An interview with Dr. Vandana Shiva "The deeper you can manipulate living structures the more you can control food and medicine" "We have managed to make the celebration of diversity our mode of resistance."
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St. Louis, Missouri Dr. Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist, activist, editor, and author of many books. In India she has established Navdanya, a movementt for biodiversity conservation and movemen farmers' rights. She directs the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy. Her most recent book is Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. This interview with Dr. Vandana Shiva was conducted in St. Louis, Missouri at the First Grassroots Gathering on Biodevastation: Genetic Engineering, on July 18, 1998. Dr. Shiva was the keynote speaker at the conference. The interview was conducted by In Motion Magazine publisher publisher Nic Nic PagetClarke.. Clarke •
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Interview with Vandana Shiva (2003) The Role of Patents in the Rise of Globalization New Delhi, India Interview w/ Vandana Shiva (2002) Discussing “Water Wars”. Johannesburg, South Africa
In Motion Magazine: Why are patents the new form of colonialism? Dr. Vandana Shiva: Patents are a replay of colonization as it took place 500 years ago in a number of
ways. Interestingly, even at that time, when Columbus set sail and other adventurers like him, they also set out with pieces of paper that were called the letters patent which gave the power to the adventurers adventurers to claim as property the territory they found anywhere in the world that was not ruled by white Christian princes. Contemporary patents on life seem to be of a similar quality. They are pieces of paper issued by patent offices of the world that basically are telling corporations corporations that if there's knowledge or living material, plants, seeds, medicines which the white man has not known about before, claim it on our behalf, and make profits out of it. That then has become the basis of phenomena that we call biopiracy, where seeds such as the Basmati seed, the aromatic aromatic rice from India, which we have grown for centuries, right in my valley is being claimed as novel invention by RiceTec. Neem, which we have used for millennia for pest control, for medicine, which is documented documented in every one of our texts, which my grandmother and mother have used for everyday functions in the home, for
protecting grain, for protecting silks and woolens, for pest control, is treated as invention held by Grace, the chemical company. This epidemic of piracy is very much like the epidemic of piracy which was named colonialism 500 years ago. I think we will soon need to name this round of piracy through patents as recolonialization as a new colonialization which differs from the old only in this - the old colonialization only took over land, the new colonialization is taking over life itself. In Motion Magazine: Just a moment ago in your speech to the conference, you said you'd like to bring in a third world perspective. Can you bring that into this discussion? Dr. Vandana Shiva: The third world is that part of the world which became the colonies in the last
colonialization. colonialization. It wasn't an impoverished impoverished world then, in fact the reason it was colonialized is because it had the wealth. Columbus set sail to get control of the spice trade from India, it's just that he landed on the wrong continent and named the original inhabitants of this land Indian thinking he had arrived in India. Latin America was colonialized because of the gold it had. None of these countries were impoverished. Today they are called the poorer part of the world because the wealth has been drained out. People have survived in the third world because in spite of the wealth that has been taken from them, in spite of their gold and their land having been taken from them, they still have biodiversity. biodiversity. They still have that last resource in the form of seed, medicinal plants, fodder, which allowed them access to production It allowed them to meet their needs of health and nutrition. Now this last resource of the poor, who had been left deprived by the last round of colonialization is also being taken over through patenting. And seeds which peasants have freely saved, exchanged, used, are being treated as the property of corporations. New legal property formations are being shaped as intellectual property rights treaties, through the World Trade Trade Organization, trying to prevent peasants of the third world from having free access to their own seed, to have free exchange of their own seed. So that all peasants, all farmers around the world would be buying seed every year thus creating a new market for the global seed industry. 80 percent of India takes care of its health needs through medicinal plants that grow around in back yards, that grow in the fields, in the forests, which people freely collect. No one has had to pay a price for the gifts of nature. Today everyone of those medicines has been patented and within five, ten years down the line we could easily have a situation in which the same pharmaceutical pharmaceutical industry that has created such serious health damages and is now shifting to safe health products in the form of medicinal plant-based drugs, Chinese medicine, aromatic medicine from India, will prevent the use. They don't even have to come and make it illegal because long before they have to take that step, they take over the resource base, they take over the plants, they take over the supply, they take over the markets, and leave people absolutely deprived of access. What we are seeing right now is a situation in which the third world, which has been the main supplier of biodiversity, the main producer of food in the world, where the majority of people are engaged in food production, is being attempted to be converted into a consumer society. But you can't have a consumer society with poor people and therefore what you will have is deprivation, destitution, destitution, disease, hunger, epidemics, hunger, malnutrition, famine and civil war. What is being sown is the greed of the corporations of stealing the last resources r esources of the poor. It really is seeds of uncontrollable violence and decay of societies on a very large scale.
In Motion Magazine: You touched on it, but what seems key to this takeover is what the RAFI (Rural
Advancement Foundation International) people call the "terminator technology". Can you talk about that? Dr. Vandana Shiva: When we plant a seed there's a very simple prayer that every peasant in India
says: "Let the seed be exhaustless, let it never get exhausted, let it bring forth seed next year." Farmers have such pride in saying "this is the tenth generation seeds that I'm planting," "this is the fifth generation seed that I'm planting." Just the other day I had a seed exchange fair in my valley and a farmer brought Basmati aromatic rice seed and he said "this is five generations we've been planting this in our family". So far human beings have treated it as their duty to save seed and ensure its continuity. But that prayer to let the seed be exhaustless seems to be changing into the prayer, "let this seed get terminated so that I can make profits every year" which is the prayer that Monsanto is speaking through through the terminator technology -- a technology whose aim is merely to prevent seed from germinating so that they don't have to spend on policing. It's not that they don't yet have means. Hybrid seeds are also not good for saving. It was the first time they found a tool to force farmers to come back to them. A market every year. But the difference is that hybrid seeds don't give good seed. It's not that they fail to germinate. They will still segregate into their parent lines. They'll still give you some kind of crop. You will not have absolute devastation. Patents are also a away to prevent farmers from saving seed. But with patents you still have to do policing, you still have to mobilize your detectives to ensure that farmers aren't saving seeds. The terminator is an extremely secure technology for corporations like Monsanto because neither do they have to do the policing, nor do they have to worry whether some segregation works, now you just basically terminate. But this is not just a violence against farmers whose basic right, in my view, is seed saving. A farmer's duty, is protecting the earth, maintaining it's fertility, and maintaining the fertility of seed. That is part of being a farmer. A farmer is not a low-paid tractor driver, that's a modern definition of what a farmer is. The real definition of a farmer is a person who relates to the land and relates to the seed and keeps it for future generations, keeps renewing it, fertility. The search for this technology comes out of a violence to that basic ethic that farmers must have if they are to be good farmers. But it is also even deeper because now it is becoming a violence against nature because in a way Monsanto is saying we will stop evolution because evolution creates freedom. In Motion Magazine: What is the historical connection of genetic engineering to eugenics? Dr. Vandana Shiva: The image of science, and particularly streams like genetic engineering is always
that somehow these things happen spontaneously, it comes out of human ingenuity and brilliance, and someone has a bright idea and new disciplines emerge. Which used to be the case, way back in the past. But since the period of the industrial revolution when Bacon said there's a marriage between knowledge and power that spontaneous emergence of ideas is not the way science has grown. Science has grown through deliberate direction through financing of certain kinds. The roots of genetic engineering go back to the thirties when molecular biology was planted as a new science with no foundations. They didn't know what it would be. They knew two things. One that eugenics had lost repute in Europe and the project of eugenics had to have a disguised presentation to the public. It couldn't be so overtly social. It had to be rooted in a so-called scientific basis. It had to be rooted more in biology. The entire enterprise was financed through the Rockefeller Foundation. It was called the social psychology program. program. The only thing they knew at that point was let's find something deeper in the way things work biologically to say that this is inevitable. That selection is inevitable. The selection selection of human beings is inevitable because they are the way they are biologically determined to be -- poor, criminals, etc. -- the kind of arguments they had used for the eugenics movement movement in Europe in the past. They first named a theoretical construction biological atoms. They didn't know what it would look like. They just said they are biological atoms that determine traits. I t took them fifty years of manipulation, of rewarding, of giving about ten Nobel prizes to themselves as a club of men doing a certain kind of science, connected to each other through the financing. Then you get Watson and Crick being rewarded for the DNA structure. But that the DNA structure is an atom that determines all traits was
named fifty years before. If it wasn't Crick and Watson it would have been another group of scientists. But it was being developed in that way. The two reasons they went this route were first, as I said, to get away from being accused of having social bias. By putting it in biology and putting it into the atoms of biology they could argue that this was in the nature of things. This was the state of affairs and this way they could get away from the political responsibility responsibility of engaging engaging in basically political acts and putting it in the domain of science. The second, and this fed over time into the industrialization of genetic engineering and biotechnology, is that they could see that the deeper you can manipulate living structures the more you can control food and medicine. We're getting that new round of propaganda now which is suggesting that somehow manipulation manipulation at the genetic level always gives you superior products, which is not at all the case. It could give you higher risks. They are just using the fact that you are intervening at a deeper level in living structures and equating it with superior, superior, with human progress. There is no correlation between these two things. The fact that people are not accepting it is clear from the fact that people are rejecting geneticallyengineered foods. They are not treating genetic manipulation as somehow a superior food production system. Are we going to see more and more of these kind of questions? I think it is absolutely key to not forget that the roots of genetic engineering are in eugenics and as genetic engineering moves from agriculture to human manipulation we are going to be right back with a very vicious eugenics program. In Motion Magazine: One of the arguments,
when you talk to biogeneticists, is "farmers have been historically changing seeds through how they pick and choose seeds through the years. All we're doing is speeding up the process ." What is the difference? Dr. Vandana Shiva: It's not true in two ways.
First of all, when farmers have been selecting they have been selecting between two boundaries boundaries and limits that t hey set for themselves. themselves. The first is the ecosystem limit. Farmers select crops according to the ecosystems in which they produce. No farmer in the world has done seed selection sitting in tropical Africa Africa and trying to grow crops in temperate Sweden. Africans have bred crops for Africa, and Swedish farmers have evolved crops for Sweden. The second is related to the fact f act that they have always worked within the limits set by intra-species breeding. You only work with rice to evolve new rice plants. You work with wheat to evolve new wheat plants. You do not try and cross the species boundaries. In fact, even conventional breeding which was not farmers' breeding which had already been taken over by scientists and industry and violated the ecosystem boundary because because it tried to breed beyond ecosystem adaptation adaptation -- it did still respect the species boundary. Genetic engineering is violating both boundaries. It's violating the ecosystem boundary. It is generating crops to be planted on millions of acres because there's no point in having patents on a particular Bt cotton if you are then only going to grow it in twenty acres where it suits that particularly variety. As As a Monsanto you have to market around the world to maximize the return on your patents, your revenues etc. This means you have to grow it everywhere. You have to violate ecosystem boundaries. But more important than that, for the first time, genetic engineering is doing something different from what conventional breeders have done. And no matter how many times they tell this lie it doesn't make it a truth. Transgenic organisms are not equivalent to farmers breeding or conventional breeding because transgenic transgenic by its very definition means something which has crossed species boundaries, something in which an alien gene has been introduced into a plant. In the case of Bt it is the toxic
bacteria gene. In the case of other crops it will be antibiotic genes. There's There's something in that plant that wouldn't have gotten there if you had just done normal breeding that farmers have done. They haven't just speeded up the process they have crossed a threshold. In Motion Magazine: Can you talk a little about Navdanya: A Movement for Biodiversity Conservation
and Farmers Rights. Dr. Vandana Shiva: Navdanya is a national program to basically fight the seed monopolies. I started it
ten years ago when I could see the emergence of this kind of world of total control. Navdanya means nine seeds. Through Through it we save native seeds. In India we still have a lot of peasant agriculture. We still have a lot of seed diversity. We do not try and do it as a museum activity. I started Navdanya as a political act so that farmers would have free seed in their hands, using that free seed they would be able to resist the kind of control system that the new corporations, corporate control, was trying to establish in India. Through those seeds they can establish sustainable organic agriculture again. New seeds are bred for heavy chemical influence and even now when Monsanto says that its genetically-engineered crops don't need chemicals, we hear every where that there's a doubling of chemicals. If they were to bring these seeds into India there would be a twenty-fold increase of chemicals because they'd introduce chemicals into farms that have never used chemicals. Through the native seeds we can become free of agri-chemicals, farmers can become free of debt, become free of the kind of burden that high inputs are creating. But we can also create freedom for consumers because frankly there's nothing as delicious as the old varieties that have been evolved over time. Our native wheat sells at twice the price that the high-yielding variety wheat flour sells at because it's much tastier, tastier, much nicer for f or chapatis. It was evolved for chapati making. Our native legumes sell for much more because not only are they organic they are tastier, they are more nutritious. They are better for the earth. They put less pressure on the earth, they put less pressure on the farmer, and they are safer for consumers. It's crazy to still continue to call these wonderfully nourishing seeds primitive cultivas. Part of our battle has been to give respect again to the innovation of farmers and the diversity that the earth has provided. What I often say is that through the seed saving of Navdanya we have managed to make the celebration of diversity our mode of resistance. In Motion Magazine: How successful has it been? Dr. Vandana Shiva: It has been very successful. We're in about seven zones now. We have the native
seed supply taking over. I have just started two new seed banks in the heart of the "Green Revolution", one in western Uttar Pradesh, one in Punjab where about thirty farmers are giving up chemicals and getting off the chemical tread mill. They are starting to shift to use of native seeds and organic agricultural methods. The wonderful thing about seed is if you have even one, you have the potential of millions. Published in In Motion Magazine - August 14, 1998
Interview with Vandana Shiva The Role of Patents in the Rise of Globalization “The recovery of economic democracy is at the heart of recovery of democracy itself.” New Delhi, India
Dr. Vandana Shiva is founder of both the Research Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology, an independent public industry research group, and Navdanya a grassroots conservation movement in India. This interview was conducted by Nic PagetClarke on August 27, 2003 for In Motion Magazine in New Delhi, India. • • • • • • • •
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A twist in the history of patents Control of the technology The role of patents Globalization Globaliza tion of U.S. patent laws Patents regulate life Medicine:: from healing to profits Medicine Ecology and equity From theoretical physicist to advocate for biodiversity Agriculture and violence Focus on biotechnology and patenting The influence of Gandhi The death of economic democracy The recovery of economic democracy The flow of wealth from South to North From ownership of land to ownership of biodiversity War is globalization by other means
Vandana Shiva at a press conference with other leaders of Vandana an anti-WTO march in New Delhi, August 27, 2003 . All photos by Nic Paget-Clarke.
Marching with former Indian prime ministers.
A twist in the history of patents In Motion Magazine: I think sometimes people’s
eyes glaze over when hearing about patents and legal matters, but in your book “Protect “ Protect or Plunder – Understanding Understanding Intellectual Property Rights” you describe some interesting history, about how originally patents were used to spread technology but now they have been turned into their opposite. Could you outline how that twist happened? Vandana Shiva: In the early days, the word patent
was used for two things. In the case of getting hold of territory, what were issued by kings and queens were letters-patent, which were open letters. Anyone could know that Columbus had been given a right by Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand to conquer and take over any territory on their behalf. But the second meaning, defined around the same time by the Venetian laws on patent, which were the first patent laws, was that a master craftsman could be brought (to a country), because technology at that time was craft technology, and if a country could not make glass they would give to the master craftsman apprentices and say, “Train our people in this art.” “Train our people to make glass.” “Train our people to make steel.” “Train our people to make
A soldier of the Indian Army provides security for the former prime minsiters marching in the anti-WTO rally in Ne w Delhi.
On the march in New Delhi.
textiles”, and we will give you an exclusive right (to make mak e these products) for seven years while you are training people. The period of the patent was seven years because it took too k seven years to learn a craft. After that seven seven years was over, the master craftsman went back to wherever whe rever he belonged and you had all the apprentices apprentices available in the country to spread that technology techn ology as a free public good. This was the pattern throughout the early use of patent law. Then you get slow shifts with the rise of industrialism. industrialism. As big industry became a major economic interest, they started to use technology as an instrument instrument of monopoly. monopoly. Patents became the way to say, “Only we will use this technology”. The way they expanded this power was, on the one han d, extending extending the life of patents. It went from seven years to fourteen. Now, under WTO (World Trade Organization), Organiz ation), for the first time it is twenty years -- extendible in a period where technologies technologies are b ecoming so obsolete that if you have that kind of monopoly for twenty years you are totally controlling the the technology. technology. And the second thing is constantly increasing the domai n over which patents will apply. For example, in India’s patent law agriculture could not be touched. Agriculture A griculture was free of monopolies. And in medicine you could not have a product monopoly. You could not monopolize a medicine but you could monopolize a method of making a medicine. But, medic ine has been been brought into monopolies. Seed has been brought into monopolies. Cells have brought i nto monopolies. monopolies. Genes have been brought into monopolies. Animals have been brought into monopolie s. Basically, the ’80s saw a twist in this and a lot of it had t o do with the rise of the big industry and their convergence into one set of giants, which are the health giants, the pharmaceutical giants, the t he gene giants controlling all life.
