this presentation is brought youby arizona state university's julie ann wrigley globalinstitute of sustainability and a generous investmentby julie ann wrigley. wrigley lecture series,world renowned thinkers and problem solvers engagethe community in dialogues to address sustainabilitychallenges. my name is chris boone. i'm the dean of theschool of sustainability, which is part of the julieann wrigley global institute
of sustainability. and i'm very proudto say that we are one of the sponsors oftonight's special presentation by dr. shiva. the julie ann wrigley globalinstitute of sustainability provides support to bring inthe world's leading thinkers and practitionersin sustainability. and of course, dr.shiva's certainly one among those ranks.
this is the second of thewrigley series of this year. one of the things thatwe do in the institute is to not only think abouthuman environmental issues, but also to thinkabout solutions. and the julie annwrigley series, i think, exemplifies that spirit andexemplifies those principles. so as i mentioned, thisis a cosponsored event. in addition to thewrigley institute, we also have the instituteof humanities research
and the school ofhistorical, philosophical, and religious studiesas cosponsors. it's my honor now to introduceto you dr. sally kitch, who is a regents professor, oneof the highest honors awarded at asu to faculty. she's also the foundingdirector of the institute of humanities researchand i'm particularly proud to say that she's adistinguished sustainability scientist.
sally. [applause] thank you, chris. i'm here to tell you a littlebit about the institute of humanities researchand also to tell you about the projectthat is actually responsible for thinking aboutbringing vandana shiva here to asu. we are part of aninternational project that
is sponsored by themellon foundation through the consortium forhumanity centers and institutes to look at a globalperspective on humanities for the environment. and sometimes people think,what do the humanities have to do with the environment? but as i think you'llhear a little bit tonight, it has everything to dowith the environment. and that, in fact,environmental issues
are not in the first instancetechnological problems, but they're issues that involvehuman cultures and capacities. and we're here in our projectto study and represent these possibilities. so also thanks not onlyto the wrigley institute but also to president crow'spresidential initiative funds and shippers, we areable to bring dr. shiva tonight so she can speak to us aboutsome of these crucial and deep issues involvingthe environment.
i would now like tointroduce the person who's going to introduce dr. shiva. because you never justget one person up here. and that is doctorjoni adamson, who is a professor of englishand environmental humanities here at asu, and alsoa senior sustainability scholar in thewrigley institute. joni. i would like to warmlywelcome you to this lecture.
today we meet on the lands ofthe akimel o'odham and pima nations. and i tell you this becausethe focus of my own work is on global indigenous andoral and written literatures. i first came to know the workof dr. vandana shiva when i had to answer the questionof why so many indigenous novelists and writersaround the world were writing aboutfood sovereignty, seed saving, and soil health.
this brought me todr. shiva's books and her prodigious writingsanswered my questions about why a prominent lagunapueblo writer such as leslie marmon silko would write a novelthat has as its main character a small o'odham girlwho collects seeds and who freely sharesthem around the world. this novel titled gardens in thedunes focuses on all the topics that we will be discussingtonight, including seeds, seed saving, and famine foods.
and the novel illustratesone of the ways in which thehumanities and the arts are contributingsignificantly to conversations around the future of foods. dr. shiva is a world renownedenvironmental thinker, a seed and food sovereignty activist,a physicist, feminist, philosopher of science, awriter, and a science policy advocate. in the 1970s, during thathistoric chipko or hug the tree
movement in the centralhimalayan region, she dramatically shiftedher career direction after learning that thewomen protecting forests against logging-- excuseme, after learning that the women protectingforests against logging were trying to convey the ideathat to the world, forests for timber, revenue,and profits, but the real productsof the forests were soil, water, and pure air.
she went on to focus herwork on protecting access to clean water andpreserving the diversity and integrity ofnative organisms. in 1993, she was a recipientof the right livelihood award, commonly known asthe alternative nobel prize. she's also the co-founder ofnavdanya, an organization that works with local communitiesand groups in india. she is the writer of manybooks, including staying alive, biopiracy, monocultures ofthe mind, and water wars,
and one that is very importantto this seminar, soil not oil, as well as over 300papers in leading scientific andtechnical journals. her recent work insoil not oil, she has argued thatwe need to quote, "change our mind beforewe can change our world. this cultural transitionis at the heart of making energy transitionsto an age beyond oil." unquote.
energy transitions is aresearch and cultural issue that we here at asu aredeeply involved in working on and it is an area of concernthat is bringing humanists together with their colleaguesacross the disciplines. dr. shiva's visit to asu is partof a humanities workshop titled forms of collaborativeknowledge and collective action, the future of food, inwhich we will dive into issues and discussions abouthow we can build interactional competenciesto work together.
there is no one morequalified to help us think about these topics. she has inspired changeand empowered others through her optimism,her strength, and her unwaveringdetermination to demonstrate the ways in whichscientific knowledge, ecological knowledge,and collective action can lead to positivechanges in the world. it is my great honorand my deep pleasure
to welcome dr. vandanashiva to the podium. her lecture is titled, "thefuture of food, dictatorship or democracy." thank you so muchto the collaboration between the instituteof sustainability, the institute forhumanities research, the school of historical,philosophical, and religious studies. and isn't that anamazing collaboration?
i think it's the first timesuch a diversity of institutes and disciplines have invited me. and it already showsthat asu is truly looking at the challengesof sustainability and non sustainability ina very fresh way. i never thoughti'd spend so much of my life looking at food. i was among thosecrazy scientists who thought food is a luxury.
you eat it whenyou have to eat it. and i realize increasinglythat food is the web of life. because the web oflife is interactions between differentorganisms, where one is the food of the other. and the soil food web it'ssuch an amazing correction to that extremelyfalse idea that life is a pyramid with man on top. the organisms in the soilare one step beyond us.
