Seeds Of Resistance

I just heard Vandana Shiva give a wonderful talk about sustainable agriculture and globalization in a presentation organized by the California Student Sustainability Coalition. She is a sustainability activist and ecofeminist who has been working on agricultural issues in India for over 25 years, her original field being physics. She described two waves of industrialization in India, the first being the Green Revolution, which left much violence in its wake due to people’s loss of empowerment, particularly in the Punjab, and the second being globalization, exemplified by a recent US-India bilateral agreement rather frighteningly entitled the “Knowledge Initiative On Agriculture”.

Not surprisingly, such knowledge refers mainly to intellectual property (a term, she notes, only came into use after WTO; before then patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc. were quite separate concepts) and the most egregious misappropriation here being the patenting of seeds. It is simply morally wrong and ontologically suspect for thousands of years worth of human creativity that has gone into crop selection to be sequestered away in a corporate patent, leading to the absurdity of it being a crime for farmers to save their own seeds.

But such an absurdity has within it an obvious path of resistance. She is the founder of a movement called Navdanya which aims to promote biological and cultural diversity through nonviolent agriculture. One major project of this movement has been saving seeds, and they have established 34 seed banks in 13 different states across the country. Next year, in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Revolt of 1857, they will be burning Bt cotton seeds and distributing seeds from their own banks! (She told an enlightening anecdote from the time of the British: it’s curious how all the English names for the pulses of India have to have an animal in them—why, there’s chick peas, pigeon peas, horse gram…The English just couldn’t get their brain around the idea of diverse vegetarian protein crops.)

At the end she quoted Wendell Berry—eating is a political act. My favorite question response concerned how do you keep up hope? By engaging, she said. Be less concerned with brutal dominating power structures, but more with the creative power within each of us.