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Jerry Mander and Vandana Shiva with Amy Goodman

Transcript of JERRY MANDER and VANDANA SHIVA with AMY GOODMAN
29 June 2001
Santa Fe, New Mexico

VANDANA SHIVA:

Thank you to the Lannan Foundation and the people of Santa Fe for giving me this opportunity to come to a part of the United States that looks a little different. [Laughter] I was a bit worried when I got off the flight last night because the first thing I saw was automobile acres. [Laughter] I don’t know how many of you take the flight into this airport. I didn’t realize you should take the flight into the airport next door. So I came in this little, little plane and for the first ten minutes it’s just dumped automobiles. And I’ve never been able to figure out cultures that have to create so much waste which they don’t know how to deal with. I’ve grown up in a society which…where we never had that problem. With the cloning of India into the American culture we are catching up fast, except that when a billion Indians start to be like a handful of Americans you can imagine what’s going to happen to us and the planet. [Laughter] And that’s why I fight ferociously because there’s too much beauty to defend.

The other day there was a film screening of a film they made on the basis of my work, on biodiversity conservation. It’s called “The Eternal Seed”. And there was, as usual you know, they have someone to talk about biodiversity and they have someone to talk about using it for genetic engineering and how we’ll all be impoverished and poor if our seeds are not exploited by the global seed industry. And this genetic engineer says, that film can’t be true because the women look too well dressed. And you know, you go to Rajasthan every village woman will be wearing a sari like me, in Barauni , and you go down to the south, and they’ll be wearing the border saris. But the idea that any culture outside the globalized market culture, and outside the industrial culture, must be impoverished, in the sense of being destitute and turned into beggars has seeped so deep in that they cannot recognize autonomy, self-sufficiency, dignity, and beauty, any more.
[Applause]

And I think that blinded eye started when Europe was going through a desperate phase. You remember that phase when they were wiping out their women as witches and doing everything they could to the eco-systems: redefining nature as dead matter, talking about raping her to be able to get her secrets. And just before that they decided that they were so poor that they had to find more land. And they started to issue these patent charters, open letters, to merchant-adventures of that time. One of them sailed in the wrong direction, thought he’d arrived in India. But he was empowered to own any part he found as the property of the kings and queens who owned it on behalf of the Pope who owned it on behalf of God. [Laughter] And I’ve never figured out how they could continue that error of calling the Native Americans Indians, 500 years after that first error. [Laughter] And that’s another reason I’m really happy to be in Santa Fe because one does get an experience that the dominant culture here is the culture of the original peoples and others have adapted to come and settle down.

That kind of desperation that led to owning other people’s lands, defining other people as savages, or into nature, is exactly what is happening today. I see the WTO agreements, the GATT treaty, the World Bank structural adjustment programs, as really the coming of Columbus 500 years later – the second coming of Columbus. Except, that when you have a religion of your own, there’s at least the limits of that, no matter how perverted you’ve made it. But there are at least some limits there. Now, when you do this in the name of legal personalities that are totally fictitious: the corporations, values that are totally constructed: profits, and you decide to dismantle everything in the name of these new gods and these new religions, there is literally no limit. And that limitless colonization 500 years after Columbus is what is doing two new things. One, instead of just colonizing other people’s lands and territories, which were at that point, as I’ve written in Biopiracy, called empty lands, and the takeover of native resources during colonization was justified on the ground that indigenous people did not improve their land, which means they didn’t sell it away, they didn’t commodify it, they didn’t destroy its unique niches and its unique biodiversity. They didn’t enclose it, they didn’t torture the animals, they left life to free and through that created cultures that were free. There was something wrong with that in the eyes of those who had grown so desperate that they had had to enclose their own commons, displace their people, destroy their biodiversity. I remember when I wrote one of my early books, rarely read because it’s an academic book – it’s published by Sage, it was written for the United Nations – it’s called Ecology and The Politics of Survival and I was looking at the history of forestry and it was fascinating. The queen had announced the forest of Malabar, down in Kerala, as hers, even though the British didn’t rule Travancore state. Just the teak was owned by the British because they had destroyed all their oak forests. They couldn’t get large enough timber to make the ships to go out and colonize other lands. And so the teak of all over India was declared imperial property long before the country itself was colonized.