Control of the technology In Motion Magazine: You’ve also said that with the rise of other countries other countries in the world, with their own
manufacturing manufacturing systems, markets started to slip away but bu t the developed developed countries countries still had control of the technology? Vandana Shiva: The thing was that when we were living living in a world based on crafts, transferring technology technology was the objective. But as the world got industrialized, as developing countries shed the colonial burden, imperialistic patent law started to develop.
For example, again India, under a 1970 law, developed a very stro ng medical sector. And I think if WTO had not come on the horizon, India would be providing cheap medicine to American citizens. It’s capable of doing that. But the American citizens, and the African citizens, and the Brazilian citizens, and in the future the India citizens are being told, “You will only buy from these monopolies.” It was a way to de-industrialize Southern countries who had started to build capacity, capacity, technological capacity for themselves.
The role of patents In Motion Magazine: So patents have had a very specific role in the latest version of imperialism, in
this globalization phase? Vandana Shiva: If you want to have one tool for imperialistic control, it’s patent law under the WTO
agreement. agreement. It’s in my view the worst of the WTO agreemen agreements. ts. It is a totally coercive tool. It has only a negative function: function: to prevent others f rom doing their own thing; to prevent people from having food; to prevent people from having medicine; to prevent countries from having technological capacity. It is a negative tool for creating underdevelopment.
It’s the privatization of knowledge. I have called it the enclosure, the ultimate enclosure. We had enclosures of land. Now, we are seeing enclosures of biodiversity, life itself. In my book “Biopiracy”, I’ve talked about how this is the last colony. It is the spaces within our minds -- for knowledge. The spaces within life forms for reproduction. A seed cannot reproduce without permission of the patent holder and the company. Knowledge cannot be transmitted without permission and license collection. It’s rent collection from life. It’s rent collection from being human, and thinking, and knowing.
Globalization of U.S. patent laws In Motion Magazine: How has the WTO been a forum for the globalization of U.S. patent laws? Vandana Shiva: The WTO has an agreement called Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights
agreement agreement (TRIPs), which basically is nothing more than globalization globalization of U.S.-style laws. And its globalization globalization of U.S.-style laws both in content and in process. In terms of content, in the late ’80s when this law was drafted, the United States was the only country that granted patents on life forms. This precedent was set in a 1980 decision on a genetically-engineered micro-organism, subsequent to which was the rise of the biotech industry. The granting of life patents was seen as an imperative both by the industry as well as the government. The U.S. government actually encouraged life patenting. The decision-making decision-making was set by the courts, rather than by Congress, never with a public debate, never with a public policy decision on the ethical implications, ecological implications, implications, economic implications implications of what life patents mean. The second way in which this is a globalization of U.S. law is the fact that it was really U.S. companies which got together, together, drafted the law, took it to the U.S. administration, administration, then took it to the secretariat of the at-that-time General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), which was the precursor of WTO, and as Monsanto, which was one of the companies in the intellectual property coalition admitted in drafting this law, “We achieved something unprecedented. We were the patient, the diagnostician, and the physician all in one.
Patents regulate life With the broadening of patents to life forms, patents do not just regulate technology they regulate life. They regulate economy. They regulate basic needs. A patent is an exclusive right to make, produce, distribute, or sell the patented product. So, if a patent is granted, for example, on seed it means a farmer who grows a seed cannot save seed from the harvested crop because that is constituted as making the seed and the exclusive right to the seed belongs to the company. It means seed-saving by farmers is now defined as intellectual property theft. Many farmers in the United States have been sued by the corporations for doing something normal in farming, which is saving their seed. Exchanging seed with your neighbor, which is called brown-bagging -- it was not a commercial exercise; it was a mutual give-and-take in society; a social act of exchange for non-profit activity -- has also been defined as an infringement because now distributing is covered by a patent, even if it is not commercial, because the companies interpret that by exchanging seed you are taking the market away from them.
Medicine: from healing to profits Also, patents can be given for medicine. For example, in the case of medicine, if there is no patent we can treat people with AIDS with $200 expenditure per year. Indian companies can make it for that cost because they can make them as generic drugs. They are not piracy drugs, which is the way the U.S. pharmaceutical industry talks about them. They are generic in the sense that different processes have been used. The same medicine, the same retroviral, costs $20,000 in the United States because of patenting -- that is the only difference. Which means something which is being made for $200 is being sold to consumers for not just ten times but a hundred times the price. As our prime minister said, the big companies are trying to turn the matter of disease from healing into a matter of profits. There was an attempt made, at the beginning of the TRIPs negotiations, to make it look like the lowercost production that could happen in the absence of monopolies was piracy. The industry managed to
define piracy as absence of monopolies. We want to define monopoly as monopoly and recognize that things like seeds should be accessible to farmers, things like medicine should be accessible to those who are dying of AIDS, and no regime in the world can put profits above people’s lives. In Motion Magazine: Are the same corporations controlling food and health? Vandana Shiva: It’s the same companies. The industry that used to be the chemical industry is also
the pharmaceutical industry, is also the seed industry, is also the biotech industry. There is no separation -- and agro-chemical industry. It is all one.
Ecology and equity In Motion Magazine:You made the statement in your book on patents that there’s always a
connection between ecology and equity. Can you talk about that? Vandana Shiva: Ecology is about interactions in the natural world, sustainability of resources.
Whether you look at water, you look at biodiversity, you look at anything, conservation happens. Environmental sustainability takes place when people have a stake and a share in the rewards of the conserved resource. resource. If people have the ability to drink water from a well, and look after that well, and will suffer the consequences of contamination, they will not contaminate that well. People who pollute a well or a river are the ones who don’t have to drink from it. Similarly, when it comes to monopolies on intellectual property, conservation is what is sacrificed. It’s the small peasants of the world who have conserved biodiversity. If they have to continue conserving biodiversity, they need to have their rights defended. They need to be able to know that when they plant basmati rice it will be their reward to harvest that basmati. They will not be treated as pieces of RiceTec property. And they need to have a market for their produce. Intellectual Intellectual property destabilizes both, and in fact, starts to become an incentive for destruction of biodiversity by pressures of the industry for monocultures, monocultures, on the one hand, but also by not giving people a chance to protect the resources from which they make a living because they are no more their resources. That is why ecology goes hand-in-hand with equity.
From theoretical physicist to advocate for biodiversity In Motion Magazine: Could you go over how you started in the field of physics and then ended up
where you are today and how that relates to your organizing? Vandana Shiva: I chose to be a physicist. I loved physics from an age when I didn’t even know what
the content was but I knew I wanted to figure out how nature works. Einstein was my hero. This is what inspired me. I lived through life training to be a physicist, initially training to be a nuclear physicist and then realizing there’s a dark side to it. I left that to become a theoretical physicist. I worked in foundations of quantum theory. As is typical, I was doing my Ph.D. in Canada and everyone everyone who goes from the South as a scientist stays on and becomes a university professor and I could see, “That’s what I will become.” I wanted to become that. But I said, “I’m not informed enough about how my society works. There is a question in my mind. We have the third biggest scientific community in the world. We are among the poorest of countries. Science and technology is supposed to create growth, remove poverty. Where is the gap? Why is science and technology not removing poverty?” I wanted to answer that question to myself. I said, “I will take off three years. Look at science policy issues. Be a little more educated, socially, and then go back to physics.” That was my chosen life path. I was, in any way, way, involved in forest protection
in the Himalayas, my home, before I went for a Ph.D. I constantly volunteered with a movement of women called Chipko . But when I started to work on science and technology issues, I realized very quickly that they are about resource control. They are not about efficiency. A big trawler in the sea is not more efficient than a small boat. It controls more resources. And denies denies the small boat. Green Revolution farming is not more efficient. It takes more water and leaves other areas deprived of financial investment, investment, water inputs, everything else. What you really see is technology acting as, what I called in that period, a polarizer of resource access. Very quickly I started to realize that technology issues, ecology issues, social inequality issues, were actually very intimately connected. I did a lot of analysis/writing at that point and I was invited by the United Nations to carry these issues further. Meantime, Meantime, the Ministry of Environment, seeing some of my reports, commissioned me to look at mining in my valley. I had just had my son, the 21-year-old boy who is walking around (in the office where this interview took place), and I said “perfect”. I had lost my mother at that time, so I said “I will go back, look at this mining, make a break in my science policy, also make a short break from my return to physics. Do the study. He’ll be a little older. But I will also do more work on ecology and the grassroots movement. Did the study. We stopped the mine.
Agriculture and violence I started to do the United Nations work and a huge world unfolded. The Punjab Punjab crisis burst which forced me to look at agriculture, ecology issues of agriculture, but also the rise of terrorism linked to unequal development. I wrote my book called “The Violence of the Green Revolution”. 1984 was the year I started to look very, very closely at those issues because we’d had genocide in Punjab. We’d lost our prime minister in that terrorism, t errorism, which eventually killed 30,000 people. people. And it was the year of Bhopal. As a result of that gas leak from a pesticide plant, 30,000 people more have died. So, I was just surrounded by these mega-violent epidemics epidemics all linked to agriculture and agriculture that was supposed to be progressive. In 1984, I decided that something was wrong and I needed to go to the roots of it. Why has agriculture gone so violent? Why are we so dependent on pesticides -weapons of mass destruction? The real weapons of mass destruction because they did move from the war industry into agriculture.
Focus on biotechnology and patenting After three of four years of looking more closely at agriculture issues, I started to get called into biotechnology biotechnology seminars because it was the next step. In ’87, at one of these seminars, the industry laid out its grand dream of controlling the world. They talked about needing genetic engineering so that there’s a technology that they have that peasants can’t use so that they can have a monopoly through technology. Patents. Because without it they cannot consolidate power. That was said by Sandoz. Sandoz merged later with Ceiber-Geigy. Sandoz and Ceiber-Geigy became Novartis. Novartis merged with AstroZeneca, AstroZeneca, which was anyway two independent companies, earlier. earlier. All of them merged to become Syngenta. What they had said at that time was, “By the turn of the century we will be five.” In ’87, I said, “I don’t want to live in a world where five giant companies companies control our health and our food.” I dropped everything else. I left my work on dams and forests and mines. I was doing very broad-scale work on the environment movement then. Dropped everything else. Handed it over to the next generation generation -- and they were brilliant activists in India -- and moved into a focus on two things: biotechnology and patenting.
I tracked the whole TRIPs negotiations through and have followed the biotech industry from the day it wanted to become a giant industry. I have tried to do my best to defend the freedom of people; create seed banks so that farmers have free seed; nature has freedom of diversity; and these monopolies are restrained. Since 1987 to now, which is 16 years, I have had a single pointed attention to prevent imperialism over life itself.
The influence of Gandhi In Motion Magazine: When you are working with the various farmers’ organizations, organizations, various mass organizations, organizations, specifically in India do people consciously learn from f rom what Gandhi had to say? (See photo of Gandhi's working room, the Harijan Ashram by the Sabarmati River, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India.) Vandana Shiva: Definitely. People very, very much learn from what Gandhi had said. When I brought
the TRIPs issues for the first time to farmers’ organizations in India, in ’91 when the first draft of the WTO texts were ready, it was called the Dunkel draft text, I started to tell people what this would imply. It took no time: by ’92, ’93, we had giant farmer rallies. And the title (of the movement) was the Seed Satyagraha Satyagraha -- the non-violent, non-cooperation non-cooperation with laws that create seed monopolies, inspired totally by Gandhi walking to the Dandi Beach and picking the salt and saying, “You can’t monopolize this which we need for life.” On the non-cooperation non-cooperation side we were very inspired by Gandhi. But also on the constructive side, the other side of our work with farmers and farm groups is the creative side of saving seeds, doing agriculture without corporate dependence dependence -- without chemicals, without their seed. All this is talked about in the language that Gandhi left us as a legacy. We work with three key concepts. (One) Swadeshi -- which means the capacity to do your own thing -produce your own food, produce your own goods. (Two) (Two) Swaraj -- to govern yourself. And we fight on three fronts -- water, water, food, and seed. JalSwaraj -JalSwaraj is water independence -- water freedom and water sovereignty. Anna Swaraj is food freedom, food sovereignty. And Bija Swaraj is seed freedom and seed sovereignty. (In regard to these fronts) Swa means self -- that which rises fr om the self and is very, very much a deep notion of freedom. I believe that these concepts, which are deep, deep, deep in Indian civilization, Gandhi Gandhi resurrected them to f ight for freedom. They are very important for today’s world because so far what we’ve had is centralized state rule, giving way now to centralized corporate control, and we need a third alternate. That third alternate is, in part, citizens being able to tell their states, “This is what your function is. This is what your obligations are,” and being able to have their states act on corporations to say, “This is something you cannot do.” The third component is Satyagraha, non-cooperation, basically saying, “We will do our thing and any law that tries to say that us being free is illegal we will have to not cooperate with it. We will defend our freedoms to have access to water, access to seed, access to food, access to medicine.”
The death of economic democracy In Motion Magazine: Last time we spoke, you were talking about how to make democracy more
viable and you were saying that it comes down to individual participation at an economic level. How would that function? Vandana Shiva: Well, actually any real, true democracy is one in which people can determine the
conditions conditions of their living -- their food, their health, their jobs, their livelihoods. These These are defined as economic issues. They used to be covered by democratic governance of the representative kind to the extent that before globalization, if you voted someone to power you could put demands on that
representative to say, “We need a school in this community, and if you promise you get us a school we are with you.” By and large, it was possible for politicians to come back and deliver their promise because it was within the national sovereign space. But globalization has meant the erosion of national sovereign space. For example, under the agreement on agriculture nobody can guarantee a price to a farmer. Governments cannot go to farmers and say, “We will make sure you get a living price for your farm commodities.” They cannot go to a community and say, “We will defend your jobs and prevent them from being undermined and companies running off to some cheap overseas site.” They cannot offer guarantees on education, they cannot offer healthcare healthcare -- the typical things democracy was made of. What we’ve seen is a split of democracy. It’s been emptied out of its economic content, been left with a representative representative shell of electoral theatrics -- literally. literally. Economic decisions have moved out of the hands of citizens and even of the hands of countries and moved into organizations controlled by corporations like the WTO, and the World Bank, the IMF (International (International Monetary Fund), and the corporations themselves. What we have is economic dictatorship combined with representative democracy. But representative democracy under economic dictatorship is not able to counter that dictatorship and act as an economic democratic force. (Rather it) moves and leans increasingly into winning votes by polarizing society and dividing society along lines of race, gender, religion, ethnicity. That is why over the ’90s, as globalization has deepened its reach in our communities and countries, fundamentalism, communalism, religious hatred have seen a rise. Because religious fundamentalism, I believe, is a child of the death of economic democracy. In Motion Magazine: Because? Vandana Shiva: Because people without economic rights are left insecure. There is joblessness.
They can’t understand the processes leading to it. Ordinary farmers can’t really understand why prices are going down. If you can say, “The prices are going down because some other farmer in some other state is doing something to you;” or, “Your water is disappearing because some other state is doing something;” or, “Your jobs are going because the Moslems are breeding too much;” or in Europe, “The immigrants are coming too fast; or in the United States, “The Mexicans are crossing the border;” it takes no time before the economic insecurity left as a result of globalization mutates into a ready-made ground for political interests to say, “Your job has been taken away by so and so.” “Your security has been robbed by so and so.” That’s the rhetoric that has filled the space as economic insecurity has grown.
The recovery of economic democracy In Motion Magazine: How can a farmer, for example, economically become involved? Vandana Shiva: I think the recovery of economic democracy is at the heart of recovery of democracy
itself. And it doesn’t stop at that. It goes further into the creation of peace. In a way, we really have three combined challenges, just now. We’ve got the threat of war and violence. We’ve got the threat of economic insecurity, insecurity, loss of jobs, loss of livelihoods, loss of incomes for farmers. And thirdly, thirdly, we’ve got this whole situation that our leaders are not representing our will -the collapse of democracy.
Ordinary farmers have to get involved, can get involved, by engaging in a recovery of economic democracy as an everyday practice meaning, as we do here, with seed Swaraj, with Anna Swaraj, saving seeds, growing your own seed, not going to Monsanto in every season and having your seed collapse.
