Earth Democracy....seed sharing and building coalitions in the 21st century

[Guest guest]

From YES!

Earth Democracy

Sarah Ruth van Gelder interviews Vandana Shiva

 

Vandana Shiva is a physicist and an organic farmer, an

instigator of India's historic " tree-huggers " movement, and

a renowned author. She speaks internationally on the perils

of globalization, while mobilizing fellow citizens to

reclaim their rights to life itself.

 

Sarah Ruth van Gelder: Tell me about the Earth Democracy

movement. Where did that notion come from, and what form is

the movement taking?

 

Vandana Shiva: The notion comes from a very ancient category

in Indian thought. Just like Chief Seattle talked about

being in the web of life, in India we talk about vasudhaiva

kutumbkam, which means the earth family. Indian cosmology

has never separated the human from the non-human--we are a

continuum.

 

When the issue of the patenting of life emerged, for

example, there were two levels of response from those

opposing this practice in India. The one level was

resistance: " This is immoral. Life is not an invention. Life

cannot be a monopoly. You cannot sell us the seeds you stole

from us, and you cannot charge us royalties for the product

of nature's intelligence and centuries of human innovation. "

 

The second level was the reclaiming of democracy: people

claimed the right to look after their biodiversity and use

it sustainably. This came out of discussions among the

movements we’ve been building at the grassroots.

 

I remember one meeting of 200 villagers who had been

involved in seed saving and seed sharing with Navdanya, the

trust that I founded to save seeds and promote organic

agriculture. These 200 villagers gathered on World

Environment Day in 1998 and declared sovereignty over their

biodiversity--not sovereignty to rape and destroy,

sovereignty to conserve. These 200 villagers, gathered in a

high mountain village near a tributary of the Ganges, said,

" We've received our medicinal plants, our seeds, our forests

from nature through our ancestors; we owe it to them to

conserve it for the future. We pledge we will never allow

their erosion or their theft. We pledge we will never accept

patenting, genetic modification, or allow our biodiversity

to be polluted in any form, and we pledge that we will act

as the peoples of this biodiversity. "

 

These discussions in villages all over India, in many

different languages, led to amazing actions. Some wrote

letters to Mike Moore, director-general of the WTO saying,

" We noticed you have passed a law called 'Trade-Related

Intellectual Property Rights.' We also notice that under

this law you want to monopolize life forms. Unfortunately,

these are resources over which you have no jurisdiction, and

you have overstepped your boundaries. "

 

Similar letters went to the prime minister of India: " You

are the prime minister of this country, but we are the

keepers of biodiversity. This is not your jurisdiction. You

cannot sign away these rights. They were not given to you.

We never delegated them to you. "

 

But the ones that were the most beautiful were crafted

literally under the village trees and addressed to Ricetec,

Inc., which patented Basmati rice, and to the Grace

Corporation, which patented the name. The letters said,

" We've used Basmati for centuries. ... Now we hear you’ve

got a patent number for this, and you claim to have invented

it. This kind of piracy and theft we know happens. There are

people who steal in our village, and we treat them with

understanding. We call them and ask them to explain what is

the compulsion that led them to steal. So we invite you to

come to our village and explain to us the compulsion that

made you steal from us. "

 

These communities started in years past by saving locally

bred seeds and saving biodiversity. Now they are seeking

self-governance over food systems, water systems, and

biodiversity systems.

 

If you think of the fact that corporate globalization is

really about an aggressive privatization of the water,

biodiversity, and food systems of the Earth, when these

communities declare sovereignty and act on that sovereignty,

they have developed a powerful response to globalization.

Living democracy then is the democracy that is custodian of

the living wealth on which people depend.

 

Sarah: Is the same language being used elsewhere to counter

corporate globalization?

 

Vandana: There is, I think, a spontaneous resurgence of

thinking that centers on protection of life, celebrating

life, enjoying life as both our highest duty and our most

powerful form of resistance against a violent and brutal

system that globalizes not just trade, but fascism, and

denies civil liberties and freedoms.

 

There isn't any one coordinated language for this movement,

and that's the beauty of it. The WTO-related events in

Seattle created the first experience of a rainbow

politics--a successful pluralistic politics, without the

working of a master mind, but with the currents and beauty

that come out of free thinking. In the new politics, people

have different ways of talking, but I feel the core will be

living democracy and living economies [see YES! Fall 2002],

and that it will include both taking personal responsibility

to make change and being part of national and international

movements for change.

 

Sarah: You’ve written about four types of

insecurities--ecological, economic, cultural, and

political--and how each results in violence. Could you say

something about why you consider each of these forms of

insecurity?