we are their food. that should bring usa little humility. [laughter] and how we produceand consume food is probably the mostsignificant impact, both on the planet and society. in recent years, there was anindifference to these issues. i woke up to it in1984, when violence erupted in the stateof punjab, which
is the land of five rivers,prosperous, hardworking farmers. the green revolution wasfirst implemented in punjab. it was even given a nobelpeace prize with the thesis that changing the seeds andadapting them to chemicals is going to create somuch prosperity that there will be peace. and the color green did notcome from the philosophy green. there was no philosophygreen in '60s.
the green movementgrew much later as a sustainability movement. green was just a colordifferent from red. and red is what you didn'twant/ and the idea was, you engineer the seeds,you engineer society, and there'll bepeace ever after. but there wasn'tpeace in punjab. that same year, inthe city of bhopal, a pesticide plant ownedby union carbide leaked.
and i rushed inwith bucket fulls of neem saplings, beautifultree whose scientific name is azadirachtaindica, which has been used for centuriesin india for pest control. and i drew a poster. no more bhopal,let's plant a neem. but by the end of thatyear, i was asking myself, why is the model ofagriculture that is dominant causing so much violence?
and i was working,at that point, on a major programfor the united nations university on conflictsover natural resources. and either i thinkthe conflicts that are deeper than the onesthat are being reported on. and will you let me investigate? they did. i wrote a book calledthe violence of the green revolution as a result.
and while doing theresearch for the book, half the time thefield trips had to be canceled because thetrain had been blown up or the bus had beenblown up with a bomb. but i persisted andfinally did the research. and i remember in particular adeclaration of the [inaudible], which is the bigbody of the six, saying when can't choose whatyou grow, when you can't decide the methods of production,when you don't determine
the price of what youproduced, when your own river's water can't be releasedthrough your decision. because the bhakra damwas controlled by delhi. then we are livingunder slavery. and the reason they came outwith this was because the green revolution, by the '80s, wasgoing into a negative economy. farmers were getting into debt. there were more pests. there was more pesticide use.
the nitrogenfertilizer was having to be used more and more, withno gain and yield right now. the yields are goingdown that much. the soils were dying, thewater was disappearing, the farmers were angry. and they took to the gun. there were protests. the protestsweren't listened to. something verysimilar is actually
happening right now in syria. but so rapidly our mindshave become so fragmented and we forget so fast. now, i remember reading innewspapers just a few years ago how there was a majordrought in syria. and just as the indian peasantshad revolted in the '80s, instead of offering a solutionthrough food democracy, through the rights of farmers tohave seed sovereignty and food sovereignty, instead of creatinga more fair system of pricing
of food, the military was sentto the golden temple, which is the sacred shrineof the six in amritsar. the six felt outraged. they had assassinated indiragandhi by the end of the year. and in response, thecongress killed 3,006 in a terrible program. and the justice on thatissue hasn't yet been done. but in syria, as the droughtcontinued to intensify, 800,000 syrians,farmers and herdsmen
in the area around thetown of [inaudible], were losing their livelihoods. 75% of the crop had finished. 85% of the herds were dead. and they came intothe city protesting. they were rested, theywere thrown into jail, and that is what createdthe anti assad movement. assad himself had locked intothe globalization paradigm of new liberalismwhere agriculture
has to be eitherdestroyed or ignored. and global trade iswhat gets priority. with the drought, the farmersstarted to mine more water where they could. and the [inaudible] figuresare there, both for punjab as well as for syria, which isin the tigris-euphrates basin. 144 cubic meters were being lostbecause of excessive drilling. in punjab, the water levelis falling by a foot a year. this is a landwhere, in my days,
younger days, wherever youwent in indo-gangetic plain, you would seepersian wheels, which would be gettingwater at 10 feet. more than 26 cubic miles ofwater disappeared in punjab. why is so much waterbeing wasted and misused? because whether it'sin syria or in india, crops that use less waterhave been displaced. whether it is drought resistantrices or barley or wheat or the millets which i callthe foods of the future.
the millets are themost nutritious crops. you think they just bird food. no, they areauthentic human food. we did a calculationthat if we grew millet, we would have 400times more food using the same amountof water in india. the green revolution, whichis based on chemicals, is water intensive. not for the plants,but for the chemicals.
uses 10 times more water. globally, between 75%to 95% of the water in different countries is goinginto an intensive agriculture which is not bringing usany gains in food security. in fact, it'sundermining food security by destroyingwater availability. because the limiting factorfor the production of food is not limits of land. we've got so much land.
but the land is notalways able to grow food because of limits on water. and in desert cultures, theindigenous people of this land or in rajasthan or thesemi-arid tracts of the deccan, farmers evolve themost amazing ways of conserving waterand using less. now of course there's a lot offashion about crop per drop. but it's not yet atthe systems level where you have ecosystemsconserving more water
and using less. i have seen, of course, onthe flights to this country sometimes napkins served thatsay, "we put more water back than we take." now that isarithmetically impossible. but coca cola and pepsicola try and convince us that they are creators of water. so water wise, these systemswere hugely non sustainable. and because we havedeveloped very reductionist
mechanistic ways ofthinking about the world since the industrialrevolution, and these have been defined as the onlyway you can approach science. but we have now theadvantage of the birth of ecological sciences all over. at no point was a response madein terms of food democracy. not in syria, not in india. not in sudan, not in nigeria. every conflict we seearound the world today that
is defined as areligious conflict has at its roots resource use. and how we grow food is thesingle biggest determinant of resource use. most people in the world farm. because we use the figuresup how much of humanity lives in cities, we forgetthat in most of africa, 90% to 95% people areinvolved in agriculture, most of them women.
