Vandana Shiva (Hindi: वंदना शिवा: born 5 November 1952) is an Indian scholar, environmental activist and anti-globalization author. Shiva, currently based in Delhi, has authored more than twenty books.
She is one of the leaders and board members of the International Forum on Globalization (along with Jerry Mander, Edward Goldsmith, Ralph Nader, Jeremy Rifkin, et al.), and a figure of the global solidarity movement known as the alter-globalization movement. She has argued for the wisdom of many traditional practices, as is evident from her interview in the book Vedic Ecology (by Ranchor Prime) that draws upon India's Vedic heritage. She is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundacion IDEAS, Spain's Socialist Party's think tank. She is also a member of the International Organization for a Participatory Society. She received the Right Livelihood Award in 1993, and numerous other prizes.
Early life and education
Vandana Shiva was born in Dehradun. Her father was a conservator of forests, and her mother was a farmer with a love for nature. She was educated at St Mary's School in Nainital, and at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Dehradun.
Shiva studied physics at Panjab University in Chandigarh, graduating as a bachelor of science in 1972 and a master of science in 1974. After that she worked, briefly, at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre before moving to Canada to pursue an M.A. in the philosophy of science at the University of Guelph (Ontario) in 1977, with a thesis entitled "Changes in the concept of periodicity of light". In 1978, she completed and received her PhD in philosophy at the University of Western Ontario, focusing on philosophy of physics. Her dissertation was titled "Hidden variables and locality in quantum theory," in which she discussed the mathematical and philosophical implications of hidden variable theories that fall outside of the purview of Bell's theorem. She later went on to interdisciplinary research in science, technology, and environmental policy at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore.
Career
Vandana Shiva has written and spoken extensively about advances in the fields of agriculture and food. Intellectual property rights, biodiversity, biotechnology, bioethics, and genetic engineering are among the fields where Shiva has fought through activist campaigns. She has assisted grassroots organizations of the Green movement in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Ireland, Switzerland, and Austria with campaigns against advances in agricultural development via genetic engineering.
In 1982, she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology. This led to the creation of Navdanya in 1991, a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seed, the promotion of organic farming and fair trade. In 2004 Shiva started Bija Vidyapeeth, an international college for sustainable living in Doon Valley, in collaboration with Schumacher College, U.K.
In the area of intellectual property rights and biodiversity, Shiva and her team at the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology challenged the biopiracy of Neem, Basmati and Wheat. She has served on expert groups ofgovernment on Biodiversity and IPR legislation.
Her first book, Staying Alive (1988) helped redefine perceptions of third world women. In 1990, she wrote a report for the FAO on Women and Agriculture entitled, "Most Farmers in India are Women". She founded the gender unit at the International Centre for Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu and was a founding board member of the Women's Environment & Development Organization (WEDO).
Shiva has also served as an adviser to governments in India and abroad as well as non-governmental organizations, including the International Forum on Globalization, the Women's Environment & Development Organization and the Third World Network. Shiva chairs the Commission on the Future of Food set up by the Region of Tuscany in Italy and is a member of the Scientific Committee which advised former prime minister Zapatero of Spain. Shiva is a member of the Steering Committee of the Indian People's Campaign Against WTO. She is a councilor of the World Future Council. Shiva serves on Government of India Committees on Organic Farming. Vandana Shiva participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project in 2007.
Activism
Vandana Shiva has spent much of her life in the defence and celebration of biodiversity and indigenous knowledge. She has worked to promote biodiversity in agriculture to increase productivity, nutrition, farmer's incomes and It is for this work she was recognised as an 'Environmental Hero' by Time magazine in 2003. Her work on agriculture started in 1984 after the violence in Punjab and the gas leak in Bhopal from Union Carbide's pesticide manufacturing plant. Her studies for the UN University led to the publication of her book The Violence of the Green Revolution.
In an interview with David Barsamian, Shiva argues that the seed-chemical package promoted by Green Revolution agriculture has depleted fertile soil, destroyed living ecosystems, and negatively impacted people’s health. In her work Shiva cites data allegedly demonstrating that today there are over 1400 pesticides that may enter the food system across the world, because only 1% of pesticides sprayed act on the target pest. Vandana Shiva, alongside her sister Dr. Mira Shiva, argues that the health costs of increasing pesticide and fertiliser use range from cancer to kidney failure to heart disease.
