Monsanto shouldn’t get away with it anymore –Vandana Shiva

Quantum physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva foresees The Future of Food, in three parts.
  • Part 1:
    There are only two applications that have been commercialized in these twenty years of genetic engineering. One is to make seeds more resilient to herbicides, which means you get to spread more Roundup, you get to spread more Glysophate, and you get to spread more poison. Not a very desirable trait in farming systems. Especially since what Monsanto will call weeds are ultimately sources of food.
    It gets even better from there.
    These are illusions that are being marketed in order for people to hand over the power to decide what we eat to a handful of corporations.
    Vandana Shiva is the keynote speaker at the Georgia Organics conference in Savannah, 11-12 March 2011. There’s still time to sign up!

    Here’s Part 1:

  • Part 2:
    Monocultures are nutritionally impoverished. The same acre of land using biodiversity, using organic and ecological methods can produce five to ten times as much nutrition a monoculture can. So maximizing the amount of commodities for international trade is directly proportionate to the decrease in nutrition availability to local communities, which is why hunger grows. The world has to be fed. It has to be fed by growing food locally to be used locally as the biggest proportion of the food basket.
    They think they can go through life fudging data.
    In the whole genetic engineering issue, it’s a totally manufactured data that farmers are growing more or earning more.
    Talking about India:
    The pesticide use with these genetically engineered bT seeds has increased 13-fold in 4 years of planting.
    Sounds like Argentina.
    It’s only when you have a duty linked to a responsibility that you will act for the common good.
  • Part 3
    Seed is life and soil is life.
    If I was an eighteen year old today I would not go into physics, I would choose to be an organic farmer.
    An organic farmer is the best peacemaker today because there is more violence, more death, more destruction and more wars through the violent industrial agriculture system. And to shift away from that into an agriculture of peace is what organic farming is doing.
    …that tiny bit of effort means security overall. Careless walking down a Wal-Mart aisle where you don’t know where the food is coming from, what’s in it, is going to condem you to all kinds of health problems, disease problems, but most importantly is going to rob you of fundamental freedom.
    Every day’s act of eating is an act of creative freedom!

-jsq