Vandana Shiva On Resisting GMOs: "Saving Seeds Is a Political Act"

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:


Vandana Shiva On Resisting GMOs: "Saving Seeds Is a Political Act"
Why the fight for biodiversity is about protecting life itself.

by Sarah van Gelder
posted Nov 15, 2013


Trained in physics and philosophy, Vandana Shiva is renowned for her activism against GMOs, globalization, and patents on seeds and traditional foods. She co-founded Navdanya, which promotes seed saving and organic farming and has more than 70,000 farmer-members.

Sarah van Gelder: The seed has been a major part of your work. Could you say a little about what a seed is at its essence?

Vandana Shiva: The seed in its essence is all of the past evolution of the Earth,
the evolution of human history, and the potential for future evolution. The seed is the embodiment of culture because culture shaped the seed with careful selection—women picked the best, diversified. So from one grass you get 200,000 rices.

That is a convergence of human intelligence and nature’s intelligence. It is the ultimate expression of life, and in our language, it means “that from which life arises on its own, forever and ever and ever.”

.....(snip).....

van Gelder: Can you say more about that? What is the relationship of freedom to biodiversity?

Shiva: Life is self-organized. Self-organized systems evolve in diversity. You are not identical to me, because each of us has evolved in freedom. The self-organizing capacity of life is expressed in diversity. Diversity of culture, diversity of humans, diversity of seeds.

Uniformity is constructed from the outside. It is coercive. So a farm of only Roundup Ready soya is actually a battlefield. Chemical warfare is going on—spraying of Roundup to kill everything green, to kill the soil organisms,
to kill the diversity, but also to kill the potential of the crop to manage itself and diseases.

Monocultures can only be held together through external control, and uniformity and external control and concentration go hand in hand. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/how-to-eat-like-our-lives-depend-on-it/vandana-shiva-freedom-starts-with-a-seed

[JimboBillyBubbaBob]

1. Wonderfully stated.

The explanations are succinct and convincing. I shall dig further.

[TexasProgresive]

3. The modern equivalent to "making salt"

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/gandhi-peaceful-resistance.html
Learn here how Gandhi helped the Indian people to dream of freedom by making salt:

Gandhi’s plan for peaceful resistance was to break the British law against Indians making their own salt from seawater. The British government had made a lot of money by charging a tax on salt and all Indians were required to pay it. Gandhi and many of his friends marched 240 miles from the Satyagraha Ashram to the sea.

There on the beach Gandhi committed a crime – he picked up a lump of raw sea salt in his hand. Soon people all over India were making their own salt as a peaceful protest. Many thousands were arrested, including Bapuji (the name the Indian children called Gandhi, which means “father”), but the protest encouraged the Indians to dream of freedom.

[bemildred]

4. Yes, nature hates monocultures. They die off through environmental exhaustion or get eaten. nt