so narrowing it down into aconflict based on religion, we then create an amazingnarrative of enemies out there. i wish president obama wasnot sending drones and fighter jets to drop bombs, but wasallowing syria and iraq, which gave agriculture to the world,to be able to rejuvenate their biodiversity, tobe able to rejuvenate their agriculture. i work very closely withprofessor [inaudible], who was, for most of hislife, in aleppo, where there
is an international centerof arid zone agriculture research [inaudible]. of course, aleppohas been bombed. but dr. [inaudible]works with us on how participatorybreeding with farmers is our only security today. he works with us onevolutionary breeding that in times ofclimate change you've got to allow the plantsto evolve to adapt.
put the seeds out inthat seed bank in norway. they call it thedoomsday seed bank. i don't think we can evertalk about the seed in terms of dooms days. the seed is what carrieshope and the future. and it is evolving. when it goes througha hot period, it evolves to deal with it. when it goes through aflat, it evolves with it.
and when a seed has to be inareas where you have cyclones or salt water in thebackwaters, farmers have evolved salt tolerantvarieties in [inaudible] seed banks. we just saved everyseed we could. we've created 120community seed banks. because we were notmaking a judgment about nature and our ancestors. we knew they had intelligence.
and then when the supercyclone hit orissa in 1999, we were able to distribute salttolerant seeds from our seed and orissa jumpedback in agriculture. in 2004 when thetsunami hit, the farmers were members of navdanya andwere growing salt tolerant seeds. gifted two truckloadsto tamil nadu. now, i've gone to tamil naduwhen the tsunami happened, and agriculture departmentsaid we can't do agriculture
for five years. and we don't know whatto do with our farmers. i said, you can doagriculture right now. we'll bring you the seeds. and the seedsdidn't just survive. they did so well that they'vebeen getting distributed. they've traveled allthe way to indonesia. a farmer came up to me onmy recent trip in indonesia to say, i'm bring thesalt tolerant seeds
we received from navdanya. so seeds are the hope. these are seeds of hope. this diversity is our realinsurance for the future. whether it is to dealwith climate change or it is to createdemocracy or it is to deal with the pestsand insects and diseases that are typical ofthe monoculture model. and yet the monoculture paradigmdestroys that diversity.
in 1995, the food andagricultural organization did a conference onplant genetic resources, to make an assessmentof how much have we lost and why have we lost it. and every countrywas asked to do this assessment ofbiodiversity in agriculture. '95 they found 75% of thediversity in agriculture had disappeared because ofindustrial monocultures. and in '95,globalization was just
being born throughthe free trade rules of what became theworld trade organization. because of my work onthe green revolution, i'd started to get invitedto agriculture meetings. and i'm a perennial learner. any place i find i can learnsomething new, i'll be there. because i don'tthink one ever learns enough with a degree ora university or a phd. i think more phds should goback to learn all over again,
something they'venever did a phd on. so i get invited tothis conference in 1987 on biotechnology. 1987 there were no gmo crops. it was a small meetingorganized jointly with the united nations and thedag hammarskjold foundation. dag hammarskjol was the firstdirector general of the un. and it was called laws of life. what are the implicationsof the new biotechnology?
it was pre commercialization. and the industrywas very honest, which was the industrythat was starting to think of biotechnology,the old chemical industry. who was this oldchemical industry that brought usthe agrochemicals? the old war chemical industry. i'm reading my bookfor my trip this time. it's not a very pleasant book.
it's called hell's cartel. and it's about thechemical industry that made chemicals forthe war, for killing people in concentration camps. there was thentried in nuremberg. they moved intoagriculture after the war, not wanting to give up theirhabit of selling chemicals for profits. but they did avery, very good job
of making it look likewithout their chemicals we could not grow food. so unless you could killevery insect you saw, we would starve as human beings. every insect was incompetition with us. textbooks on pest controlsay the war against pests. we have to keepescalating it because they are getting smarter. pesticides havecreated more pests.
1,200% is what the figurewas a few years ago. now, at this meeting,industry said very clearly the reason we've got todo genetic engineering is it's the only way wecan continue to grow. only through genetic engineeringcan we claim patents on seeds. by adding a newgene, we can now say we have created another lifeform and claim a patent. and they also said itwasn't good enough. the sampling is the rich worldis a very small market when
it comes to food. europe and the usaare small compared to the billions in ourparts of the world. and everyone must eat. and most farmersare in the south. every fourth farmeris an indian peasant. so it's not goodenough to have laws of patenting of seedfor europe and america. we've got to have itglobally and therefore we
need an intellectualproperty rights agreement. in what became the gatt,the general agreement on trade and tariff, iswhat became the world trade organization. in 1995, a monsantorepresentative in a speech inwashington, dc said, "we've achieved somethingabsolutely unprecedented. we wrote an agreement,gave it to our government, which then had itmoved through the gatt.
we also went directlyto the gatt secretariat and moved the treaty. and we were the patient,diagnostician, physician, all in one." and what was the problem? what was the disease? the disease was farmersare saving seed. now, a patent is aright of an inventor to exclude anyone else frommaking, using, selling,
distributing what is invented. the problem is when it comes toseed, seed is not an invention. seed evolves. farmers co-evolve with theseed to breed varieties. seed is evolution. and i'm so glad pope francishas said evolution happens. evolution is real. just gave a speechthe other day. so the invention of seedbeing built into law for me
was so outrageous. because i had beenworking to defend the integrity of species, theintrinsic value of every life form of this planet. and to suddenly be told thelife forms are inventions was a very, very deep violation. but i kept thinking,these companies are talking about five ofthem controlling the seed supply in the future.
that's what they said. they said we are too small,so we must become bigger. and right now you see monsantois controlling so many seed companies. that meeting there wasciba-geigy and sandoz. they merged to become thepharmaceutical firm novartis and then they joinedwith astra and zeneca to become syngenta, the secondbiggest corporation that controls seed, especiallygenetically modified seeds.
