The red dots indicate many of the farms on Kauai growing GMO crops.
Image: Hawai‘i seed
Food as Weapon
Dr. Vandana Shiva Brings Earth Democracy to Hawai‘i
by Tiffany Hervey | Jan 9, 2013
Albert Einstein was Dr. Vandana Shiva’s hero as a
little girl growing up in India. “I was always fascinated with the
workings of nature, and Einstein was the kind of scientist I wanted to
be,” says Shiva, born in 1952. Trained as a physicist, with a Ph.D. in
philosophy, she became an activist known globally for her opposition to
genetically engineered (GE) crops and her advocacy for sustainable
farming. Dr. Shiva is coming to the Islands next week to speak about
food justice and ecologically responsible, diversified
agriculture–issues that are pivotal as Hawaii, a cradle of GE seed corn,
begins to address its severe food insecurity.
Dr. Shiva has authored more than 20 books on globalization, food
supply, eco-feminism and biotechnology. Her writings reveal that modern
industrial agriculture, a high-cost, chemical-intensive method, is
actually a recipe for hunger. As an expert on biodiversity and
intellectual property rights (IPR) legislation, Dr. Shiva has received
numerous awards. She has assisted Africa, Asia, Latin America, Ireland,
Switzerland and Austria in grassroots campaigns against genetic
engineering. Time Magazine named her an environmental hero in 2003.
Growing up in the Dehradun forest on her mother’s farm, where wheat,
chickpeas, mustard, sesame and sugarcane grew amongst guava, lemon and
lychee trees, Shiva saw firsthand how much food could come from a small
farm. Her father was a forester. “That childhood did shape my values,
and my love for nature. More importantly, my parents taught me two
things by example. Follow your conscience, and be fearless.”
Earth Democracy
Shiva began fighting globalization in 1987 when she discovered the
biotech industry’s plans to genetically engineer and patent seeds.
That’s when she started the nonprofit organization Navdanya, the
movement to save seed. In 1993, she mobilized 500,000 farmers in India
for a rally in Bangalore to say, “No to Patents on Seed and Free Trade.”
She also helped form the International Forum on Globalization, which
organized the anti-globalization protests against the World Trade
Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999.
“Everything we predicted has happened,” Shiva recalls via email from
Delhi, where she resides. “Inequalities have grown, democracy has
eroded, economies are collapsing, an oligarchy is emerging. Our goal is
to defend the planet, people’s rights, and democracy. This is what I
call Earth Democracy.”
Earth Democracy translates into a mission of preserving biodiversity
and creating seed sovereignty, food sovereignty and water democracy.
Navdanya has helped set up 111 community seed banks throughout India,
trained more than 500,000 farmers in saving seeds and practicing
sustainable agriculture over the past two decades and helped set up the
largest direct-marketing, fair-trade organic network in India.
“I have followed Gandhi’s footsteps of Swaraj, self rule, and Satyagraha, the force of truth and the refusal to obey unjust laws,” she explains. “We have practiced seed satyagraha, the refusal to obey patent laws on seed, since seed is not an invention, and seed monopolies are immoral and unethical.”
The biggest myth
Shiva wishes to dispel the misconception that industrial agriculture
produces more food. In reality, “Industrial agriculture promotes
monocultures, which are nutritionally impoverished,” she says.
Monocultures (growing a single crop every year on the same land without
rotation) and GE crops use 10 times more water than ecological
agriculture, and are the single biggest reason for the water crisis,
according to Shiva. She adds that genetic engineering has not increased
the yield of a single crop.
“To turn the world into a dependency on staples [like corn, soy,
sugar and rice] has nothing to [do] with feeding the world, it has to do
with control,” Shiva said in an interview for The Future of Food
video series. “Maximizing the production of commodities for
international trade is directly proportionate to the decrease in
nutrition availability to local communities, which is why food
insecurity grows.”