Seed freedom
Central to Shiva’s work is the idea of seed freedom, or the rejection of corporate patents on seeds. She has campaigned against the implementation of the WTO 1994 Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, which broadens the scope of patents to include life forms. Shiva has criticised the agreement as having close ties with the corporate sector and opening the door to further patents on life. Shiva calls the patenting of life ‘biopiracy’, and has fought against attempted patents of several indigenous plants. In 2005, Shiva’s was one of the three organisations that won a 10-year battle in the European Patent Office against the biopiracy of Neem by the US Department of Agriculture and the corporation WR Grace. In 1998, Shiva’s organisation Navdanya began a campaign against the biopiracy of Basmati rice by US corporation RiceTec Inc. In 2001, following intensive campaigning, RiceTec lost most of its claims to the patent.
Golden Rice
Shiva strongly opposes Golden rice, a breed of rice that has been genetically engineered to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of Vitamin A. It was developed for purely humanitarian purposes, has the potential to prevent "half a million to 3 million poor children a year" from becoming blind, and would assist in alleviating the vitamin A deficiency suffered by 250 million people in developing countries. Shiva has claimed that the women of Bengal grow and eat 150 greens which can do the same, which a furious Martina McGloughlin subsequently compared to "Marie Antoinette, [who] suggested the peasants eat cake if they didn't have access to bread". It was also pointed out that "nutritionists at UNICEF doubted it was physically possible to get enough vitamin A from the greens Shiva was recommending". Patrick Moore writes that most of these 250 million children don't eat much else than a bowl of rice a day. Doctor Adrian Dubock says that golden rice is as cheap as other rice and vitamin A deficiency is the greatest reason for blindness and causes 28% of global preschool child mortality.
Shiva claims that Golden Rice is more harmful than beneficial in her explanation of what she calls the "Golden Rice hoax": "Unfortunately, Vitamin A rice is a hoax, and will bring further dispute to plant genetic engineering where public relations exercises seem to have replaced science in promotion of untested, unproven and unnecessary technology... This is a recipe for creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it."
At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the director of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, Ismail Serageldin, asked: "do you want 2 to 3 million children a year to go blind and 1 million to die of vitamin A deficiency, just because you object to the way golden rice was created?" In a 2013 report "The economic power of the Golden Rice opposition" two economists, Wesselera1 and Zilberman from Munich University and the University of California at Berkeley respectively calculated that the absence of Golden Rice in India had caused the loss of over 1.4 million life man years in the previous ten years.
GM, India, and suicides
According to Shiva, "Soaring seed prices in India have resulted in many farmers being mired in debt and turning to suicide". The creation of seed monopolies, the destruction of alternatives, the collection of superprofits in the form of royalties, and the increasing vulnerability of monocultures has created a context for debt, suicides, and agrarian distress. According to data from the Indian government, nearly 75 percent rural debt is due to purchased inputs. Shiva claims that farmers' debt grows as GMO corporation's profits grow. According to Shiva, it is in this systemic sense that GM seeds are those of suicide.
However, the seller offers golden rice royalty-free to local farmers who earn less than US$10,000 per yearâ€"virtually all of the target farming community.
However, farmer suicides had begun to grow before the introduction of the GM seeds, and the growth decreased when GM seeds were introduced. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) analyzed twice academic articles and government data and concluded the decrease and that there was no evidence on "resurgence" of farmer suicides, GM cotton technology has been very effective in India and there have been many other reasons for the suicides.
Shiva replied to these assertions, that her critics had reduced the issue to GM cottons and ignored the issue of seed monopolies, and that the suicide figures were from the government statistics of the National Bureau of Crime records.
Ecofeminism
Vandana Shiva plays a major role in the global Ecofeminist movement. According to her 2004 article Empowering Women, Shiva suggests that a more sustainable and productive approach to agriculture can be achieved through reinstating the system of farming in India that is more centered on engaging women. She advocates against the prevalent "patriarchal logic of exclusion," claiming that a woman-focused system would change the current system in an extremely positive manner. She believes that ecological destruction and industrial catastrophes threaten daily life, and the maintenance of these problems have become the responsibility of women.
