Original subtitles

Vandana Shiva is one of the most prominent activists in the world.

Vandana Shiva, trained in physics. She's an activist and political author.

Vandana was one of the pioneers who started the global speed movement.

The truth is, Vandana Shiva is Monsanto's worst nightmare.

Now, will you please join me in welcoming Vandana Shiva. Vandana Shiva.

Dr. Vandana Shiva to the stage.

I believe the war against the earth begins in the minds of men.

And I mean men.

Especially men who control power and capital.

Industrial farming is the single biggest destructive force on the planet today.

Both in terms of what's happening.

to the earth as well as in terms of what's happening to society.

Food has been turned into a war.

She's a warrior to the patriarchal system, to the system that destroys.

We give notice to Monsanto.

We will not be stopped.

We have a duty to save people.

Vandana Shiva is the reason why there are no GMO foods in India.

I mean, she's known amongst farmers, amongst movements in India since

decades.

And now, of course, globally.

Oh, my God. She's a hero.

She's become kind of a rock star.

It's like a phenomenon.

This is Bandana Seema. I'm banned as a part of Bandana.

One moment, she'll be speaking to farmers from small villages.

We'll begin with 20 farmers.

And the next moment, she'll be speaking to parliamentarians.

I can remember that I was with her, and suddenly I was seeing her

in the taxi. I didn't know where she was going.

And finally, a few hours after, I saw her on CNN explaining this and that

about the crisis, etc.

She has unlimited energy.

I mean, she has the energy of 20, 30, 40 people. I don't know how many people.

She does think of herself as a catalyst.

She catalyzes people.

40% of the solution to climate change lies... in organic ecological

farming in the hands of small farmers.

Owning intellectual property right on seed is a pathetic attempt at seed

dictatorship. Our commitment will make sure that dictatorship never flourishes.

Food is a weapon.

When you sell real weapons and arms, you control armies.

When you control food, you control society.

And I would say for seed, when you control seed, you control life on earth.

I grew up in the Himalayan forest. I'm born in the Himalayan forest. And my

father, protecting the forest was his work.

He would go into the forest and do the inspections.

I remember tracks we've done with him of 35, 40,

45 miles a day.

You know, as little kids.

Going around in the hills was always a pleasure because you went through the

pine forest, the road's entrance.

The different kind of aroma you got from the nature's plants.

They still linger around.

And being that little gold, you took a breath and you could feel the clean air

come down to your lungs.

While traveling, we'd be learning everything.

You know, he'd be telling me, and this is this, and this is this, and this is

this.

So and so tree, you give me this and you give me that.

We'd be collecting cinnamon.

We'd be collecting herbs.

So we had a classroom out in those forests.

I studied in the convent.

And the convent don't really think of science as a career for women, at least

not at that time.

But I wanted to do physics honors.

As a very young child, I was very impressed by a human being called

Einstein.

Hello.

There's Einstein.

There's my Einstein.

My orientation to what science was came from his writings, which were not his

scientific writings, but his writings that connected intuition to the best of

science.

Everyone has their favorite person they want to be.

Einstein was the shaper of the dream of my life.

I got an Einstein scholarship.

The next four years, I was at the university.

And it's part of this that let me go to the Bhabha Atomic Research Center for

training in atomic energy.

I was in the fast breeder reactor when it went critical.

When I came home and was showing off, my sister Meera, who's a medical doctor,

just asked me some basic questions on radiation.

About the health impact and the ecological impact of nuclear technology.

I had no idea. I couldn't answer a single question.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what it had done to the people.

For me, nuclear was that, and radiation was that.

In the top institutions, you're not taught radiation.

You're taught energy transitions.

and chain reactions.

And I realize that a science that only teaches you how

to modify nature without the understanding of what that

modification does to the larger world is

not a complete science.

So I felt violated.

Why wasn't I taught all this?

And I gave up my idea at that time of being a nuclear physicist.

So much of science is one-sided, one-eyed.

And I want knowledge in the whole. If you don't understand the whole, you

don't understand the patterns, if you don't understand the interconnections,

you really don't have knowledge.

So I started to study on my own, and I found quantum theory.

Quantum theory opens our world to relate at the level of interrelationships.

And so I started to read every possible journal and started to find out the

community of about 10 people.

It all converged at the University of Western Ontario to study quantum theory.

Some were logicians, some were mathematicians, some were philosophers,

some were physicists.

And I said, this is the place to be.