so after i'd heardthe corporations talk about their future, i saidi'm going to save seeds. and i took inspiration fromgandhi's spinning wheel. realizing thatthe british empire ran on control over the textileindustry and the raw material for the textile industry. and the living seedwas being reduced to raw material for thebiotechnology industry. because you don'tinvent the seed,
you take it from somebody. usually you just steal it. and so much of my lifehas gone in dealing with what i call biopiracy. now seed exchangehas always happened. exchange is not piracy. but you come to meand you take the seed and then you patent it andsay i created it and now you pay me royalty,that's bio piracy.
so the four cases wehave fought and won. the first was neem,that wonderful tree i took to bhopal. 10 years later ifind it's patented. and world's firstbiopesticide from neem. so we started a campaign andi took 100,000 signatures to the european patentoffice as well as to the us patent office. now, the us patentoffice wrote and said,
"what's yourcommercial interest?" we said we don't havea commercial interest. we have a public interest. we have an ecological interest. sorry, we only entertaincommercial competition between two peopleclaiming a patent. but the european law has aclause on public interest, so they admitted it. for 11 years we foughtthat case and we won.
and the patent was heldjointly by a company called wr grace and the usdepartment of agriculture. i remember when wefirst filed a case. the lawyers, theywere common lawyers, and they're pointing to me inthe courtroom of the european patent office and saying,"she can't be here because she's not a european." so i just smiled andsaid, "no, are you?" because they were americans.
but of course there'sthis thing of how can a brown woman in asari come and challenge us? but when it's illusions of thatscale that cause so much harm to the democracy of life on thisplanet and our food democracy, then i will challenge. there was another case wherea texas company claimed to have invented ourbeautiful basmati, for which my valley, doonvalley, is famous. and we had to docampaigns on that.
i had to fight cases. and eventually they had todrop most of their claims. we even did an actionwhere i came to texas and worked with churchgroups to send postcards. so it's us patent and trademarkoffice, which becomes usbto. and the postcard just said, ifyou don't revoke this patent, we will have to call you theus piracy and theft office. and they dropped the patents. and then everyone'sgetting gluten allergies
because wheat hasbeen bred in a way that it's expressingtoo much gluten. we in india have wheats thatdon't express the gluten. our ancient wheats don'tlead to gluten intolerance. so when [inaudible]realizes a huge market. some figures i've readis every third american has problems with the wheat now. so there's a market. they pick up anindian wheat variety
and say we've inventedall its properties and now we're going tocontrol and monopolize all products made from,all the seed, the grain, and all productsmade from wheat. in this particularcase, by the time i went to file the patent inthe european patent office and the head ofthe patent office is coming out in the snow, i'mtrudging through and saying, i'm so happy to seeyou again, dr. shiva.
i said, you should be ashamedto see me again, because it just means you keep issuingbio piracy patents, which is illegitimate and illegaland violates the law. because piracy is theft. it's not an invention. sadly, this idea ofa totally constructed intellectual propertyin seed and life is being pushed very, very hard. and it is havingvery high costs.
i don't know howmany of you have because of patents onseed, on gmo seeds. american farmers are spending$10 billion extra for royalty. because that'sthe main intention of genetically engineeredseed, to collect a royalty. in india, i won't giveyou the long story of what happenedto india's cotton, but before globalization, beforemonsanto entered the country, if it was a farmer'sown seed, it was 0 cost.
if it had been boughtfrom a public institution or a local company,it was five rupees or 10 rupees a kilogram of seed. monsanto enters with 450gram packages 1,600 rupees. it's more than 3,600for a kilogram. and as a monsantorepresentative said to a parliamentary committeethat was investigating, the crisis related to gmos. they said, yeah, half ofit is royalty collection.
but can you imagine? here's the seed that'sgrowing and evolving. here are farmers who haveworked to evolve that seed. they're doing the hardwork in the field. and the royaltiescome to monsanto. there've been somany investigations on the banking system. on ponzi schemes of all kinds. one thing that hasn'tbeing investigated,
and i hope the amazinginstitutions that are hosting this lecture will get intothis, intellectual property rights on seed patents, onseed are a ponzi scheme. of course, this ponzi scheme isupheld with claims of miracles from gmos, the first claimbeing that they produce more food and theworld will go hungry and there'll be 10 billionpeople on the planet and without gmosyou won't have food. because of gmos wedon't have food.
only 10% of thegmo corn and soya which accounts for thelargest expansion of acreage in the world inthe recent years. only 10% goes for food. the un data has clarifiedthat 70% of the food we eat comes from small farms. and i would assume that if weadd the gardens, urban gardens, organic farms, we would havefigures that would cross 80%. so in fact the industrialsystem is a minority system
when it comes to food security. but it is the majorsystem that is causing both the ecologicalcrisis as well as the crisis of democracy. what is a dictatorship? a dictatorship basically iscontrol of an absolute kind. and look at what's happeningto our food system. see the first linkin the food system is being controlled likewe've never seen before.
it was not controlled before. it was shared. we had publicuniversities breeding seed and they'd share the seed. farmers shared seedamongst each other. i have learned so much fromthe peasant cultures of india and the cultures of seedsaving and seed sharing. but what we havewitnessed so far is just the beginningof this new system.
we've had industrialagriculture. we've had the green revolution. but this thing called thesecond green revolution, precision agriculture,one agriculture for the entire world, that'swhat they're talking about. that future visionis a disaster. so can gmos produce more food? they can't. the technology isnot for breeding.
the technology is forshooting a gene that doesn't belong to the plant. the yield comes fromthe original plant. you don't reallyknow what's happening when you shoot a gene. it's not a precise technology. it's a highly inaccurateand imprecise technology. but it brings newrisks, which is why we have internationallaw on bio safety.