Some of the viewpoints held by Vandana Shiva have been criticised as being essentialist by Cecile Jackson.
Indian Intelligence Bureau Investigation
In June 2014, Indian and international media reported that Navdanya and Vandana Shiva were named in a leaked, classified report by India's Intelligence Bureau (IB), which was prepared for the Indian Prime Minister's Office.
The leaked IB report raises concerns over the foreign-funding of Indian NGOs whose campaigning activities, the report claims, are hampering India's growth and development. In its report, the IB said that Indian NGOs, including Navdanya, receive money from foreign donors under the 'charitable garb' of campaigning for human rights or women's equality, but instead use the money for nefarious purposes. "These foreign donors lead local NGOs to provide field reports which are used to build a record against India and serve as tools for the strategic foreign policy interests of the Western governments," the IB report states.
The present Indian government, however, is perceived by others as using nationalistic arguments in order to financially hobble and thus limit the activities of NGOs that pose a challenge to it.
Criticism
Journalist Ronald Bailey accused Vandana Shiva of being a "proud self-declared luddite".
In a 2013 message on Twitter, Vandana Shiva described Mark Lynas as "..saying farmers should be free to grow #GMOs which can contaminate #organic farms is like saying #rapists should have freedom to rape." Forbes magazine commented on this tweet: "Comparison of agricultural biotech to “rape†is deplorable considering the astronomical rate of sexual assault in India.." Mark Lynas called Shiva's tweet “obscene and offensive.â€
Investigative journalist Michael Specter, in an article in The New Yorker on 25 August 2014 entitled "Seeds of Doubt", raised concerns over a number of Shiva's claims regarding GMOs and some of her campaigning methods. He wrote: "Shiva’s absolutism about G.M.O.s can lead her in strange directions. In 1999, ten thousand people were killed and millions were left homeless when a cyclone hit India’s eastern coastal state of Orissa. When the U.S. government dispatched grain and soy to help feed the desperate victims, Shiva held a news conference in New Delhi and said that the donation was proof that “the United States has been using the Orissa victims as guinea pigs†for genetically-engineered products, although she made no mention about the fact that those same products are approved and consumed in the United States. She also wrote to the international relief agency Oxfam to say that she hoped it wasn’t planning to send genetically modified foods to feed the starving survivors." Shiva's responded to Michael Specter's article by publishing a section on her web page in part of which she stated : "For the record, ever since I sued Monsanto in 1999 for its illegal Bt cotton trials in India, I have received death threats" and "The concerted PR assault on me for the last two years from Lynas, Specter and an equally vocal Twitter group is a sign that the global outrage against the control over our seed and food, by Monsanto through GMOs, is making the biotech industry panic." Specter responded by publishing a letter in the New Yorker.
In the same piece, Specter wrote "Shiva refers to her scientific credentials in almost every appearance, yet she often dispenses with the conventions of scientific inquiry." Specter also questioned the credibility of a note that according to him is on most of Shiva's book jackets, and that states "Before becoming an activist, Vandana Shiva was one of India’s leading physicists"; he relates that when he asked her if she had ever worked as a physicist, she suggested that he search for the answer on Google; but he says that he found nothing, and that she doesn’t list any such position in her biography.
Journalist Keith Kloor, in an article published in Discover on 23 October 2014 entitled "The Rich Allure of a Peasant Champion", revealed that Shiva charges US $40,000 per speaking lecture, plus a business-class air ticket from New Delhi. Kloor writes: "She is often heralded as a tireless 'defender of the poor,' someone who has courageously taken her stand among the peasant farmers of India. Let it be noted, however, that this champion of the downtrodden doesn’t exactly live a peasant’s lifestyle."
Film
Vandana Shiva has been interviewed for a number of documentary films including Freedom Ahead, Roshni; One Water, Deconstructing Supper: Is Your Food Safe?, The Corporation, Thrive, Dirt! The Movie, and This is What Democracy Looks Like (a documentary about the Seattle WTO protests of 1999).
Shiva's focus on water has caused her to appear in a number of films on this topic. These films include "Ganga From the Ground Up," a documentary on water issues in the river Ganges; Blue Gold: World Water Wars by Sam Bozzo; Irena Salina's documentary Flow: For Love of Water (in competition at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival), and the PBS NOW documentary On Thin Ice.
