Dr. Vandana Shiva
Food Sovereignty Transition
See also: Just Transition & Food Sovereignty
Dr. Vandana Shiva outlines nine steps necessary to transition away from the status quo production of food as a commodity via chemical intensive Industrial Agriculture to a system of Food Sovereignty. The steps are:
From Fakeness to Reality
The first transition is from fiction to reality: Moving away from the idea of corporations being people and recognizing there are real people everywhere that are facing nutritional crisis and there are people that can grow food everywhere. "Whereas the rise of industrial agriculture was based on the removal of people from the land, the emergence of the new agriculture paradigm is based on returning to the dirt, to the Earth, and to the soil: in cities and in schools, on terraces and on walls. There is no person who cannot grow food, and part of being fully human is reconnecting to the Earth and its communities."[1] Farming and Gardening can become revolutions everywhere as people begin to create real food systems made to protect the Earth and People.
From Reductionism to Agroecology
The second transition is from mechanistic, reductionist science to an agroecological science based on relationships and interconnectedness: "It is the recognition that soil, seed, water, farmers, and our bodies are intelligent beings, not dead matter or machines... The old universities teaching chemical warfare as agricultural expertise are being replaced by farms servings as schools, where the knowledge of real farming to produce real food is growing. A transition away from the rule of corporations and profits is also a knowledge transition toward the emerging scientific paradigm of agroecology"[2] This new paradigm requires a knowledge commons where ideas, methods, and techniques can be openly accessed and shared. As we grow this knowledge commons the interconnectedness needed to proliferate agroecology will expand.
From Intellectual Property to Seed Commons
The third transition is from seed as the "intellectual property" of corporations to seed as living, diverse, and evolving: toward seed as the commons that is the source of food and the source of life: "The creation of community seed banks and seed libraries is part of the movements for seed freedom that are resisting the imposition of unscientific and unjust seed laws based on uniformity. Also part of this resistance are the scientific movements innovating with participatory and evolutionary breeding, which are offering successful and superior alternatives to industrial breeding."[3]
From Chemical Monocultures to Biodiversity
The fourth transition is from chemical intensification to biodiversity intensification and ecological intensification, and from monocultures to diversity: This involves removing chemicals and toxins as the main input into agriculture to chemical-free, agroecological systems. "This transition must also move away from the fiction of "high yield" to the reality of diverse systems outputs, including quantity, quality, taste, health, and nutrition. Not only are biodiverse agricultural systems more productive and resilient, biodiverse food systems are the best insurance against diseases linked to nutritional deficiencies..."[4]
From Commodification to Farmer's Rights
The fifth transition is from pseudoproductivity to real productivity: This involves the decommodification of food and analyzing the cost of social, health, and ecological costs of chemical-, capital-, and fossil-fuel-intensive industrial agriculture, as well as the benefits of ecological agriculture for public health, social cohesion, and ecological sustainability. "... A real productivity calculus recognizes farmers' rights. In an ecological and living world, farmers are not just producers of food; they are conservators and builders of biodiversity and a stable climate, they are providers of health, and they are custodians of our diverse and collective cultures."[5] Agroecological food sovereignty projects around the world are working on creating this framework path towards transitioning away from industrial agriculture.
From Junk Food to Healthy Food
The sixth transition is from fake food to real food, from food that destroys our health to food that nourishes our bodies and minds: "This is also a transition from food as a commodity produced for profits to food as the most important source of health and well-being. The entire food and agricultural system treats food as a commodity to be produced, processesd, and traded solely to maximize corporate profits. The highest use value of food is in providing health and nourishment, and the primary contribution of food is to public health, not corporate profits. Commodities are based on quantity alone, irrespective of whether they are nutritionally empty or full of toxins and poisons. Food as a tradable commodity loses its use value of nourishment."[6]
From Big Ag to Small Farms
The seventh transition is from the obsession with "big" to a nurturing of "small," from the global to the local: "Large-scale, long-distance food chains in an industrialized, globalized food system must become a small-scale, short-distance food web based on the ecological enlightenment that no place is too small to produce food. Everyone is an eater, and everyone has the right to healthy, safe food with the smallest ecological footprint. Everyone can also be a grower of food, which means that food can and must be grown everywhere." [7] A common argument for industrial agriculture is that large scale production is needed to feed people living in large cities. Dr.Shiva addresses this concern three fold:
1) "... large-scale farms are not producing food; they are producing commodities. Commodities do not feed people."