I sometimes say when the dominant culture gets used to that kind of usurpation for too long, calls all kinds of invasion its discovery, it doesn’t take too much to take the next step: the theft of living resources, of living knowledge, of cultural diversity as an invention. And that step of mistaking invasion as discovery, and piracy as invention, is part of what is being attempted – it’s been attempted for the last 10 years, 12 years. In fact I got involved in biodiversity largely as a result of being at a meeting, organized in the United Nations in Geneva, at which…at that point the chemical industry didn’t own the seed companies then, it was largely the pharmaceutical and chemical companies, Sandoz, Ciba-Geigy, talked about how by the turn of the century there would be five corporations controlling health and food and what they would need to be among the survivors because they saw themselves in a race of survival. What they would require to be one of the survivors would be the control over biotechnology, as a tool to make people dependent on something they could do for themselves, which is growing crops in traditional ways. You basically save your seed, you plant it our next season, you save it again, and that perennial cycle of life embodied in the seed has been the basis of every culture. It’s the only reason we have cultural distinctiveness because culture is about the crops we grow or the foods we eat, the clothes we weave and wear, the homes we build. That’s what makes us distinctive.

Culture is materially rooted in our everyday lives. But a very serious element of the culture of biodiversity is to treat it as a duty to maintain that diversity, to ensure that you’re not stealing from the future by wiping it out. I know we have these sayings in every part of my country that there is no bigger sin than to allow the seed to disappear. And way back, two centuries ago, when the Gurkhas had invaded my part of the country people had died but they had not eaten their seed. I’m sure the Native Americans save seed in the same way, in squash containers called tombris in our area. All the tombris were full but people had died of starvation. But you could not consume your seed. Except that now under the new GATT rules, under the new intellectual property rights rules, saving seed is a crime, because seed is now to be defined as intellectual property.

When intellectual property was about machines and designs of podiums like this it didn’t really hurt anyone’s life. That’s why nobody really objected that an inventor had worked out a new design for a table, a chair, a mike, or a new scientist had worked out a new process. When that next leap took place, the leap of the new colonization and the new globalization which is the redefining of all of life – our genes, our cells, in humans, in animals, in plants, in microbes – as the new colonies are not just taken over, they are actually being created.

There is a very, very famous case – I’ve written about it in Stolen Harvest. It’s the case of Percy Schmeiser, a farmer in Saskatchewan who was growing his own canola but farmers around him were starting to grow Monsanto’s genetically engineered canola, the Round-Up resistant canola. And through pollination and wind, his fields had started to get invaded by the Round-Up resistant variety. Monsanto sued him for stealing their intellectual property. He said you have polluted my genetic resources, my seeds, which I have been growing for 50 years. The case should really have been Monsanto paying Percy because they had polluted his seed. There is, in ecology, and it was firmed up in the principles of Rio, the polluter-pays principle. But through patents and genetic engineering, the polluter-pays principle has been turned on its head and been rendered the polluter-gets-paid principle. Because the courts in Canada, the federal court, ruled in March, the end of March this year, that it didn’t matter how the genetically engineered traits came to be in Percy’s field. It could have been carried by the wind. It could have been carried by bees through pollen. But the fact that this is intellectual property means that no matter where it exists it is treated as stolen property.

And the case is even more fascinating because the material was collected through private detectives entering Percy’s farm. And the judges have said, yes, yes, this is about encroachment and property and evidence collected through bad means – it’s usually not good evidence in courts – but because it’s about a lower form of property, you know land is a lower form of property than the higher form, intellectual property. It reminds me so much of Descartes. [Laughter] The reason, the constructed knowledge, is secure. It is because somehow it has spiritual connection to the other spheres. And when we actually know the smell of food, its flavor, those are all unreliable knowledges, just the dimension and the weight that can be measured with that deep connection, upstairs somewhere. Intellectual property rights seem to have a similar kind of spiritual endowment, but the spiritual endowment now comes purely from capital, not from any notion of the creator because part of what the new colonization requires is dispensing with creation and the creator.