But before I was going for my PhD to Canada, I wanted to visit some of my

favorite spots not too far away.

To carry the memories with me.

It was a particular oak forest.

And I'd kind of climbed down the mountain to go swimming in these pools I

was familiar with.

The stream was gone.

The oak forest had been cut for apple orchards, and the entire microclimate

changed.

So it's the first time I experienced the loss of something that was so much part

of me.

I'm sitting waiting for the bus at the chai shop, and I talk about how much

damage has been done, and this person says, Chipko has started.

There is a timber mafia in India.

They were clear-felling in violation of the law and preventing the access

of villagers, primarily women, because women collect fuel and fodder. Men

don't.

The women go out, and it's forest produced from the trees that they

collect.

So for them, it's a survival issue.

And so how do unarmed women prevent the violence of logging

and the violence that would be visited on them?

These are illiterate women.

They're not about to come and storm Parliament.

But what they did was much more effective.

They decided.

They were going to hug the trees.

The first Gandhian action.

of contemporary times.

We will hug the trees, we will not let them be cut.

Women protecting the earth, women protecting nature, in order to

protect sustenance.

The slogan, Chipko, which means to hug, to embrace, came from a song written by

a poet who could sit exactly in this lawn and recite to my mother.

And that song became the anthem.

Every kid would be singing it, and every woman would be singing, going to collect

water in the forest.

In today's language, it went viral.

And the developers called chipkos as a swear word. Oh, these chipkos.

And, you know, the tree huggers.

And so I made a pledge that every holiday of mine, I would spend as a

volunteer for chipko, even while I was doing my PhD in Canada.

And so here are these two streams, the stream of ecology from my childhood, my

parents, and then the intellectual training through quantum theory. And the

two became one.

The women of Chipko, they didn't know English.

So the first task of being a volunteer was being the messenger.

I knew English, so I said, OK, I'll write your reports.

And I knew how to make graphs.

That takes it to 20 levels higher.

It's like you're straight to the 16th floor just by saying the same thing in a

graph.

Years later, it took a big flood for the government to realize what the women

were saying was right.

The logging operation had led to huge landslides.

And then they did realize that the revenue from the forest was very little

compared to what they were having to pay.

for flood relief.

It was in 1981 that eventually the government listened to the women and

ordered a ban on logging in the high altitude Himalaya.

Tree-hugging then became really a practice worldwide of ecological

activism.

The women of Shipko have had a very big contribution in my life.

They taught me how much women who'd never been to school knew in

terms of the interconnectedness of nature.

In 1982,

literally just had my baby and i was asked by the ministry of environment to

do a study on the impact of mining of limestone into valley the valley of my

birth it was surface mining and literally a scraping off of the

lifestones so there were scars all along the mountain

for the government the issue was to assess the impact on tourism of the

ugliness of these mines

So I went to the women and I said, what's the issue?

The women said, the issue is water.

I started to study everything about limestone and water.

The rainfall in limestone creates these giant caves and cavities.

These are nature's aquifers.

Up in those mountains, the mining was robbing the valley of its water source.

Billions of dollars' worth of water resources.

The miners' wastes were destroying the stream flows.

Villages were being washed away.

The workers were exploited. Some worker would die.

And so other workers would try and organize and whoever was the leader

would get killed.

I'd go off to villages with my boy.

And one day I got a call saying, you leave your 80-year-old father and child

behind and one day you'll come back to find them gone.

Stop this work. Don't do it.

And I talked with my dad and he said,

That as long as you follow your conscience, there's nothing to fear.

No power constructed by man is worthy of being afraid of.

Your work, your duty now is to do this study to protect this valley and the

people.

And there are bigger powers to protect us.

I continued the study.

in spite of the threat.

So we did a very rough calculation.

This is the amount of water flow in the streams of the valley that come from

this limestone belt.

Assume the limestone has all been mined. We will still need to have a water

system. They'll have to make an artificial one.

Then we'll have to pump water from the Ganges, from the Yamuna, up to that

height. What would the cost of that be?

That's what made...

The Supreme Court realized that the limestone left in the mountain

contributed more to the economy than the extraction of limestone from the

mountain, exactly like earlier.

The government was forced to recognize that the forests left standing in the

Himalaya contribute more than their conversion into timber.

The six months of an independent study can save an entire valley.

If I am free to dedicate my life in service, rather than constantly have

to listen to what the money that finances my research wants me to do,

I can serve much better if I'm free and independent. And my parents were so

generous. My mother just said, take the cow shed.

