Vandana Shiva, global champion for organic farming, visits Rodale Institute

She’s taken on powerful adversaries in her quests to stop GM crops and free farmers from the unwarranted restrictions of “biopiracy,” but this crusader has a light touch in bringing big questions back to simple truths of justice, freedom and food.

BT cotton impact on the ground

Vandana Shiva and her allies in India work directly with an estimated 200,000 farmers in 14 Indian states and jurisdictions to conduct training and assess farming practices for nutritional output, managed biodiversity, food security, drought tolerance and economic impact.

Switching to genetically modified strains of cotton for commercial production—and the purchase of seed and chemical inputs needed—has been difficult for many farmers.

In her remarks at Rodale Institute, Shiva noted: "We have had nearly 200,000 farm suicides in India concentrated in Bt-growing areas. We’ve found that 84 percent of farm suicides are due to debt related to growing Bt cotton."

"Farmers can’t imagine farming that is supposed to be better would eventually take everything from them,” Shiva said, according to writer Amanda Kimble-Evans. “We started to do ‘Seeds of Hope’ in the area hardest hit by farm suicides and within 2 years, the farms who are going organic are earning 10 times more than they were with the Bt."

“Seeds of Hope” is one Navdanya’s farmer efforts within its Earth Democracy.

Biopiracy just genetic update of continuing Western colonialism, Shiva says

Biopiracy—the appropriation of native crops and their genetic code through intellectual property rights—is a personal crusade for Vandana Shiva. She deconstructs the practice in a multi-disciplinary approach to make clear its deceptive claims, gene-mining methods and negative impacts.

She characterizes this practice simply as the contemporary extension of Western colonial conquest that began centuries ago. This shifting of genetic ownership from the populations that maintained and refined the genetic traits for generations to a commercial owner makes it a crime for farmers to use the seeds without paying for them. This means they can’t save patent-protected seeds for planting, and can be sued if a trace of a patented gene is found on their land or in their bins in a way that is outside of the proprietary legal agreement demanded for use of the genetic product.

Writing extensively on the subject, Shiva has argued that “the creation of property through the piracy of another’s wealth remains the same as 500 years ago,” but that multinational corporations now accomplish this by incorporating “non-Western systems of knowledge into the reductionism of commercialized Western science and technology.” That is, complex organisms are reduced to a few key genetic traits that these companies find marketable, and organisms that were once propagated and kept for public benefit easily become private property.

Shiva cites the neem tree, native to India and long used there, as a prominent example. Neem tissues have myriad medicinal and anti-microbial properties that have caught the eye of several Western companies looking for “all-natural” ingredients to promote. The only real “innovation” to be claimed in the patent is the use of modern extraction techniques.

Shiva believes additionally that aggressive marketing campaigns for genetically engineered crops has gradually forced farmer dependence on expensive, patented inputs. Indian farmers don’t initially understand the implications of the radically new, input-intensive agriculture being promoted to them. The shift in production style had a devastating and widespread social impact, locking farmers into debt and removing any trace of self-sufficiency from the modern agrarian lifestyle in India.

~ Genevieve Slocum, communications intern at the Rodale Institute

An international leader in organic farming and food sovereignty, Vandana Shiva, dropped by the Rodale Institute recently to talk with staff and guests. With grit and grace, she articulated the failings of the global food system and the hope that can still be found in our land, our seeds, and our farmers.

She and Institute CEO Tim LaSalle have crossed paths in their strong advocacy for regenerative agriculture, and share interest in new research into the potential of organic systems to nutritionally sustain communities and to fight climate change. LaSalle detailed Institute findings on how its organic systems have stored up to a ton of atmospheric carbon per acre per year when amended with compost.

Vandana Shiva and Tim LaSalle

A physicist, environmental activist and author based in Delhi, India, Shiva is known for her fearless challenges to genetically modified crop technology and the farming methods it necessitates.

She debates top GM spokespeople at high-level events, leads popular farmer protests and guides farmer-focused scientific inquiries from her research center, Navdanya (www.navdanya.org). The center’s purpose is to “protect nature and people’s rights to knowledge, biodiversity and food.”