2) "... every city should have its own "foodshed" that supplies most of its food needs in the same way that cities have "watersheds" that supply water. Larger cities can have larger foodsheds. Planning for food needs, as well as integrating the city and the countryside through good food, should be part of Urban Planning.
3) ... "the new food and agricultural movement is exploding in cities. Urban communities are reclaiming the food system through urban gardens, community gardens, school gardens, and gardens on terraces and balconies and walls. No place is too small to nourish a plant that can nourish us."[8]
From Exploitation to Justice
The eighth transition is from false, manipulated, and fictitious prices based on the Law of Exploitation to real and just prices based on the Law of Return: "In rich countries, citizens are questioning "cheap" food and what an over consumption of this food means for people's health. In poor countries, there are riots and protests and changes in regimes because of rising prices of food linked to free market polices. The Egyptian "Arab Spring," for example, started because of the rising prices of bread. Both the "cheap" food in rich countries and the rising costs of food in poor countries are based on a food system that puts profits about the rights of people to healthy, safe, and affordable food. This is based on the manipulation of prices by corporate giants and financial institutions through subsidies in rich countries, financial speculation, and betting on agriculture. Fair trade initiatives, on the other hand, allow farmers to get a fair and just return for their contributions to health and planetary care."
Dr. Vandana Shiva continues:
"The price of anything should reflect its true cost and true benefits: the high costs of ecological degradation and damage to people's health in the case of chemical-intensive industrial agriculture, and the positive contributions of ecological agriculture to rejuvenating the soil, considering biodiversity and water, mitigating climate change, and providing healthy, nutritious food." [9]
From Competition to Cooperation
The ninth transition is from the false idea of competition to the reality of cooperation: "The entire edifice of industrial production, free trade, and globalization is based on competition as a virtue, as an essential human trait. Plants are put into competition with one another and with insects, including pollinators. Farmers are pitted against one another and against consumers, and every country is in competition with every other country through chasing investment performance and through trade wars. Competition creates a downward spiral from the perspective of the planet and people, and an upward spike for corporate profits. But the ultimate consequence of competition is collapse."
Dr. Vandana Shiva continues:
"The reality of the web of life is cooperation: from the tiniest cell and microorganism to the largest mammal. Cooperation between diverse species increases food production and controls pests and weeds. Cooperation between people creates communities and living economics that maximize human welfare, including, livelihoods, and minimze industry's profits. Cooperative systems are based on the Law of Return. They create sustainability, justice, and peace. In times of collapse, cooperation is a survival imperative."[10]
Dr. Vandana Shiva founded Navdanya in 1987 when she
... heard the coprorations spell out their vision of total control over life through genetic engineering and patents on life and seeds... Navdanya was formed to protect our seed diversity and farmers' rights to save, breed, and exchange seed freely. For me, life-forms, plants, and seeds are all evolving, self-organized, sovereign beings. They have intrinsic worth, value, and standing. Owning life by claiming it to be a corporate invention is ethically and legally wrong. Patents on seeds are legally wrong, becasue seeds are not an invention. Patents on seeds are ethically wrong, because seeds are life-forms-- they are kin members of our Earth Family.[11]
Since its inception Navdanya has helped establish more than one hundred community seed banks in local Indian communities to help "reclaim seed diversity and seed as a commons."