Namaste Deepa.

I came right back to Dehradun and rebuilt the cow shed to start the

Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, which did

amazing work with very, very few resources.

That's the starting point.

That is the original thing which Vandana started, where all the research work is

done, papers, technical papers, etc.

are published.

is where I did a lot of my writing.

That's my Einstein.

I made Einstein.

I think one of the most important learnings I had while researching for

writing is how what we call science is a very narrow

patriarchal project for a very short period of history.

Domination of nature, exploitation of nature, declaring nature as dead.

But these were born at a time when the Industrial Revolution

needed an exploitative knowledge.

So who are the experts of the forest?

Those who know how to cut the trees.

Similarly, who are the experts in geology?

Cement industry, sugar industry.

steel industry, that was their expertise.

They weren't experts in knowing how that geological formation is the

water formation that allows the freedom of rivers to flow, that keeps the

entire river valley alive.

And that's why when I started the Research Foundation, I called it the

Institute for Counter-Expertise.

to counter the expertise of the destroyers and bring to the front the

knowledge of those who are defending the earth and their lives.

Many movements grew out of the studies in that period because we really honed

the art of participatory research, getting communities involved.

So either you can have a billion-dollar grant and hire.

hundreds of research scholars who don't know anything about the situation or you

can have a few thousand dollars and work with the communities who are being

affected and they do all the research and maybe they write in Hindi all you

have to do is translate into English that's why when people say but I don't

know where I'll get a proposal I don't know who will finance it I say you'll

never get it done you'll never get it done when money is your master

then your conscience is no more your guide.

Now, one of the periods of Vandana's life that was sort of a gap was

her marriage.

It's a chapter in the life we all don't feel very happy about.

But the only positive thing and the most positive thing about it is Tiku, my

nephew.

Well, historically, men in families have been, this is a patriarchal society,

so the man is in charge, the man has the money, the man has the keys.

In the interest of children, it was thought reasonable to have a father take

care of children in cases of divorce.

Indian law is very much Anglo-Saxon British law. And the British law on

custody was written in the years, in the time, where it was assumed

that women are property, children are property.

It was written with patriarchal ownership.

And it just so happened that I was subjected.

to the use of that law when it came to my child.

And the law said it doesn't matter if the father is absent, insane,

alcoholic, but he will continue to be the natural guardian.

I was aware that my life would be very different if I was to live with my

father. But I also knew that My connection to my mother was

much stronger.

I challenged the law at the level of the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court

where you can change laws.

And I called for a change in fathers being natural guardians.

You know, you can bypass the high court. You can go directly to the Supreme

Court.

Once you do that, though, it's a risk.

Because if the Supreme Court throws out your case, there's no court of appeal.

That judgment stays.

It was the first case where the courts decided that mothers should get

custody.

That set precedent for all of India.

I've had so many calls from women saying, you know, I was in this

difficult situation and we cited your case.

It all worked out.

In 1985, I was invited to Nairobi for the big United Nations Conference on

Women. It was for me to speak on my work, which was at that time.

on the Chipko movement and on women and the environment.

The focus in Nairobi was on development and on challenging

the growth-oriented notion of development.

That was voiced with terrific clarity at Nairobi.

It was the very first time.

that the link had been made between environmental degradation and its impact

on women.

There was a feminist publishing house that had just been created in India

called Kali for Women.

And Ritu Menon said, nobody's connecting environment and women, except you,

Vandana. You've got to write a book on this. As a child,

writing was something I

rejected.

I found my brain tired, I wrote, and liberated when I solved problems in

equations.

But we had to write essays in English, and, you know, essays had to be four

pages long.

And I would write one paragraph and submit it.

Mother Superior would say, you will fail.

I said, but I've put everything that I could say in four pages in these lines.

Mother Superior would say, if you don't write.

And you don't know English, you're going to fail in life.

With our feminism and our feminist publishing, we've always said that

writing is subversive. She said, but Vandana, publishing can be a subversive

activity. And write a subversive book.

And that's when I wrote Staying Alive.

It was the connection with the Chipko movement.

and the women on the ground for whom she became a voice.

It became ecofeminism.

And so she was writing and writing. I mean, she never stopped.

I was asking your sister why

her bindi was so much smaller than her younger sister.

And what did she say?

Ask her.

Well, for very long I never wore a bindi.

And then I read this amazing book on the Sri Chakra.

