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[polly7]

12. As will I.

Last edited Mon May 26, 2014, 03:00 AM - Edit history (1)

Vandana Shiva, a woman who cares deeply for millions of people affected in terrible ways by GMOs.

Vandana Shiva’s Message for the March against Monsanto

People often ask me “Why Monsanto”?
My response is, we did not choose to target Monsanto, Monsanto chose to target our seed and food freedom, our scientific and democratic institutions, our very lives.

Monsanto has admitted it wrote the intellectual property treaty of WTO that allows seeds to be redefined as Monsanto’s intellectual property. And it is through patents that Monsanto, a poison maker, has become a seed giant, with the largest share in control over the seed market. In India it controls 95% of the cotton seed market, and the extraction of superprofits through royalties has trapped our small farmers in unpayable debt. 284,000 farmers have committed suicide in India because of debt linked to seed and chemicals.

Corporations like Monsanto were behind the EC Seed law that would have made diversity and seed saving illegal in Europe. The last parliament sent back the law to the European commission. We must ensure that the new parliament does not pass the law.

In the US, Monsanto used its money to undermine the Right of US citizens to Know what they eat. It is threatening the State of Vermont because it got a labelling law in place. And it now has introduced a bill in Congress called called The Safe and Accurate Food Labelling Act which has earned itself the name the Dark (Deny Americans the Right to Know) Act.

This is an assault on Democracy and people’s freedom.
While Monsanto announces that it is retreating from Europe, it is pushing GMOs on the Eastern European countries. And is pushing new trade treaties like TIPP, to undermine Europe’s largely GMO free status, and to get stronger IPR rights on seed.

http://seedfreedom.in/vandana-shivas-message-for-the-march-against-monsanto/


Reforms not working

However, both the food crisis and the economic crisis are a result of the so-called reforms. More people are denied their right to food because, on the one hand the livelihoods of small and marginal farmers are being destroyed to carry out the reforms of corporatising the agriculture sector, with corporate seeds and chemical products, and corporate procurement instead of public procurement. The result is debt, hunger and despair.

One out of every four Indians today is a victim of hunger. And half of the hungry are farmers who cannot eat what they grow, either because they are planting cash crops such as cotton; or they're growing costly crops such as rice, wheat and corn, which they have to sell in order to repay the loans they get to buy seeds, fertilisers, etc.

That is why lowering the cost of production and increasing the livelihood sustainability of small and marginal farmers must be the first step in building food security. However, the Food Security Act is totally silent on production, procurement, and farmers' livelihood and food rights. This in my view is its biggest failing.

The silence on production makes many people feel that the Food Security Act could increase India's dependence on food imports. We are already spending millions of dollars in importing and subsidising pulses - grain legumes - and edible oils. Until the Green Revolution, India was the biggest producer and exporter of oilseeds and pulses.The Greed Revolution which is based on rice and wheat production has destroyed our self-sufficiency in pulses and oilseeds, and the globalisation and libralisation of the food trade has made it worse. We need to introdruce tariffs on imports of edible oils and pulses, both to give our farmers a level playing field, and to reduce our trade and budget deficits.


Full Article: http://www.zcommunications.org/indias-food-security-act-myths-and-reality-by-vandana-shiva.html

"In fact, to take advantage of these seeds, small farmers who are among the hungriest people in the world, have to take out loans to buy the costly products that are required—the seeds, the fertilizers... and the pesticides that are required" for the GMO seeds.

"So in fact the honorees ... are actually contributing the problems that keep us locked... in hundreds of millions of people in a world where there is plenty of food," concluded Lappe.

The World Food Prize explained that the GMO work by the new winners has "contributed significantly to increasing the quantity and availability of food."

Not so, says Shiva.

"The evidence is so clear," she says, that "GMOs have not increased production, there's a failure to yield." In addition, "they have not reduced use of chemicals. Worse, they have increased the use of chemicals because they have created superpests and superweeds."

Full Article: http://www.zcommunications.org/frances-moore-lappe-vandana-shiva-blast-award-for-gmo-scientists-by-andrea-germanos


Vandana Shiva - We Don’t Need Genetically Engineered Bananas For Iron Deficiency

Saturday, April 27, 2013

The latest insanity from the genetic engineers is to push GMO bananas on India for reducing iron deficiency in Indian women.

Nature has given us a cornucopia of biodiversity, rich in nutrients. Malnutrition and nutrient deficiency results from destroying biodiversity, and with it rich sources of nutrition.

The Green Revolution has spread monocultures of chemical rice and wheat, driving out biodiversity from our farms and diets.

