“Food is the divine, and therefore you must respect food and ensure that nobody goes hungry in your sphere of influence,” Vandana Shiva told a packed EMU Ballroom Monday night during her closing speech on Food and Seed Sovereignty.
As the grand finale of last weekend’s Food Justice conference, Shiva’s concluding plenary was ripe with warnings about the modernized practices and paradigms surrounding agriculture and food. She railed against global fertilizer and biotechnology corporations like Monsanto for destroying indigenous communities’ symbiotic relationships with the Earth, which has led to mounting poverty rates and global climate change. Through genetic manipulation and corporate monopolization, Shiva argued, seeds of staple crops that have sustained human life since hunter-gatherers learned to cultivate them could soon end up being “seeds of death.”
As a philosopher, environmental activist and ecofeminist based in Delhi, India, Shiva has advocated for the wisdom of traditional farming practices since the 1970s, vociferously condemning recent, drastic advancements in bioengineering and intellectual property rights. The scientist and professional speaker is a trained physicist, holding a doctorate in physics from Canada’s University of Western Ontario. She is also the University of Oregon’s 2011 Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics, has authored 20 books and more than 500 papers in scientific and technical journals, and received the Right Livelihood Award – known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize” – in 1993.
University President Richard Lariviere opened Monday’s ceremony, introducing Shiva and briefing the audience on her extensive and far-flung history.
“I applaud her for … questioning authority and holding power accountable,” Lariviere said. “Dr. Shiva gives voice to the food justice movement in India. Her activism and her writings advocate an alternate food paradigm.”
Shiva said humanity’s increasing dependence on monoculture – growing massive, genetically similar food crops – has undermined biodiversity and is causing recurring ecological disasters by way of plant diseases and herbicide-resistant weeds.
“Every year there is a different devastation in monoculture,” Shiva said.
Because of modern intellectual property rights and genetic patenting, multinational corporations now own the reproductive rights of some of the world’s most vital staple foods. This two-decade-old practice, called “bioprospecting” by biotechnology advocates and “biopiracy” by its opponents, has bankrupt thousands of subsistence farmers who now have to buy their seeds, fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides from the same company year after year. Meanwhile, those who grow non-genetically modified crops are reeling from cross-pollination and genetic contamination problems.
“With that kind of thinking, of course you will create terminator seeds,” Shiva said. “You will create anti-seeds that are the very source of life end up being seeds of death.”
The environmentalist repeatedly credited Mahatma Gandhi for inspiring her humanitarian work, using the Indian religious and folk hero’s advocacy of small, cheap spinning wheels to make his own clothes as a metaphor for the bold, grassroots power wielded by the global dispossessed.
“Gandhi decided to spin cloth to get freedom,” Shiva said. “It’s so small, it can be in the hands of the poorest person. It (is) in the small actions that we will reclaim our seed sovereignty. We do what Gandhi did so brilliantly … We will not obey any law that comes in the way of our ecological, ethical duty to save seeds.”
The food justice advocate linked the violent political struggles currently playing out in a half dozen Islamic countries to the broader, worldwide struggle for environmental justice. In the recent regime toppling in Egypt, Shiva said rising food prices were a catalyzing factor.
“We as a species are destroying our food supply and our capacity to feed ourselves,” Shiva added. “What is the limit to which (we) can push this gambling on food?”
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