In Indian cosmology, the Sri Chakra is the chakra of the feminine energy of the

universe.

Everything can be expressed as geometric form, which is the yantra.

A triangle is three lines.

A line is a moving dot.

A circle is a moving dot.

And so, in effect, the dot contains the universe.

And so, I...

carry the dot to constantly remember that we are in this

amazing, miraculous, generous, interconnected universe.

And our little dots in it have a little role in it, and we have to do our best.

And since it was about the feminine energy of the universe, why not display

it more?

And I also have a big nose.

In 1984, I was working for the United Nations University on

conflicts over resources.

In June, there was an eruption of extremist violence.

between Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab.

And all the newspapers talk about religion as

the only cause of the conflict.

I've been keeping files for my conflict research.

You know, where are the conflicts of rivers and waters? Where are the

conflicts on land? Where are the conflicts on forests? So I had these big

binders. And my file on conflicts on water is that fat for Punjab.

I said, this is very strange.

Till now it was water and now suddenly it's religion. Something funny is going

on.

And then that December, a pesticide plant leaked

in the city of Bhopal.

the Bhopal disaster.

The devastating consequences of the leak was so enormous that the news of the

Bhopal disaster was reported immediately across the world.

Authorities now say the toxic gas that escaped from a Union Carbide plant on

Monday has killed at least 1,600 people.

Since the accident, more and more victims are found lying helplessly in

their homes. At one point, an official said one death was being recorded every

minute from the poison gas leak in the city of Bhopal.

The leak from a pesticide plant, 3,000 people died immediately.

30,000 have died since then.

And the communities in the area are suffering dire health consequences right

to this day.

So between Bhopal and Punjab of that year, my head is in a spin.

That's when I realized Punjab was the land of the Green Revolution.

The Green Revolution was the name given to introduction of chemical agriculture.

in the third world using pesticides that kill, poisons that

kill.

So pesticides are linked to the Green Revolution and the Bhopal disaster.

Green Revolution got a Nobel Peace Prize.

The big spin about the Green Revolution was with chemicals there would be more

food. With more food, there would be more prosperity.

And with more prosperity, there would be more peace.

And yet here we are with all of this death.

It's not hanging together.

You're supposed to give a Nobel Peace Prize for peace.

This is war.

So I decided to dedicate my research to the Green Revolution.

And I found that after the Green Revolution, the soils were dying, the

rivers were dying, there was desertification.

25% of the small farmers were dispossessed.

So in Punjab, men who were angry were taking to guns and throwing bombs.

This was about an agrarian crisis.

Punjab was never about conflicts between Hindus and Sikhs.

I found that the people being killed were the managers of the seed bank,

managers of the Bhakra dam, people building the canal to take water

from the Sutlej River to Haryana.

These were all key positions of bureaucratic power.

controlling the architecture that allowed the Green Revolution to happen.

So at the end of it, I did the book for the United Nations University to show

how so many conflicts that are made to look like they're ethnic or religious

have at their root conflict over natural resources.

That, of course, became a controversial book.

However, now as you look back, you realise how right she was and

we're actually starting to see the end of the Green Revolution now because of

the damage that it's done to farming communities.

So having understood that the Green Revolution was a lie, I had to start

working on sustainable agriculture.

And because of the book, I'm suddenly thrown into more conferences dealing

with agriculture.

And one of these conferences was on the laws of life, the emerging

biotechnologies.

And I had been invited with my sister Meera, who's a medical doctor.

And it's interesting, both Meera and I were invited. And she's ringing me up

and saying, I think they made a mistake. I think it has to be you. I don't do

biotechnology. And I said to Mira, I thought it was for you because I don't

do biotechnology.

And he said, let's go for fun together.

We'll have some time together.

So we trot off to Geneva and we sit through this discussion where the

industry lays out its great vision for the future.

They have to do GMOs because that allows us to patent seeds.

And it's not enough that it's in Europe. We've got to get the world.

And we need an international treaty.

And I realized GMOs weren't GMOs for feeding the world.

The spin later would be about feeding the world.

But the reality was they were the door to owning life on Earth.

Now, when industry enters the picture on seed,

Industry needs monocultures because they want to sell the same seed everywhere.

They have to stop being ecological because they have to replace people with

herbicides.

They have to replace people with machines.

They have to become industrial.

They have to get rid of the small farmer.

But industrial farming is the most insane human activity.

It's taking...

70% of the grain.