Making chipatis in Old Delhi.
I was just told, yesterday, that 41 billion rupees of losses have been faced by farmers in one state who were sold Monsanto corn. We did a calculation that farmers of Bt cotton, the genetically-engineered genetically-engineered cotton, lost a billion rupees in one season. If farmers are saving the seed, growing their crop, they are making reclamation of their economic space. They are giving up chemicals and the pesticides that have contaminated all sources of water in this country, including the soft drinks now. They are not just saving money. They are saving their lives and they are saving public health.
Making saris.
By reaching out to consumers and setting up alternate marketing marketing systems, as we do with the Dilli Haat where we have our direct marketing stall, we in Navdanya,, my organization, which is the main outlet Navdanya for organic growers in this country, we bring the produce directly from farmers, and it’s literally their marketing platform.
The flow of wealth from South to North In Motion Magazine: The contradiction between
knowledge, knowledge, as a collective process, and patents being the opposite of that … do you think that is related to the fact that wealth has been flowing from one half of the world to the other?
Sacks of peppers in Old Delhi.
Vandana Shiva: North-South inequality inequality is very
clearly a result of imperialistic structures being put in place that suck wealth out of the South, put it in the North. That’s exactly why the North looks rich and the South looks poor. Not because human beings in the South don’t know how to create wealth. Everyone knows how to make things, create things. Every one is creative. But when the results of your creativity, productivity are not yours to hold and the results of your labor and creativity are transferred somewhere else the one who takes it becomes rich and the one who’s left without it is the one who stays poor.
Spices for sale in Old Delhi.
During colonial rule, this extraction was done through ownership ownership over land. The British came to to India to a country, which was richer than England at that time, and every record tells you that. They used to exchange pepper with bags of gold. A sack of pepper used to be equal to a sack of gold. Then they came in as traders, established themselves themselves as Busy market area in Old Delhi.
rulers. First as the East India Company, which was thrown out in the 1857 Rebellion and War of Independence, then, as the crown which took over the role of the Company and continued to rule. The regions that were the richest, such as Bengal, became the poorest. In 1942, two million people died of famine in the land where there was no shortage of wheat. Amartya Sen got a Nobel prize for saying something so basic, that people did not die because there was not enough food. They died because they had been robbed of their entitlement. That was the basis of his Nobel prize. That is also the basis of noticing inequality. We (Navdanya) have two books on the history of food and farming and we have tracked in them what the wealth of Indian peasants was being used for. Schools were being built in England. Mental asylums were being run by the transfer of peasant wealth into England. That’s why the colonizing empire constantly grew. grew. That’s what land ownership did at that time, which the British institutionalized in this country. Before that we had land use. We had use-of-it right. Not private property in land. The British turned the revenue collectors into landowners and created what they called the permanent settlement and Zamidari system through which wealth would flow to them. The revenue collectors were left as landowners. The original cultivators were left as the dispossessed peasants. peasants.
From ownership of land to ownership of biodiversity What ownership over land, a very distorted ownership of a land, did to indigenous communities at that time of colonialism, ownership over biodiversity, seeds, genes, medicine is doing in today’s world. The biodiversity is in what is called the poorer part of the world. We are biodiversity rich but every year, annually, $60 billion worth of wealth-transfer is taking place because the control over the products is in the hands of the North. Monopolies of patents are in their hands. Monopolies on trade are in their hands. Coffee -- trade jumped from $40 billion to $70 billion billion over the last few years so there was literally a doubling of trade. One would have imagined a doubling of trade would have left a doubling of incomes in the hands of those who grew the coffee. The incomes of the coffee producers dropped from $9 billion to $5 billion and some of the most dispossessed people of the world today are the coffee growers, as also every other commodity grower. These are amazing mechanisms -- the trade arrangements, trade treaties, intellectual property rights patent treaties. They are doing, once again, in a deeper way what colonialism did and the projections are that 70% of American wealth will be through rent collection, through patents, because the U.S government government is not designing America as a society where people are involved in making things. It has dismantled dismantled manufacture. It has gone off to China. Pick up anything in a supermarket -- it is made in China. But America would would still like to collect returns and that is through intellectual property. property. So, while people’s people’s jobs are disappearing, disappearing, the corporate wealth is increasing and then, of course, all the details of the rest of it carry on. There are all these mechanisms of taking wealth from those who work, those who create, to those who control through extremely coercive instruments of power.
War is globalization by other means In Motion Magazine: Which is now further enforced by invading other people’s countries? Vandana Shiva: I have said that war is another name for globalization because if you really look at
Iraq it wasn’t liberated. American soldiers didn’t come out winning. More of them have died since the so-called war got over. But one thing did happen and that was that corporate America got to enter Iraq and use American American tax money in the process. Bechtel got a big contract. Halliburton got a big contract. That is where the whole so-called reconstruction went. This is exactly what globalization does – (for example) put the water of the world in the hands of Bechtel, Suez (Lyonnaise des Eaux), Vivendi (Environment). (Environment). Globalization is war by other means and war is globalization by other means.
In Motion Magazine: It depends on the policy of the leaders of the U.S. at the time? Vandana Shiva: At this point it so happens America America is the empire. But one thing we learned with the
British Empire is that empires rise and empires sink. Published in In Motion Magazine March 28, 2004
Interview with Vandana Shiva (2002) Discussing “Water Wars” Resurrection of commons, community rights, and direct and basic democracy Interview by Nic Paget-Clarke Johannesburg, South Africa •
• • • • • •
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Introduction Anti-poverty movemen movements ts Water lessons Dams Vandana Vand ana Shiva in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo Industrial agriculture and the World Bank by Nic Paget-Clarke. Women organizers and activists The market paradigm and the ecological paradigm Water rights and indigenous communities Cowboy economics The Narmada Project / the Baliraja Memorial Dam Public-private water projects Corporate states and privatization Earth democracy Crop prices fixed by farming communities The World Summit
Introduction Dr. Vandana Shiva is founder of both the Research Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology, an independent public industry research group, and Navdanya a grassroots conservation movement in India. This interview was conducted by Nic Paget-Clarke on September 1, 2002 at St Stithians, site of the People's Earth Summit parallel event to the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development Developm ent in Johannesburg. Her most recent book at the time of the interview is " Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit". •
•
To see our full series of interviews and articles from the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, August 26 - September 4, 2002 click here here.. Also see: Interview with Vandana Shiva (2003) The Role of Patents in the Rise of Globalization New Delhi, India
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Water lessons We got a logging ban in the High Himalayas because of this direct action over a whole decade. Ordinary village women, no education, not one word can they write, but they taught the world one of the biggest water lessons. Taught me my big water lesson that as you log the forest you get floods and droughts. Springs dry up. That’s where the water crisis comes fr om. The next lesson I learned was when I was commissioned by the Ministry of Environment to look at the impact of mining in Doon Valley. From a typical sort of bureaucratic-agency scientific perspective the impact of mining was the superficial impact that you can literally see with your eyes. But when I started to visit the villages f or surveys, the women said, “It’s about water.” water.” And that’s what took me down the track of recognizing that the limestone was the aquifer, it was the water body that conserved water that would have been conserved, would have been stored by a two hundred thousand thousand crore, which is twenty thousand million Rupees, investment in a water storage system. That’s what nature and the limestone belt and the mineral deposits were doing for us. It is the women’s lessons in hydro-geology rather than the scientists’ lessons in geology that taught me about mountains and mining and how mining too is linked to water.
Dams Then, in the same period, the early ’80s, one by one our rivers started to get dammed – Survernarekha, Survernarekha, Narmada – and I started to go to every local community that was protesting against displacement displacement to help them put together their assessments, including the early assessments and
impact of the Narmada dam, and training the younger generation of activists who then really built a massive movement called the Narmada Bichao Andolan. I learned there, during that period, that dams are built on the assumption that you augment water. All you do is re-direct water. You do not increase the flow of water in a river you merely store it and divert it to places where you can create commercial agriculture, feed industry, feed big towns. And meantime the areas that were getting water through the river, the wells that were being re-charged by that river, the fisheries that were being supported by that river, are killed. That cost is never taken into account.
Industrial agriculture and the World Bank It was during that time that the violence in Punjab taught me that industrial agriculture was a very big water destroyer. The economics of industrial agriculture had always been posed as higher productivity. That the reason you need these seeds, these crops, these chemicals is to produce more food. But more food with respect to what was never questioned. Yes, with respect to labor by getting rid of labor from the land. But not with respect to land because you are not producing more nutrition per acre. You were destroying many crops to create monocultures. Densely mixed farming produces far more per acre.
Site of the People's Earth Summit parallel event to the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
But the most important thing was water was never considered. Water was planned for. Inputs were planned for. But in the productivity assessment the inefficiency of water use was never considered. And my calculations showed me during that period that many of the wars and civil conflicts of that time were around rivers because different regions were fighting over the same rivers to feed these thirsty crops. Five times more water is used in industrial agriculture for growing the same amount of wheat and rice than indigenous agriculture. With respect to scarce water you actually had an inefficient revolution. You had a regressive revolution. In the ’90s, the early ’90s, women in the coastal areas started to destroy shrimp farms. They called me to help them when they were arrested. I did the studies to file a Supreme Court case in their defense and those studies showed me that for something simple like shrimp landing on a plate in North America … . No one realizes that for one acre of a shrimp farm two hundred acres of eco-systems are being destroyed. The waters are being made saline. Sea waters are being polluted. There are high costs for the Green Revolution -- the Green Revolution is the word for the industrial agriculture in India. And it is not just the dams. Where there were no rivers r ivers and there were no dams, the World Bank gave money to pump water from the ground so that today there are places where water is being pumped from a thousand to five thousand feet. I remember two regions in particular where I did surveys for governments when the water started to get scarce and they were wondering, wondering, “Why is there no water?” I said, “Show me your plans. Show me your policies.” I started reading and I found that at a certain point the World Bank had said, “Stop growing millet. Start growing sugar cane. Stop growing subsistence crops. Start growing cash crops.” And that shift to very, very water-demanding crops, all World Bank requirements, lead to groundwater being mined and creating water famine. My dream is one day to make a bill for genocide for the World Bank because more than any other agency it has destroyed the hydrological systems of this planet in its arrogance and blindness. In Motion Magazine: Why would they suggest these changes? Vandana Shiva: Because the World Bank only looks at returns on investment. It drags countries into
borrowing. It forces loans on them and then wants to maximize return on loans. Well, loans don’t come
out of stable eco-systems. Loans come out of cash crops. Loan payments, interest payments. They are squeezing out loan re-payments by killing water systems and killing people who depend on them.
Women organizers and activists In Motion Magazine: How is it that so many of these organizers and activists are women? women? Vandana Shiva: Well, for water it is very clear. In the Third World women carry the water to get it home. They are the ones first to know water is polluted. They are the first to know the well has run dry. They are the first to know water is saline. They are the canary of the eco-crisis.
The market paradigm and the ecological paradigm In Motion Magazine: What’s the difference between the market paradigm of water security and the
ecological paradigm? Vandana Shiva: The ecological paradigm paradigm focuses on the water cycle and recognizes that by its very
nature water is a renewable resource. resource. If we respect that cycle and do not interfere in it it’s going to give us abundance forever. But we have to function within it. We have to be bounded by it. Within that binding we have limitless water forever. The market paradigm does not look at the water cycle. It begins with cash. It begins with finance and then it’s, “How can I invest if I have money to extract water as a raw material and put it into something else that will generate more cash?” When that paradigm starts to create water crises that same paradigm comes up with a second solution which it is now offering here at the WSSD (World Summit on Sustainable Development). It’s a big offer. “We will now privatize water and commodify it.” Water is being exploited because because it is being treated as valueless, “Therefore, we will put a price on it,” but value and price are two very different things. When you function in an ecological paradigm you value water but you don’t price it. Because it is in fact priceless. In a market paradigm you price water but you don’t value it.
Water rights and indigenous communities In Motion Magazine: Why do collective water rights and management work well in indigenous
communities? Vandana Shiva: Well, for example with things like water, water is interconnected. Surface water is
connected intimately with the ground water. You can’t separate the two. Your river flows are connected with wells. Your mountain watershed is connected with the waters it receives. And not seeing that interconnectedness interconnectedness of water is what has lead to the privatization. Communities Communities have always recognized two things. First, that which we need for survival should never belong to an individual. It should be the common wealth. Second, it should be managed as the common wealth. Therefore, Therefore, community structures of responsibilities responsibilities have to be put in place. The rights are derived from collective responsibility. They are secondary. Primary is the collective responsibility. If you do not build that storage tank to harvest your monsoons monsoons in low-rainfall areas you are never going to have water. And you can’t build a tank alone. You have to join collectively. Once you harvest it together, then the only way to make that tank serve you is to have a common regime of what will be grown. If one individual grows sugar cane and drains that tank dry that is the typical tragedy of the commons that Garret Hardin (The ( The Tragedy of the Commons by Garret Hardin – 1968 Science ) talks about. But that is not typical of the commons. That is typical of the destruction of the commons
The tragedy is that Western individualized, atomized societies and their academics have imposed on the rest of the world this very false idea that commons by their very nature must degrade. But it is privatized property by its very nature that must ecologically degrade because because it is not being managed for ecological maintenance. It is being managed for highest returns. Common property property is what has allowed tanks built in India four thousand years ago to still supply water to people. In Motion Magazine: How big are these tanks? Vandana Shiva: The tanks are small but in huge chains. I have walked down chains of a thousand
tanks in a row. Literally connected with overflow from one to the other, feeding the other. Miraculous engineering that cannot be reproduced by any engineer today. In Motion Magazine: What dimensions? Vandana Shiva: Some will be a hundred square feet. Some might be a square mile, depending on the
topography. But in very dry areas, 600, 700 millimeters … they have been the lifeline in dry regions. In Motion Magazine: And they are constructed by humans? Vandana Shiva: They are constructed by humans. And we had, until the British tried to destroy it, systems of community management. management.
If today we have an ecology movement movement to fight privatizations it is because we can tap back into our historical memory, to say, “This is how this it could be done.”
Cowboy economics In Motion Magazine: What is cowboy economics? Vandana Shiva: Cowboy economics is the mentality of, if you get
somewhere first you have absolute rights to rape, plunder, pollute. You have no responsibility for neighbors, for those who came before you, the inhabitants who were there, or those who have to come after you.
A sculpture set up by the international NGO Friends of the Earth at the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development (August 26 - September 4, 2002) in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
It is cowboy economics that is being brought back to the front with privatization. privatization. Cowboy economics was the basis of the water rights in the western United States. Whoever gets there first has absolute rights. Eastern United States had a much more decent form of water distribution -- use-rights based on not disrupting the river flow so that others’ rights are not interfered in. It took others into account. Cowboy economics takes no one else into account – just the cowboy. The cowboy and his gun.
The Narmada Project / the Baliraja Memorial Dam In Motion Magazine: The Narmada project was financed by the World Bank. Can you explain to me
the difference between that and the Baliraja Memorial Dam – conceptually? Vandana Shiva: The Narmada dam is a giant dam – very, very big. The Naramada Project is 30 big
dams, and about 300 small ones. The Narmada Sagar is the big, first one they built. It is being built for the state and has the highest commercial agriculture and the highest industrialization. industrialization. All the polluting
chemical industry of the world has relocated to that state. It’s the thirst of the polluting petrochemical and chemical industry for which this dam is being built. Investors, basically, are looking for returns on investment. What that land did in terms of being ancestral homelands for indigenous people, what that water did, in terms of being a flow down a major, one of India’s most sacred, rivers is not even being considered. It’s based on large amounts of foreign investment, whether it was earlier the World Bank, or later bonds raised internationally. The Baliraja Dam is a small dam in another drought-prone area built with people’s mobilization. Their hands, their labor. It is meant to serve the sustenance needs of people. That is what it is designed for. In Motion Magazine: There is such a thing as a good dam? Vandana Shiva: The word dam is applied for any storage. The problem is the mega-dams, the giant dams. When you try and store water by human work there’s a limit of scale. Baliraja is not a giant dam. It’s a small storage system.