Farmer Suicide
Because of overwhelming debt around 30 Indian farmers kill themselves everyday. In 2020 more than 10,000 farmers committed suicide.[12] Dr.Vandana Shiva speaks on the crisis of farmer suicide:
"Lee Kyung Hae martyred himself while wearing a sign reading "WTO kills farmers" at the Cancun WTO ministerial to attract attention to one of the worst genocides of our times -- the genocide of small farmers through the rules of globalization... Thirty thousand farmers have been killed by globalization policies in India over a decade. According to India's National Crime Burea, 16,000 farmers in India committed suicide during 2004. During one six-month span in 2004, there were 1,860 suicides by farmers in the state of Andhra Pradesh alone."[13]
This crisis has its roots in the introduction of the so called green-revolution and the subsequent results which created a "rural society dominated by a class of powerful notables under whom live a class of smallholders, microfund farmers or sharecroppers, while a proletariat of agricultural workers depends on the goodwill of the owners who employ them and of whom they are often creditors for life." [14]
Monocultures of the Mind
Intellectual Colonization
See also: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Knowledge commons
The disappearance of local knowledge through its interaction with the dominant western knowledge takes place at many levels, through many steps. First, local knowledge is made to disappear by simply not seeing it, by negating its very existence. This is very easy in the distant gaze of the globalizing dominant system. The western systems of knowledge have generally been viewed as universal. However, the dominant system is also a local system, with its social basis in a particular culture, class and gender. It is not universal in an epistemological sense. It is merely the globalized version of a very local and parochial tradition. Emerging from a dominating and colonizing culture, modern knowledge systems are themselves colonizing.[15]
... The first level of violence unleashed on local systems of knowledge is to not see them as knowledge. This invisibility is the first reason why local systems collapse without trial and test when confronted with the knowledge of the dominant west. The distance itself removes local systems from perception. When local knowledge does appear in the field of the globalizing vision, it is made to disappear by denying it the status of a systematic knowledge, and assigning it the adjectives 'primitive' and 'unscientific'. Correspondingly, the western system is assumed to be uniquely 'scientific' and universal. The prefix 'scientific' for the modern systems, and 'unscientific' for the traditional knowledge systems has, however, less to do with knowledge and more to do with power. The models of modern science which have encouraged these perceptions were derived less from familiarity with actual scientific practice, and more from familiarity with idealized versions of which gave science a special epistemological status. Positivism, verificationism, falsificationism were all based on the assumption that unlike traditional, local beliefs of the world, which are socially constructed, modern scientific knowledge was thought to be determined without social mediation. Scientists, in accordance with an abstract scientific method, were viewed as putting forward statements corresponding to the realities of a directly observable world. The theoretical concepts in their discourse were in principle seen as reducible to directly verifiable observational claims. New trends in the philosophy and sociology of science challenged the positivist assumptions, but did not challenge the assumed superiority of western systems. Thus, Kuhn, who has shown that science is not nearly as open as is popularly thought, and is the result of the commitment of a specialist community of scientists to presupposed metaphors and paradigms which determine the meaning of constituent terms and concepts, still holds that modern 'paradigmatic' knowledge, is superior to pre-paradigmatic knowledge which represents a kind of primitive state of knowing.[16]
Earth Democracy
Who Really Feeds the World
Sources
- ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva, Who Really Feeds the World:The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology, Page:127
- ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva, Who Really Feeds the World:The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology,Page:127
- ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva, Who Really Feeds the World:The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology,Page:128
- ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva, Who Really Feeds the World:The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology,Page:128
- ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva, Who Really Feeds the World:The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology,Page:128-129
- ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva, Who Really Feeds the World:The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology, Page: 129
- ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva, Who Really Feeds the World:The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology, Page: 130
- ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva, Who Really Feeds the World:The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology, Page: 131
- ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva, Who Really Feeds the World:The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology, Page: 131-132
- ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva, Who Really Feeds the World:The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology, Page: 132-133
- ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva,Who Really Feeds the World, page 80-81
- ↑ https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/17/opinions/india-farmer-suicide-agriculture-reform-kaur/index.html
- ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Page. 107
- ↑ Sociotechnical Context and Agroecological Transition for Smallholder Farms in Benin and Burkina Faso Parfait K. Tapsoba , Augustin K. N. Aoudji, Madeleine Kabore, Marie-Paule Kestemont, Christian Legay and Enoch G. Achigan-Dako
- ↑ Shiva, V. (1993). Monocultures of the Mind—Understanding the Threats to Biological and Cultural Diversity. Indian Journal of Public Administration, 39(3), 237–248. https://doi.org/10.1177/0019556119930304
- ↑ Shiva, V. (1993). Monocultures of the Mind—Understanding the Threats to Biological and Cultural Diversity. Indian Journal of Public Administration, 39(3), 237–248. https://doi.org/10.1177/0019556119930304