And what survived as spontaneous crops like the amaranth greens and chenopodium (bathua) which are rich in iron were sprayed with poisons and herbicides. Instead of being seen as iron rich and vitamin rich gifts, they were treated as “weeds”. A Monsanto representative once said that Genetically Engineered crops resistant to their propriety herbicide Roundup killed the weeds that “steal the Sunshine”. And their RoundUp Ads in India tell women “Liberate yourself, use Roundup”. This is not a recipe for liberation, but being trapped in malnutrition.

Full Article: http://www.zcommunications.org/we-don-t-need-genetically-engineered-bananas-for-iron-deficiency-by-vandana-shiva

Seeds of Suicide
By Vandana Shiva
Source: Asian Ag
Thursday, April 04, 2013

“Monsanto is an agricultural company.
We apply innovation and technology to help farmers around the world produce more while conserving more.”
“Producing more, Conserving more, Improving farmers lives.”

These are the promises Monsanto India’s website makes, alongside pictures of smiling, prosperous farmers from the state of Maharashtra. This is a desperate attempt by Monsanto and its PR machinery to delink the epidemic of farmers’ suicides in India from the company’s growing control over cotton seed supply — 95 per cent of India’s cotton seed is now controlled by Monsanto.

A Monsanto representative admitted that they were “the patient’s diagnostician, and physician all in one” in writing the patents on life-forms, from micro-organisms to plants, in the TRIPS’ agreement of WTO. Stopping farmers from saving seeds and exercising their seed sovereignty was the main objective. Monsanto is now extending its patents to conventionally bred seed, as in the case of broccoli and capsicum, or the low gluten wheat it had pirated from India which we challenged as a biopiracy case in the European Patent office.

That is why we have started Fibres of Freedom in the heart of Monsanto’s Bt cotton/suicide belt in Vidharba. We have created community seed banks with indigenous seeds and helped farmers go organic. No GMO seeds, no debt, no suicides.

Full Article: http://www.zcommunications.org/seeds-of-suicide-by-vandana-shiva

VANDANA SHIVA: I’m here in Los Angeles to address a conference on International Women’s Day on global ecologies, on how globalization, shaped by a very patriarchal mindset, a capitalist, patriarchal mindset, has actually aggravated the violence against women, that we are living in a very violent economic order to which war has become essential—war against the earth, war against women’s bodies, war against local economies and war against democracy. And I think we need to see the connections between all these forms of violence, which impact women most. Whether it’s climate change or biodiversity erosion or seed monopolies, all of it is connected. It’s one piece.

VANDANA SHIVA: I think this case is not just about Bowman, the Indiana farmer. It’s about every farmer, every person and every seed in the world. First, the idea that Monsanto can patent a seed by putting a toxic gene for Roundup resistance into a plant, that that is a creation of seed, that has evolved over millennia, been bred over thousands of years in East Asia, not by Monsanto—how can we be governed by an illusion that introducing a toxic gene is creation of life? It’s an error. And it is this error that compelled me 26 years ago to start Navdanya, the movement for seed saving in India, because I do not think seed is invented, and therefore, a patent on seed is wrong from the first step.

In India, this kind of false claim to creation, false claim to invention, the collection of royalties from seed, has led to Monsanto controlling 95 percent of the cottonseed supply, 95 percent through a monopoly, not through the choice of the farmers, as it’s often made out to be. Farmers are getting indebted because the price of seed jumped 8,000 percent, and there’s no option, except the little options we are creating through Navdanya by saving open-pollinated seed.

Two hundred and seventy thousand Indian farmers have committed suicide since Monsanto entered the Indian seed market. That’s more than a quarter-million. It’s a genocide. And every farmer who commits suicide leaves behind a widow. For me, this is a prime example of violence against women through violent economic means.


Full Article: http://www.zcommunications.org/vandana-shiva-on-int-l-women-s-day-capitalist-patriarchy-has-aggravated-violence-against-women-by-vandana-shiva

"Born in India in 1952, Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and thinker. Director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology, and Ecology, she is the author of many books, including Water Wars: Pollution, Profits, and Privatization (South End Press, 2001), Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (South End Press, 1997), Monocultures of the Mind (Zed, 1993), The Violence of the Green Revolution (Zed, 1992), and Staying Alive (St. Martin's Press, 1989).

Shiva is a leader in the International Forum on Globalization, along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin. She addressed the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, 1999, as well as the recent World Economic Forum in Melbourne , 2000. In 1993, Shiva won the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award). The founder of Navdanya (“nine seeds”), a movement promoting diversity and use of native seeds, she also set up the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology in her mother’s cowshed in 1997. Its studies have validated the ecological value of traditional farming and been instrumental in fighting destructive development projects in India .

Before becoming an activist, Shiva was one of India ’s leading physicists. She holds a master’s degree in the philosophy of science and a Ph.D. in particle physics."

http://www.livingunderdrones.org/ ~~~~GO LEAFS! ~~~~~ http://www.journeyman.tv/66218/short