in the us, youdon't have such laws because president bushcame back and implemented a principle which istotally unscientific, a principle ofsubstantial equivalents. if i have a corn thathas evolved as a corn and crossed withother corns, and i have a corn witha bt toxin in it that has taken a genefrom a soil organism and is now expressingtoxins in this corn,
this bt corn is not thesame as the ordinary corn. we make a difference betweenchemically farmed and organic crops. and here we are tampering withthe very genome of the crop and saying it's the same. i've called thisontological schizophrenia because when it comes to owningthe seed through patents, you say never existed before. i'm the creator.
i'm the inventor. i am the one who's broughtsomething novel in the world. so give me a patent. then say, ok, this thing youbrought into the world that's so novel, can weplease look at it and see what impact ithas on the environment, on the pollinators,on the soil organisms? can we please look at whatit does to our health? can we please look at what doesit do to farmers economics?
we are told no, justlike nature made it. we don't have to look. we don't have to see. we don't have to find. and by not doing anything,we declare safety. and then we go aroundbullying the world which does experiments on safetyto say it's unscientific. now europe has safetylaws and they do tests. the first was a test doneby the-- the uk government
commissioned the top lectinexpert of his time, dr. [inaudible], to dotests on gmo crops, because the movementswere very strong. and he was actually pro gmo. he didn't expect tofind anything different. but he found that the rats hewas testing in the three month study, their brain had shrunk,the pancreas had expanded, their intestinalwalls were damaged, and their immunitysystem was compromised.
so he went to his directorand said, this is serious. three months of feeding? what will happento lifelong eating? come on, humans, wemust warn the public. so they did a press conference. it went all over the world. next day there was a callfrom the united states to tony blair. shut this man, shut this lab.
put a gag order. putting a gag order onscientists who are telling us what's really going onat the level of science means not just sowing theseeds of dictatorship, but preparing us forignorance of what's happening. the next victim was [inaudible]at berkeley, who did studies on the contaminationof the corn in mexico. his paper waspublished in nature, and suddenly therewere letters to nature
saying withdraw this paper. nature had neverexperienced this before, so they withdrew the paper. turns out, there's a systemcalled viral marketing, and it was a britishjournalist who tracked it, where on one computer i can cookup 1,000 names of scientists who don't exist, bombard thejournal, and have them panic. there were no scientistscomplaining to nature. it was viral marketing.
the more recent case is thatof seralini, eric seralini, who used to be a regulator at[inaudible] for bio safety. and he used to see the dossiersthat the companies were bringing. and he says, this is so sloppy. there's no research here. they're just declaring safety. and he went back to francewhere he had been a scientist and opened a lab tolook at bio safety.
he's the first personwho did a two year study on geneticallyengineered corn. it hasn't been done before. most trials are forthree month feeding. he did a two year feeding study. and because he knew whathappens, he kept it very quiet, got it published in thejournal of chemical and food toxicology. it was published.
then this viralmarketing started. they said, withdraw the paper. they said the rats were too few. he said, my rats were morethan the monsanto number. wrong species. same species. this is the one that's used allover the world for lab trials. anyway, they started puttingout saying, unscientific. and dr. seralini'swikipedia doesn't
talk to dr. seralini's research,it talks about seralini affair, like he's some shadyscientist cooking up his data. and when they couldn't get awaygetting his paper withdrawn because the journal just said,sorry, this is peer reviewed, it's gone through allthe tests, and we are not going to withdraw it, theyjust changed the editor. a monsanto man was plantedand he withdrew the study. seralini published itin another journal, but you can see that theissue of food dictatorship
begins with theseed, goes into food, goes into our knowledge systems,goes into how our decisions are made, because governmentsare being hijacked. i feel very sorry tosee the white house, whether it was underbush or under obama, only doing what monsantoasks them to do. i won't go into detailsof the new trade treaties, but i will talk a little aboutthe fact that in spite of gmos not producing morefood, in spite of gmos
not reducing chemical use. that was the promise, thatwe won't have to spray. there'll be no chemical uses. everything will be done. i'll just run through. in india, bt cottonis not working to control the bull worm,but has created new pests. aphids, [inaudible]. but new epidemics,more pesticide use.
in china, 12 fold more usepesticides in the bt crops. in the us, herbicideuse increased 15%. and right now in argentina,overall glyphosate use has tripled becauseof roundup ready soya. and then if youlook at the impacts, you see the argentinian studieson the birth defects, children being born withoutbrains, children being born with no anus. and these are pediatriciansof the government
doing these studies. chemical use hasn't gone down. production hasn't increased. farmers incomes haven'tincreased, because you now have the burden ofadditional chemicals as well as the royaltypayment for seed, seed which should be a commons, seed whichshould be in every farmer's hands. seed sovereigntyis the very basis
of food sovereignty, which isthe basis of food democracy. the alternatives aredoing so much better. every un study has shown thatagroecology produces more food. there's a unep study calledpreventing future famines, defending the ecologicalfoundations of agriculture. a unctad study called the wakeup call to governments saying don't go down thisnon sustainable path. fao study showing that even inafrica agroecological systems are producing much more food.
and our own studies,the health breaker, which shows that man measuredin terms of nutrition, biodiverse ecologicalsystems can feed not just the 10 billionthey would like us to be scared about,but 14 billion. but we shouldn'tbecome 14 billion. we are too many already. and i won't go intotoo much detail about how, an agriculture thatremoves people from the land
has a big role inpopulation growth. because as long as peopleare secure in their land, they know how largethe family should be. so when they're displaced, thatthey have to sell their labor power, they've gotto have a child who grows up enough, whosurvives until they are old. all of that combinationof insecurity, which on the one hand iscreating conflicts, which is being labeled asreligious conflict.