The giant dams which are built with huge earth-moving equipment … that’s where the problem starts because that really disrupts the water cycle. The lesson for the world was the Tennessee Valley corporation and the Hoover Dam -- these displays of huge power. Harvesting water with smaller dams has not been a problem. For example, there’s a very famous dam system in India built during the Vijayanagar Empire (1336-1565) and that dam has never caused waterlogging. Waterlogging is when too much water gets locked into the ground and the water table rises and your plants can’t grow because now they are getting suffocated. But in that same place, the World Bank financed a giant dam for the same amount of irrigation in the same region. Within a year, there was waterlogging. Within a year, thirteen people were shot dead for protesting against the land being destroyed through waterlogging. And this was due to the World Bank’s mechanisms. The World Bank leaves instructions in our countries. We can’t rule ourselves, according to our terms. The Bank tells us, now you will have a department like this, collection of rents like this, water taxes like this. So when the water tax people went to collect taxes from these farmers, the people said, “Not only have we received no benefits, you’ve destroyed our land. We won’t pay you.” And there was the worst form of police action and brutality that created an amazing new organizing among farmers. They realized suddenly they were into a different period with industrial agriculture and these large dams. Large dams are twins of polluting industry and industrial agriculture.
Public-private water projects In Motion Magazine: What are the negative consequences consequences of public-private
water projects? Vandana Shiva: There are three negative consequences of public-private
Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit -- by Vandana Shiva
water projects. The first is it inevitably leads to the privatization of the state. As is being done here at the World Summit, voluntary agreements are no more part of policy. They are no more debated through transparency of parliamentary debates. debates. Executives, individual individual bureaucrats in power, power, usually with a kickback or a bribe, sign off something that does not belong to the state. Water. It is not the property of the state. Water belongs to the people and the earth. It is a community resource, common property. Common property cannot become state property. But private-public partnerships assume water to be a state property, property, to then be privatized to a private corporation. But the very action privatizes the state and stops it from being a public entity. That to me is the single most crucial damage that it does.
Second, it takes what is a community resource and transfers it into a monopoly right. A distortion. distortion. First, a monopoly of the state and then a monopoly of the corporation that takes over. And the third damage it does, it leaves no accountability system either within a public-oriented state regulation or commons-oriented commons-oriented community regulation to regulate use. And I’ll give you just two examples of how this functions. Someone Someone signed away rights to Coca Cola. Where do they get their bottled water from? Why are they able to enter the market in such a big way with their Aquafinas Aquafinas and their Kinleys and their whatever they call them? They are capturing the market because they are getting the water for free. How do they get the water for free? Because somewhere somewhere someone wrote a contract with them. That was a private-public private-public partnership. They get a piece of land. They start drilling deep – a thousand feet, two thousand feet deep where there is no pollution. They are not purifying water. They can’t manufacture water. That’s not for us to manufacture. They steal water. In the state of Kerala, for example, in a region that has such high rainfall that that region has never had water scarcity, within one year of a Coca Cola plant coming, pumping up 1.5 million liters a day for bottling water, three lakes went dry, rivers went dry. The women started to protest. Tribal women. Three hundred of them are now in jail. We organized a meeting against water privatization three weeks ago -- they couldn’t join us because they were in jail. That is how the consequences of privatepublic partnership end up. Another example example is the case of Suez getting the privatization contract for water in Delhi (linked to “Suez - Degrémont and the Privatization of Ganga Water” article). Where does it get the water? By stealing it from the Ganges. Not purifying the Yamuna, which is polluted, but stealing it through a dam that was built on public cost, a hundred thousand people displaced. This is a bigger disaster than Narmada, actually, it’s just not been in the world news so much. They divert the water out of irrigation, 635 million liters a day. Those bureaucrats who signed those contracts never had those rights. That is why private-public partnerships are in my view illegal both constitutionally, and we are going to file cases on all of these issues, but also illegal in a system of natural rights. Water has to be governed by natural law, not by the law of the market.
Corporate states and privatization In Motion Magazine: You mention corporate states. What do you mean by that? Vandana Shiva: The oil industry scandals in the United States have made it very clear that as the
nexus between industry and government grows more and more intimate and these kinds of privatepublic deals allow decisions to be made in a totally undemocratic way against the interests of people and against sustainability, what you get is actually one entity. Mr. Bush is both an oilman and the head of the most powerful state of the world. He is one individual defending defending the oil industry using state power. He is the corporate state. Given the way our representative democracy has been perverted, and is depending so much on money with no regulation of how much money gets spent and where the money comes from, there constantly builds up a spiral such that the closer you are to industry, and the more you are industry, the more money you can mobilize to get yourself into power and the more favors and deals and private-public private-public partnerships you can strike to t o make the industry of which you are a part bigger so that the next time round it can finance you even more against your opponents who might have far more popular backing but don’t have the mobilizing capacity for elections, given that votes today are bought not mobilized. Anyway, Anyway, private-public partnership, the privatization of the state, the corporatization corporatization of the state, inevitably leads to a situation where electoral democracy also becomes a marketplace and votes become a commodity. That’s why we need deep change.
Earth democracy In Motion Magazine: Do you have ideas on that deep change? Vandana Shiva: I’ve called it earth democracy. And by that I mean three critical things.
First, recognizing once again that we are just one inhabitant, one species among many on the earth. We have to be responsible to the rest of the earth’s inhabitants. We have to relocate ourselves not in the global marketplace but in the earth family, in the earth community. Secondly, to conserve the resources of the earth, and this can only be done through custodianship, guardianship, guardianship, love and care in concreteness and locally, it is necessary that power-responsibility rights go where water can be conserved, seeds can be conserved, biodiversity can be conserved, education can be guaranteed, livelihoods can be generated, people can have meaning. The highest powers need to go right to the bottom. We’ve had radical shifts in our Indian constitution recognizing this. If you really want to conserve resources you’ve got to put the powers to make decisions about natural resources on the ground. Of course, now that is conflicting with globalization and we have massacres over that conflict right now. But our constitution recognizes that the highest powers must be at the bottom. The right powers must go upwards. So, resurrection of commons, community rights, and direct and basic democracy.
Crop prices fixed by farming communities The third critical change is a shift in both the politics and economic paradigms. Politically, a paradigm based on democracy is bottom upwards. It does not begin with elections, it begins with decisions on everyday matters. What price should crops sell at needs to be fixed by local farming communities communities not by Chicago commodity exchange control. Once you have the right prices, everything else will fall into place. Justice will fall into place. Sustainability will fall into place.
A large protest puppet peers over the Monsanto headquarters sign, St Louis, Missouri. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
And that will also generate a living economy. Just now, the economy has become an economy of death. Just killing countries. Killing farmers. Killing fisherman. Killing children. Killing women. It is efficient at killing and then saying that is not my responsibility. “You can’t prove it’s because of what I did.” For example, U.S. farmers have lost a crop. Indian farmers have lost a crop. Southern African farmers have lost a crop. But the oil industry is still not taking responsibility. responsibility. President Bush is not taking responsibility. Instead they are taking the damage caused by one irresponsible industry, the oil industry, through climate change, and saying, “Now, we will use this to blackmail the Africans to buy GM (genetically modified) foods and create a market opportunity for another industry – Monsanto.” To this, a local democracy, a living democracy would basically say, “No. Our economy, we will shape. We know what we can do and we will tell you what we can’t do. Then we’ll import from you.” It turns globalization on its head. You know, we’ve handed over too much power and at this point if we don’t take back power there will be no humans alive on this planet. It used to be said, “Bread or freedom”. It used to be either / or. It’s very clearly bread and freedom. freedom. If we don’t make ourselves really free we won’t have bread.
The World Summit In Motion Magazine: This seems like a critical conference. Vandana Shiva: Yes. In Motion Magazine: What is your understanding of what has been going on?
Vandana Shiva: At the formal conference, two opposite things have been happening. On the one hand they’ve got some negotiators busy with working out timelines for real commitments but implementation about how to get to those objectives is all about WTO (World Trade Organization) globalization. I just did a count in the negotiations last night. Doha and WTO are mentioned 46 times in the implementation decision. Rio is mentioned once in one square bracket, which means it could disappear. So it is a hijack of the Rio agenda and replacement by the globalization and trade agenda, which means by the corporate agenda. The countervailing force that international environmental environmental treaties and laws and policies were able to create – the attempt here is to totally dismantle it so that in international law we have nothing but the power of cooperation. That is what is being sought to be done. Last September 11, there was the hijack of planes which were then rammed into the World Trade Center towers. What we are seeing is a hijack of world governance governance and the right to ram into all ecosystems and all people’s lives on this earth. We have to find ways other than summit decisions to find ways to protect our lives. In Motion Magazine: As yet undetermined? Vandana Shiva: No, I think they are being shaped. I think small invisible gatherings like this People’s
Earth Summit, the Children’s Earth Summit, there are places where people are recognizing that we have to withdraw consent and we have to withdraw engagement, and build alternative systems. Published in In Motion Magazine, March 6, 2003
"GANGA" is not for sale Suez - Degrémont and the Privatization of Ganga Wate Water r by Vandana Shiva, Afsar H. Jafri, Kunwar Jalees New Delhi, India •
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State appropriates people’s resources for corporate profits Suez-Degrémont Water Plant at Sonia Vihar Who is paying for corporate profits? Water Requirement and Sources of Water in Vandana Vand ana Shiva in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo Delhi by Nic Paget-Clarke. Corruption in Delhi Jal Board's Suez Degrémont Plant Destruction of Tehri for Water Supply to Delhi Tehri Dam built in a seismic fault zone. Impact of Water Diversion on Agriculture and Food Security Water Requirements for Different Crops
The Descent of the Ganges
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Upper Ganga Canal: the lifeline of Western U.P. Water Needs for Different Crops in the region.. region Water Requirement Requirement for Rice What does diverting water to Delhi mean for National Food Security? Alternatives to privatization of Ganga and meeting Delhi's water needs Water Liberation Water Liberation Declaration
Interview w/ Dr. Vandana Shiva (2002) Discussing “Water Wars” Resurrection of commons, community rights, and direct and basic democracy Johannesburg, South Africa
On August 9th, 2002, on the eve of the Quit India Day, more than 5000 farmers of Muradnagar and adjoining areas of western Uttar Pradesh gathered in a Rally at Village Bhanera to protest the laying of a giant 3.25 meters-diameter pipeline to supply the water from the River Ganga to the Sonia Vihar Water Plant for Delhi. The project, which has been contracted to Suez-Ondeo Degrémont of France by the Government of Delhi, will deprive the richest farmlands of India of irrigation water. The Sonia Vihar water treatment plant, which was inaugurated on June 21, 2002 by the Chief Minister of Delhi, is designed for a capacity of 635 million liters a day on a 10 year BOT (build-operate-transfer) basis, at a cost of 1.8 billion rupees (approx. 50 million dollars). The contract between Delhi Jal Board (the Water Supply Department of the Delhi Government) and the French company Ondeo Degrémont (subsidiary of Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux Water Division Division - the water giant of the world), is supposed to provide safe drinking water for the city. The water for the Suez-Degrémont plant in Delhi will come from Tehri Dam through the Upper Ganga Canal up to Muradnagar in Western Uttar Pradesh (UP) and then through the giant pipeline to Delhi. The Upper Ganga Canal, which starts at Haridwar and carries the holy water of Ganga up to Kanpur via Muradnagar, is the main source of irrigation for this region.
This legend relates to the descent of the River Ganga from the heavens into the earth. The ruler of Ayodhya, King Sagar, an ancestor of Rama, of the solar race performed the Aswamedha Sacrifice 99 times, where each time, the horse that he sent around the earth, returned to his kingdom unchallenged. Indra the King of Gods, in an act of jealousy, kidnapped and hid the horse in the hermitage of Kapila Muni - when the 100th sacrifice was being performed. The sixty thousand sons of Kapila came to the hermitage of Kapila in their search for the horse, and mistaking Kapila Muni to be the abductor, attacked him. An enraged Kapila Muni burnt the 60000 princes to ashes. One of the grandchildren of King Sagar, hearing about the plight of his father and uncles, came in search of Kapila Muni and asked him for a solution to the problem, and was advised that the waters of the River Ganga would miraculously bring back the dead princes to life. His descendant Bhagirathi, continued his efforts to bring the Ganga to the earth from the heavens to purify the ashes of his ancestors and bring them back to life. Bhagirata's Bhagirata's prayers were rewarded and the Ganges rushed to the earth; however, the might of the river was too much for the earth to withstand. Fearing a catastrophe, Bhagirata prayed to Shiva, who held out his matted hair to catch the river as she descended, and thus softened her journey to the earth. Bhagiratha patiently patiently led the river ri ver down to the sea from the Himalayas; however, being unable to locate the exact spot where the ashes lay, he requested Ganga to follow her own course. The Ganga, therefore in the region of Bengal, divided herself into a hundred mouths and formed the Ganges delta.
The 9th August Rally at Bhanera village was the culmination of the 300 kilometer-long mobilization drive along the Ganga by the farmers of Garhwal and inhabitants of the devastated city of Tehri to liberate the river from being privatized. The rally was launched from Haridwar - one of the oldest and holiest cities of India built on the banks of Ganga - where hundreds of farmers, together with priests, citizens and worshippers of Ganga announced that "Ganga is not for Sale", and vowed to defend the freedom of this holy river. Thousands of farmers and others in villages along the route joined the rally to declare that they would never allow Suez to take over Ganga waters.
The rallyists joined more than 300 people from across the country, representing over a hundred grassroots groups intellectuals, writers and lawyers, at the 3-day Convention on Earth Democracy People's People's Rights to Natural Resources, organized by Navdanya from 10th to 12th August 2002, at Indian Social Institute, New Delhi. The Convention sought to provide evidence of the state's violent appropriation of people's land, water and biodiversity, and evolve common action plans and strategies to defend collective community rights to resources. "There is only one struggle left - the struggle for the right to life", said Magasaysay Award Award willing writer Mahaswheta Devi. Eminent author Arundhati Roy and eminent scientist Vandana Shiva stressed the urgent need to take collective united action to defend people's rights to land, water and biodiversity.
The Haridwar Declaration
Today, the 8th of August 2002, on the eve of the 60th Anniversary of the “Quit India Movement”, we all have gathered here to pledge that: We will never let the river Ganga be sold to any multinational corporations. Ganga is revered as a mother (Ganga Maa) and prayed to and on its banks important ceremonies ceremonies starting from birth till death are performed (according to Hindu religious practices). We will never allow our mother or its water to be sold to Suez-Degrémont or any other corporations. corporations.
The sacred waters of the Ganga cannot be the property of any one individual or a State appropriates people’s resources for company. Our mother Ganga is not for Sale.
corporate profits The farmers of western Uttar Pradesh, Tehri and Muradnagar are not the only ones whose local common resource are being appropriated by the state, to be handed over to corporations for making corporate profits. All over India, such appropriation appropriation of people's people's natural resources is taking place, often accompanied by state violence, as a result of unethical practices of globalization being pushed through the dictates of the World Bank (WB), International Monetary fund (IMF) and World Trade Organization (WTO). Globalization for the large majority of the poor in India has meant losing what they have in the form of water, land and biodiversity through transferring the common property of the t he villagers and tribals to global corporations. This is being achieved through water privatization, patent regimes and creating new property rights to biodiversity and new genetic materials, liberalization and corporatization of agriculture and liberalization of investment investment which is alienating land from the poorest in total violation of the Indian Constitution which guarantee's guarantee's human rights and natural rights. Reckless privatization and appropriation of water is robbing people of water, the very basis of life. The New Water Policy is centered around water privatization. privatization. In Kerala 300 adivasis of the Coca-Cola Virudha Samara Samithy (Anti Coca-Cola Struggle Committee) Committee) were arrested at a mass rally at Plachimada on 4 August 2002. The people were protesting Coca Cola's takeover of common water resources of the village for its water bottling plant. The company has been drawing 15 lakh liters of water per day, which has dried the aquifers within 2 years and has polluted the water.
We boycott the commodification and privatization of the Ganga and any other water resources. We pledge to conserve and judiciously use our regional water resources to save our environment and ecology, so that we would gift our coming generation a clean and beautiful environment environment as well as safeguard their right to water resources. We pledge and declare that the local community will have the right over the local water resources. It is the duty of the local community to conserve and sensibly utilize their resources. Anyone from outside the community whether an individual, an organization organization or a corporation have to take the permission of the Gram Sabha for utilizing these resources. The river Ganga was brought upon the face of earth by Bhagirath through his yagna (prayers) to sustain the existence of life on Earth. The Ganga is now intrinsic to our cultural and a part of our heritage and our civilization. Our life and progress over the millennia has been dependent upon the sacred waters of Ganga. We will fight any multinational multinational company trying to take away our right to life by privatizing Ganga waters. The "Water Liberation Movement" will continue till we liberate the sacred waters of Ganga from the clutches of corporations, like Suez-Ondeo Degrémont.
