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An Interview with Dr Vandana Shiva, one of the world's foremost environmentalist, anti-GM activist and an advocate of ecological farming and sustainable agriculture as a solution to climate change, food security, hunger and peace. The interview was taken on 16th March 2011, during "Grandmonther's University" a three day course at Navdanya Biodiversity Farm at Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India which Dr. Vandana Shiva founded in 1987 to help save traditional seeds. The farm also undertakes research and training, along with the important role of distributing native seeds to farmers in the region.

Please see the full article at http://www.ecowalkthetalk.com/blog/2011/03/31/vandana-shiva-traditional-knowl...



The interview was conducted by Geraldine, Emiliano and Bhavani. Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of http://www.ecowalkthetalk.com

When the Ogoni people demanded a halt to the unwholesome acts of the Shell Production and Development Company (SPDC or Shell) and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), the government called them names and unleashed security agents to maim, rape and murder and hound many into exile.

The report on the pollution of Ogoniland prepared by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and released on August 4, 2011, marks the first official confirmation that there is a major tragedy on our hands. UNEP's report unequivocally shows that the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) under the prescient leadership of Ken Saro-Wiwa was not crying wolf when it maintained that grave injustice was being inflicted on Ogoniland.

UNEP officials say the report was issued to respond to innuendos. At over $9 million, this must be the most expensive innuendo-dousing report on record. Whether the "innuendo" provoked the study or the release of the study is not known. But if it was that the report was a prelude to resumption of oil exploitation in Ogoniland, it is certainly not doused.

It is shocking that in the face of the Ogoni tragic environment the UNEP report suggests a possible restarting of oil exploitation in Ogoniland. That may be likened to obtaining blood from a dying man.

The report largely says what has been known and said before. But this is official and very valuable. When Shell doled out the funds for the study, they claimed they did so on the basis of the polluter-pays principle. True. Shell polluted Ogoniland, just as they and other companies have done and continue to do all over the Niger Delta.

Claims by Shell that a majority of the oil spills in Ogoni are caused by interference by local people flies in the face of the observations in the UNEP report. The report says the bush refineries, for example, became prominent from 2007. Obviously, one of the conclusions should have been that with livelihoods utterly destroyed, some of the people had to find a means of survival and chose this unfortunate and illegal trade. With UNEP's obvious care not to antagonise Shell in the report, this path was not pursued. MORE

BHUBANESWAR, India, Jul 1, 2011 (IPS) - In eastern Orissa state’s tribal hinterlands about 200 ‘seed-mothers’ are on mission mode - identifying, collecting and conserving traditional seed varieties and motivating farming families to use them.

The seed-mothers (bihana-maa in the local dialect) from the Koya and Kondh tribal communities have reached 1,500 families in the Malkangiri and Kandhamal districts and are still counting. These women are formidable storehouses of knowledge on indigenous seeds and biodiversity conservation.

Collecting, multiplying and distributing through exchange local varieties of paddy, millet, legume, vegetables and leafy green seeds, the seed-mothers already have a solid base of 80 converted villages.

As they spread their message through the hinterland, targeting another 140 villages, the women also promote zero dependence on chemical fertilisers and pesticides.

Considering that Malkangiri is Orissa’s least developed district, with literacy at a low 50 percent and isolated by rivers, forests, undulating topography and poor connectivity, the achievement of the seed-mothers is admirable.

The struggles of Malkangiri farmers with climate change is visible in the Gudumpadar village where seed-mothers are passionately reviving agricultural heritage and convincing the community to stay with local seeds and bio-fertilisers and pesticides.

"This is the best way to cope with erratic rainfall, ensure the children are fed and avoid the clutches of moneylenders," says 65-year-old seed-mother Kanamma Madkami of Kanjeli village, who has multiplied 29 varieties of local millet and paddy seeds. MORE

Working with nature, farmers in the South Asian countries of Pakistan, India and Nepal have cultivated basmati rice for countless centuries. Rice is an integral part of many of the region's diverse cultures. In some of the ancient texts, rice has been associated with prana, or breath. Basmati literally means "fragrant earth" and is considered one of the most aromatic and flavorful rice varieties in the subcontinent. It is also one of the more lucrative export rice crops from South Asia. The Basmati rice exports of Indian farmers alone are worth over $270 million (US). Quite a sizeable amount for any transnational corporation to get their hands on.

In 1997, the powerful United States Patent Office gave Rice Tec, Inc., the patent on Basmati rice. Rice Tec, Inc. is an US-based corporation in Alvin, Texas and a subsidiary of the larger Rice Tec Group whose CEO is Hans-Adam 11, the prince of Leichtenstein. By cross-breeding two Basmati rice varieties the owners of Rice Tec insist that they have invented a "novel" variety of this age-old rice from South Asia. Their patent covers any Basmati variety crowd with a semidwarf strain grown anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. More ominously, the patent also covers any basmati rice that resembles the original plants they used in their cross-breeding methods. This could potentially extend their patent to South Asia.

