Thoughts on the Seed Revolution by Vandana Shiva - Bringing the Seed Back to the Farmer

This past weekend I went to the National Heirloom Expo in Santa Rosa. I was honored to hear Vandana Shiva speak. I read a few of Vananda Shiva's books while studying international food systems and gender in university. I'd love to share with you some of the thoughts that Dr. Shiva shared with us at the expo. This is a bio of Dr. Shiva:

Dr. Shiva combines sharp intellectual enquiry with courageous activism, and her work spans teaching at universities worldwide to working with peasants in rural India. Time Magazine identified Dr. Shiva as an environmental ‘hero’ in 2003, and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators in Asia. In November 2010, Forbes Magazine identified Dr. Shiva as one of the Seven Most Powerful Women on the Globe.
Dr. Shiva has contributed in fundamental ways to changing the practice and paradigms of agriculture and food. Her books The Violence of the Green Revolution and Monocultures of the Mind pose essential challenges to the dominant paradigm of non-sustainable, industrial agriculture. Through her books Biopiracy, Stolen Harvest and Water Wars, Dr. Shiva has made visible the social, economic and ecological costs of corporate-led globalisation. Dr. Shiva chairs the Commission on the Future of Food set up by the Region of Tuscany in Italy, she is a Board member of the International Forum on Globalisation (IGF), and a member of the Steering Committee of the Indian People’s Campaign Against the WTO. Source

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Monsanto's need to control the seed is driven by the fear of diversity, the fear of life, and the fear of self-organization

A seed is naturally inexhaustive and abundant with life, so Monsanto creates technology to make seeds dead

The Green Revolution was not created to feed people - it was created to introduce chemicals into agriculture

Monsanto created hunger because it created scarcity by killing the seed (by making seeds unable to reproduce)

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• Mexico's ban on GMO corn is a direct result of people coming out and saying "We are the corn. You cannot separate us from the corn"

• As citizens seeking freedom, many of us have resign ourselves to monoculture activism (ex "I'll just be an activist for the rainforest") when infact we area all connected

• All movements for freedom are dependent on each other

• You are not free until everyone is free

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90% of corn in the soil is being grown for biofuels - it is no longer a "food" system

• Hybrid crops are designed not to breed true, so farmers become dependent on coming back to the seed companies every year

What has been passed off as "development" is actually neo-colonialism guised as technology that is meant to better the lives of "underdeveloped" populations

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To patent seeds is an attack on the rights of the farmer to grow food and the rights of the seeds to continue its life freely to the next generation

• Patented seeds are a war against abundance, because abundance in the hands of the people allows for sovereignty

• Our economy is based on companies thinking "how can we make people dependent on us so that they have to keep giving us money without choice"

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To try and kill weeds through mono-extermination creates a superweed that is immune to that extermination method

The same principle applies to the revolutions and resistance movements that those in power attempt to monoexterminate

We just become stronger. We are stronger than Monsanto.

Anything that comes from fear will never have the same power as that which comes from life and love

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