The water scarcity has hit the local Adivasi and Dalit community the hardest. The adivasis are asserting their primary rights to water and demanding demanding that the Coca-Cola restore the environment, environment, pay compensation, dose down the factory and quit the country. In another instance, Coca-Cola is also sucking about 200 cusecs of water every day through four - 20 inches pipes in Khichri Village near NTPC in Ghaziabad for its Kinley brand. Due to this the water level in this region has gone down by 10 feet. It is also known that Coca-Cola factories at Nemam (Madurai), Athur (Chennai), in Thane District, Khammam in Andhra etc have created similar problems. The problem is not isolated nor exclusively to Coca-Cola alone, but is repeated wherever water resources have been handed over to corporations who are overexploiting it.
Suez-Degrémont Water Plant at Sonia Vihar Ondeo Degrémont, a subsidiary of Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux Water Division, has been awarded a 2 billion rupees contract (almost 50 million dollars) for the design, building and operation operation (for 10 years) of a 635 million liters/day Drinking Water Production Plant at Sonia Vihar in New Delhi to cater 3 million inhabitants of the capital. Won through the collaboration of all the Group companies, within the context of an international call for tenders, this 2 billion rupees contract is the first contract of this size in India, after Bombay, Bombay, for Degrémont. World leader in water treatment engineering, Ondeo Degrémont has a turnover of 810 million euros in 1999 and it is present in more than 70 countries with 3,600 employees while Suez operates in 130 counties in all five continents. Out of the 30 water contracts awarded by the big cities as on 1990's water privatization drive, 20 went to the Suez (http://www.ondeodegremont.com ). Degrémont, on its web site, proudly state "today, the support of Suez enables Degrémont to use its knowhow throughout the world: pumping water, treating and transporting it, collecting, treating and controlling the pollution of waste water are some of the company's company's oldest skills. This support results in a combination combination of technical experience and reassuring financial basis, which can be made available to fund construction and operating contracts".
Uneven Distribution of Drinking Water in Delhi
The per capita daily water supply should be at least 150 liters as per the standards set by the Central Public Health and Environment Engineering Organization of the Union Urban Development Ministry, Govt. of India. Despite DJB claim of equal allocation of water, supply of drinking water in the Capital is characterized by vastly unequal distribution, with posh colonies and VIP areas getting several times more than the supply given to rural areas and resettlement colonies.
Construction of the giant 3.2 meter-diameter meter-diameter pipe on A recent report reveals that people in a stretch of 30 kilometers from Muradnagar to Sonia Mehrauli and Narela receive only 29 and 31 Vihar is going on and till date, about 10 kilometers of liters per person per day respectively, those the pipeline has been laid down.The disastrous in the Cantonment Board get 509 liters and impact of this project on the farmers of Western UP is Lutyen's Delhi 462 liters, The Karol Bagh evident from the fact that this area is totally zone receives 337 liters per person per day. dependent upon the canal for irrigation. Even before It is also estimated that unless the depleted being operationalised to divert 630 million liters water table in Mehrauli is maintained or water/day from irrigation, farmers are already feeling replenished, replenished, Mehrauli will experience the impact of corporate greed for profits - the Upper desertification within the next ten years. Ganga Canal is being lined to prevent seepage into the neighboring fields (an important source of moisture for farming) and recharge of ground water, and farmers are being prevented from digging wells even as they are reeling under severe drought. The lining of the canal to prevent recharging of groundwater groundwater has terrified the farmers of the whole region of western UP. At a meeting organized by Navdanya on 21st July at Chaprauli, the land of Choudhury Choudhury Charan Singh, ex-Prime Minister, farmers stated, "we will not allow the Canal to be lined
and supply water to Delhi. Instead the government should link the Upper Ganga Canal to the Yamuna Canal passing through this area to tackle the severe drought."
Who is paying for corporate profits? Privatization of water has been justified on the ground that f ull cost must be paid when water giants get water markets whereas with water privatization they demand a full price from the people. However, as the case of the Delhi Water plant shows, the corporations get the water for free without paying for full social and environmental cost to those rural communities from whom the water is taken. The country has got into huge debt for the loans taken from World Bank for the Ganga Canal. At the same time the giant 3.25 meter-diameter pipe is being built through public finances. In effect the public pays the price while transnational companies make the profit. Private Public Partnership is the buzzword in the water privatization. They are also the dominant theme on the up coming World Summit for Sustainable Development at Johannesburg, 10 years after the Rio Summit. Delhi water privatization is a clear example that shows that private public partnership in water amount to public cost and private gain. Delhi Jal Board's proposal to meet the needs of the entire population of Delhi includes activities centered around the public-private partnerships models as propagated by the World Bank, with an emphasis on commercialization and cost recovery.
Sale of River Bhavani
The Ganga is not the only river whose water is being privatized to satisfy corporate greed. River Bhavani - an important tributary of Cauvery has been sold by the Tamil Nadu government to Kinley - the brand name under which Coca-Cola sells bottled drinking water. This sale has been effected by the government government even while the state is reeling under severe drought, ground water levels have reached depths of over 1,000 ft., and water riots and water-related murders have become an everyday occurrence. The sale of the river, which was a major source of water for the people of the region, has been routed through Poonam Beverages, a new firm belonging to the Coimbatore-based Annapooma Hotels, who will draw 1,00,000 day/day to supply it to Kinley, Coca Cola's bottled water. The annual fees that Poonam Beverage has paid the government is a mere Rs. 5,00,000, for which hundreds of thousands of people are being denied a vital resource, that is their t heir natural right, and without which they cannot survive.
The enforced process of decentralization is turning developing developing countries economies into lucrative markets for construction and design firms who are seeing business boom from funds earmarked for development projects. With World Bank's and other international international financial institutions' funds earmarked for water infrastructure investment, in the form of BOT (Build, Operate, Transfer), BOOT and BDO (Build, Design, Operate), India is a buoyant market. The World Bank even states that it can help increase the international revenues of companies whose activities include wastewater management, via the ‘UN Development Business’ bank. Delhi Jal Board (DJB) claims that they have no intention of raising the water rates for the time being. However, as has been seen in the case of Enron with electricity, the Orissa Lift Irrigation Corporation in Orissa, and other cases, privatization leads leads very quickly to a steep rise in the price of water and electricity. With regards to concession to the poor, DJB said there would be no such proposal. DJB will continue to deliver the water to Delhites and maintain infrastructure i.e. burst water pipes, billing etc. Thus the people of Delhi will not just be paying Suez and the Jal Board for the water directly, they will be paying through taxes to maintain the infrastructure, thus freeing the corporation of any expenses which might detract from their profits.
Water Requirement and Sources of Water in Delhi Delhi is experiencing increasing pressure to meet demand for its water resources. Growing urbanization, improvements in living standards, exploding population are just some of the contributing factors. The population of Delhi is expected to cross 15 million by the end of 2002. The city, at the moment, requires 3,324 million liters of water a day (MLD) while what it gets stands closer to 2,034
MLD. Average Average water consumption in Delhi is estimated at being 240 liters per capita per day (lpcd), the highest in the country. The large-scale extraction of groundwater is a result of this widening gap between the demand and supply of water. And still worse, serious doubts are also being raised about both the quality and quantity of groundwater. Delhi receives its water from 3 sources: •
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A. Surface Water . 86% of Delhi's total water supply comes from surface water, namely the Yamuna River, which equals 4.6% of this resource through interstate agreements. B. Sub-surface -- Ranney wells and tubewells. This source, which is met through rainfall (approx. 611.8 mm in 27 rainy days), and unutilized rainwater runoff, is 193 MCM (million cubic meters). C. Graduated Resources. It is estimated at 292 MCM, however current withdrawal equals 312 MCM. Salinity and over exploitation has contributed to depletion and drastically effected the availability of water in different parts of the city (http://teriin.org/news/terivsn/issue35/wat er.htm)) However, according to a report er.htm released by the Central Ground Water Board (GCWB), Delhi's ground-water ground-water level has gone down by about eight meters in the last 20 years at the rate of about a foot a year.
Apart from groundwater, groundwater, Delhi gets its water from the Ganga Canal, the western Yamuna canal, the Bhakra canal and the Yamuna. Delhi’s water and wastewater management is controlled by the Delhi Jal Board (DJB), which has signed the contract with Suez Degremont. With the demand-supply gap projections for water set to increase in the next ten years, DJB have identified new raw water sources including Tehri, To see a larger version of this chart - click here here.. Renukal, Kishau Lahawar dams. Plans also center on the construction of new and existing sewage treatment plants (STPs) which will enable an increase in treatment capacity. Rainwater harvesting is another option that DJB is considering.
Corruption in Delhi Jal Board's Suez Degrémont Plant The process for allotment of contract for the Sonia Vihar Plant to Ondeo Degrémont has not been without controversy and objections objections by senior DJB members. Of the 3 companies companies that bid for the tender, Ondeo Degrémont was chosen despite being higher in cost than the two other contenders, and allegedly an inferior technology. It was also known that Ondeo Degrémont had already experienced problems with previous contracts in Surat and Delhi (Ohkla) where they were 2 years behind in the project. Jagdish Anand, a member of the Opposition party, has accused senior politicians of trying to bribe him into silence. “Earlier also I had exposed the irregularities committed by the Jal Board and its officials with regard to the allotment of Sonia Vihar 140 MGD (million gallons a day) plant ... (they) approached me on more than one occasion. They independently requested me not to expose the working of the Delhi Jal Board.... They also tried to tempt me with suitable reward and my adjustment in lieu of my not exposing the irregularities being committed by Delhi Jal Board....” ( The Hindu , New Delhi, Nov. 28). Yet another accusation was against the politicians and senior DJB members of pushing through a contract to Larsen and Toubro for laying of water pipeline in Sonia Vihar at a cost that was approx. Rs
30 crore more than the justified amount. The clear water tr ansmission mains will supply water from Sonia Vihar Water Treatment Plant to different parts of Trans-Yamuna-Delhi. Former mayors of Delhi Yog Dhyan Ahuja and Shakuntala Arya (both members of D]B) said that though the appropriate amount for laying the 33.94X km long water pipeline within Delhi was about Rs X5 crore the contract has been awarded for Rs 111.31 crore. Out of the four firms that were short listed, two did not even submit their tenders and the lowest tender bid was as high as Rs 14X crore. Though a final offer of Rs 111.31 crore was made by Larsen and Toubro only on February 27, 2001, the technical committee had already given its approval a month earlier.
Destruction of Tehri for Water Supply to Delhi Ganga's Ganga's waters, the lifeline of northern India and India’s food security, are being handed over to Suez to quench the thirst of Delhi’s elite even as a hundred thousand people are forcefully and violently removed from their homes in Tehri for the Tehri Dam.
To see a larger version of this diagram - click here here..
Tehri, the capital of the ancient kingdom of Garhwal on the banks of the Ganga in the Himalayas, is in the process of being submerged as the tunnels of the controversial Tehri Dam are being closed. More than a hundred thousand people have been displaced by the dam, costing thousands of crores. In 1994, a budget of Rs. 6000 crores had been earmarked for it. The figure must have escalated substantially substantially since then. The main stream of the region's Bhagirathi River reversed the direction of its flow after officials shut the gates of two water tunnels. Tehri's main town is located uncomfortably close to the swelling waters, which have already submerged parts of the town. The only bridge linking the old town with the new, and the rest of the country, is almost submerged under rising waters. The people of Tehri say dam authorities have stopped the river's natural flow to intimidate them into leaving without staking a claim to a rehabilitation rehabilitation package. The 200-year old town of Tehri is expected to be totally submerged by November 2002. Incidentally Incidentally this part of Uttaranchal's Garhwal region is often referred to as 'Devbhumi' 'Devbhumi' or the "Abode of the Gods". The Tehri dam project was first conceived in 1949 and was sanctioned by the Planning Commission in 1972. It is located in the outer Himalaya in the Tehri- Garhwal district of Uttaranchal. It is planned to be the fifth highest dam in the world - 260.5 meters high and spread over an area of 45 square kilometers in the Bhagirathi and Bhilangana valleys near Tehri town. The dam will submerge 4200 hectares of the most fertile flat land in the Bhagirathi and Bhilangana Bhilangana valleys without really benefiting the region in any way. Ever since the dam was sanctioned in 1972, local people have been opposing the dam and offering resistance to its construction. Many scientists and environmentalists have pointed out the grave risks involved in building this dam in a highly earthquake-prone zone. But the government dismisses these allegations of risk, saying that all those who oppose the Tehri dam are "anti-development".
Tehri Dam built in a seismic fault zone
The huge Tehri dam is located in a seismic fault zone. This area is earthquake prone. Between 1816 and 1991, the Garhwal region has witnessed 17 earthquakes, the recent one being the Uttarkashi earthquake of October 1991 and the Chamoli earthquake of 1998. The International Commission on Large Dams has declared the site ''extremely hazardous". Geological surveyors have assessed that some of the mountains near the dam are very unstable because they do not have any vegetation cover. In case the dam collapses due to an earthquake or any Ganga at a Glance other fault, the devastation will be unimaginable. The huge reservoir built at such a height will be emptied Length: 2,525 sq. km in 22 minutes. Within 60 minutes Rishikesh will be Source: Gaumukh (Gangotri glacier) at under 260 meters of water. Soon after Haridwar will 4,100 metres above MSL. be totally submerged under 232 meters with the next Ganga Basin: more than one million sq. km 23 minutes. Bijnor, Meerut, Hapur and Bulandshahar (1,060,000 sq. km) will be under water within 12 hours (Sunderlal Drainage area: 861,404 sq. km (26.2 Bahuguna). Thus the dam is potentially dangerous percent of India’s total geographical area) for large parts of north-western India, and large areas Break up: in the Gangetic plains could be devastated in the Uttar Pradesh: 294,413 sq km event of a mishap. It is also estimated that the life of Madhya Pradesh: 201,705 sq. km the dam could not be more than 30 years because of Bihar: 144,410 sq. km heavy sedimentation. sedimentation. So far as the electricity Rajasthan: 107,382 sq. km generation generation is concerned. Is it worthwhile to have a West Bengal: 72,010 sq. km dam spanning 30 years with so much ecological Haryana: 34,200 sq. km instability and uneconomic viability? Himachal Pradesh: 5,799 sq. km Moreover, with the building of the dam, the River Ganga will become a dead river. Ganga is not just any river; it is a unique symbol of our ancient civilization and culture. Ganga water has the quality of remaining fresh for many years and is, therefore, part of many sacred rituals, including the pouring of a few drops of Ganga Jal into the mouth of a dying person. People come from all-over the country to perform asthi pravah in the Ganga at Haridwar. Once the Ganga is made to flow through tunnels dammed at Tehri (and also at Bhaironghati Thala dam), this sacred river will soon lose the quality of freshness and purity it is mainly revered for. The Tehri Dam is being built to provide water to the tentacled megapolis of Delhi. The Tehri Dam disaster is a microcosm of a violent process which in the name of development, displaces sustainable communities communities and destroys their sustainable lifestyles, converting them into environmental refugees who are forced to migrate to large cities and urban settlements.
Delhi: 1,485 sq. km TOTAL: 861,404 sq. km Annual flow: 468.7 billion cubic metres
(25.2 percent of India’s total water resources) Flow at Rishikesh: 27 billion cubic metres of water. Important stations on the Ganga and distance from source:
Rishikesh 250 km, Balawali 330 km, Garhmukteshwar 440 km, Kachla Bridge 510 km, Fatehgarh 670 km, Kanpur 800 km, Allahbad 1050 km, Mirzapur 1170 km, Varanasi 1295 km, Buxar 1430 km, Patna 1600 km, Baharampur 2175 km, Nabadwip 2285 km
However a report by the World W orld Commission on Dams (WCD), published in November 2000, alleges that "few dams have ever been looked at to see if the benefits - outweigh the costs". According to the UK's New Scientist magazine, magazine, these costs include social upheaval, increased flooding, damage to farmland and the extinction of freshwater fish species. The WCD report also observes that dams cause ecological damage and exacerbate flooding, and that many deliver less than half the amount of water expected. The World Bank, the sponsor of the study, is not learning any lessons of the WCD report.
Ironically, the disaster management plan submitted by Tehri Project authorities states that Tehri dam has no built-in provision for providing protection against floods and that flood management of the down-stream area is not the direct responsibility of the project authorities. Since 10% of the dams in India and abroad have failed or collapsed, it is therefore important to make the dam break analysis and disaster management reports mandatory. In fact, the disaster management management report submitted to the Union Ministry of Environment by the project authorities clearly emphasizes emphasizes the need for such reports. Further the Union Ministry of Environment Environment in their conditional clearance insisted on the preparation of such a report in consultation with the people likely to be affected in case of a major accident. However, such a report has not yet been prepared and the safety of the Tehri project have not been properly assessed. Despite all these huge costs to the people and the government exchequer, Suez-Degrémont is not paying any of the social, ecological or financial cost f or the construction of Tehri Tehri Dam. Rather it will get free water and will sell it to the people of Delhi at a very high cost.
