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Feature
Reclaiming Our Roots: A Return to the Soil
A Conversation with Dr. Vandana Shiva
by Elyssa Paige
“All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil.”
– William Butler Yeats
In our world of urban sprawl, it’s commonplace for corporate names and logos to be plastered on everything that meets the eye. But what happens when corporations seek ownership of the source of people’s livelihoods, thereby removing what has been an inherent right of nature and our place within it?
That’s what is happening with the global patenting of seed and the privatization of water. Nature’s rights are being usurped by big business. The biotech industry, in a thinly veiled campaign to increase farmer productivity and end world hunger through the genetic engineering of crops, is really perpetuating the problems they claim to solve by putting price tags on basic elements that have been free for generations, often leading to farmers not being able to feed their families.
Dr. Vandana Shiva, author of many books including Soil Not Oil and Earth Democracy, and winner of the 1993 Alternative Nobel Peace Prize, is a leading environmentalist and activist of our time. She has been the voice of the people and has worked tirelessly in India and abroad to preserve the seed and biodiversity. In protecting our food rights against the threat of globalization, she founded Navdanya, a program of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology. With the creation of 46 seed banks and Bija Vidyapeeth, an organic farm in north India, Dr. Shiva presents a natural solution that rests in the soil which gives life to all.
Vision Magazine: How did your journey into the ecological sustainability movement begin?
Vandana Shiva: My journey into ecological sustainability began with my birth. My father was a forest conservator and my mother had chosen to become a farmer, so it was always a part of my life.
A very clear understanding of the link between justice and sustainability began at the Chipko Movement in the 70s when I was still a student. The forest of our region, the Himalayas, was disappearing for logging profits. The women organized themselves and said, “We will not let the forest be cut. You will have to kill us before you kill the trees.” That’s where the idea of Chipko comes from, meaning to hug, and the word treehuggers comes out of Chipko.
VM: What inspired you to start Navdanya?
VS: Sometimes inspiration can come from something extremely negative. The inspiration for Navdanya was from a conference I attended on biotechnology. I’m not a biotechnologist and at this conference were all the giants in the chemical industry who today are the big players in genetic engineering. They talked about how by the turn of the century, they wanted to control all seed and our health through patents, genetic engineering, consolidation, and through the buying of smaller companies. They said five companies would be the players by the time the project was through.
What they were talking about is dictatorship over life. When they talked about no options beyond patenting, I realized that this is about slavery, knowing the risks of genetic engineering a little bit. Then we are committed to hazards; we’re committed to no options and it’s not a future I wanted to see for my people or anyone in the world.
VM: What are some of the ways that Navdanya realizes its mission to protect nature and people’s rights?
VS: I think the most important point is that we connect the rights of nature, different species, and the rights of people. These are not separate rights, and of course we begin with the recognition that nature has rights. We do this by protecting biodiversity and our mission statement very clearly. We live for a world where every species has a place and a future.
Conservation of biodiversity is our most important service, but the wonderful thing that has happened though this is that as we use biodiversity to get rid of toxics, organic manure to get rid of chemical fertilizer, trees like the neem and the pongam to get rid of pesticides, we found that we have a lower cost system of production because now the farmer can grow the trees on his farm and make his own compost. This was something I had not expected when I started this. I started it just for the protection of people’s rights and nature. What we have found over 20 years is that these systems produce more food, more nutrition, and more income for people. There has been an unanticipated economic benefit flowing out of the conservation system, which has confirmed my belief that the more you respect nature, the more she gives to you.
VM: What is the true cost of corporate domination of natural resources?
VS: The corporate domination of natural resources takes many forms. One form is enclosing the commons of biodiversity through patenting. I have called this the enclosure of the biological commons. Then there is enclosing the commons through water privatization. Even climate change and now carbon trading through the Kyoto Protocol, about which I talk a lot in my book, Soil Not Oil, is an enclosure of the atmospheric commons. It is turning what belongs to all into the property of the corporation, thereby forcing people to pay the corporation for what is a common gift of nature.
This ends up with farmers in India having to spend 17,000 or 20,000 rupees on seed that used to cost nothing or perhaps five or six rupees for a kilogram. The seeds then need the chemicals. After all, the companies that are genetically engineering and patenting seed are chemical companies—they have interest in selling more chemicals. They don’t do genetic engineering to reduce chemical use; they do genetic engineering to increase chemical use.
The consequence of this has been 200,000 farmer suicides in India over the last decade. Most of these [were] concentrated in areas of the highest planting of Bt [genetically engineered] cotton. The second way in which corporate control over natural resources hurts is that corporations do not conserve; they exploit. Therefore the most renewable of resources has turned scarce. Water is a renewable resource, but corporations have mined water—whether it is in India or America, now there is water scarcity. Corporations have also given us the climate chaos that we are seeing threatening life at all kinds of levels. That’s control over natural resources. For me, of course, the control over the seed is the most serious and therefore keeping the seed free has become my life’s mission.