and on the otherhand, is triggering the need for larger numbersin the context of insecurity. the roots are in removingpeople from agriculture. we've also done a new reportthat agriculture minister just released. it's called wealth breaker. i've done a phd in thefoundations of quantum theory, very tricky combinationof non separability and unpredictabilityand it's tough to get
your head around it. and i would very oftennot solve a problem and then i'd go tosleep and in the morning i'd start writing mychapter in my phd. but the globalized industrialsystem is like 10 phds. here you have high costseed with a patent royalty, and it ends up as cheap food. in fact, the otherday i had the debate where the biotechindustry was saying,
only we can producefood that's cheap. i said no, you produceseed that's costly. the subsidies producefood that becomes cheap. 400 billion is theglobal subsidy. $1 billion a day. in the us, theindustrial system would collapse if that taxmoney was diverted from subsidizing toxic foodthat's destroying the planet and destroying our health tobeing shifted to growing food
that protects the planetand protects our health and generates employmentin the process. let me revisit thedestruction on the planet. 75% of planetary damage,water, soil, biodiversity. 40% of the greenhousegases come from the globalizedindustrial system. we are talking about thebiggest impact on the planet. and yet ecological farmingand local food system can be the place where we dothe opposite, we rejuvenate
bio diversity, we save seeds. we build up organic fertilityof the soil, we conserve water. and we mitigate andadapt climate change. we literally have capacitythrough organic farming to take out much moreof the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere thanis being put into it. but of course, we get ridof nitrogen oxides that come from nitrogen fertilizers. we get rid of methanethat comes on the one side
from factory farmingand on the other side from wasting 50% of the food. that's the figurefor this country. 50% food is wasted. it's wasted on the farmthrough imposing uniformity. it's wasted in supermarketshelves because of the long distance travel,with a best before date. and i was so happy i hadto do a convocation in one of the washington colleges.
and the students cooked awonderful dinner for me. so i innocentasked, i said, which organic farmsupplied the dinner? and they all hadgrins on their face and they weren't telling me. i said, what's the secret? they said, it's alla dumpster dived. and they explained to meabout this new culture of preventing food wastein doing dumpster diving.
i really pay tributeto the young people. they come up with such amazingthings to face these giants and to change theinsanity to sanity. because all theseinitiatives are growing, organic is growing,local food is growing, seed saving is growing, there'sa new attempt at seed and food dictatorship. there's now an attempt tocriminalize seed saving. already in pennsylvaniaand maryland,
notices have been servedto seed libraries. in the case of pennsylvania,a statement was made. agroterrorism is a very,very real scenario. and where doesagroterrorism come? from the ancientseeds that we have grown for hundreds of years. herited seeds and ancientseeds pose a threat. gmos are totally safe. they should be deregulated.
the law basically is alaw imposing uniformity. says, it shall be unlawfulto sell, offer for sale, expose for sale, which isexchange between people, or transport any seed subjectto the provisions of this act. any seed. they tried the samelast year in europe. and we built a huge seedfreedom movement there with the european parliament. there's a new french film madeby the french called seed wars,
and they just sent methe link for youtube. i looked at it and it wasreally nice to go back to last year and themobilizing we did. the law was sent back tothe european commission. but there are 19 stateswith such legislation to make biodiversityand local seeds illegal. 19 states, and arizonais one of them. now, a similar law wasintroduced in india. same year, 2004, whenyour laws are changing,
they've been kind of kept incold storage all these years, and they're beingbrought out now. and the fact that they'rebeing brought out now is because the dictators arepanicking because of democracy. if all these seedsare available, how will they collectroyalties from toxic gmo seeds? sooner or later, thatmarket will shrink. so the only way tomake that market grow is shut down the rest.
and in 2004 they triedto do a similar law. and i can just see how 2004they became very active. and i saw these two linesin our financial papers. so i immediately got intouch with parliamentarians, got a text of this seed act. these acts are called seed acts. and therefore compulsorylicensing and compulsory registration of any seed. i've studied it.
i've traveled the country. when any occasionlike this happens, i just get out therewith communities and travel the country andinform them and show them and translate intodifferent languages. and by the end of it, hundredsof thousands of farmers had signed a petition tellingour prime minister, which i carried to him, that weare in the land of gandhi. and when the britishtried to impose salt laws,
gandhi walked to thebeach, picked up the salt from the sea, saidnature gives it for free. we need it for our survival. we will continue to make salt. we will not obey your laws. and we take inspirationfrom the salt satyagraha. satyagraha was gandhi'sword for the force of truth. satya is truth,agraha is the force. truth, force.
and he said, as longas the illusion exists that unjust laws must be obeyed,so long will slavery exist. and he worked on thisfirst in south africa against the apartheid regime. 1930, he used itagainst the salt laws. so i told our prime minister,we are in the land of gandhi. and if you imposesuch a law, we will have to do a seed satyagraha. so it won't work anyway.
because we have higherduties to higher laws. laws of corporate monopolyare degraded laws. laws of protecting biodiversityand providing good food to all through saving goodseed is the higher law both in terms of the lawsof the earth and the planet as well as laws ofjustice and human rights and human dignityand human freedom. we now have to decide ourrole in the future of food. will it be a role of engaging,of building the alternatives
that allow all lifeon earth to prosper while bringing us big food? or will it be a future wherewe witness impassivity, this unfolding of adeeper dictatorship? you know, theother dictatorships were around speech. if i can't speak mybeliefs, i don't die. the difference betweenthis dictatorship over seed and food andall earlier dictatorships
is because this is touching onthe very basis of our survival. so we have to move beyondreductionist mechanistic science that separates andfragments and creates illusions that we are doing betterin our food system, even while we are losingour ecological endowment, and while we arelosing our health and we're losing our freedom. we have to go beyondreductionist economics, which defines people as laborand then labor as an input
and the earth as landand land as an input into a system where mysteriouslyvalue gets created somewhere else. i deeply believethat human beings are a creativeforce, not capital. toxic chemicals arenot a creative force. they're a destructive force. human beings as a creativeforce are an outcome of a good agricultural system.