That could be feeding people.

So during this meeting, I got scared. I got scared.

I spent my entire time on the flight back on how to deal with this.

A century ago, the imperial power of the world was British power.

And it was based on the control of textiles, cotton, slaves. It was a

cotton empire.

Gandhi, with deep thought and deep reflection, picked

the spinning wheel as the mode of resistance.

to the empire of cotton by saying, if we make our own cloth, we will be free.

He said, I do not want society to be a pyramid where the top crushes the bottom

on which it rests.

Gandhi picked the spinning wheel because it's so small that it can be in the

hands of every woman.

And every woman becomes a freedom fighter.

against the British monopoly.

I realized first Industrial Revolution textile.

Gandhi pulls out the spinning wheel.

Second Industrial Revolution was chemicals.

Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring.

And we got the environmental movement.

Third Industrial Revolution, the life industry with biotechnology.

And by the time I got off the flight, the seed was speaking to me.

Saying the seed is the spinning wheel of today.

Farmers with their own seed, fighting for their seed freedom, are the biggest

force in the world against seed monopoly.

In India, there was still so much abundance of seed that nobody was

worried.

80% seeds came from the farmers themselves, were saved on the farm.

20% came from the government for food security.

Really, we had no breeding of seed for profit.

But the issue is seed monopoly.

Because of the 87 meeting, I knew what was coming. And I said, if we wait till

this disaster strikes, there'll be nothing left to save.

But I also realized it's not enough to talk anymore.

I'd go off to the villages where I knew communities because of my involvement in

CHIPCO.

And I would chat and talk about, do you have the seed, do you grow this crop?

Wheat seed, which is very drought resistant, very high length of storage

and extremely tasty.

And the men would always say, no, no, no, we grow potatoes.

No, we do soya bean because that's the crop they took to the market.

I'd stay back and have a tea.

And then the woman of the house would say, I have the mandua and I have the

jangora and I have the corny.

Yes.

So I started seed saving, going from farmer to farmer, field to field,

encouraging them.

to save their own seeds, to conserve and distribute their seeds, and to shift to

organic farming.

In 1994, I decided to set up a training and research farm in

order to have a seed bank where all the seeds were collected,

and also to have research and visibility of how biodiversity and

native seeds can feed the world.

For me, seed saving was never about a museum.

I wanted it to be the seed of the future, where every seed we've saved is

planted out every year in order to adapt to the changing climate, the drought one

year, the flood one year.

And in the process, the farmers who save the seeds and grow the seeds are also

the scientists who measure how much is the grain, how much is the straw.

Before we started farming here, it was monoculture of sugarcane. So when we

started farming, you know, our neighbors were really, you know, they were not

really convinced with our idea. Oh, you're going to do some farming here or

going to grow rice here. It's not possible.

Here was the first part that we bought, the first piece of land we got.

We grow now 260 rice varieties that can grow in this climate.

More black rices, red rices, brown rices, golden rices,

long-grained rices, short-grained rices.

We used to have 200,000 rice varieties in this country, and the Green

Revolution... tried to breed one variety at a time, and each of them kept

failing. Because the Green Revolution was not successful in wiping it all out,

we have been able to work with farmers to be able to bring this issue back.

Saving seeds and creating seed banks was one aspect of what...

I've been doing since I realized what is happening to seed and what is going to

happen to trade in food.

The second aspect was create awareness.

Translating the intellectual property treaty into every language.

I went around the country to organize rallies and protests everywhere to tell

the world we will not give up our ancient practices of saving seed and

sharing seed.

Protect the crop, protect the farmer, and protect the diversity on which

sustainable agriculture depends.

So I went to Tiket, who was the biggest farm leader at that time.

And he's initially looking very bored.

And at the end of it, he says, I've understood.

The East India Company is returning.

We've got to fight for our freedom again.

They understood immediately because the best teacher is the experience of past

slavery, which allows you to know what new slavery could look like.

But if that experience is so far out of your memory, then you fall for all the

verbiage around invention and IPRs and new technology.

If you've been enslaved before, and your resources have been taken, and your

culture has been controlled, then when the new colonization comes, you know

what's coming.

So the cat said, I will come.

And when he says he comes to the rally, then all his hundreds of thousands of

people come to the rally.

1992, we organized one rally, 200,000 farmers.

1993, 500,000 farmers.

1994, again 200,000 farmers at the Red Port.

And I remember Jose Luttenberger, who was the environment minister of Brazil,

had tried to protect the Amazon.