On the topic of genetically modified crops, she was featured in the documentary Fed Up! (2002 film) Genetic Engineering, Industrial Agriculture and Sustainable Alternatives and the documentary The World According to Monsanto, a film made by the French independent journalist Marie-Monique Robin.
Shiva appeared in a documentary film about the Dalai Lama, entitled Dalai Lama Renaissance.
In 2010, Shiva was interviewed in a documentary about honeybees and colony collapse disorder, entitled "Queen of the Sun."
She appears in the French movie "Demain".
Selected listing
- Poverty Inc. 2014
- The Farmer and His Prince 2013
- Creating Freedom: The Lottery of Birth 2013
- Seeds of Death: Unveiling the Lies of GMOs 2012
- Another Story of Progress 2012
- The True Cost 2015, a documentary about fast fashion and the garment industry.
Publications
- 1981, Social Economic and Ecological Impact of Social Forestry in Kolar, Vandana Shiva, H.C. Sharatchandra, J. Banyopadhyay, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore
- 1986, Chipko: India's Civilisational Response to the Forest Crisis, J. Bandopadhyay and Vandana Shiva, Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage. Pub. by INTACH
- 1987, The Chipko Movement Against Limestone Quarrying in Doon Valley, J. Bandopadhyay and Vandana Shiva, Lokayan Bulletin, 5: 3, 1987, pp. 19â€"25 online
- 1988, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India, Zed Press, New Delhi, ISBNÂ 0-86232-823-3
- 1989, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Ecological degradation and political conflict in Punjab, Natraj Publishers, New Delhi
- 1991, Ecology and the Politics of Survival: Conflicts Over Natural Resources in India, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, California, ISBNÂ 0-8039-9672-1
- 1992, Biodiversity: Social and Ecological Perspectives (editor); Zed Press, United Kingdom
- 1993, Women, Ecology and Health: Rebuilding Connections (editor), Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation and Kali for Women, New Delhi
- 1993, Monocultures of the Mind: Biodiversity, Biotechnology and Agriculture, Zed Press, New Delhi
- 1993, Ecofeminism, Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Fernwood Publications, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, ISBNÂ 1-895686-28-8
- 1994, Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development Worldwide, Earthscan, London, ISBNÂ 0-86571-264-6
- 1995, Biopolitics (with Ingunn Moser), Zed Books, United Kingdom
- 1997, Biopiracy: the Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, South End Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, I ISBNÂ 1-896357-11-3
- 2000, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, South End Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, ISBNÂ 0-89608-608-9
- 2000, Tomorrow's Biodiversity, Thames and Hudson, London, ISBNÂ 0-500-28239-0
- 2001, Patents, Myths and Reality, Penguin India
- 2002, Water Wars; Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, South End Press, Cambridge Massachusetts
- 2005, India Divided, Seven Stories Press,
- 2005, Globalization's New Wars: Seed, Water and Life Forms Women Unlimited, New Delhi, ISBNÂ 81-88965-17-0
- 2005, Earth Democracy; Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, South End Press, ISBNÂ 0-89608-745-X
- 2007, Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed, editor, South End Press ISBNÂ 978-0-89608-777-4
- 2007, Democratizing Biology: Reinventing Biology from a Feminist, Ecological and Third World Perspective, author, Paradigm Publishers ISBNÂ 978-1-59451-204-9
- 2008, Soil Not Oil, South End Press ISBNÂ 978-0-89608-782-8
- 2010, Staying Alive, South End Press ISBNÂ 978-0-89608-793-4
- 2011, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature & Knowledge, Natraj Publishers, ISBNÂ 978-8-18158-160-0
- 2011, Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity, Natraj Publishers, ISBNÂ 978-8-18158-151-8
- 2013, Making Peace With The Earth Pluto Press ISBNÂ 978-0-7453-33762
See also
- Biopiracy
- Green Revolution in India
- Science and Technology Studies in India
References
External links
- Vandana Shiva's personal website
- Navdanya Website
- Seed Freedom
- Website for the so-called Monsanto Tribunal of 2016
- Vandana Shiva on IMDb
- A Conversation with Dr. Vandana Shiva, Mount Allison University, 26 February 2012, Dr. Ian Mauro and an audience of ca. 300 on YouTube; accessed 22 February 2013.