Gangotri glacier recedes fast helping Suez to cash water "Glaciers in most areas of the world are known to be receding," said Kargel, an international coordinator coordinator for Global Land Ice Measurements Measurements from Space (GLIMS), USA. "But glaciers in the Himalaya are wasting at alarming and accelerating rates, as indicated by comparisons of satellite and historic data, and as shown by the widespread, rapid growth of lakes on the glacier surfaces." The Gangotri glacier between Kashmir and Nepal is retreating at an accelerated rate. The Gangotri glacier-and many others-feed the Ganga River Basin, upon which hundreds of millions of people, including those in New Delhi and Calcutta, depend for fresh water. The glacier, spread over an area of 260 sq.km, is of great significance for maintaining the water balance in north India. Observations on the retreat of the Gangotri go back to 1842, and between 1842 and 1935 the snout of the Gangotri glacier was receding at an average rate of 7.3 m a year. Indian scientists echoed the same in Current Science January 2001 issue. A group of geologists from HNB Garhwal University, who conducted the study revealed that the retreat has become much faster than it was before 1971. Reporting their findings the scientists say that data for the last six decades 1936 to 1996, clearly show that the glacier had receded by 1,147 m, with the regression assuming alarming proportions proportions particularly over the last 25 years. It has retreated by more than 850 m between 1971 and 1996 alone, as against a total of 2000 m in the last 200 years. The study has also found out significant changes in the shape and position of the glacier, which is 30 km long and with a width varying from 0.5 to 2.5 km. In May and June 1999, the scientists found that the glacier's snout changed its shape every day, with huge blocks of ice getting detached on a daily basis. The findings of HNB Garhwal University scientists are based on investigations investigations over three and a half years, between May 1996 and October 1999. The aim of the Garhwal University group was to establish evidence evidence for the increased rate of retreat seen in the earlier data sets of other research groups in terms of the geomorphological geomorphological characteristics of the glacier. However, some of the regular visitors to Gangotri have also observed the same. According to them the 26-km-long Gangotri glacier in Uttaranchal has been shrinking by about 18 metres a year. Swami Sundaranand, Sundaranand, a priest and ecologist, who has lived alongside Gangotri Gangotri for over half a century is one of the first to point out that Gangotri Glacier is retreating. "Over the past five years or so, the Gangotri glacier has annually receded at a rate of nearly 10 metres'', said the Swami. Geologists Geologists do not rule out the possibility of the holiest and greatest of all Indian rivers, Ganga, doing a vanishing act in coming years. If the glacier could recede two kilometers over some 150 years, the future may be gloomy for the mother of all Indian rivers. According to climatologists, mountain mountain glaciers, such as those in the Himalayas, are particularly sensitive indicators of climate change. While ice reflects the sun's rays, lake water absorbs and
transmits heat more efficiently to the underlying ice, kicking off a feedback that creates further melting. According to a 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, scientists estimate that surface temperatures could rise by 1.4°C to 5.8°C by the end of the century. The researchers have found a strong correlation between increasing temperatures temperatures and glacier retreat (
[email protected] - 29 May 2002). Glacier changes in the next 100 years could significantly si gnificantly affect agriculture, water supplies, hydroelectric hydroelectric power, power, transportation, mining, coastlines, and ecological habitats. Melting ice may cause both serious problems and, for the short term in some regions, helpful increases in water availability, but all these impacts will change with time. This would only benefit Suez Degrémont which would encash the increased flow of water in the Ganga and diverting them to Delhi through Upper Ganga Canal for selling it to elite Delhities. Not only the Gangotri Glacier but also several other Himalayan glaciers are melting fast. The melting glaciers of Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal have rung alarm bells among environmentalists. They fear this might result in unprecedented unprecedented floods and thereafter acute water scarcity in the plains. The Bara Shigri glacier in Himachal Pradesh and the Pindari glacier in Uttaranchal are shrinking at an alarming rate of about 36 metres and 135 metres per year. The deep cracks in the Chhota Shigri glacier of Himachal indicate that it was receding. Studies indicate that it was shrinking by 6.7 metres per year and the Trilokinath glacier was receding by 15.4 metres. The size of the Bara Shigri glacier reduced by 650 metres between 1997-1995, while the Trilokinath glacier got reduced by 400 metres between 1969 to 1995. Despite a severe winter in 1997, the 5-km-long Dokriani Bamak glacier in Himachal Pradesh shrunk by 20 metres, while its average melting rate had been 16.5 metres a year. The glacier might soon vanish in the case it continues to melt. Studies have indicated that almost all 335 glaciers in the Sutlej, Beas and Spiti basins were receding. These have created artificial lakes which might cause floods in the low-lying areas (Source: The Tribune Online Edition, 26 May 2001).
Impact of Water Diversion on Agriculture and Food Security Water is a prime resource that fulfills a number of significant functions. It can be used lavishly or efficiently, but cannot be replaced. It is an indispensable, finite and vulnerable resource. Virtually no activity in society or process in the landscape or in the environment would be possible in the absence of water. India is one of the few countries in the world endowed with abundant land and water resources. Water is basically required for domestic consumption and agriculture. Apart Apart from this water is used by industries. Diverting water from domestic and agriculture to industries poses serious problems. Presently per capita availability is about 2300M3/p/year, which is going to decline 1400M 3/p/year by the year 2050. Of the 187 MHM (million hectare metres) of water 60 MHM of the surface water and 43.2 MHM of ground water are available for use. The present utility is about 60 MHM for various purposes. Since the population is likely to stabilize at a maximum of 1640 million by 2050, the country will have to plan for increasing the food grain production from the current level of 200 MT to 450-500 MT by 2050. Also the production of vegetables and fruits should be increased as the production at present is not even sufficient to the minimum requirements of the people. To achieve the objectives, the current irrigation potential potential of 96.9 Mha (million hectares) (gross area) will have to be increased to about 140 Mha.
Water Requirements for Different Crops
The plant roots suck or extract water from the soil to live and grow. The main part of this water does not remain in the plant, but escapes to the atmosphere as vapor through the plant's leaves and stem. This process is called transpiration. Transpiration happens mainly during daytime. Water from an open water surface escapes as vapor to the atmosphere during the day. The same happens to water on the soil surface as to water on the leaves and stem of a plant. This process is called evaporation. The water need of a crop thus consists of transpiration plus evaporation. Therefore, the crop water is used for "evapotranspiration". "evapotranspiration". The water need of a crop is usually expressed in mm/day, mm/month or mm/season, or cm/hectare. Suppose the water need of a certain crop in a very hot, dry climate is 10 mm/day. This means that each day the crop needs a water layer of 10 mm over the whole area on which the crop is grown. This means that this 10 mm has to be supplied by rain or irrigation every day.
Facts about Upper Ganga Canal •
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There is a large variation of the total growing period not only between crops, but also within one crop type. In general, it can be assumed that the growing period for a certain crop is longer when the climate is cool and shorter when the climate is warm.
Upper Ganga Canal: the lifeline of Western U.P U.P.. Upper Ganga Canal is one of the oldest canals in Western U.P. Initial discharge of water in the canal was 6750 cusecs, which was later increased to 10500 cusecs. The length of the canal is about 304 km. and it irrigates irr igates about 9.24 lac hectares of land in Hardwar, Roorkee, Saharanpur, Muzaffar Nagar, Meerut, Ghaziabad, Gautam Budh Nagar, Bulandshar, Aligarh, Mathura, Hathras, Mainpuri and Etah.
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Work on the canal started in -- 1837 A.D. Canal completed in -- 1855 A.D. Total years to complete the canal -18 Initial capacity -- 6750 cusecs Enhanced capacity (1951) -- 10500 cusecs Total length -- 189 miles (304 km) Total length of the channels -- 2650 km Area irrigated by the canal -- 9.28 hectares Districts irrigated by the canal -- 13 districts (Hardwar, Roorkee, Saharanpur, Muzaffar Nagar, Meerut, Ghaziabad, Gautam Budh Nagar, Bulandshar, Aligarh, Mathura, Hathras, Mainpuri and Etah district)
As said earlier the 635 million liters daily (MLD) of Ganga water will be diverted from the Upper Ganga Canal to Delhi, which would affect the agriculture potential of the canal and the food security of the region where the canal had been irrigating since more than one century. Some of the major crops in the area, which is irri gated by Upper Ganga Canal are Wheat, Rice (Basmati), Rice (Coarse), Sugarcane, Maize, Potato, Gram and others. Briefly, Briefly, the water requirement requirement for cultivation of any crop and its productivity depends depends on several factors, such as • • • • • •
a. Climatic conditions b. Soil composition c. Micro Nutrients in the Soil d. Temperature variations e. Variety of the crops (High yield variety needs more water) f. Application Application of fertilizers.
According to experts, it is a complicated procedure to calculate this water requirement for any crop, however an effort has been made to estimate the water requirement to grow different crops on the land irrigated by Upper Ganga Canal. The water requirement to grow 1 kg. of a particular crop would
facilitate to estimate the implications on agriculture sustainability if water (6350 lac liters per day) is drawn from Upper Ganga Canal at Muradnagar.
Water Needs for Different Crops in the region • • • • •
1 kg. of Basmati Rice requires 4200 liters 1 kg. of coarse rice (long duration) requires 2500 liters 1 kg. of coarse rice (short duration) requires 2250 liters 1 kg. Wheat requires 700 liters of water. 1 kg. of potatoes require 240 liters
A
i) Water Requirement to grow wheat in Western UP & Delhi = 30-35 cm -- (6-7 irrigation 5 cm per irrigation) irri gation) ii) For rice (Basmati) = 140-160 cm iii) Rice (coarse) = 120-150 cm iv) Maize = 30 cm v) Potato = 60 cm
B
1 Hectare = 2.46 Acre 1 Acre = .405 hec 1 Acre = 4000 sqm 1 hec = 1/.405 = 2.46 x 4000 = 9840 sqm or 1 hec = 10000 sqm (approx.)
C
1 hec = 100 x 100 m2 or 1 hec = 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 cm2 Volume of Water = 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 35 (C.C) or Volume of water= (100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 35 liters)/1000 = 3500000 liter per hec Average yield of wheat = 50 quintal per hectare (approx.) Therefore water requirement per quintal = 3500000/50 = 70000 liters. Water requirement for wheat per kilogram 3500000/(50 x 100) = 700 liters or 700 liters water is required to grow = 1 kg of wheat or 70,000 liters water is needed for = 1 quintal (100 kg.) of wheat or 7,00,000 = 1 ton
Water Requirement for Rice Similarly we may calculate the water requirement to grow rice. •
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Water requirement requirement for rice (Basmati) = 140 -160 cm per hectare Average yield of rice Basmati = 35 quintal per hectare (4200 liters of water is needed to grow 1 kg of basmati rice) Water requirement requirement for lice (Coarse) = 120 -150 cm per hectare (short duration) Average yield of rice Coarse = 60 quintal per hectare (2250 liters of water is needed to grow, grow, 1 kg of rice (Coarse) (short duration) Water requirement requirement for rice (Coarse) = 140 -160 cm per hectare (long duration) Average yield of rice Coarse = 60 quintal per hectare (2500 liters of water is required to grow one kg. Coarse rice r ice of long duration)
What does diverting water to Delhi mean for National Food Security? The annual water diverted to Delhi from the Upper Ganga Canal at the rate of 635 million liters per day will result in critical reduction in the production of food crops in the region, and thus possible destruction of national food security. This massive diversion of water would have produced in a year • • • •
3310550 quintals of wheat 551150 quintals of rice (Basmati) 927100 quintals quintals of rice (Coarse) 9657290 quintals of potato
Alternatives to privatization of Ganga and meeting Delhi's water needs (1) At present Delhi has allocation of waters from the Yamuna, the Ganga and the Beas (Bhakra project), in addition to ground water resources, with the total availability, as follows: Water Source
Allocated
Useable
Yamuna
0.724 BCM
0.500 BCM
Beas
0.2464 BCM
0.1724 BCM
Ganga
0.1800 BCM
--
Treated sewage
0.100 BCM
--
Ground water
Govt. wells 0.012 BCM
Private wells 0.010 BCM
Total
0.9645 BCM
The above capacity can be reinforced through the following means: •
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Flood plain reservoirs at Wazirabad. Barswal. Badapur. Nala Mandela and at Nizamuddin bridge providing additional 0.168 BCM. Rain water reservoirs at Tilpat/ Tughlakabad 0.010 BCM Reservoirs in the NCR at Najafgarh Jheel and Hindon-Ganga bed with the capacity 0.285 BCM. Harvesting in existing tanks and wells to the extent of 0.010 BCM Revival of dried up streams (through afforestation) of Delhi with capacity 0.015 BCM Increased ground water output in government and private wells due to better recharge of aquifers through greater flow in River Yamuna, yielding additional 0.033 BCM Greater output of treated sewage-of higher quality in 9 eco-parks designed by Paani Morcha to the extent of additional 0.500 BCM.
It can be seen that the above measures would yield an additional 1.011 BCM of usable clean water, giving Delhi sufficient waters to meet its increased requirements of the next century and obviating the need to bring Tehri dam waters to Delhi.
Water Liberation
Water Liberation Declaration
On the eve of Independence Day, 15th August 2002, the Indian people have resolved to defend the real freedom -- the freedom of access and rights to their own resources - Land, Water and Biodiversity. Movements gathered in Delhi committed themselves to shut these water theft units and rejuvenate alternatives. In the Resolution issued at this occasion they said, "Water "Water is the essence of life. Its marketization is unacceptable to us. We reject the anti-people water policy. We will fight intrusions of all sorts of companies, national or multination, multination, at every level with all our might". The Water Liberation Campaign (Jal Swaraj Abhiyan) which had already organized a study tour of farmers from Tehri in Uttaranchal to Delhi for World Water Day is committed to stop the water theft by global water corporations corporations in the name of public private partnership. Specific demands to the Delhi Government are •
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Activists from around the world met at Navdanya' ' s organic farm on December Navdanya 16th, 2001 to develop national and global strategies to defend water as a collective community commons, and drafted the Water Liberation Declaration. The Declaration has over five hundred signatories. Water Liberation Declaration
Water is life. It’s a gift of nature. The access to water is a natural and fundamental fundamental right. It is not to be treated as a commodity and traded for profit. People shall have the right to freedom from thirst, and shall have adequate access to safe water for all of their living needs. Experiences Experiences all over the world reveal quite convincingly that water which is “life” is being privatized and brought under corporate control. This will deprive the people of water lifeline for survival. All the water resources should be owned, controlled, managed and utilized by local communities communities in their natural setting.
Make the contract with the Suez-Degrémont public Organize a public hearing on the full cost of water treatment plant at Sonia Vihar, including We the people from all over the world will cost for both backward and forward linkages. Let the public through a democratic process fix not allow our waters to be made a commodity for profit. the cost that Suez-Degrémont must share to pay compensation to the displaced people of We will work together to liberate water Tehri and the farmers who will loose their land from corporate/private agencies, control in and around Muradnagar in U.P. and return it to the people for common The government of Delhi must ensure that: good. a. Water for sustenance which is 50 liters per day is available as a basic right to all. We demand that governments all over the b. Higher use can be charged higher taxes. world should take immediate action to c. A ceiling must be put on water use so that there is no wastage of scarce water resources. declare that they accept waters in their territories a public good and exact strong If hidden cost of bringing water from Tehri to regulatory structure to protect them. Delhi are not being internalized for the operation of the Suez-Degrémont plant and water delivery in Delhi, the Delhi government should give up the project and develop lower cost conservation based water system which have been proposed by many citizens organizations.
The water liberation movement will continue to carry out independent studies and continue to do public awareness to ensure that water is not stolen from the rural poor and sold to the urban elite through water markets under the control of water giants like Suez. Navdanya
Navdanya is a programme to conserve agricultural diversity. diversity. It places the farmer at the center of conservation conservatio n and empowers to take control over the political, ecological and economic aspects of agriculture Navdanya means nine seeds and these represent India's collective source of food security. It connotes a diverse ecological balance at every level, from the ecology of the earth to the ecology of our body. Email:
[email protected]
Footnote 1. This section has been prepared by Cdr. Sureshwar D. Sinha of the Paani Morcha. Delhi, and has been taken from their website www.paanilllorclla.org
Published in In Motion Magazine, October 20, 2002
Interview with Devinder Sharma The politics of food and agriculture Part 1 -
From British Colonialism to WTO Rules and Privatization New Delhi, India
Devinder Sharma is an award-winning journalist, writer, and researcher on food and trade policy. He is the author of "GATT and India -- Politics of Agriculture" (1994) and "In the Famine Trap" (1997). He chairs the New Delhi-based Forum for Biotechnology & Food Security.This interview was conducted August August 25, 2003 by Nic Paget-Clarke for In Motion Magazine in New Delhi, India.