He's looking at this ocean of farmers.

And he said to me, Vandana.

The reason they want to get rid of the small farmer is the small farmer is the

last free person on this planet.

Everyone else has to depend on something else to make a living.

But a small farmer with a piece of land, some seed in their hands, their

intelligence, the sun shining, a bit of water can produce with no external

dependence.

That is why the independence of the small farmer is seen as such a threat by

those who would like to control the last living system.

Seattle was the wake-up call for the rest of the world.

In 1999, the World Trade Organization had its ministerial meeting in Seattle.

When we decided to organize, we formed with the idea that now that

globalization will be institutionalized through WTO, it's going to have huge

impact. And if we aren't there as citizens to tell the true story about

what free trade is, then their propaganda machinery will make it all

look miraculous.

The idea was, how do we stop Monsanto?

How do we deal with the fact that they want to?

Build this new world order based on the rights of multinational corporations and

drive a billion small farmers off the land.

And the WTO should not force countries to accept Frankenstein biotech food. We

were expecting that with all the mobilization, there'd be about 5,000

people.

30,000.

Every activist of the world was there.

We decided to mobilize at the grassroots.

Would you rather be anywhere else in the world than here in Seattle for the

battle in Seattle?

And literally through nonviolent civil disobedience, stop the WTO. And if it

comes down to it, there's an awful lot of us who wouldn't hesitate to climb a

tree and stay there.

I was there.

I was on the street.

The protests outside became a force which prevented WTO from eating.

We started to block the delegates from the WTO to getting in.

I would see these young people joining their hands and blocking the road.

And I said, where did you learn this? They said, Gandhi.

And they're sitting in America, in universities, and they've learned from

Gandhi, non-violent resistance.

Take your day off! Take your day off!

There's no way you can get in. No one gets in there.

No one knows what's going on. No, no, no, no, no, no.

No, no, no, no, no, no. Police

shot

tear gas and beat us up.

You know, we were running down the streets.

It actually had a global impact. We stopped the WTO meeting.

WTO delegates are leaving Seattle after failing to reach agreement on a new

round of global trade talks.

It showed us that we have the power to stand up to the multinational

corporations.

We want a return to national decision-making which we control.

The WTO system is voluntary. You choose to take on these obligations.

We have watched our countries being forced to accept the rules by arm

-twisting, by constant threats.

It's wrong to believe that world trade rules are just for the big players, for

the global corporations.

The rules of intellectual property rights were written to protect the

Monsantos. These are not rules for the environmental people.

These are rules for monopolies.

Income disparity is increasing, but I think not because of trade, I think

because of skills.

I assume he's thinking that Monsanto has the right to take over control over

seeds because it has high skills, and the rest of the farmers having low

skills can disappear from the planet.

I think for a lot of young people, young activists, that was the first time

they'd ever heard her.

But she then became, if not the acknowledged, the unacknowledged leader

of the global food movement.

The nationals have grabbed the sea economy, which used to be a farmer's

economy, it used to be a women's economy, and now are bringing

unreliable, untested sea to the market.

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.

.

Genetically modified BT cotton has been marketed by Monsanto under the trade

name Bollgard with the claim that it will control the bollworm, the worst

pest in cotton, and solve all the farmers' problems.

This is the sea. This is bollworm, attack of bollworm.

So what the company claims, this variety is resistant to bollworms. This is the

bollworm.

Genetically modified BT cotton.

Have a pesticide-producing gene put into them.

They are not analyzed for safety for agriculture and food.

They are put as an approved pesticide. There's no bias safety.

But BT cotton does not control pests.

It has created super pests.

Farmers are having to spray more pesticides to control these pests.

They're getting into deeper debt.

In the case of India, seed costs jumped 8,000%

with the introduction of betacot.

Which is the recipe for debt in an officer?

But then because it didn't work as a tool to control the pest, and a 13 times

increase in pesticide expenditure also took place, the deeply

indebted farmers were pushed to something

I have not seen in my very long life.

Suicide.

284,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide

as a result of the indebtedness.

Most of these suicides in the cotton belt.

We don't

have this kind of

school. . . . .

In the cases where BT cotton is predominant, the suicides are

increasing.

Why are farmers still using it? It was a question I had to answer for myself.

That's when I realized that the alternatives had been destroyed.

We happen to be sitting in the middle of all the Steve industry shops right here.

Monsanto this side, Syngenta shops that side.