Monsanto is the creator. It has created new seed and all seed traits found anywhere in the world, no matter how, are their property, and whoever has it is liable. What does that mean in terms of very ordinary steps of farming? It basically means that every farmer who performs their duty and practices their cultural freedom to save seed and exchange seed is basically participating in criminal behavior. Percy has been sued about $150,000. He is, of course, appealing.

The reason I started the movement to save seeds after that meeting at which the corporations said that patents and genetic engineering were going to be the tools through which they would be able to run ahead of other firms and other companies and be among the 5 who survive. For me there was nothing more dictatorial than a future image of that kind. Of course, in these 13 years since 1987, that future image is real. Sandoz merged with Ciba-Geigy, became Novartis, which then merged with Astra and Zeneca and AstraZeneca became Syngenta. And Monsanto’s been merging and merging. Monsanto, in the last 2 years, has bought up every one of India’s private seed firms. But that’s not just in India. You go to Africa, you go to Brazil, you go to Argentina, Monsanto is the seed provider.

But when Monsanto starts to become the seed provider it doesn’t want farmers to do farming in ways that don’t require buying new seed every year, that don’t require buying chemicals, because they also sell chemicals. And in areas where Monsanto and the new seed companies have entered, we are seeing a new phenomena of Indian farmers – among the most resilient of peasants anywhere in the world, where they can go through a flood one year and a drought next year and still come back and farm their fields – they’ve started to commit suicide. And our studies show that in two states alone the suicides are up to 20,000 in the three years since the new seeds started to come in. The rate of pesticide use in two districts where the suicides are highest are 2,000% increase over the last decade, since the new globalization policies started to change our regulatory systems and the possibilities of government to intervene between the farmers and commercial entities.

I have watched these companies sell their seeds and their chemicals using every one of our diverse gods – and I don’t know how many of you know we have 300 million of them, because every plant, every rock, every river, every mountain is divine. There are a few embodiments and Guru Nanak in Punjab, the founder of the Sikh religion, is the salesman for Monsanto’s Round-Up. In Orissa Juggernatan of the Temple of Puri from where the term the juggernaut comes – it comes from the temple Juggernatan because they take out a cart – well, Lord Juggernatan is selling seeds for them in Orissa, and the god Hanuman is selling their hybrid cotton seeds down in Andhra – I actually have a collection of these advertisements.

So not only does it start to distort the cultural freedom of diverse cultures – to be ethical, be ecological, to be sustainable – it pushes every culture into a monoculture. All these regions are ultimately growing the same hybrid cotton for export. I’ve just done a public hearing on hunger. We’ve driven away famines, after Independence. The last big famine we had was 1943 when 2 million to 3 million people died. It was a free trade, globalization-driven famine – our rice was feeding the armies during the big wars – as was the famine in 1887.

Each of these famines took place when there was a peak in exports. We’ve had exports shoot up. This year there’s going to be 10 million tons of wheat and rice from India exported. And the newspaper will say it’s all because there’s huge abundance and huge surpluses because of new technologies. No, we do have surpluses but these are pseudo-surpluses. We have surpluses because part of what globalization did was twist the government’s arm to prevent any support to farmers on the one hand and consumers on the other. The withdrawal of support to farmers meant that farmers are paying the entire cost of pesticides, and the hybrid seeds need more and more pesticide. It has also meant there is no low-cost credit so the farmers are borrowing from the same companies, and their agents, that sell the seeds and the chemicals. And in one or two years they’re getting into debts of 100,000, 200,000 rupees which no peasant in India could ever imagine paying in a lifetime. And every one of these debts have been created by advertising that talks about a peasant becoming a millionaire overnight, nothing less than a millionaire. One of the big programs that’s become a hit, Jerry, in India, is “How to Become a Millionaire”. (Title in Hindi) is the way it’s named. They’ve found that even that kids were getting excited so they’ve started a junior (Title in Hindi) race. [Laughter] And that race is what… is the images that gods are supposed to be selling. You can just imagine in the mind of a very, very devout peasant who really believes in the Ramayana, when Hanuman comes to say you’re going to become a (words in Hindi) tomorrow. And they buy those seeds but they don’t have the money and so they’ll take credit and then they’re in debt. They’re selling their children, they’re selling their wives, they’re selling their kidneys, and when nothing else works, they’re using the same pesticides to commit suicide.

