Dr. Vandana Shiva
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.[1]
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.[2] 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."[3]
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." [4]
Earth Democracy
Who Really Feeds the World
Sources
- ↑ 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