The next plane is all selling seeds of suicide.

There is a system that's used both by governments as well as by the companies,

and they call it seed replacement. They make it look like a scientific act.

Yeah, and they say, your seeds are primitive, and we must replace your

seeds with higher quality seeds.

So give that up and take this.

And if they're still reluctant to give up, you say, you know, I'll even give

you 500 rupees for it. And the farmer again thinks, Oh, I get 500 rupees, and

I go pick up from my neighbor.

Somewhere my seed will be available. My uncle, my aunt, my relative in a distant

village will have it.

But they don't realize everyone's doing the same thing at the same time.

So within one season, there's a blitzkrieg on seed replacement.

And that is what accounts for 95% cotton, seed being Monsanto's cotton

seed.

When I started Navdanya, my dream and vision was we should be able to

create a culture where seed can be free and farmers' rights are defended.

We started to fight GMOs and corporate concentration through growing seeds and

saving seeds.

In India, we've created 127 seed banks.

And this will, of course, keep growing.

We have a whole network of farmers and seed savers.

They get training for organic, non-GMO cotton, non-GMO food.

Now people have started to spread seed banks and seed libraries all over the

world.

And now, before I breathe my last, I will see the end of BT

Cotton in India.

There is a massive push to introduce GMOs in Africa.

So we have witnessed what GMOs like BT Cotton have done in India.

I go to Africa to support citizens and farmers in their struggles, to avoid

that destructive path, that suicidal path.

Very big one coming from Africa.

I have some very good friends all the way from India.

Dr. Vandana Shiva.

You're welcome, madam.

Well, what a joyful studio. The whole world should sound like this.

GMO. When we talk about GMO, what exactly is it?

They use the tools of cutting genes from one species and putting them into

another species.

Genetic engineering introduces a toxic gene.

So you take the cells of an existing plant with existing yield. Then you

shoot a gene with a gene gun.

You don't know if that gene will enter, so you add an antibiotic resistant

plant. You don't know if it will express, so you add a viral promoter.

They've calculated trillions and trillions of dollars of profits,

thinking that they can make every farmer dependent on their seed and every

country dependent on genetic engineering.

That is what the Plant Breeders' Bill of Ghana is about, to make it a criminal

act if farmers save their own seeds. The Plant Breeders' Act should be called the

Monsanto Takeover Act.

It's a very scary future, what's really being planned for Africa.

If you add it all together, there's a plan to displace all the African farmers

so that investors can run the kind of farms that exist in the United States.

People who have heard about the issues for the very first time, the issue about

DMOs, the issue about farmers' rights, they are now coming out in their numbers

and they're asking themselves, what is it we can do to assist?

Yeah, boss, we are going to the international press center.

All you're going to do is to just, you know, have a discussion going about, you

know, kid laws, you know.

And agriculture for the future. Exactly.

You've got everything on your side, food store in Uganda. There's no way this

bill should pass.

But that's it.

This is our study of health per acre. Industry measures yield per acre to

measure commodities which don't go to feed people.

We measure health per acre to measure the nutrition that goes back to feed the

people. Food sovereignty can feed two Africans. It is time for a food

revolution. And it will come from the people of the third world.

It seems the conference has shifted from... No. Yeah, please, let me finish.

When you were talking, I was quiet.

So let me finish.

Dr. Shiva, I know it's a philosophy.

I know... Also a physicist.

Because I want to talk about plant-breeders' view and GMOs. This is a

press conference.

Yeah, it is.

I was not invited.

I came because I... You get crashed.

You gave a crash.

And you're talking so much. Let me leave.

Let me leave.

But you know, since I don't know you, madam, since I don't know you, could you

let me know?

Who supports your research?

Who finances your research? Because if you don't want my comments... No, you

can tell the public who supports your research.

No,

no, it's okay.

It's okay.

It's okay.

I don't go to conferences where it is, you know, like a massage.

You have to save this country.

Excuse me. The country is in danger. Please don't talk.

No, I have to talk because you are destroying this country. I am not

destroying this country. I am not.

Do you know me? Do you know me?

Is it not today that I see you?

There have been a lot of bad press about Vandana.

Anyone who's going to stand up to big corporations, and especially some of the

most powerful corporations in the world, like the agrochemical companies, is

going to come under attack some way, somehow.

This is a billion-dollar industry that's spending so much money to try and

denigrate the people who are telling a different story.