In her book Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply
(South End Press, 2000), Shiva explains that the growth of agribusiness
in the U.S. has gone hand-in-hand with U.S. foreign policy to
deliberately create hunger in order to make the world dependent on our
food supplies, allowing us to exert control over their decisionmaking.
Shiva says that the U.S. has been using hunger as an instrument of war
since the Vietnam War, when the term “food as weapon” was popularized as
chemical weapons were used to destroy vegetation and crops.
The U.S. Foreign Trade Act strong-arms other countries into
participating in monopolies that cause growing economic injustice,
according to Shiva. “We were bullied to allow Monsanto in India,” she
says. As a result, she adds, Monsanto was responsible for triggering an
epidemic of 270,000 farmer suicides from 1995–2010 in India’s cotton
belt, where the company had established a genetically engineered Bt
cottonseed monopoly. “Monsanto controls 95 percent of the cottonseed,
which is now all Bt cotton,” Shiva explains. “The costs are 8,000
percent more than cottonseeds that were available earlier. Farmers are
getting trapped in debt, and indebted farmers are committing suicide.”
Chemical treadmill
According to Shiva, GE crops harness farmers to a chemical treadmill.
In India, Bt cotton called “Bollgard” was supposed to control the
Bollworm pest. Today, the Bollworm has become resistant to Bt and now
Monsanto sells Bollgard II cotton, containing two additional toxic
genes. New pests have emerged, and farmers are using more pesticides.
Pesticide use has increased 13-fold since Bt cotton was introduced,
according to research by Navdanya. A study recently published in the Review of Agrarian Studies also showed a higher expenditure on chemical pesticides for Bt cotton by small farmers than for other varieties.
Although Monsanto’s advertising campaign in India reported a 50
percent increase in yields for its Bollgard cotton, a survey conducted
by the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology found
that the yields in all trial plots were lower than what the company
promised. Navdanya’s research in India has shown that contrary to
Monsanto’s claim of Bt cotton yield of 1500 kg per acre, the real yield
is an average of 400–500 kg per acre.
GE crops create resistant pests and, through pollen drift, weeds.
They need an almost sterile environment, so more pesticides are needed
on these crops. In the U.S., GE crops increased overall pesticide use by
318.4 million pounds over their first 13 years on the marketplace
(1996–2008), according to a study derived from U.S. Dept. of Agriculture
data by Dr. Charles Benbrook, chief scientist at the Organic Center.
Increased concentration of chemicals in air, water, and soil in the
communities surrounding GE fields is a legitimate public health concern.
Pesticide drift
Dr. Shiva will visit Kauai because it’s the island with the most
extensive GE crop plantings (approximately 13,000 acres) in Hawaii,
where biotech companies Dow, BASF, Monsanto, Syngenta and Pioneer
operate on ag lands throughout the state. More than a year ago, a group
of 150 Waimea, Kauai residents filed suit against Pioneer Hi-Bred (a
subsidiary of chemical giant DuPont) over allegedly pesticide-laden dust
that has been blowing onto their properties for more than a decade from
GE fields. According to the lawsuit, filed Dec. 2011 in 5th Circuit
Court, Pioneer uses dangerous pesticides during open-air testing of GE
crops without controlling airborne pollutants, as required by state and
county law.
Toxic impacts
Dr. Shiva further contends that GMOs have their own unique health and
environmental risks. This, she points out, is why a UN Biosafety
Protocol was created in 2000. The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety is an
international treaty that seeks to protect biological diversity from the
potential risks posed by GMOs. It establishes an advanced procedure for
ensuring that countries are provided with information necessary to make
informed decisions before agreeing to import GMOs into their territory.
To date, 163 countries and the European Union have ratified or acceded
to the Protocol. The U.S. has not. In addition, the biotech industry
that brought the world agrichemicals tries to silence all scientists who
do research on the health and environmental impacts of GMOs, states
Shiva. Contamination of crops, soil and water, along with unknown risks
of human consumption, are the major issues of scientific debate.
