Seed Sovereignty Food Security Read online

  Seed Sovereignty, Food Security

  Also by Vandana Shiva

  Making Peace with the Earth: Beyond Resource, Land and Food Wars

  Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

  Globalization’s New Wars: Seed, Water & Life Forms

  Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace

  Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit

  Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply

  Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development

  Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge

  Ecofeminism (coauthored with Maria Mies)

  Monocultures of the Mind: Biodiversity, Biotechnology and Agriculture

  The Violence of the Green Revolution: Ecological Degradation and Political Conflict in Punjab

  Seed Sovereignty, Food Security

  WOMEN IN THE VANGUARD OF THE FIGHT AGAINST GMOS AND CORPORATE AGRICULTURE

  Edited by

  Vandana Shiva

  North Atlantic Books

  Berkeley, California

  Copyright © 2016 by Vandana Shiva. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

  Published by

  North Atlantic Books

  Berkeley, California

  Cover photo © iStockphoto.com/AfricaImages

  Cover design by Jasmine Hromjak

  Seed Sovereignty, Food Security: Women in the Vanguard of the Fight against GMOs and Corporate Agriculture is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

  North Atlantic Books’ publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Shiva, Vandana, editor.

  Title: Seed sovereignty, food security : women in the vanguard of the fight against GMOs and corporate agriculture / edited by Vandana Shiva.

  Description: Berkeley, California : North Atlantic Books, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015021347| ISBN 9781623170288 (trade pbk.) | ISBN 9781623170295 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Plant genetic engineering--Moral and ethical aspects. | Transgenic plants—Moral and ethical aspects. | Crops—Genetic engineering—Moral and ethical aspects. | Agricultural biotechnology—Moral and ethical aspects. | Food security—Moral and ethical aspects. | Women in agriculture.

  Classification: LCC QK981.5 .S44 2016 | DDC 581.4/67—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015021347

  Contents

  Seed Sovereignty, Food Security VANDANA SHIVA

  International: Reflections on the Broken Paradigm

  Fields of Hope and Power | FRANCES MOORE LAPPÉ and ANNA LAPPÉ

  The Ethics of Agricultural Biotechnology | BETH BURROWS

  Food Politics, the Food Movement, and Public Health | MARION NESTLE

  Autism and Glyphosate: Connecting the Dots | STEPHANIE SENEFF

  The New Genetics and Dangers of GMOs | MAE-WAN HO

  Global North

  Seed Emergency: Germany | SUSANNE GURA

  GM Soy as Feed for Animals Affects Posterity | IRINA ERMAKOVA and ALEXANDER BARANOV

  Seeds in France | TIPHAINE BURBAN

  Kokopelli v. Graines Baumaux | BLANCHE MAGARINOS-REY

  If People Are Asked, They Say NO to GMOs | FLORIANNE KOECHLIN

  The Italian Context | MARIA GRAZIA MAMMUCINI

  The Untold American Revolution: Seed in the United States | DEBBIE BARKER

  Reviving Native Sioux Agricultural Systems | SUZANNE FOOTE

  In Praise of the Leadership of Indigenous Women | WINONA LADUKE

  Celebrating the Chile Nativo | ISAURA ANDALUZ

  Moms Across America: Shaking Up the System | ZEN HONEYCUTT

  Global South

  Seed Freedom and Seed Sovereignty: Bangladesh Today | FARIDA AKHTER

  Monsanto and Biosafety in Nepal | KUSUM HACHHETHU

  Sowing Seeds of Freedom | VANDANA SHIVA

  The Loss of Crop Genetic Diversity in the Changing World | TEWOLDE BERHAN GEBRE EGZIABHER and SUE EDWARDS

  Seed Sovereignty and Ecological Integrity in Africa | MARIAM MAYET

  Conserving the Diversity of Peasant Seeds | ANA DE ITA

  Seed Saving and Women in Peru | PATRICIA FLORES

  The Seeds of Liberation in Latin America | SANDRA BAQUEDANO JER and SARA LARRAÍN

  The Other Mothers and the Fight against GMOs in Argentina | ANA BROCCOLI

  Seeding Knowledge: Australia | SUSAN HAWTHORNE

  Contributors

  About the Editor

  Seed Sovereignty, Food Security

  Vandana Shiva

  Seed and food the world over have been shaped by millions of years of nature’s contribution and centuries of women’s intelligence, skills, hard work, and perseverance. Today, women are again in the vanguard of defending seed freedom and food sovereignty in the context of globalization, which—worldwide—has facilitated corporate grab, through patents on seed associated with genetic engineering. Corporations have done this via a mechanistic paradigm of biology and agriculture, and through a reductionist paradigm of the economy.

  This volume demonstrates how women as activists, scientists, and scholars are at the forefront of shaping new scientific and economic paradigms to reclaim seed sovereignty and food security across the world. They are leading movements to change both practice and paradigm: how we grow and transform our food. As seed keepers and food producers, as mothers and consumers, they are engaged in renewing a food system that is better aligned with the ecological processes of the Earth’s renewal, the laws of human rights and social justice, and the means through which our bodies stay well and healthy.