But it’s not just the farmers who are being pushed into suicides. For the first time we are starting to have reports of starvation deaths. 2,000 children in one district of Maharashtra died of starvation. In our public hearing we had family after family come up. Why is this happening? Because the low-cost food that was available is now being priced at international market prices. The people in India still earn their salaries and wages in rupees but we are supposed to buy in a dollar economy. Meantime, of course, the rupee is of course getting devalued further and further and further.

What this has done is increase the price of food four-fold and remove the entire food subsidy in the name of saving government expenditure. But the government expenditure on our food system has shot up in the decade from 20 billion rupees to 130 billion rupees, just to make people starve. Because managing such a convoluted system is a very costly affair. They used to count three – I always have to translate the crores – 30 crores will be 300 million. 300 million Indians used to be counted as very poor. Out of the blue, the World Bank did a new study and said there’s only 50 million who are really poor, and only they should be targeted. Now, when out of 300 million you start to search for the really, really, really poor, you can’t find them. And all that means is lots of government people are getting lots of jobs and more and more multi-colored booklets are being created between the poor and not so poor and the really poor. That’s why our government expenditure has actually increased as a result of this while people aren’t getting food. People aren’t able to buy; the food stocks are rising. The godowns are bursting. We’ve go 60 million tons rotting. The government’s been talking of dumping it into the ocean because we are not allowed to get it to the people according to the new rules of globalization.

We are allowed to dump it but even more interestingly the same public expenditure that can’t get food to the poor is being allowed to be used to finance Cargill. Cargill is buying at half the price that the poor in India are buying and that subsidy is coming from our government, from our taxes. I’ll just give you the figure: 1330 billion dollars, rupees, in just this one year. And every corporation that wants to export is getting our tax money to build the ports for them, to build the highways for them, to build cold storage chains for them, to do processing plants, to get absolutely zero taxation. The entire land resource, water resource, and biodiversity resource is being handed over to the corporations. And you can only watch this if you live in the society on a daily basis and see how concoction of figures of poverty, concoction of fiscal deficit, cooking up of every detail under the sun is used, so that our financial resources and our natural resources can be put at the service of a handful or corporations -five corporations who will sell us all the same food, bad food at that, that we don’t want.

They even use famine-relief money. The entire World Food Aid money, the entire U.S. Aid money, is being used today to finance Cargill and Monsanto shipping genetically engineered soya and genetically engineered corn in every area of disaster, whether it’s the Orissa cyclone, whether it’s Hurricane Mitch in the Honduras. And that is yet another way where you use a crisis to create another monoculture. You use the crisis to wipe out the crops and diets and food systems of local communities. Which is why, when we started to find out that the food aid in Orissa after the big super-cyclone was genetically engineered corn and soya, we rushed in to bring seeds of rice, of native rice that farmers could grow out and at least get back their farming system.