Monsanto’s argument is that the Bt toxin in GE crops poses no danger
to human health because the protein breaks down in the human gut.
However, a recently published Canadian study entitled, “Maternal and
fetal exposure to pesticides associated to genetically modified foods in
Eastern Township of Quebec, Canada,” (Reproductive Toxicology,
May 31, 2011) found the Bt toxin in the blood of 93 percent of pregnant
women tested and in 80 percent of their umbilical cord and fetal blood.
Seed slaves
GMOs go hand-in-hand with patents. Patents mean royalties, which help
to cause farmer debt. In addition to dangers to public health and
ecosystems, biotechnology allows for corporations to own seeds and crops
through patents and IPRs. Patents provide royalties for the patent
holder, creating corporate monopolies, which results in monster profits
for biotech companies like Monsanto and inescapable debt for small
farmers.
The most dramatic case of patent bullying via contamination and
genetic pollution made its way to the Supreme Court of Canada when Percy
Schmeiser, a canola seed grower whose crop was contaminated by
Monsanto’s Round-Up Ready Canola refused to pay Monsanto a license fee
when he found their seed had contaminated his fields. Contamination of
canola in Canada is so severe that 90 percent of certified non-GE Canola
seed samples contain GE material. Instead of paying Percy for the
damage of contamination in accordance with its “Polluter Pays”
principle, Monsanto approached him to pay a license fee for using their
patented technology without a license, and then sued Percy for
Intellectual Property theft (patent infringement) to the tune of
$300,000.
After six years of court battles, the court ruled in a 5-4 majority
that, intentionally or not, growing genetically modified plants
constitutes the use of the patented invention. This case increased the
protection available to biotech companies in Canada and set a precedent
globally.
“I have called what is happening a new form of imperialism:
bio-imperialism,” Dr. Shiva contends. “I see it as a new form of
slavery–seed slavery.” She asserts that all communities should be
sovereign in their seed supply. “That is why we should have seed banks
of open pollinated seeds everywhere. Communities should become free of
GMOs, chemicals, and poisons. Working with nature on the principles of
agroecology is the best road to sustainability.”
Food sovereignty
In Hawaii, a status quo with an immense amount of privately owned
land leased to the highest bidder has allowed Monsanto and other
agribusiness “farmers” to use prime ag land to produce export crops that
do not feed us.
For example, Kamehameha Schools has recently come under fire for
leasing 1,033 acres on Oahu’s North Shore to Monsanto since 1999.
According to Neil Hannahs, director of KS’s Land Assets divison, “We
have looked into Monsanto’s pesticide application methods and are
comfortable that they are following all regulatory protocols. We do not
have any seed corn fields close to any schools or immediately adjacent
to any residences,” Hannah wrote in an email.
Shiva maintains that the way to resist agribusiness and further
pollution is by creating local, regenerative, resilient economies and
communities. She says that communities with the greatest food insecurity
today, such as Hawaii with our 85 percent imported food, could be the
most self-sufficient. The solution is biodiversity–growing diverse food
crops using organic and ecological methods. Such multiculture can
produce five to ten times more nutrition than monocultures can,
according to Shiva, who is currently advising the government of Bhutan
on how to achieve their goal of becoming the first fully organic
food-sovereign country. Hawaii already has a successful example: MAO
Farms’ 24 acres of organic crops produce approximately 4,000 to 6,000
pounds of produce per week.
Hannahs adds that KS’s North Shore Plan includes a future 100-acre
organic farm near Chun’s Reef, already has diversified Kahuku Farms and
Twin Bridge Farms among their lessees, and is doubling their ag acreage
in Punaluu. “We have many small farmers there and have invested heavily
in the irrigation system, as well as in land clearing in order to
increase the amount of acreage contributing to local food production,”
Hannahs says.