 

Vandana: The ecological crisis is a severe form of

insecurity, especially in conditions of poverty when rivers

are polluted and you have no clean drinking water, when

groundwater is exhausted and you're forced to migrate. There

couldn't be a deeper insecurity than this. Many conflicts

within Third World countries are related to the practice of

exploiting resources faster than nature can renew them or

diverting them away from where people need them. Dams in

every society have become major sources of conflict. As

water scarcity grows, neighbors, families turn against each

other.

 

Sarah: Many people assume that scarcity has always been part

of the human condition and that scarcity is closely related

to population increases.

 

Vandana: In my 25 years of work on resource and

environmental issues, one thing I have learned is that

different parts of the planet are endowed in different ways.

There may be little rainfall in the deserts of Rajasthan,

but the culture of Rajasthan evolved to manage that amount

of rainfall, and they have developed miraculous technologies

for harvesting and storing what rain they get. They have

sophisticated underground storage systems and

water-harvesting systems so that not a drop is wasted. These

technologies still sustain cities like Jodhpur and Jaipur.

They have enough drinking water because they've developed a

conservation culture, and they grow crops that don't need

much water. The moment you think the desert of Rajasthan

should be growing rice paddy or cotton, you create scarcity.

 

Scarcity is not a result of uneven endowments--that is

diversity. Scarcity is having a mismatch between a culture

and nature's giving. Cultures have evolved cultural

diversity to mimic the biological diversity of climates and

ecosystems. It’s when that relationship is disrupted that

you get unsustainable population growth.

 

There is no society in which you've had so-called population

explosions as long as societies have lived within the

context of their rights to the resources and the ability to

conserve those resources for the future. Just look at two

situations. In England, the population explosion started

with the enclosures of the commons--when peasants were

uprooted from the land and had to depend on selling their

labor. In India, 1800 is the watershed for the consolidation

of colonial regimes. For centuries before 1800 our

population had been stable. When you depend on the land, you

know there are five people who can be supported. You work

your society out so you have five. When you are selling your

labor power on an uncertain basis, in an unstable wage

market, you know that having ten is better than having five.

So dispossession from the Earth's natural wealth is at the

root of instability and population growth.

 

Sarah: So economic insecurity is actually created?

 

Vandana: Instead of leaving seeds in the hands of the

peasants who co-evolve them in partnership with nature,

seeds become a monopoly in the hands of five or six global

corporations. Instead of water belonging to millions of

local communities, water too is to be controlled by five or

six global water giants. These are recipes that use economic

systems to appropriate for the few the base of survival of

the majority. The 80 percent who are dispossessed of the

wealth of nature move into economic insecurity, because

their livelihood as peasants, as fishermen, as farmers, as

tribals, as forest dwellers, all depend on having the

fisheries, the land, the forest, to make a living. When

those rights are taken away, they become economic

refugees--they become disposable people.

 

This economic model rested on the assumption that the

favored 20 percent would gain security as a result of these

policies. But recent events on Wall Street show us that this

model creates economic insecurity both for the 80 percent

who rely on natural wealth and for the 20 percent who rely

on virtual wealth, because virtual money is a construct, and

that construct can disappear as easily as it is created.

 

Either way, economic insecurity is the legacy of a

finance-driven, capital-driven, corporate-driven economic

model that is destroying our natural capital and the

resilience of local economies.

 

Sarah: The third type of insecurity is cultural. You’ve made

a connection between globalization and the rise of

nationalist violence and right-wing repression. What kind of

evidence have you seen that there are links?

 

Vandana: Well I'm a physicist, not a social scientist. But

as a citizen of India, I have had to suffer the violence and

brutality that comes with rising fundamentalism, and I've

asked myself how a society that is the cradle of peace, the

land of Gandhi and Buddha, could be reduced to one of the

most volatile societies in the world.

 

One incident that contributed to my understanding of these

links was the violence that erupted in the Punjab in the

1980s. As the magic of the Green Revolution started to

disappear, as subsidies were removed and an artificial

system of prosperity started to decay, the Punjab became the

birthplace for anger and discontent. When you look at why

people were fighting, you find they were fighting for their

rivers, for fair prices, for a say on when dam waters should

be released. None of this was decided locally or

regionally--it was all decided from the capital, Delhi. So

the discontent was against centralized regimes in which

people had no share in shaping their future.