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The Indian Express Implications Implication s of the WTO for agriculture Corporate Double Standard The Union Carbide Bhopal disaster Cattle feed Emission standards, standards, recycling plastics, vaccine for cows The Great Trade Robbery Market access, domestic support, and domestic subsidies What happens with these subsidies? How cows and farmers survive WTO Negotiations Privatizing every sphere of activity The British legacy in India Divide and rule (the British and the WTO) The Bengal Famine Famine amidst food surplus The Kalahandi Syndrome Importing Unemployment
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Also, click forward to Part 2 – From Secured-Cash Crops to Village Republics
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Devinder Sharma. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
The Indian Express In Motion Magazine: Could you please tell me a little about your background and how you came to
focus on hunger and food? Devinder Sharma: I started off my career as an agricultural scientist. I did my masters in plant
breeding and genetics and then did not take up a research assignment. The first job I landed
immediately immediately after my university was with the Indian Express in India. The Indian Express at that time, even now, was the largest selling newspaper in India – a multi-region paper. It is published from about 14 places in the country. When I joined the Indian Express, in 1981, it was a paper which was anti-establishment. anti-establishment. It was a paper which for quite some time brought down government after government. government. It was a paper which gave me training, if you put it like that, to understand the politics of food and agriculture. I joined as an agriculture writer of the paper and the advantage I had, compared to others, was that I was given the task to look into the entire country, not one region. As an agriculture editor, I had the privilege to travel through the length and breadth of the country and then write my reports -- unlike the other reporters who would be covering one beat and one area, and so on. That gave me a tremendous learning experience. Nothing else could have given me that kind of exposure. Once I had done that for about ten years, I left at the stage when I became the development editor for the paper. I left them and I went to Nepal for a short while to launch Nepal’s first independent daily, called The Kathmandu Post. Post . Today that paper is the largest selling. I left them in ’93.
Implications of the WTO for agriculture
GATT and India - the Politics of Agriculture by Devinder Sharma.
Then, I thought, I will take a sabbatical. It was a time when the Dunkel Draft was very popular. Dunkel was the first director-general of the WTO (World Trade Organization), at that time it was called GATT (General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade). I thought people would be on the streets here but nobody understood what the implications of WTO and agriculture were. So I thought, I will take a sabbatical, do a book, and then come back to journalism. I took one year off, and did my book, which is in your hands, the first book. But I never came back to journalism or what you call active journalism. From one to another, another, I realized the realities are much different and much in contrast in what you are doing. Hunger in India is at a level today that it very shameful. We have this hunger existing at a time when we have a mounting food surplus. We have an unmanageable food surplus, which is a record in history, and we also have a record number of hungry with us today. This paradox forced me to get into this issue of hunger. There are two ways of looking at it. One, of course, is the grassroots effort that one can do to bring people out of hunger. The other, to my understanding, understanding, is that hunger is the result of policies, national and international. The basic idea, or the basic focus, today, is to keep one half of the world hungry, because you can only exploit the hungry stomach. You cannot exploit a full stomach, somebody who is very happy and fed. That is the world’s effort. And that is very shocking and demeaning, shameful. That is the focus of my work.
Corporate Double Standard In Motion Magazine: One of the things you mentioned
in one of your essays is the double standard that the corporate world has in the way it treats the West and the way it treats the developing world. Could you talk about that, perhaps in light of the Coke/Pepsi scandal, scandal, and also the questions of grain to India and GMOs? Devinder Sharma: If you look at the double standards
they are apparent, very clear and very loud. A Pepsi banner over the streets of New Delhi at the time of the contamination controversy. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
In the recent cola controversy in India, the companies are saying that, “Your groundwater is polluted so therefore you can’t blame us that the cola is also contaminated.” This argument has gone on for some time on the television and in print media. In one of the shows, though, I came out and said, “This is not the issue. If you look at the groundwater in Europe and America, it is much more contaminated than in India. How come in those countries they sell colas which are without any pesticides? They are following double standards.
The Union Carbide Bhopal disaster If you look back, if you remember the Union Carbide accident that happened in India, the tragedy of Bhopal, the Bhopal plant had lax safety standards, but the same plant in America, they had very tight safety standards there. The double standard was apparent apparent after the Bhopal disaster struck. Looking at the cola controversy, we are being told that, “Your pesticide and fertilizer consumption is so high in India that obviously the ground water gets contaminated” But let’s look at America and let’s look at Europe. In India, the average pesticide consumption per hectare is 450 grams per hectare. If you look at Holland, the per hectare pesticide usage or consumption is 11,000 grams per hectare. In Japan it is 12,000 grams. In the U.S. it is 3,000 grams. And 99.9% of the pesticides go into the environment, whether they leech into the water or they go into the air. Only 0.01% hits at the target – everyone knows that. (This is a study done by David Pimentel of Cornell University. ) And they use 700 different kinds of pesticides. In India, we use 160 different kinds of pesticides. But now we have reached a stage that we are being told that, “Your water is contaminated”. And fertilizer, fertilizer, the fertilizer intake in Holland is 495 kg per hectare. In India it is 99 kg per hectare. In America it is 110 kg per hectare. If you look at Japan it is about 350 per hectare. If you look at the European European Union as a block then the pesticide usage is 500 grams per hectare. I’m not trying to say that our water is not polluted, I’m not trying to defend that, but the double standard is very clear. In those countries they follow strict health and safety norms, whereas in India they know you can get away with murder -- as in the classic example of Union Carbide.
Cattle feed If you look at the grains, we are being told that whatever we export from our country is not of good quality so, therefore, “You need to have quality norms.” “You can go up to .0001 parts per million for looking at toxin level in grains.” And so on. It’s interesting. And, yes, we all agree that quality is important, but let’s look at double standards here. What is going from India meets the quality of the Western countries, countries, but what comes from the Western countries to India has to be cattle feed. So we are given to understand that, “You are very comfortable with cattle feed so why this problem?” Now, when I say cattle feed I will give you one example. In 1996, the last time we imported wheat, we imported one million tons from Australia. That wheat, when it came to India, it was cattle feed quality. What they exported to us was rubbish. It came with forty-two weed plants, seven of them new to India. And they didn’t even clean it on the high seas when India said, “You should clean this grain.” Look at America. America. At the time that Dan Glickman was the Agriculture Secretary he came to India. He went around and met India’s Agriculture Minister and he asked him, “Why did you reject American wheat?” because when we selected Australian wheat, which in any case was cattle feed, it was after we rejected the American wheat. wheat. He was told that the wheat from America doesn’t conform to the quality standards. The wheat from America actually had a downy mildew, a disease. The incidence of downy mildew was more than .001 parts per million. And you know what he said? He said, “Where in the world can you find wheat of that quality?” I’m glad our Agricultural Minister stood up and said, “Sir, this is what you had asked the Codex Alimentarius to follow.” (editor: a Rome-based organization, “The Codex Alimentarius Commission was created in 1963 by FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization] and WHO [World Health Organization] to develop food standards”). And subsequently, it is also being
reported, the Secretary finally told our Agriculture Minister that, “If you could import all the cattle feed that we exported at the time of PL480 (U.S. food aid in the ’50s and ’60s) when India was importing wheat from America, what is the problem now?” Soybeans. Soybeans. Now they are trying to export soybeans to us, and those soybeans come with several viral diseases and five pests. America is forcing India to accept this saying that, “These pests are not harmful for you.” If we were to export the same soybean back to America, America, they would reject it. So the double standards are very clearly apparent.
Emission standards, recycling plastics, vaccine for cows
A rally in New Delhi against the WTO, just prior to the September 2003 Cancun ministerial meeting. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
And it is not only foodstuffs. If you look at the entire WTO paradigm, the genetic engineering paradigm, the technology, what is being developed, today … it is the opposite of technology, which is being dumped on to us. Let us take the example of automobiles. The automobiles that are being manufactured in India conform to Euro 1, Euro 2 emission standards. In Europe they follow Euro 4. Because that (Euro 1, Euro 2) technology has become become obsolete they must find a market for it. So they dump it on to countries like us. Look at America, America, since a few years back they have had a wonderful way of recycling the plastic bottles in which Pepsi is sold in America, or in India, for that matter. You can’t recycle that in America because of the strict human safety norms. So what they are doing is shipping the plastic bottles to Madras in India, recycling in Madras and taking it back and selling it for the colas in America. As if the humans here don’t matter. One can go on and on with these kinds of examples where the West has demonstrated that it doesn’t give a damn. And the worst now is we are always taken as the children of a lesser god, for all these years, but the worst is now apparent and happening. One of the institutes in New Zealand has clearly said that they are going to develop a genetically-modified genetically-modified vaccine for treating tr eating tuberculosis tuberculosis in cows, which is good news of course. But they are saying the same vaccine would be applicable for human beings in the Third World countries. What the rich countries need is a different vaccine, is a better vaccine. Which means they are treating animals and human beings in this part of the world as the same. What more do we need as an example for double standards?
The Great Trade Robbery In Motion Magazine: How is globalization accelerating the process of marginalization of farmers in
the Third World? Devinder Sharma: I’m sure, Nic, you have seen a movie called The Great Train Robbery, way back.
To me, this is a new edition of the same movie. It can be called The Great Trade Robbery. This is a wonderful way of exploiting the Third World countries. I remember once I had the privilege of sitting with Nelson Mandela. He was chairing one of my talks and he said, “They follow a triple-M approach.” He said, “First, they sent the missionaries. It didn’t work. Then they sent the military. It didn’t work. Now they are sending money – it will work.”
Basically, if you look at the world today, the West has got so used to being a parasite on the Third World that they cannot imagine they do not do this harm to us. Under one pretext or the other, they are going to exploit us. They are going to suck the blood of this part of the world -- in the name of trade, in the name of growth, in the name of development, in the name of millennium goals, and so on, and so forth. I’m not being cynical, but let me explain. India is a country, which is one sixth of humanity, and I think can be taken as a symbol or representative of the developing world in many ways. India is a country, which has about 1,000 million plus people today. Out of it, 320 million people still go to bed hungry every night. That’s a shameful paradox. But let’s look at the globalization globalization process as far as agriculture is concerned. We have in India 557 million farmers, today. At the time of independence, fifty-five years back, the number of farmers in India was 200 million. It has grown to 557 million today. The average land-holding land-holding size at that time, fifty-five years back, was four hectares for a family. Today, it has come down to 1.4 hectares. This is an average for the rest of the developing developing world, also. And, if you compare this with America, just to compare the two biggest democracies, fifty-five years back in America their population in Small farm in western Tamil Nadu, India. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. agriculture was about ten percent of whatever the population at that time was. The average landholding size in America at that time was fifty hectares. Today, the average landholding size in America is 200 hectares. The number of farmers in America today is 900,000, less than one percent of your population. There are more people in American jails than on American farms. There are 2.1 million people in American jails today and there are 900,000 people on American farms. You can see the contrast between India and America. Now having said that, the reality is that American agriculture is of course in the hands of the industry, but the American economy is so dependent upon agriculture and is so weighed down by the artificial subsidy support that American American agriculture has been providing to its agriculture that there is no market for your produce, the economy collapses under the artificial weight of subsidies that America has created all these years. They have to find a market for it. The second block is the European Union. They, too, are overburdened with food stocks, especially after the Common Agriculture Policy came in. They, too, face the same problem that America faces. So they join hands. What can you do both of you? Both of the blocks could not dump food into the sea now because international treaties do not allow you to do that. You can’t burn it because again the international international treaties do not allow you to do that. So you have to find a market. What better way than to force open the developing countries to ensure that this kind of produce goes into them?
Market access, domestic support, and domestic subsidies When the WTO came into effect, first the GATT then the WTO, they laid it down very clearly, based on three pillars - market access, domestic support, and domestic subsidies. These These are the three pillars of the WTO Agriculture Agreement. But, at that time, the developing countries didn’t even understand what all it meant. So they accepted, signed, and so on. The West, though, was very clear and very sure about what it was doing. They came out with all these parameters, which actually supported or protected their agriculture at the cost of the developing countries’ farmers. farmers. Everything was put into place and we were supposed to sign -- take it or leave it. And we were also given this promise that if you don’t enter into the WTO it is very difficult to trade bilaterally, bilaterally, and so and so forth. Our political leadership accepted that dogma. Now eight years later, we find that the negative impacts have been so large and so huge it has begun to show. If you look at the world, today, the American farmers, or let’s us say the OECD countries, (the Organization Organization for Economic Cooperation Cooperation and Development), the richest trading bloc, which is 24 countries, annually annually provides subsidies to agriculture to the tune of U.S. $360 billion, which means one
billion dollars a day. In India, we provide subsidies to our 557 million farmers and the total subsidy is one billion dollars a year. In the OECD the subsidies are direct. And can you imagine who are the beneficiaries of these subsidies? Ted Turner receives subsidies for agriculture in America. David Rockefeller receives subsidies for agriculture in America. These are the people who get subsidies. They don’t farm. Just because they own land they get subsidies. If you look at India, all the subsidies that we provide are indirect -- by way of cheaper fertilizer, cheaper electricity, cheaper seed, cheaper water. There are no direct subsidies in India. But the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Monetary Fund) have asked us to remove subsidies because they are too distorting. The poor should not get subsidies, whereas the rich should get subsidies.
What happens with these subsidies? Now what happens with these subsidies? They contribute to corporate control of prices.
Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment joins a protest at Monsanto corporate headquarters, St. Louis, Missouri. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
It should be noted, though, that a major percentage of farmers in the U.S. get no subsidy at all because 70% of U.S. subsidies go to 10% of the recipients who are the largest farmers and corporations. In addition, U.S. family farmers usually sell their products below their cost of production while corporations sell their meats in the store and their grain for f or higher prices through processing and export. Faced with this situation, U.S. family farmers maximize production in order to survive and the excess production is then many times dumped around the world where it isn’t needed thanks to bad trade policy from the WTO. No matter the falling global prices, the corporations continue to benefit. The corporations take their agricultural subsidies and trade incentives while they argue against subsidies in the Third World, then, with their increasing level of control, they pump into agriculture such new problems as geneticallymodified seeds.
How cows and farmers survive Look at the inequalities. We are being told that there is a clash of civilizations but the biggest clash of civilizations that I see is when we compare the situation in which the farmer in this part of the world, in the South, exists and the cows in the North. Every cow in America, America, Europe, Australia, Canada, Canada, all OECD countries, needs a shower, needs a fan, needs a tube light, needs centrally-heated conditions. You will agree all these are luxuries to farmers in this part of the world. And whenever whenever the cow goes to milk -- milking is done of course by machines, we all know -- I have seen that every cow wears a strap around its neck. The strap has a chip, computer chip so the moment the cow goes for the feeding f eeding bin when it is getting milked that chip matches with a chip on the wall and it tells what exactly is the weight of the cow, what exactly are the protein requirements at that time of the cow, and only that quantity comes out. In a way, the cow is the most food secure animal on this earth today. We all know, at least in India, that 320 million people go to bed hungry every night, and 50% percent of the farming population elsewhere in the world goes to bed hungry every night. A farming family in India, or in developing countries, survives on less than 1.4 hectares. But if you are rearing one cow you need an average of 10 hectares of land for the feed and everything that you feed that cow. This
means for each cow you require about 10 hectares of land. On that 10 hectares five farming families can survive. And the inequalities don’t end there. The first time I wrote about this was in an article in The Ecologist a few years back, and I am glad everyone is talking about this, but I did an analysis of the cow and of the human being, of a farmer in a developing developing country, country, and I worked it out that every cow gets a subsidy of two dollars a day whereas fifty percent of our farming population and the developing world lives on less than one dollar a day. Such is the quantum of subsidies that you give for cows that you can put every cow into business class and take it on a round-the-world trip. That’s That’s the kind of subsidies you provide. Yet we are being told, “You open up (your markets) and you get tremendous opportunity to export and you’ll gain, and so forth.” Unfortunately, developing countries didn’t realize what this meant then, but I’m sure now that the shoe is pinching, people are beginning to realize and that is what is now getting reflected in the WTO.