In profiteering hands, food can be used as a weapon for control and
oppression. However, the people can use food as weapon by voting with
their dollar for every item on the grocery list. “To protect ourselves
from GMOs we need to shift to local, organic food,” Shiva urges. “Know
your farmer. Know your food.”
Vandana Shiva Visits Hawaii
Dr. Shiva’s visit is sponsored by Hawaii SEED and Ceres Trust. She
will be accompanied by Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the
International Center for Technology Assessment (ICTA) and the Center for
Food Safety, and local GMO labeling advocate Walter Ritte.
Events are FREE but one must reserve seats ahead of time and check in at venue ticket tables.
Tue., Jan. 15
UH Campus Center Ballroom: 5 p.m. (sold out), [vshivahonolulu.eventbrite.com]
Wed., Jan. 16
“Heleku” March from UH to State Capitol: 8:30 a.m.
“We the People” Rally, State Capitol Rotunda: 9:30 a.m.
Salvation Army Ray Kroc Center, Kapolei: 7 p.m. talk, [vshivakapolei.eventbrite.com]
Thu., Jan. 17
Kauai Memorial Convention Hall, Lihue: 5 p.m. seed giveaway, 6 p.m. talk
For more information and updates: [hawaiiseed.org]
Common Pesticides
Conventional and GE food crops are sprayed with many pesticides that
can endanger human and ecological health. GE crops use more pesticides.
Below are some pesticides used in Hawaii.
Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is a soil-dwelling bacterium that
kills insects, traditionally used as a spray by organic farmers. Now,
Bt-toxin-secreting GE corn, cotton, potato and soy are grown.
2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), which was an
ingredient in Agent Orange, is a weed killer commonly used on commercial
crops like wheat, corn and rice. One study, published by the American
Cancer Society in 1999, suggests that 2,4-D may contribute to the
incidence of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which has increased in most Western
countries during the last few decades.
Atrazine is commonly used with corn crops. The European Union
banned all use of atrazine in 2004 because of persistent groundwater
contamination. Studies have suggested that the chemical may be dangerous
to reproductive organs in humans and other species. Recent
epidemiological and animal research has suggested that exposure to high
levels of atrazine during specific periods of pregnancy could result in
birth defects, low birth weight babies, menstrual problems and cancer.
Glyphosate/Roundup, a weed killer, was discovered by a
Monsanto chemist in 1970. By 2007, it was the most-used herbicide in
U.S. agriculture. Many staple crops, like soy, alfalfa, canola,
rapeseed, sorghum, corn, sugar beet, cotton and wheat have been
genetically engineered by Monsanto to be resistant to it (“Roundup
Ready”).
Chlorpyrifos/Lorsban is a neurotoxic insecticide introduced by
Dow Chemical in 1965. While it is one of the most widely used
insecticides in commercial agriculture, according to the EPA, it has
been banned for use in homes since 2001 due to health risks to children.
Chronic exposure has been linked to developmental disorders and
autoimmune deficiencies. Lower birth weights and smaller head
circumferences have been found in children whose mothers were exposed to
the chemical during pregnancy.
Neonicotinoids (nicotine seed coatings) are insecticides that
affects the central nervous system of insects. Several European
countries have suspended the use of neonicotinoids in response to acute
poisoning of honeybees associated with Colony Collapse Disorder. Data
currently being reviewed by the EPA suggest that neonicotinic residues
can accumulate in pollen and nectar of treated plants.
Dicamba (Banvel, Oracle, Vanquish) is a benzoic acid herbicide
used on rye, asparagus, barley, corn, oats, soybeans, sugarcane and
wheat. It persists in soil, may leach into groundwater, and is very
irritating to eyes.
Sources: Fact sheets from the National Pesticide Information Center, [npic.orst.edu] and Beyond Pesticides, a non-profit organization. [beyondpesticides.org]
Source: http://honoluluweekly.com/cover/2013/01/food-as-weapon-2/ Honolulu Weekly