VM: How do small organic farms compare to industrial mega farms in terms of food security, pollution and health?
VS: The first thing about small ecological farms is that they don’t use chemicals. Because they don’t use chemicals, they don’t push small peasants and farmers into debt. We also don’t pollute the soil, the water, or the air. In terms of soil pollution, it means killing the soil and its fertility. In terms of water pollution, it means pesticide residues in groundwater and nitrate pollution in water bodies. In terms of food security, industrial agriculture has given us what I call empty mass. There is no nutrition in the food that’s being produced and there’s data now from the very few studies that have been done that show that there could be as much as a disappearance of 40 [to] 70 percent of the vital micronutrients and trace elements. If you don’t put them into the soil and you try to replace them with nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, you are going to have a depletion of nutrients in the soil. Then the plants will be depleted and the empty food we eat will give us nutritional deficiencies.
Overall, you’ve got two industrial agricultural productions of pollution and disease. But the most important issue is that industrial agriculture has told the world a big lie, which means the corporations that run it have told the people a big lie, including the governments who have supported them. The lie is that industrial agriculture feeds people. Industrial agriculture feeds profits. People are going hungry. A billion people are hungry today because chemical farming does not let them eat the food they grow; instead they have to pay back the debt. They sell what they grow—I witness this on a daily basis in India. Hunger today is a rural phenomenon and the producers of food could be eaters of food if the chemicals weren’t stealing their entitlement.
VM: Can you explain your belief that the solution to climate change and poverty are the same?
VS: Globalization, which is driven by fossil fuels that cause climate change, is also driving people off their land into poverty and dispossession. The biggest solution to climate change is to allow people to have livelihoods on the land. And these livelihoods on the land can only be generated on a sustainable basis if we farm without chemicals or violence to animals, if we farm by conserving the soil, the water, and the biodiversity that makes farming possible. This reduces climate change on one hand, while it removes poverty on the other. So it is not the case that we have to have different packages for poverty removal and environmental protection; the same acts transform into acts of equality, justice, and sustainability.
VM: What do you see as the next step for humanity?
VS: The next step for humanity, as I said in my book, Soil Not Oil, is a transition from a world of oil and fossil fuels—which also means a world of capital, of concentration of power, of lack of democracy—to a world of renewability, of decentralization, and of recognizing our potential as co-creators and co-producers with nature. The fossil fuel paradigm makes us believe that we have no power, that we have no energy. The paradigm of the soil reminds us that the soil is waiting to be worked. Our co-creation with the soil can produce anything we need—all the wonderful food and fiber we need. There isn’t a thing that we cannot produce, with our hands and with our labor.
Another part of this transition is redefining human work. Physical work for the age of oil was made to look like degraded work and energy slaves were used to displace humans from work. And that displacement was defined as liberation. What is has given us is poverty. It has given us the movement of people into slums. It has given us unemployment and it has given us what I call disposability of the human being. The next step has to be to embed ourselves in nature and her power to renew and in that embedding, to bring human beings at the core of creative production that is non-violent to the earth and non-violent to other human beings. That also means recognizing our tremendous potential, which we have hardly begun to even experience.
VM: What can people do in their everyday lives to become a part of this revolution?
VS: I think the fact that many crises are happening together can be a major opportunity to become a player in creating a better world—a world based on soil. A world based on soil is a world of the earth, a world of God. In their everyday lives, people can start creating from communities that are ecological and local. People can start becoming authentic and creative workers, again building local economies.
But local economies do not get built on the basis of individuals; they get built on the basis of communities. So reestablishing relationships that make community becomes another challenge of the 21st century. Most importantly, I think we’ve forgotten that to be human means to recognize our species identity. Narrowed identities have made us escape from our earth identity and become afraid of each other. Narrow religious identities have led to fundamentalism, ethnic identities have led to ethnic cleansing, and money identities have led to class divides.
All of these explosive and fragmented identities have made us forget two wonderful parts of who we are as human beings. First, that we are rooted in the soil in our place, wherever we are, as potential. Second, we are all equal on this amazing planet and the universal identity of our human species comes out of our citizenship. It comes out of reclaiming biology. In the hands of capitalist patriarchy, biology was misused and in the process, every progressive step was to escape biology, escape ecology, and escape limits. The new liberation will come out of recognizing limits and turning the acceptance of limits into the unfolding of new potential.
Learn more about Navdanya, Bija Vidyapeeth’s schedule of courses, and Dr. Vandana Shiva at www.navdanya.org. Soil Not Oil, as well as other books by Dr. Shiva, is available at your local bookstore.