. She and her team work to return food sovereignty and control where it rightfully belongs—in the hands of the farmer—and especially the woman farmer, who is so rarely acknowledged as a farmer at all, and whose work and ownership are so often disputed or dismissed. As she points out on her website, for her, “ecology and feminism have been inseparable.” So the movement for food self-sufficiency is also withal a movement for the empowerment of women, for women’s right to claim ownership of the food that they toil to produce.

Shiva’s fight is against biopiracy, the theft of seed and life-forms, and therefore the theft of food and ultimately of life, by big agribusiness. She seeks to replace huge corporate-controlled monoculture farms, where decisions are made to profit people completely alienated from the local interests and ground reality of farming and farmers, with local organic farms that are dedicated to biodiversity, nature’s answer to the debilitating effects of monocropping on the local ecosystem. Shiva’s foundation, Navdanya, saves hundreds of varieties of seed, maintains a seed library, fights patents by transnational agri-Goliaths like Monsanto in international courts, and spearheads the organic food movement in the Garhwal foothills of North India. Where the natural and ecologically friendly methods of organic, sustainable and biodiverse farming have been adopted, Shiva points out with quiet and justifiable triumph, there have been no farmer suicides at all.

The movement of the future, the pulse of tomorrow, might even now be beating in the return to food sovereignty movement in India, not in the giant distraction machines run by the mainstream media, so adept at hijacking our attention from the things that matter.

Many of us spend time following the adventures of characters on reality TV shows. Those of us who pride ourselves on our awareness of “relevant” issues are kept busy weighing the relative merits of a Tweedledum versus a Tweedledee, of a Bush versus an Obama. But what is at stake here is what sort of knowledge is really important, which questions are the right ones to ask, and which questions exist, or are deliberately created, to prevent us thinking about the issues that affect our lives most deeply and with the greatest urgency. In the knowledge wars, the awareness tournaments, style trumps substance every time; noise drowns out meaning. Shiva’s is one of the still small voices that hardly ever blips on our radar, but the point is that it should, because in terms of relevance to the most fundamental aspect of our lives—what we eat, and therefore what we are—her work could hardly be more crucial.

Shiva recently sent out a general invitation to visit India and see for yourselves the transformation being brought about by the “Earth Democracy” movement. “Come to India,” she says, “and expose yourself to another way of living.”

This invitation has not gone out because India is the next “happening place,” because it has a bunch of newly minted dollar bloodsuckers—pardon me, billionaires—or because it’s the next “superpower” (read “super” at exploiting its local resources and indigenous people for dizzyingly large profits for a few blood—er, billionaires.) India might be worth your attention because there’s a quiet revolution taking place there at the most basic of all levels—that of life, that of hope. Though it might come as news to many of us who live in the West and imagine non-Western lands as perpetually peripheral to our concerns, we are all connected—we do live on the one small planet. What this modest Indian woman stands for might not matter to the moneyed and powerful of this world, because, frankly, she is inimical to their interests. But it should matter to you.

Pubali Ray Chaudhuri is an Associate Editor of Intrepid Report.