Orissa, for those of you who don’t know, is the home of rice diversity. ‘Til the green revolution and the monoculture culture wiped out our diversity, Orissa gave us more than 200,000 rice varieties. Our small organization has managed to save about 2,000 rice varieties and we have every color under the sun. But we didn’t have yellow rice. They were going to give us that with genetic engineering of Vitamin A into rice, forgetting that the huge sources of Vitamin A in the biodiversity that we have: our greens in our fields, some planted, some voluntary, every one of our fruit trees, every one of our vegetables, rich in Vitamin A. And it is the wiping out of those sources of Vitamin A by the green revolution that created the deficiency. And now, instead of the 14,000 micrograms you can get out of the greens, they want to give us genetically engineered rice which produces 30 micrograms per 100 grams. But just because they don’t compare, they say, my God, rice never had Vitamin A, so this is a lot. [Laughter] I sometimes say this is like comparing me to a…. saying I am very fat, but not comparing me to a sumo wrestler. You know. I turn out very slim. [Laughter]

The point is what is more with respect to? And those very basic issues are part of what the blinded eye, the position of the creator, never lets you know, because the creator must pretend that they have created for the first time something that never existed before. And every application, whether it’s blue jeans – that was the big talk in the biotechnology industry – natural blue jeans through genetic engineering, forgetting that there is blue cotton, that is naturally blue, that there’s a natural color called indigo, that there is organic cotton without genetically engineering beating into the cotton.

To me, the real threat about cultural freedom linked to biodiversity, is not just how our cultural richness is getting destroyed. To me it is even more seriously, what I call the Taliban response to defense of cultural freedom. Because when cultures are that eroded, when every thing that identifies you positively, has been taken away from you, when every source of livelihood and security is gone, when you do not know where your food will come tomorrow, you become absolute, easy prey for what I call a negative defense of cultural identity. And that is why cultures that have existed intimately in their diversity – the Muslims and Hindus, the Sikhs and Hindus, in Sri Lanka the Tamil and the Sinhala – everywhere that richness of culture and cultural diversity is at internal war with itself, an internal war generated by the homogenization and the emptying out of culture by globalization. It’s not an accident that the Taliban had to shoot at those Buddhas in Bamiyan. They are so desperate to defend their identity that even the silent images were a threat to them.

When I was organizing with the farmers, and I’ve been doing this for the last 13 years, and we decided we are never ever going to obey laws that force us to violate every responsibility to our earth, force us to stop saving seed, force us to basically treat our neighbors as enemies by treating seed exchange as a crime and a theft. We are not going to accept that degradation of our lives. And we call this the seed (Hindi). Every year we take a pledge on Gandhi’s birthday. Every year we manage to roll back the implementation of tricks. For 10 years they’ve tried, they’ve tried every bullying partner under the sun. There’s been disputes in the WTO, there’s been threats of trade sanctions by the United States, but for a decade we have managed to get our parliament to not allow the implementation of laws that would allow patents on seeds, on plants, on human genes, on human sex. [Applause]

And it’s because wherever an ordinary response is available for people, people want to have their cultural freedom, at peace with other cultures, not at war with other cultures. And the war of globalization against all cultures forces all cultures to be at war with each other. That is the inevitable, vicious, unending cycle of violence that we have to stop before it is too late. That is why we have to celebrate our diversities, our peace. And I took a commitment 13 years ago that no matter what it takes, every seed I come across we are going to save, every freedom that is ours we are going to fight for.

And later this year, partly because I am so fed up of the impoverished language of globalization, as if the only way we could feel one is in the global market place of Barbie dolls – actually I had a debate where they told me that if I wanted to defend our food systems I was preventing Indian kids from playing with Barbie dolls. [Laughter] And to me there are better ways that Indian kids can grow up playing with. Well, the idea that there is only Barbie dolls, there’s only McDonalds, and we are one only if we can identify ourselves in the genetic reductionism of the human genome, that otherwise we cannot feel one, we are starting at the end of this year, starting again with Gandhi’s birthday, a new school, called a seed school. We call it (Hindi). It’s for education for our citizenship. It is about celebrating our diverse cultures and celebrating our earth family, putting the market in its secondary position where it belongs.

I hope some of you will be able to visit us. I really enjoyed visiting you. Thank you.

[Applause]

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