Vandana Shiva
Once in a while we come across personalities who are striving wholeheartedly to make a difference in the community. Yesterday, I came across one such person. A thinker who's actively arguing and challenging popular policies that are disadvantaging the poor and the needy in the garb of empowerment.Vandana Shiva, world-renowned environmental leader and thinker. She is also a physicist and ecologist and the Director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology, and Ecology. She is the founder of Navdanya -"nine seeds", a movement promoting diversity and use of native seeds. Dr. Shiva was the 1993 recipient of the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize -the Right Livelihood Award. And she is the author of many books, her latest is "Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace."
People like her can help us look beyond instant gratification and objectively look for ways to truly help the impoversihed! More on her.[Link]
Here's something that she mentioned in a recent interview:
Indian farmers have never committed suicide on a large scale. It’s something totally new. It’s linked to the last decade of globalization, trade liberalization under a corporate-driven economy. The seed sector was liberalized to allow corporations like Cargill and Monsanto to sell unregulated, untested seed. They began with hybrids, which can’t be saved, and moved on to genetically engineered Bt cotton. The cotton belt is where the suicides are taking place on a very, very large scale. It is the suicide belt of India.The World Bank, WTO, and the IMF have hijacked the developing nations with flashy solutions for things they don't understand! Politicians and businessmen in these countries have also fallen for these deals either out of ignorance or their hunger for money!
And the high cost of seed is linked to high cost of chemicals, because these seeds need chemicals. In addition, these costly seeds need to be bought every year, because their very design is to make seeds nonrenewable, seed that isn’t renewable by its very nature, but whether it’s through patenting systems, intellectual property rights or technologically through hybridization, nonrenewable seed is being sold to farmers so they must buy every year.
In the state of Rajasthan, which is the capital of the production of mustard -- and mustard in India is very symbolic. It’s the color of our spring. When spring comes, we dress in the yellow of the mustard flower. It’s our staple oil, and we love the pungency of it. 1998, Monsanto and Cargill managed to get a ban on indigenous oils in order to create a market for soya oil, something we’ve never eaten before.
Read on ... this is even worse!
... the nuclear deal with India has a twin agreement, and that twin agreement is on agriculture. It’s called the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture, and on the board of this agreement are Monsanto, ADM and Wal-Mart.
Coming up- another humbling person whom I've started revering from the first day I found out about his mission in life.
posted by RadioActive Ray at 12:30 PM
1 Comments:
You should do some research before quoting a dogmatist like Vandana Shiva. She has very little other than a strong protesting voice. Farmers are not committing en masse suicide because of hybrid seeds but because the government will stifle their decision making by telling them whats best for them. For example, Bt Cotton led suicides happened when the government arbitrarily sprayed acres of fields with fungicide killing their crops overnight. More importantly, why are fertilizers, seeds and other essentials so expensive - very easy for shiva to say my god so expensive. The primary reason why these are so expensive is that internal trade in India is extremely regulated - moving commodities across state borders is anightmare, raising prices to an unaffordable level. Just because someone seems to have good intentions, does not make them right. Remember the road to hell is paved by good intentions.
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