What the Rice Tec patent covers are the breeding methods as well as the germplasm of the basmati rice variety Rice Tec claims to have "invented." Now, while the patenting of the breeding method is itself a theft of farmers' knowledge and a privatization of the common, age old practice of cross-breeding, the patenting of germplasms of plants amounts to nothing less than the colonization of life.MORE

When travelling through the Minas Gerais state last April, the blogger known as the Viajante Sustentável (The Sustainable Traveller) spoke to inhabitants of the Jequitinhonha valley [en], and discovered how the region's visual and social landscape has changed over the last twenty years:

A catastrófica monocultura de eucalipto pelas empresas privadas nas cabeceiras dos rios e riachos, além de envenenar o solo, expulsou a fauna e flora do local, secou as nascentes e o lençol freático. O deserto verde do eucalipto tornou-se uma calamidade socioambiental. A região já foi auto-suficiente em alimentos essenciais, cultivados pela agricultura familiar, integrados com a natureza. A situação mudou radicalmente, exibindo riachos completamente secos, sem olhos d’água, rios cada vez mais baixos e assoreados, praticamente toda a alimentação proveniente de distribuidores em Belo Horizonte, pastos abandonados. Enquanto isso, as transnacionais de eucalipto e celulose engordavam os lucros.

The disastrous concept behind growing company-owned eucalyptus monocultures in river and stream sources not only poisoned the soil, but also destroyed local flora and fauna and dried up streams and the water table. Consequently, the eucalyptus green desert became a social and environmental calamity. The region already produced essential foods in a sustainable manner, as food was grown using integrated farming, but the situation changed radically. The streams completely dried up, there were no freshwater springs, water levels gradually decreased, silt levels increased, farms were abandoned and practically all food came from distributors in Belo Horizante. Meanwhile, the eucalyptus and cellulose transnational corporations were making huge profits.

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On the morning of Friday, May 6th President Mauricio Funes of El Salvador’s left-wing FMLN party, arrived at the La Maroma agricultural cooperative in the department of Usulután for a potentially historic meeting with hundreds of small family farmers. Usulután has often been referred to as the country’s bread basket for its fertile soil and capacity for agricultural production, making it one of the most strategic and violent battleground zones during El Salvador’s twelve year civil war between the US-supported government and the FMLN guerrilla movement.


Once again, Usulután has entered the spotlight for its agricultural reputation. The FMLN, which initially formed around an ideology of national liberation from US hegemony, has now adopted the goal of “food sovereignty,” the idea that countries hold the right to define their own agricultural policies, rather than being subject to the whims of international market forces. On Friday, officials representing the Ministry of Agriculture and the local governorship accompanied President Funes in inaugurating a new plan aimed at reactivating the country’s historically ignored rural economy and reversing El Salvador’s growing dependence on imported grains.


The opening ceremony for the new plan was hosted by the Mangrove Association, a non-governmental organization established by members of a grassroots social movement called La Coordinadora del Bajo Lempa y Bahia de Jiquilisco (known locally as La Coordinadora), which has been supporting initiatives for food security and environmental sustainability in Usulután for over 15 years. MORE

As international food prices continue to soar, land purchases by foreign investors face ban in much of Latin America.

...The governments of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay are drafting laws to curb acquisition by foreigners of extensive tracts of their fertile agricultural land.

Despite slight differences between them, the proposed measures are generally fairly mild. None of these three member countries of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) - the other member is Paraguay - proposes to ban land sales to private or public foreign capital, nor to regulate land use, nor to repossess land that has already been sold.

But they are attempting to set limits on further expansion of rural properties in the hands of companies or citizens belonging to foreign countries that regard them as an asset to supply food for their own markets, or as a speculative investment.

Brazil has already passed a law limiting the purchase of land by foreigners, and by Brazilian companies partly owned by foreign capital, while Argentina and Uruguay are studying similar bills.

Alarm has arisen over the increasing purchases of land in these countries in recent years, due to soaring international food prices and the lack of other safe options for financial investment.

A 2008 report by Grain, an international non-governmental organisation working on behalf of small rural food producers, had already warned about this trend and described concrete examples of its advance.

China, Egypt, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, India, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are all buying or leasing fertile land in other countries where food is not always abundant, the Grain report says. MORE

As executive director of Resisting Environmental Destruction On Indigenous Lands (REDOIL), [Faith] Gemmill is part of a growing network of indigenous women organizing against oil extraction on their lands, both in the U.S. and Canada. In recent years she has focused on halting Shell Oil’s plans to develop offshore drilling in the Chukchi Sea, which borders Alaska’s northwestern coast. Shell leased the area from the U.S. government in 2008 for $2.7 billion, but Gemmill has repeatedly frustrated their attempts to begin exploration. Last year, REDOIL won a lawsuit against Shell, effectively halting production until more studies are completed on the potential environmental impacts of offshore drilling.

The oil industry wields incredible power in communities where exploration is taking place, often dividing residents by offering them economic opportunities—thus complicating activism against the destructive side of the industry’s activities.

“The industry comes into these communities when people are in high school and starts paying men huge amounts of money just to go to trainings—to get them hooked,” says Kandi Mossett, an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network. “It causes tension in the community, because while they’re destroying our water supply, they’re also providing jobs.”

While men have jobs in the industry, women have taken on the task of leading the activist fight. “My guess is that 98 percent of the leadership in the activist communities we work with are women,” Mossett says. “It’s not to say that men aren’t worried, but typically they will be the ones working in the industry, on the oil rigs. …I think women recognize that there is an inherent need to do something, because our children are sick and our future is in trouble.”

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