Whenever you take on a martyr of any kind, you're open to a lot of threat and

a lot of slander.

I can't see why you'd describe Vandana Shiva as either prominent or respected.

I mean, she does knowingly make statements which are clearly inaccurate

and incorrect about farmer suicides and other assertions about Monsanto and BT

Cotton, which are just flat. I mean, not just wrong. I would say those were lies.

Vandana Shiva, who's an Indian activist.

She claims she's a scientist, she's a philosopher, demonizes modern

agriculture, calls the green revolution an utter failure, but has single

-handedly blocked the introduction of a lot of technology in Asia and elsewhere.

Their approach always is sow the seeds of doubt.

We were in Indonesia.

Michael Spector's piece in the New Yorker came out.

He obviously has a motive and he has pre-decided what he's going to write.

Now, the most mindless epidemic we're in the middle of right now is this absurd

battle between proponents of genetically engineered food and the organic elite.

It's an idiotic debate. It has to stop. The idea that we should not allow

science to do its job because we're afraid.

It's really very deadening and it's preventing millions of people from

prospering.

Everyone who is part of this Monsanto mafia, I could call it, they

thought that they do these attacks and everyone will say, pack up Vandana

Shiva, but Vandana Shiva is not packable.

They don't realize that when you do a systems approach in science, when you

work on interconnectedness in science,

that

interdisciplinarity is what has allowed me to combine knowledge from different

streams.

And if I'd made a contribution in the world, it's because of that combining.

A handful of multinational corporations.

Literally a cartel of three that I have named the poison cartel.

It's driving species extinctions. The poisons they have deployed is pushing

the disappearance of bees, the disappearance of pollinators, the

disappearance of insects, the disappearance of biodiversity.

And industrial agriculture is not just destroying biodiversity, it is

destroying the soil and releasing large amounts of greenhouse gases to the

atmosphere.

Vandana was one of the pioneers bringing up the issue of how critical soil is.

to climate change.

The way we've been farming these industrial methods have meant that

carbon is released from our soils and has gone into the atmosphere to become

carbon dioxide.

This is not a food system. It's not an ecological system.

It is a recipe for destruction of the planet's health and the destruction of

our health.

Today, one of the big movements is around regenerative agriculture.

The need to restore carbon into the soil.

I wrote a book called Soil Not Oil. Now all the data is coming out through

organic farming.

We can increase the capacity of the soil to absorb carbon.

Industrial farms are producing commodities.

They claim to be feeding the world, but it is the small farms, the biodiverse

farms, the ecological farms that produce 75% of the food we eat.

Food can be grown in abundant, ecologically sustainable and just ways.

But to do this, we need a shift in our perception.

We need a change in paradise.

We are part of nature. We must participate in her processes.

We have to understand our interconnectedness, our oneness on this

earth.

But this is not how big food and big agriculture works.

So if I travel today, it's because through globalization, the powers of

corporations have become global.

And the same forces that put an Indian farmer to suicide are threatening the

Latin American farmer, threatening the African farmer.

threatening the Indonesian farmers, or threatening the American citizen by

denying them the right to know what they're eating through labeling attacks.

Why did Gandhi say, be the change you want to see?

He said, too many people use too much of an excuse to say, I can't do this

because the system must change before I change.

But you are a living force in the world.

The minute you see...

You are not alone, that you are interconnected with all other living

beings. It changes your potential.

And we can all find a place to be the change in the ecological food web.

You could be a cook, you could be a farmer, you could be an artist, you

could be a scientist, you can be an activist.

We are all agents of change.

And this way.

Activism is now an ocean.

we want to see and no one is going to stop us.

For me, a speech in Copenhagen and saving a seed on

this farm that can resist climate change is of the same kind of impact.

In an ecological world, everything's in evolution.

Quantum world, everything's in potential.

And that means every moment you have a role in terms of which potential

you evolve towards.

You can do it mindlessly, thoughtlessly, with ego.

Or you can, at every step, cultivate the constant sense of

what's next.

Thank you. Thank you.

Seeds of freedom, time has come.

Seeds of freedom, life will overcome.

Seeds of freedom, all we need is love.

Seeds of freedom, life will overcome.

For this victory.

just to share.

Seeds of freedom, time has come.

Seeds of freedom, life will overcome.

Maltese big tree, goddess of hope,

wind blows it cold.

From head to head, please our freedom, time has come.

Please our freedom, life will overcome.

Little old lady from India.

Why does she drive you nuts?