Vandana Shiva, besides being a hero of mine, is one of the true visionaries of our time. I cannot urge you strongly enough to listen to the podcast/MP3 of this edition of
Living on Earth w/ her and reading her book. Buy it if you can or get it from the library but read it.
original-livingonearthDiet for a Dying PlanetTRANSCRIPT:
GELLERMAN: It's Living on Earth. I'm Bruce Gellerman. In India, the benefits of modern agriculture come with a high price. It's been reported as many as 150,000 Indian farmers over the past decade have committed suicide—many by drinking the pesticides they put on their crops. According to physicist and social activist Vandana Shiva, the farmers' despair is due to the weight of overwhelming debt. They can no longer afford the escalating price of chemicals and bio-engineered seeds, like pest-resistant Bt cotton. Shiva says the suicides in India are only part of a global problem that can be traced to the way food is produced.
SHIVA: Chemical agriculture really is a theft from nature. Organic ecological farming is the only way we will be able to address the ecological crisis related to farming, the agrarian crisis emerging from industrial globalized agriculture, and the public health crisis coming from using war chemicals to produce our food.
GELLERMAN: Vandana Shiva is editor of a new book called "Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed." Living on Earth's Steve Curwood recently spoke with her about the problems, the politics, and the possibilities of food production.
CURWOOD: How did you first become aware of the relationships between the environment, the poor, and food?
SHIVA: The connections between the environment and agriculture, and food systems, and the issues of poverty really came home to me in the 80s, particularly 1984—and I don't why George Orwell picked that as the title of one of his books. It was the year we had the worst terrorism and extremism in India. Thirty thousand people were killed in Punjab where the Green Revolution had been implemented—the Green Revolution had even received a Nobel Peace Prize for creating prosperity and through prosperity creating peace. And yet in the 1980s, there was the worst form of violence you could imagine. In December of 1984, we had the worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, which killed 3,000 people in one night, 30,000 people since then, and I was forced to wake up and ask the question: why are we involved in an agriculture that is killing hundreds of thousands, that is so violent, and pretends to be feeding the world? And I started to do scientific research on this. My book "The Violence of the Green Revolution" came out of the research that I was doing at that point for the United Nations. And increasingly, I have realized that if farmers in India are getting into debt and committing suicide, it's because of these industrially driven agricultural systems that are also destroying the environment. If children are going hungry today and are being denied food, it's because the money is being spent on buying toxic chemicals and costly seeds rather than being spent on feeding children, clothing them, and sending them to school. So chemical agriculture really is a theft from nature and a theft from the poor.
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complete article and link to podcast/MP3
here
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