The Life of Food
July 2009
Banner photo: Oxheart tomatoes [© Creativ Studio Heinemann]
Saving Seeds, Feeding the Future
Dr. Vandana Shiva was born in Dehradun, India. A renowned physicist, she later trained as an environmentalist and is now director of Navdanya (Nine Seeds), a program of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE). Navdanya is actively involved in the rejuvenation of indigenous knowledge and culture and campaigns for people's rights. It has 52 seed banks across the country and an organic farm spread over an area of eight hectares in Uttarakhand, north India. Dr. Shiva's publications include Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace (2005) and Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed (2007). Visit www.navdanya.org
SGI Quarterly: What did your upbringing teach you about life?
Vandana Shiva: When I was growing up in Dehradun, India, as the child of a Gurkha family, although the local families might have starved to death during a time of famine, they did not eat the seed. In the ethics of the seed and its relationship with society, you save seed because it embodies the future and you have to defend the future, rather than consume it. The history of our region has thus definitely had a very powerful influence on me.
SGIQ: Your Navdanya movement has created bija satyagraha seed banks so that farmers can freely exchange and preserve a great variety of seed. What successes have you had with this movement, and what obstacles have you faced?
VS: I started seed saving in 1987. The laws that prevent us from saving seeds are immoral laws. So, just as Gandhi did not cooperate with the salt laws which would have made salt-making illegal in India--through the salt satyagraha (nonviolent protest)--we have also created a movement for noncooperation with any law that makes it illegal for us to save our own seeds. In most parts of the world, there is now a law that requires every farmer to get permission from a registering authority that licenses and registers seeds. So farmers' varieties are made illegal because they are not approved in the list, and then they are wiped out from the face of the Earth. When the Seed Licensing Law (2004) was being brought to India about five years ago through a new seed act, we did a satyagraha across the country and stopped the act from being implemented.
It is our duty to save the diversity of our seeds. We have about 52 seed banks in different parts of the country, which have had two very important contributions: First, the seed banks mean that local seeds are available that don't need chemicals and are good with organic farming. The creation of a community seed bank also builds community awareness, so farmers don't get trapped in the cycle of using hybrid nonrenewable seeds. The so-called improved varieties require more chemicals, so farmers are induced to buy both the seed and the chemicals. Then they get into debt and go hungry because they sell everything they have grown in order to pay back their loans. The result has been an epidemic of farmer suicides.
The second positive impact is that we have seeds that help us deal with climate change. So, in the state of Orissa, we have seeds that can help us deal with saltwater and cyclones. In Bihar, where the Ganges floods, we have rice varieties that can grow six meters tall to survive the flooding; in the desert areas we have seeds that survive droughts. But the corporations are greedy and try to patent all this rich diversity.
The best seeds are bred when scientists cooperate with farmers, and the best biodiversity conservation happens when local communities partner with taxonomists; the best organic farming happens when soil scientists work with producers.
Finding Food Security
SGIQ: How is helping small farmers preserve biodiversity linked to developing food security?
VS: It has been assumed that monocultures produce more food. In fact they produce more commodities that can be sold in the global market-place--they produce less nutrition and less food security. Food grown by industrial agriculture also has more hazards linked to micronutrient deficiency. Real food security is to let the small farmers of the world grow more biodiversity. From this comes more food and nutrition for the farmer and the family. Some of the food is sold locally, some of it is traded long-distance, and then you have genuine food security for all, based on good food and high nutrition.
We have had a whole generation of people who have forgotten how to farm with biodiversity. We run farmers' training courses at our farm in Dehradun, a conservation, teaching and research farm, and I run a school about seed called Bij Swaraj. Fifty-year-old farmers see the different crops and respond like children: "This is what the sesame looks like; this is what the tuber looks like!" The richest source of biodiversity is the soil, which is least known by humanity because so many of the organisms are so tiny that the eye cannot see them; it is wonderful to show the farmers under a microscope how rich and living the soil is.
SGIQ: How does returning to biodiversity fit in with the global trend toward renewable resources?
VS: All economic science in recent times is based on linear calculus with externalities, which means you get raw materials, ignore their cost and the cost of fossil fuel in the fertilizer and the environmental impact of all of this. You measure the commodities, saying, "We produced so much." But in fact everything is depleted: the biodiversity, the water, soil fertility and farmers' lives. Focusing on renewability means you recognize your production is based on the law of return, not just the law of appropriation. Through organic farming, we reduce water use--water comes out of organic farms as pure water, as opposed to the dead zones and rivers created by the runoff of chemicals. Nature made everything renewable. We are trying to work to make the resources renewable again.
Self-Sufficiency
SGIQ: How are small farms linked to the wider community?
VS: The public good and the social good are the most important consideration. People are not pitted against one another in the kind of food and farming systems we practice and promote. Farmers gain, in the form of higher incomes, better food and better health; and of course the environment is protected, so you have a win-win-win situation all the way from farmers' livelihoods to the environment and public health.
India is a land of 650 million small farmers feeding 1.2 billion people. We are basically food-sufficient although we are sometimes forced to import food to generate profits for large corporations. In agriculture, the larger the farm, the more you destroy biodiversity and move toward large-scale monocultures with lots of chemicals and fossil fuel use. Each small-scale farm would not produce huge amounts of surplus, but millions of farms added up produce large amounts of surplus. All our farmers are less than one-hectare farmers. Some of them maybe have 500 kg extra, or 200 kg extra, which adds up to be the surplus for feeding the cities. The small farmers are able to give quality attention to biodiversity, to their animals and to the soil. Farmers feel proud of farming when they work with us; in fact we bring dignity back to farming. Young people are either staying on or moving back to the land. In the biodiverse organic systems we have developed, families can look after themselves for future generations. We are also giving scientists a new paradigm to work with, new partners, so there is a larger base of knowledge.
SGIQ: In what way do you see what you have started in India as contributing to world peace?
VS: Our annual lecture on Gandhi's birthday is a celebration of nonviolent farming. Peace with the Earth, not to kill biodiversity, organisms, the birds, the bees. Our model establishes peace with the land and the farmers. Privatization creates competition and conflict. By recovering seed as a commons, we are creating peace. If you make people hungry, they will turn violent. By ensuring an agriculture of abundance, we are establishing an agriculture of peace, so people don't have to fight each other over food.