“She works to break the assumption that organic food is for the rich by making sure that people of all incomes can get healthy food from her farm,” said Alison Grantham, research and policy associate at the Institute. Shiva explained that conventional methods are not cheap because they are highly effective, but because they can produce artificially “cheap food” due to subsidies and by externalizing social and environmental costs.

Research into organic farming is important because it offers more life-saving alternatives in dry regions—in India and Africa—where soils show the most dramatic improvements from added carbon through biological techniques. Abundant biodiversity—integrating the life cycles of many kinds of plants—helps organic farming to provide more food and effective nutrition per acre for human consumption, Shiva said, compared with chemically dependent monocrop systems.

Area environmental writer Amanda Kimble-Evans jotted down quotes from Shiva’s encyclopedic critique of industrial agriculture:

You can’t fix nutrition deficiency with supplementation. Everyone who gave us chemical farming--everyone who gave us the deficient foods to begin with--is grabbing at nutrition as the next problem they can solve. The answer is simple: Biodiverse farms produce more food and more nutrition.

Chemical farming displaced nutritional crops in India. Poor farmers in areas where subsidies are not prevalent had to borrow to buy the seeds and the chemicals. But, they have to sell all their crop. They can't touch any of the harvest.

Monsanto has been pretending they are creating climate resilient seeds when in reality they are simply mapping existing seed genomes, maybe adding a Bt gene, and patenting them.

For geography professor Steve Schnell, Shiva’s Indian perspective sets her apart in dialogues about technology, science and agriculture. He teaches at nearby Kutztown University. He uses an article by Shiva (on attempts to patent the traditional neem tree) in teaching his class “Spaces of globalization,” and she appears in a video that he shows to the class.

Schnell said seeing Shiva in person illuminated the breadth of her knowledge of globalization issues. She brings to life “the human impacts of agribusiness that we don’t see from afar,” he said, citing the farmer suicides and bankruptcies tied to the promotion of GM cotton in India. He said she uses the transnational networking aspect of globalization to right some of globalization’s negative effects.

Shiva is a world leader in organic farming systems in the context of ecology, feminism, genetic integrity and farmer independence from corporate dominance. She champions what she calls “Earth democracy,” which includes the sovereignty of land, seed, water and food resources for the world’s people.

Navdanya helps Indian farmers learn and assert their rights in the "Earth democracy" issues of land, seed, water and food.

Shiva received the 2007 Blue Planet Award, an international environmental honor, and received the Right Livelihood Award in 1993 “for placing women and ecology at the heart of modern development discourse.” She has long supported indigenous peoples' rights in India and traditional Vedic culture, and has pioneered the role of women in leading ecological activism. Shiva participated in the Chipko movement of the 1970s, which was spearheaded by tribal women directly affected by deforestation in the Himalayan mountains of Uttar Pradesh.

Navdanya’s biodiversity farm is housed on a 20-acre tract in Uttranchal, north India. It is a hub for farmer training and research into preserving and identifying traditional genetic resources, and implementing successful organic practices. The organization has other offices in New Delhi and Mumbai.

The Organic Revolution describes the center’s work to link what it learns through field research and a vast network of experts to farmer training and its advocacy in agricultural and trade policy.

Farming

Submitted by Paula Sanford (not verified) on Tue, 10/13/2009 - 16:29.

The more research that is done in organic farming the quicker we can all enjoy the benefits. There is much to this research and the hope is that there are going to be more people who will join the cause. casino online

Thanks for this - cool blog

Submitted by Frances Evans (not verified) on Fri, 05/22/2009 - 06:50.

Thanks for this - cool blog

Relevance of organic farming

Submitted by prabhakar (not verified) on Mon, 03/30/2009 - 06:02.

A thought provoking ,excellent article for all agricultural scientists , even for those who do not subscribe to sustainability of organic farming.