 

More recently there have been clear indicators of how

fundamentalism is growing out of the economic insecurity of

globalization. Let me just give you two examples. In the

late 1990s, because of the pressures of globalization, onion

prices went up from 2 rupees to 100 rupees. The ruling party

lost what became known as " the onion elections " of 1998

because they allowed this price increase. The opposition

parties used the onion as the symbol of their fight against

globalization, and they won in every state. Immediately

after that we saw a round of fundamentalist violence.

 

In Gujarat, we had another set of regional elections, and

the WTO, agriculture, and farmers’ survival were the major

issues. Farmers said they were being destroyed by

globalization policies, and they voted the ruling party out

of power. Immediately after that the fundamentalist wave

erupted, the genocide and warmongering started, and while

public attention focused on the violence, the globalization

agenda was pushed further.

 

As decision making is centralized away from local

communities to national governments--and ultimately to

corporate board rooms, financial markets, institutions like

the World Bank, IMF, and WTO--representative democracy loses

its base in economic democracy. As local and national

governments lose control over economic resources and

priorities, elected leaders can no longer build a political

base by championing programs responsive to family and

community needs.

 

Political demagogues of the far right emerge to fill the

void by channeling the anger and insecurity created by

empire’s program of scarcity, injustice, and exclusion into

an us-versus-them politics that blames particular national,

racial, culture, or religious groups. The rise of the LePens

in France, the Fortuyns in Netherlands, Haiders in Austria,

and the Narendra Modis in India is a result. So there is a

strong affinity between the forces of empire and a politics

of hate that justifies policies of domination and exclusion.

So long as people’s attention is focused on fear and hatred

of foreigners or members of a particular religious group,

such as Muslims, they are distracted from organizing to deal

with the system of institutional domination and exploitation

that is the real source of their insecurity.

 

Sarah: That certainly sounds like what is happening in the

United States also.

 

Vandana: Absolutely. It’s a vicious cycle, and we need

instead to create virtuous cycles that allow economic

democracy to feed political democracy, cultural identities,

and cultural diversity.

 

It comes back to deepening of democracy. What we have at

this moment is democracy reduced to the rule of lies--lies

in the way the popular will is being counted, as we saw in

Florida in 2000, and lies in the way the people’s wealth is

being counted, as we see in today’s accounting scandals.

That false wealth is influencing who will rule--it’s all

just too false now.

 

Our system of food security is being destroyed in the name

of economic growth and economic liberalization, and people

don’t have enough food to eat. Our farmers are being

ravished by seed companies, being pushed into debt, and

committing suicide. This system is going to cost lives even

in the US, where people don’t know how they’ll pay for their

health or retirement.

 

The way out of this violent cycle is to deepen democracy--to

bring decisions that directly affect people’s lives as close

as possible to where people are and to where they can take

responsibility. If a river is flowing through some

communities, those communities should have the power and the

responsibility to decide how the water is used and whether

it is to be polluted. The state has no business giving to

Coca-Cola the groundwater of a valley in Kerala, resulting

in rich farmland going totally dry. Communities need to take

back sovereignty and delegate trusteeship to the state only

as appropriate.

 

What we have now is a regime of absolute rights in the hands

of corporations with zero responsibility for the

environmental and social devastation and the political

instabilities they are creating. If we want to reactivate

and rejuvenate democracy, we have to bring back the economic

content.

 

Sarah: Let me wrap up with a personal question. Every time

I’ve heard you speak or met you, you’ve had so much energy,

not only intellectual energy, but personal or spiritual

energy. I’m just wondering, what keeps you so alive?

 

Vandana: Well, it’s always a mystery, because you don’t know

why you get depleted or recharged. But, this much I know. I

do not allow myself to be overcome by hopelessness, no

matter how tough the situation. I believe that if you just

do your little bit without thinking of the bigness of what

you stand against, if you turn to the enlargement of your

own capacities, just that in itself creates new potential.

 

And I’ve learned from the Bhagavad Gita and other teachings

of our culture to detach myself from the results of what I

do, because those are not in my hands. The context is not in

your control, but your commitment is yours to make, and you

can make the deepest commitment with a total detachment

about where it will take you. You want it to lead to a

better world, and you shape your actions and take full

responsibility for them, but then you have detachment. And

that combination of deep passion and deep detachment allows

me always to take on the next challenge because I don’t

cripple myself, I don’t tie myself in knots. I function like

a free being. I think getting that freedom is a social duty

because I think we owe it to each other not to burden each

other with prescription and demands. I think what we owe

each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and

hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.

 

Vandana Shiva’s books include: Water Wars: Privatization,

Pollution, and Profit; Stolen Harvest, the Hijacking of the

Global Food Supply; The Violence of the Green Revolution:

Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics; Biopiracy:

The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge; and many others.