and in a similar way,rejuvenated biodiversity, rejuvenating soils,rejuvenated water, a stable climate are outcomesof an agriculture system. they are the objective. taking care of theearth is the objective. i always tell people whocome to our earth university where we run courseson agroecology, we run coursesthroughout the year. there's a biodiversityfarm, a research farm,
a training farm in doon valley. i say our first work increating earth democracy and in creating fooddemocracy is earth care. we just have to take care ofthe earth and the biodiversity in the soil. the rest biodiversitydoes for us. she controls the pests. she rejuvenates the water. we only have to doour duty to the earth.
and i can tellyou in these years since we've started the work,we don't have pests that damage. we have insects thatare doing all the work. ladybirds and spiderson every plant. volunteer cropsthat are food, that would be the sourceof nutrition if they weren't sprayed with roundup. and then they want todo bio fortification by genetically engineeringrice and banana.
rice for vitamin a, bananafor vitamin a and iron. biodiversity is thousandsof percent more efficient in getting us thenutrition we need. these new reductionisttricks, for a short while, will work only because there'slots of advertising money. i've been told $400million has been spent to kill labelinglaws in the last few years. and talking aboutdemocracy and freedom, besides the fact thatthere's this new attempt
to shut down seedlibraries, there is of course the attemptto prevent labeling. 64 countries of the world havemandatory labeling of gmos. this country doesn't onlyme not have labeling, every time citizens organizeto get labeling, 40 million is put in, 30 million is putin, california, washington, right now oregon is going on. well, vermont's too smalland it went through. they got their labeling law.
and i am traveling from hereto vermont for solidarity. not only do we havea dictatorship, we have a dictatorshipof fictitious persons. vermont is being suedfor its labeling law because monsanto and otherssay that citizens knowing what they're eating and having thefreedom to choose what they eat is robbing the cooperationof their freedom of speech. i feel the challenge wehave for food democracy is to realize that democracyis populated by real beings.
earth democracy is allthe beings of the earth. food democracy, thehuman beings involved in producing foodand eating food. and it's their freedomthat comes first. not a fictitious person[inaudible] corporations. that's a construct and it'snow becoming a construct that's threatening bothfood and democracy. we have neitherbread nor freedom if this kind of falsefreedom, of folds beings,
is allowed to unfold. so we have all the evidencethat working with the earth, we produce more food. working with the earth,we produce better food. and this is scientific. it's scientific to workwith the laws of nature. it's unscientific to cookup laws and impose them on nature and humanity. so the earth is invitingus to create food democracy
as a way of restoringearth democracy. to decline her invitationat this point of our species evolution would be to live ina dictatorship for a short time and not live at allin the long run. and that, i'm sureyou agree, would not be a very intelligent choice. thank you. so because we have sucha limited amount of time, we have asked all of thepeople who reserved tickets
for tonight to submit questions. and so i'm going to bereading the questions that were submitted by those ofyou who sent in questions. and i'm going to just read themthe way they were submitted. so in fact, you might havealready sort of answered some of these questions, butthis will give you a chance to elaborate alittle bit further. some researchers aresaying that 80% of people will live in citiesby 2050 or 2080.
can you talk about howyour work answers questions about the loomingincreases in urbanization of the world's population? first i don't treatit as an inevitability that cities willcontinue to grow. cities are growing because ofa dysfunctional agriculture system that's making agriculturelivelihoods un-viable because of the way farmersare being exploited. farms don't earn anythinganymore because of all
those subsidies that are used todump cheap products, especially in our parts of the world. but when farmers arein a distressed system where there's onlyone buyer, a cargill is the only one you'llsell your corn to. cargill fixes the prices. and they always fix the pricesdownwards, never upwards. and i've been toldthis here corn and cotton are in such lowlevels of price for farms,
there's going tobe more distress. so we do need to correct theagrarian system for fairness and sustainability. the fact that citieshave grown recently doesn't get rid ofthat responsibility to correct ouragricultural system. as far as cities are concerned,cities are dependent on food. food is their metabolism. i was just reading a mitsubishiad saying the same thing.
there will be biggercities, more cities. and therefore, we are thesmart ones who'll deliver food. and we'll do itthrough logistics and we'll do itthrough gps systems. no, you can do itwith local farmers. that's what the csa's about. that's what urbanagriculture's about. and if we just realize thatfood is the metabolism even of cities, then youfirst begin to grow
in the city what youcan grow in the city. you can have csaslinking to the city. and then you have food shedslinking on a larger level. a larger city will havea larger food shed, but it'll still belocal to that city. and a smaller city willhave a smaller food shed. so cities don't meanlocal doesn't work, organic doesn't work. it's just an illusionof the mind to say,
because there are cities,let's trash the planet. there'll be no foodon a dead planet. what would you say orrecommend to students interested in food systems abouthow they can make a career out of making our food systems moresustainable and democratic? well, the first is i reallydo believe that being a farmer is the highest vocationin today's world. and it's as the young people,as you students, get into it, you're going to change it.
you're going tochange the terms. i was giving a talkand the moderator just asked the students,how many of you would be farmers if you could? the whole hall put up its hands. if you could. it's also necessary toundo this deep inequality between the countrysideand the city. with the assumption that thepeople in the countryside
have no brains. all the brains are in cities. and of course thatthesis doesn't work. because how could someone withno brain when they migrate to the city suddenlyhave brains? i have a new bookcoming out for the expo 2015 that's goingto be held in milan. and i worked in that bookhow it is so important to see agriculture as theplace where opportunities
for employment andlivelihood grow. i meet young people who'vebeen at our farm in training, and i meet them in brazil ori meet them somewhere else. they've started organic cafes. someone is an organic farmer,someone else is a city dweller. they are creating partnershipsof the most amazing kind. so the food system is so rich. it's inviting you as produces. its inviting you as researchers.