We too are engaged in the organic farming research in vegetable crops for developing technologies for economic and productivity sustaining practices for vegetable crops in the semi arid reasons with emphaisi on siol fertility and productvity through eco frielndly organic farming principles by means of organic nutrition through enrichrd manures, biofertilizers, bioagents, crop rotations etc. Thanks for the nice information

Dr. Shiva needs an Enterprise Budget

Submitted by Fred the farmer (not verified) on Sun, 03/22/2009 - 14:33.

I admire Dr. Shiva’s activism and enthusiasm. She needs another tool in her tool box to take on her advisories and help the farmers in India. My advice for Dr. Shiva is to learn how to do an enterprise budget and teach it to all the farmers and agriculturalists in India.

There’s an old American farmer saying “If you can’t pencil a profit, you aren’t likely to plow one.” This applies to farmers in India as well.

Enterprise budgets estimate profitability for agriculture enterprises while documenting management practices and the resources and technology used. Enterprise Budgets can be based on Excel spreadsheet software. The spreadsheets can be designed to provide a planning and educational tool that contains estimates of production costs and returns based on the current and/or expected economic environment as well as the management practices typical of an area. A cost of all the given input products and operations can be calculated on a per acre or per hectare basis.

Before any wise American farmer adapts a new farming system (conventional or organic) he considers and reviews enterprise budget models for that system.

One of the core fundamentals of sustainability is economic profitability which can also be referred to as economic sustainability. If the farmers input costs are not covered by the price they receive for the products that they produce then the farm and farmer are not sustainable, they cannot continue that trend for long and they will go out of business, plain and simple. If his net income per acre is not profitable they will not remain in business, this is not sustainable.

Were enterprise budgets developed and used for these farmers in India as models as they are for American farmers to calculate the sustainability of net income per acre? I doubt it.

Input costs vary greatly from one country to another. Fertilizers, pesticides, fuel, seeds etc. all have a cost in America, just as they have a corresponding cost in India, these costs are not unknowns, they are know and can be calculated.

If the farmers in India learned how to do an enterprise farm budget and applied it to their farming operations; the numbers would not lie, this would have very quickly shown them to avoid farming practices that are not economically sustainable and could have helped to prevent the suicides by the farmers who went into the hole economically.

Before switching to genetically strains of cotton for commercial production, if they would have put in the variable and fixed input costs into the model they would have seen the input costs of tech trait seeds and chemical inputs would have drastically impacted their bottom line net income per hectare. The enterprise budget model would have quickly revealed to them that they couldn’t afford this system. An un-profitable model would not have been promoted and expanded throughout the land.

Before any country should embrace a farming technology practice of any kind an enterprise budget model should be developed, if the budget doesn’t give sustainable net income per unit of land area then the practice should not be adopted. This is not rocket science, this is Ag economics 101.

Although it seems the farmers in India were quick to adapt the new technologies of genetically engineered crops and mono-culture cropping systems as promoted and researched at the American land-grant agricultural universities, they should have also adapted the enterprise budget model to their farming systems, from an Ag economics course at those same land grant universities.

The concept of the enterprise budget should be taught to the people of India in their language explaining the math. The numbers don’t lie; the math is the same in English or Hindi.

If the practice doesn’t cut the mustard on paper then CAN it. Or modify it to change the bottom line, but certainly don’t adapt a practice blindly throughout the land before doing this simple exercise.

When Dr. Shiva debates the top GM spokespeople at high level events all she needs is a copy of a well drafted enterprise budget to show them with the associated input costs of the genetically modified crop technology seeds and associated pesticide input costs needed for monoculture. Then she can say to them “Show me the money” because it’s not there on the bottom line of net income per hectare for the Farmers in India! This isn’t sustainable!

Vandana Shiva, global champion for organic farming, visits Rodale Institute

She’s taken on powerful adversaries in her quests to stop GM crops and free farmers from the unwarranted restrictions of “biopiracy,” but this crusader has a light touch in bringing big questions back to simple truths of justice, freedom and food.

BT cotton impact on the ground

Biopiracy just genetic update of continuing Western colonialism, Shiva says

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Farming

Thanks for this - cool blog

Relevance of organic farming

Dr. Shiva needs an Enterprise Budget

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