  The Industrial Paradigm of Agriculture

  The industrial paradigm for food production is clearly no longer viable. It is unviable because it came from labs producing tools for warfare, not from farms and fields producing food and nourishment. The industrial paradigm of agriculture has its roots in war; an industry that grew by making explosives and chemicals for the war remodeled itself as the agrochemical industry when the major twentieth-century wars ended. Explosives factories started making synthetic fertilizers; war chemicals began to be used as pesticides and herbicides. Whether it is chemical fertilizers, or chemical pesticides, their roots are in war. They are designed to kill. That is why thousands were killed in India, in Bhopal on December 2, 1984, and why hundreds of thousands continue to be maimed because of leaks from a pesticide plant owned by Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical). That is also why chemicals like Roundup (glyphosate) are being implicated in new disease epidemics by scientists like Stephanie Seneff of MIT, who identify the processes through which these chemicals cause harm.

  In 1984, because of the Bhopal disaster and extreme violence in Punjab—projected as the granary of India—I decided to study why agriculture had become so volatile. The aggressive introduction of chemicals in Indian agriculture was promoted as the Green Revolution. Introduced initially in Punjab, its main advocate, Norman Borlaug, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970; bu
t by 1984, Punjab had become a land of war, not peace, and peace had broken down because the sustainability of water, the health of soils and of people were all being undermined by the chemicals that drove the “Green Revolution.” Poisons have contributed to a cancer epidemic in Punjab; a “cancer train” takes cancer victims from Bhatinda to Rajasthan for treatment.

  A paradigm born of the violence of a militarized mind sows the seeds of violence in nature and society. It is ignorant of how seed and soil, how biodiversity are renewed. It is blind to the subtle balance by which insects (or “pests”) are controlled through diversity and a complex web of life. For chemically driven agriculture, every insect is an “enemy” that must be exterminated by the most lethal weapons of chemical warfare. And even though poisons and pesticides are designed to kill, another paradigm war around “safety” has been initiated.

  The violence of Punjab and Bhopal propelled me into dedicating my intellectual and activist energies to creating a nonviolent paradigm for food and farming; and it is why I started Navdanya—saving local seed varieties. Collectively, across the world, we have forged a new paradigm for agriculture referred to as agroecology. Agroecological systems produce more and better food, and return higher incomes to farmers.

  The chemical push reoriented agriculture toward toxicity and corporate control. Instead of working with ecological processes and taking the well-being and health of the entire agroecosystem, with its diverse species, into account, agriculture was reduced to an external input system adapted to chemicals. Instead of recognizing that farmers have been breeders over millennia, giving us the rich agro-biodiversity that is the basis of food security, breeding was reduced to breeding uniform industrial varieties that respond well to chemical inputs. Instead of small farms producing diversity, agriculture became focused on large monoculture farms producing a handful of commodities. Correspondingly, the human diet shifted from having 8,500 plant species to about eight globally traded commodities available. The scientific paradigm was also transformed. Instead of encouraging a holistic approach, the practice of agriculture was compartmentalized into fragmented disciplines based on reductionism.

  Just as gross domestic product (GDP) fails to measure the real economy and the health of nature and society, the category of “yield” fails to measure the real costs and real outputs of farming systems. As the United Nations observed, the so-called high yielding varieties (HYVs) of the Green Revolution should in fact be called high response varieties, as they have been bred for chemicals; they are not high yielding in and of themselves. The narrow measure of “yield” propelled agriculture into deepening monocultures, displacing diversity and eroding natural and social capital. The social and ecological impact of this broken-down model has pushed the planet and society into deep crisis.

  • Industrial monoculture agriculture has pushed more than 75 percent of our agro-biodiversity to extinction.

  • 75 percent of bees have been killed because of toxic pesticides. Einstein had cautioned, “When the last bee disappears, humans will disappear.”

  • 75 percent of the water on the planet is being depleted and polluted for chemical-intensive industrial agriculture. The nitrates in water from industrial farms are creating “dead zones” in our oceans.

  • 75 percent of land and soil degradation is caused by chemical-industrial farming.

  • 40 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change come from a fossil fuel, chemical-intensive industrial globalized system of agriculture. Fossil fuels that are used to make fertilizers, run farm machinery, and transport food thousands of miles from where it is grown contribute to carbon dioxide emissions. Chemical nitrogen fertilizers emit nitrogen oxide, which is 300 percent more destabilizing for the climate than carbon dioxide. And factory farming is a major source of methane.

  While this ecological destruction of natural capital is justified in terms of “feeding people,” the problem of hunger has grown. One billion people are permanently hungry; another two billion suffer from food-related diseases. When the focus of agriculture is the production of commodities for trade, instead of food for nourishment, hunger and malnutrition are the outcome. Only 10 percent of corn and soy grown in the world are used as food; the rest goes for animal feed and biofuel. Commodities do not feed people, food does.