it's inviting youas entrepreneurs. but the mostimportant issue is, it is time to stop looking downon those who give us food. it's time to put themat the pedestal of being the custodians of the land. they're not producingcommodities. they're taking care of theland and the biodiversity and the water andeven the atmosphere. because when theydo organic farming,
they are reversingclimate change. and when we realizeagriculture's about these multi-dimensional,multi-functional activities, then the shift willstart to happen. and then you'll be the ones whomake sure that farmers aren't getting 2% of the consumerdollar, but getting 50%. and that'll make anyone'slife possible in agriculture. we have several of ourlocal farmers here today and csa honors, and ijust want to give a nod
to those people whoare here with us today. yay. next question. is there a way thatyou think small scale farmers and conventionalagribusiness can coexist? given our need to feed theworld, are there things that the smallscale sector could learn from agribusinessand vice versa? well, i think i cansee farmers running
classes for agribusiness. but frankly, what hasagribusiness brought us? they brought us toxic chemicals. and i think agricultureand food systems are better off without them. and we now havethe data that shows that ecological agricultureproduces more food. agribusiness has brought usglobal distribution chains. do we need more food comingfrom far away or less?
so this long distance globalizedsupply chains is, again, not a relevant issue. i would be so happy to seeagribusiness realize that they depend on the land and thebiodiversity and the farmers to create relationshipsof respect and then take permission fromthe earth as well as farmers tell us what is our role. if they have a role,farmers will decide. very nice.
what would you sayto our students who don't want tobe farmers or who don't want to goback to the land? i'm just reading the questions. i absolutely don't thinkeveryone should be farmers and it shouldn't become anew imposition of any kind. it should be an inspiration. if it matches yourpassions, then we have to change the terms so thatit's fulfilling and satisfying
and meaningful anddignified for you. but you can't run awayfrom food no matter what. you can run away from farming. but you've got to eat. so all students just haveto become more concerned about where does their foodcome from, how was it grown. they need to become active,if not as farmers, as eaters. and that is both about thesustainability of the planet and it's about thesustainability of your health.
i don't have to tell youabout the obesity epidemic of this country, which isall related to bad food. we've created structureswhich have imposed bad food and deprived peopleof good food. now, that health literacyis vital for everyone. and that role inspreading that literacy, you have a particularlyspecial responsibility because you've been to awonderful university which is the top on sustainability.
how can we have non sustainablehealth and a sustainable planet? our health itself isreaching limits of total non sustainability withthe disease epidemics. and that's another areawhere constantly research is shut down and goodresearchers are ridiculed. so you need to joinin that side of it. if you don't want to beat the beginning of it, at least be at the end of it.
given that most everythingwe and our ancestors have ingested over the yearshas been genetically tweaked, what make thecontemporary methods used to alter geneticmakeup of a crop taboo? and why, at the endof the day, when practically every cropin existence was modified ages ago even make thedistinction between gmo and non gmo? ok, the word that's used forgenetically engineered seeds
has become gmos by default. it's become gmosbecause industry never wanted genetic engineeringto be the word communicated. and in fact, in the untreaty on convention on biological diversity,they went further and said no, not even gmos. talk about it asliving modified. now, there were tworeasons this was done. each of you is a living modifiedversion of your parents.
offspring are neverclones of their parents. they're a little variation. living modified, geneticallymodified, and from it to gmos. the differencebetween what is called genetic tweaking andgenetic engineering is this. in nature, plants haveevolved in a dynamic way. farmers have worked with plantsas breeders in co-evolution. all farmers breeding,which accounts from 99.9% of all ofbreeding, is a core evolution
with nature. working with theevolutionary patterns of the plant and the seed. even cross breedingworks within those laws. and cross breeding iswithin the same species, as this hybrid seeds. they are all withinthe same species. the distinctivenessof all breeding and genetic engineeringis genetic engineering
allows you using the toolsof recombinant dna research to introduce genesinto a plant that don't belong to that plant. and because it's an[inaudible] technology, you don't justintroduce new genes of bt toxins orherbicide tolerance. you add antibioticresistance markers just for marking and separatingthe failed introduction from those that weresuccessful and viral promoters.
no plant has ever had genesfrom unrelated species through evolution's historyor through plant breeding. and that's whatwe are calling on for testing andresearch and safety. pigs with human growth hormones. in england, theladybird beetle controls aphids beautifullyin wheat plants. they've killed thebeetles and now they want to genetically engineerthe wheat with a cow like gene.
and when i asked mycolleagues in england, asked what thiscow like gene is, they said we can't tell you. trade secret. so we don't know whatthe cow like gene is. a wheat has never hadcow like genes before. a cabbage has never hadscorpion genes before. there was a dr. bishopdoing this work. corn has neverhad bt toxin genes
in it before being expressedin every cell all the time, impacting the butterflies. monarch butterflies diedwhen they were fed bt pollen. we've done studieson soil organisms, 22% gone in fouryears of planting. so it's not the same. there is a distinction. that is whysubstantial equivalents or the argumentthat we've always
tweaked genes or naturehas always tweaked genes and therefore we can mess upthe genetic code of plants in our food systems isunscientific to begin with and irresponsibleto everyone. that's, i think, a reallywonderful ending of the lecture and so yes, let'sgive her a hand. this presentationis brought to you by arizona state university'sjulie ann wrigley global institute of sustainability.
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