  A high-cost external input system is artificially kept afloat with $400 billion in subsidies—that is more than $1 billion a day. So-called “cheap” commodities have a very high cost financially, ecologically, and socially. Industrial, chemical agriculture displaces productive rural families; it is also debt-creating, and debt and mortgages are the main reason for the disappearance of the family farm. In extreme cases, as in the cotton belt of India, debt created by the purchase of high-cost seed and chemical inputs has pushed more than 127,000 farmers to suicide in a little over a decade.

  The false argument that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are needed in order to increase food production to feed growing populations is a desperate attempt to extend the life of a failing paradigm. A series of myths are formulated to bolster this argument, centered around GMOs.

  Living organisms, including seed, are self-organized complex systems. As Mae-Wan Ho points out in her contribution in this volume, they adapt and evolve, and are “fluid” at the level of the genome. Genes are influenced by the environment, as the new discipline of epigenetics shows. GMOs or genetically engineered seeds and food are being promoted as a technological miracle for feeding the world, and ending malnutrition and hunger. However, after twenty years of commercialization, all promises of the GMO miracle have been discredited. The following GMO myths need to be challenged and disproved.

  Myth 1: GMOs are an “invention” of corporations, and therefore can be patented and owned. Living organisms, including seeds, thus become the “intellectual property” of the GMO industry. Using these property rights, corporations can forcibly prevent farmers from saving and sharing seeds, and can collect royalties on their patented products. A Monsanto representative is on record stating that his company wrote the intellectual property agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO). He added that they were the “patient, diagnostician, physician”; they defined the problem—farmers save seeds—and offered a solution: seed saving should be made illegal.

  The claim to invention is a myth because genetic engineering does not create a plant or an organism; it is merely a tool to transfer genes across species. Living organisms are self-organizing, self-replicating systems. They make themselves. Unlike machines, they cannot be engineered. There are only two ways of introducing genes from unrelated species: one is the use of a gene gun, the other is through plant cancer. Just as a mover of furniture is not the maker or owner of the house to which the furniture is moved, the GMO industry is merely the mover of genes from one organism to another, not the creator or inventor of the organism, including seeds and plants.

  Through the false claim of “invention” and creation, the GMO industry is appropriating millions of years of nature’s evolution, and thousands of years of farmers’ breeding.

  Myth 2: Genetic engineering is more accurate and precise than conventional breeding. All breeding has been based on breeding within the same species: rice is bred with rice, wheat with wheat, corn with corn.

  The tools of genetic engineering allow the introduction of genes from unrelated species into a plant, and include genes from bacteria, scorpions, fish, and cows. The introduction of genes from unrelated species is a blind technology, neither accurate nor precise. When genes are introduced into the cells of a plant using a gene gun, it is not known if the cell has absorbed the gene or not. That is why every GMO also uses an antibiotic-resistance marker gene, to separate cells that have absorbed the gene from those that have not. This means that every GMO in food has antibiotic-resistance genes that can mix with bacteria in the human gut and aggravate the crisis of antibiotic resistance we are currently facing.

  Further, since the introduced gene does
not belong to the organism, genes from virulent viruses are added as “promoters” to express the trait for which genes have been introduced. These additional transformations are evidence of the unreliability and inaccuracy of the gene transfer technology. Moreover, nothing is known about what these genes do when they enter our body as food. In the case of herbicide-tolerant crops like Roundup Ready soy and corn, the combination that needs to be considered for its impact on the environment and on health is both Roundup (glyphosate) and the new genes in the food crop.

  Myth 3: GMOs are just like naturally occurring organisms, and are therefore safe. Myth 3 is inconsistent with myth 1. To establish ownership, the GMO industry claims novelty. To avoid responsibility for adverse impact, it claims naturalness. I have called this “ontological schizophrenia.” GMOs have an impact on the environment, on our health, and on farmers’ socioeconomic status; that is why we have an international UN Biosafety Protocol.

  I was appointed a member of the expert group that worked on the framework of the protocol to implement Article 19.3 of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The unscientific principle of “substantial equivalence” has been institutionalized in order to avoid research on biosafety. Substantial equivalence assumes that the GMO is substantially equivalent to the parent organism. This leads to a “don’t look, don’t see, don’t find” policy, and not having looked for impacts, GMOs are declared “safe.” Ignorance of impacts, however, is not proof of safety.

  There is as yet no proof of safety.1

  Myth 4: GMOs are based on cutting-edge science; GMO critics are “anti-science.” Genetic engineering is based on an obsolete paradigm of genetic determinism, a linear and deterministic flow of information from genes, which are called “master molecules,” to proteins. Francis Crick called this the “central dogma” of molecular biology. Genetic determinism assumes that genes are atoms of biological determinism, with one gene carrying one trait, and determining the traits in an organism. But these are assumptions that come from the idea of control and domination; this is patriarchal ideology, not science.