WTO Negotiations In Motion Magazine: Why are there seemingly permanent negotiations at the WTO? Ever since GATT
and the WTO started it has all been about the negotiations. Can you explain that? Devinder Sharma: What happened at the WTO was they laid out a phase-out program where you
have to take stock of certain things after a few years. There is a review of the WTO Agriculture Agreement -- it is going on at the moment. There is a review of the WTO TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement Agreement also going on. But at the same time, the world realized that they haven’t had enough. They needed to exploit the Third World more. They have to bring in new issues. So what are the new issues? The new issues cropped up at Singapore sometime back and they are called the Singapore Issues: Issues : transparency in government government procurements, trade facilitation, investments, and competition policy. These new issues have to be taken on board now. The new round of negotiations at Cancun will be negotiating these four Singapore Issues. We are transgressing from the issue of agriculture, patents and so on, into the investment issues and where they want to move in the services sector, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Now you want education to be privatized. Now you want water to be privatized. Now you want health services to be privatized. All these things -- because the economic economic interest of the corporations in the West is so dominant now that they are finding all kinds of areas where they can exert influence and exploit the developing countries.
Privatizing every sphere of activity In Motion Magazine: From reading some of the more recent essays that you have written,
globalization globalization has had various definitions over the years, even over the centuries. But it seems the current definition is liberalization -- privatizing the planet? Devinder Sharma: It is in fact happening. If you look at the recent phenomenon phenomenon of privatization, which
actually the European Union, America, Japan, and countries like Australia or Switzerland are a party to, it is because of the dominance of the multinational corporations corporations coming up or the private companies coming up and occupying almost every sphere of activity. So much so the politics. There was a time, if you remember, when Abraham Lincoln gave his famous quote to all of us saying that democracy is of the people, by the people, and for the people. If you look at today, I’m sure Abraham Lincoln is turning in his grave because democracy has changed, because democracy’s definition has changed. Democracy is of the industry, by the industry, for the industry. Whether it is (U.S. President) George Bush, whether it is (U.K. Prime Minister) Tony Tony Blair, whether is (Indian Prime Minister) Atal Bihari Vajpayee, all that they have been doing is to represent industry. If you look at WTO, or NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), the entire focus has been to promote the interests of industry, multinational corporations and so on.
President Bill Clinton has gone on record, when he was the president, saying that Monsanto is the company which will take us into the 21st century. So we know what is happening. We know the Iraq war, why it happened -- the oil corporations wanted more oil. That kind of thing is happening and there’s always justification. The kind of education that is being forced onto us in India is privatized and then goes into corporate hands. Specifically, Specifically, it is all a game for control. It is a game for control and monopoly. Earlier, Earlier, when we were faced with the colonialization era, it was the governments which were in controlling, controlling, but today control is in the hands of corporates and they are trying to extract as much as possible. There was a time, and I’m sure you remember, when the sun would never set on the British Empire. When you talk of globalization today, I think one indicator is the sun never sets on the multinational corporations. corporations. That gives an indication of how globalized the corporations are, of the phenomenon which is the using of democratic institutions, so called democratic institutions, like WTO, or the financial institutions, to force the banks of multinational corporations corporations or the private corporations onto us. It is an issue of control and dominance. A few people are controlling the entire global wealth and that control comes through corporations.
The British legacy in India In Motion Magazine: What is the legacy of the British
in India, if there’s a way of summarizing it?
Gateway of India, in Mumbai, erected by British colonial authorities to "Commemorate the landing in India of their Imperial Majesties King George VI and Queen Mary". Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
Devinder Sharma: Nobody wants to talk about it now.
Maybe it is politically incorrect. But what the British did to India is very apparent. There was a time, if you remember, when Columbus sailed to look for India and landed in America, 500 years back. Then came Vasco da Gama who landed in India, eventually, from Europe and the world became exposed to India. That was a time when India was called, if you look at Indian literature, we were called a golden bird. That’s why all these fellows were looking for India. Not searching for America or anybody else. Then, the British stepped in to India and when they left India was a poverty-stricken country. That is the legacy of Britain. If you look at Europe, Europe survives today because of their colonial past. Nobody wants to talk about it now because nobody wants to rake up those memories, but if you look at India and if you look at Indian history, you’ll find ample examples of how they looted India. In fact the viceroys, the people who were appointed viceroys, would advance based on how much they looted. There was an era in Indian history when you find that the one who gave the best or highest booty to the emperor became the viceroy.
Divide and rule (the British and the WTO) They followed the divide and rule policy. One of the British legacies is the divide and rule policy, which they did remarkably well in India. They took almost all of India as their colony because of the divide and rule policy, which is now being followed exactly by the WTO. If you look at global politics now they are actually following divide and rule. W hy are developing countries not there as a block, it is because now the divide and rule policy says you should be having issue-based issue-based coalitions. What is an issue-based coalition? coalition? It is that on agriculture I don’t agree with
Malaysia but on investment use I would agree with Malaysia. So India and Malaysia would go together on the issues of investment but not go together on agriculture. So we are divided, you know. The West has been very clearly using the same kind of legacy of divide and rule in commercial terms or economic terms, and doing it very effectively. Developing countries stand isolated, or let’s say separate and not as a bloc ,as the E.U. (European Union) would be, or for that matter as the U.S. and E.U. together. Developing countries do not bloc because we have been put against the same formula of divide and rule and we haven’t learned our lesson. Another part of the legacy is in India, the British, whatever they left us with, unfortunately, unfortunately, the same system prevails in India. We follow the same systems, political, bureaucratic, constitutional, constitutional, all the same systems the British left us with. The British left us with more problems but we continue with them. We haven’t tried to set our house in order the way Mahatma Gandhi would have liked the house to be. But that is the way people want it, or whatever you can say.
The Bengal Famine But going back to your question of the British legacy, I just have to give you one example. In 1943, the year when the world was shocked by the Bengal famine, the Bengal famine killed about three million people. It was a time when India was under British dominance and there was enough food, but food was diverted by the British to the armies which were fighting the Second World War. People died in Bengal, but not because of the loss of production, because there was the loss of production in 1941, that was a bad year, and there was no famine. 1943 was a better year but there was a famine in 1943. And the interesting part is the then-viceroy of India gave a report to the Emperor, (and we all know of Amartya Sen’s Theory of Entitlement which talks about the Bengal Famine), but what is not known is that letter actually said that concerning the three million people who died, those are the people who in any case would have died. They were of the lowest strata of life -- urchins and so on. Laborers, poor, beggars, they should have in any case died. So, we should not have any regret. Look at the way they have treated us. And when I say us I mean the Third World and the First World. Ireland was also under British governance. Ireland had the infamous Irish Potato Famine in the nineteenth century. Tony Blair went and apologized for the Irish Potato Famine. Yet, he has come to India a number of times, and so has the Queen, and they have never apologized for the 28 famines that occurred during the British rule in India. And 28 were man-made famines. That is the way they have treated us. But I think we have to blame ourselves, also.
Famine amidst food surplus In Motion Magazine: You wrote an article about the famines in Kalahandi and Koraput. What sort of
system allows for massive crop production, even export, while the people living around the f ood are dying? How is that structured? Devinder Sharma: This is the greatest tr agedy I would say in this century. century. The stark reality of India.
You talk about Kalahandi but let me first give you a little picture of the India scenario. We today have 50 million tons of food surplus, wheat and rice stocked in the open. You can go around the country and see it stocked in the open. I think at least 50 percent of it has already turned into cattle feed. It cannot be consumed by human beings. And there are 320 million people who go to bed hungry every night in India. One third of the world’s 800,000 people who go to bed hungry every night are in India. But it is not that only India’s political masters or Indian elite is unconcerned unconcerned or criminally cr iminally apathetic apathetic to the realities of hunger. The international community is equally to blame. They are talking about removing half the world’s hunger by the year 2015 and they are talking about the 800 million people who go to bed hungry, so we should be moving at least, – but all they have done is to say that we will remove half the world’s hunger by 2015. If they were really honest, the international community, they
could have focused on a country like India, because we have food, we have hungry, why should we wait to the year 2015? There’s no explanation for this. I’m sure you will agree. And not only India. Until recently Pakistan was overflowing with food grains. Bangladesh has been overflowing with food grains. If you put the population of these three countries together, roughly 4243% of the world’s hungry are in these three countries. If the world was serious, they could have used international political will to force these developing countries, these three countries, to feed the hungry. But it never happened. Economics doesn’t want to talk about the hungry. Economics is like the pigeon. Pigeons keep their eyes closed when the cat comes, f eeling that the world is now safe. Economists do the same. They feel that if you don’t talk about the hungry, you know, they don’t have to worry about the hungry hungr y.
The Kalahandi Syndrome But, to your question, if you look at realities - - Kalahandi is a stark reality. reality. Kalahandi is as well known as Mumbai or Chennai. People haven’t been to Kalahandi but they all know Kalahandi because whenever there is a report of hunger and starvation, Kalahandi Kalahandi will always figure. (It is in western Orissa in India.) When I did my book In the Famine Trap, working in Kalahandi, I came out with this conclusion or terminology, which is now popularly used of “Kalahandi Syndrome”. I was shocked myself to see that Kalahandi Kalahandi was not a food-deficit area. It was not an infertile area. It was as good or as bad as the rest of the country. Rainfall was as normal as the rest of the country. It was always green, as you could expect. In fact, when the Bengal famine happened in 1943, the first shipload of rice went from Kalahandi. But today the tragedy is that Kalahandi people die of hunger and starvation. For the last five years, Kalahandi has produced on average surplus of 50,000 tons of rice, year after year. And those people who produce cannot buy that rice. The problem is that there is food, but people do not have the purchasing power to buy that food. That is why we have 50 million tons rotting in the country. People can’t buy it. Multinational companies and WTO, they are using this promise, “Look, these people can’t afford that food. When we bring the subsidized food it becomes cheaper.” But this is untrue. Untrue because the price at which that food is being made available in this country, no multinational company can provide food at that level. They will not survive. Economically they will all collapse.
Importing Unemployment Rice is available at 4 rupees/kg. Wheat is also available at 5 rupees/kg, or 4 rupees/kg. For the poor, this would mean it would come down to less than 10 cents, 10 American cents/kg. Please tell me where in America can you find wheat or rice at less than 10 cents a kg. At those kinds of low prices, people can’t even buy that food. Basically they have lost their capacity. capacity. And that is because of the globalization process. Why? Because when the cheaper food comes into the country, actually it means we are importing unemployment. When the people give up agriculture, what do they do? Not that this wasn’t happening earlier, but the process has been accelerated by globalization coming into India from 1991 onwards. We are becoming a victim of globalization. And this is a phenomenon not only confined to India. This Kalahandi Syndrome extends all over the world. The world today has more food than the hungry need. The tragedy is that they can’t buy it. If you look at the world supply of food today, if you were to distribute whatever is available today, we, according to the norms laid out by the WHO, by the minimum calorie requirement, we would have food left for 800 million people, a surplus left for 800 million people -- after feeding everybody. But why we have 800 million people hungry today is because they can’t buy that food. These are the inequalities and to us globalization will further accentuate that crisis because it is not only not providing the poor food, it is taking away their jobs. How do you expect them to buy their food, even if it is cheaper?
This kind of Catch 22 situation has never been explained by the economists, has never been asked and understood by the economists. And because the poor and hungry have no voice, nobody is talking about them. That’s the biggest tragedy. To me, this is the greatest challenge for us in the country and that is why a few of us have got together to set up a small center we are calling the World Hunger Institute. We think we are technically qualified to call it the World Hunger Institute because we have the largest number of hungry in the world with us and we want to launch a direct assault on feeding the hungry. Not as charity but as something that can build up their capacity to be food secure for the years to come.
Interview with Devinder Sharma The politics of food and agriculture Part 2
From secured-cash crops to village republics New Delhi, India
Devinder Sharma is an award-winning journalist, writer, and researcher on food and trade policy. He is the author of "GATT and India -- Politics of Agriculture" (1994) and "In the Famine Trap" (1997). He chairs the New Delhi-based Forum for Biotechnology & Food Security.This interview was conducted August August 25, 2003 by Nic Paget-Clarke for In Motion Magazine in New Delhi, India. • •
Water conservation Agriculture technology
Devinder Sharma. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
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Micro-credit Traditional farming practices Cyclic Mode of Development SEWA A real democratic movement Village republics “Engineerr bureaucrat and contractor friendly” “Enginee Leading the world into two clear halves From staple foods to cash crops The diversification mantra He who controls food controls the world Genetically-modified Genetica lly-modified crops Control through research Profit-securing crops Privatization of research Value-added exports Tea from Luxembourg Part of our culture, part of their business One man took up the courage …
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Also see Part 1 – From British Colonialism to WTO Rules and Privatization
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Water conservation
In Motion Magazine: You have written about some possible
techniques techniques or strategies for change: traditional farming practices, tuning agriculture technology to the needs of people, micro-credit, and water conservation. Can you talk about them? Devinder Sharma: There is no denying that these four sectors are
very important. But if you look at it the way we are being told to, we should not follow our own traditionally applicable and time-tested technologies and methodologies, which are suitable to the country’s needs and to the environment. A villager collecting water from a well
Let’s look at water. We have in India a watershed program which in western Tamil Nadu. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. talks about conserving water. In India, the rainwater comes in a hundred hours, in the three months of the monsoon season, that is where we get 90% of our rainfall. In America, it’s intermittent throughout the year. For us, it is very important to conserve that rainwater, so we are saying that we should follow water harvesting technologies. But the tr agedy is the water harvesting methodologies methodologies we follow in India are actually borrowed from America. The Tennessee Valley Authority in America has a water harvesting structure, which is called “ridge to valley”. That model was adopted by India. Since 1982, we have been propagating this waterharvesting model, supported by the World Bank and IMF and it has spread throughout the country. But the tragedy is that model is alien technology for India. It can never work for an Indian environment because it is not suitable for India. It was suitable for American conditions. And look at the irony, today the American Texas A&M University is using the water harvesting model of Chennai (south-eastern India) in their own research farms whereas we are using the American technology. So, unfortunately, we have no faith in our technologies. When I was taught agriculture, all that I was taught was that, “Your agriculture is substandard. Your agriculture is backward. Your agriculture is dependent on monsoon. The only way for you to grow is to follow the American or developed model of agriculture.” So, the mindset has been tuned to that. For us, all that we did in Indian agriculture was backward. But these (developed) technologies have caused lots of problems as we all know, now.
Agriculture technology Number two is the system of agriculture technology. We are being told that the world needs to produce for a world population that will go up to 1.4 billion by year 2015. Therefore, the world needs to produce more and therefore you need genetic engineering. This is going on all over the world. But the reality is in a country like India, we are asking our farmers f armers not to produce more because they have no place to keep it. In India, there is a new phenomenon, which has begun called “produce and perish”. Farmers produce and because there are no buyers they perish. They commit suicide. And we are being told we have to produce more. There is something wrong somewhere. somewhere. Both things don’t go side by side. So, agriculture technology, again it has to come from the Western companies, the Western NGOs.
Micro-credit Self-help groups, the women groups are something which came up from Grameen Bank, and so on, and we have taken that thing (micro-credit) and multiplied it without even realizing whether it was good or bad. I see no reason why the poor should get a loan, a credit from the bank at 24%, which the Grameen Bank provides. I see no reason why the corporate houses in India should get a credit at 6% rate of interest. The more they are poor, the higher the rate of interest. There was a debate in parliament, two days back, and in that debate one of our ex-Prime Ministers was very emotionally talking about the farmers getting credit at 14%, whereas the rich or middle class is getting the credit at 6 to 8 %. I told him subsequently that you are worried about 14%, which the farmers are getting, which of course is bad, but look at the tribals in the Kalahandi belt. Nobody can
imagine that those poor who are hungry, who die of starvation and hunger, when they go to the money-lenders money-lenders to take credit, the rate of interest is 460%. I’m sure even if Monsanto was to pay a rate of interest of 460% the company would collapse. And we expect those poor to come out of the poverty trap? All our focus is to ensure that the rich get the credit much cheaper, and then we believe in the trickledown effect. It is the poor who are being taxed, who are being exploited in all these games. If you are able to pass on that benefit to the poor, I’m sure the poor can do miracles. But that is not happening
Traditional farming practices The last issue you mentioned was traditional farming practices – which they think is a bad idea. “It is not sustainable. It will not feed the country.” We have been given to understand that, “Your food production will collapse if you go in for traditional farming practices.” Please tell me where in the world, and I’m talking of Farming in western Tamil Tamil Nadu. Photo by Nic Pagetthe rich world, do we have a technology which suits a Clarke. farmer in 1.47 hectares? And still we are being told that technology which is applicable for 200 hectares is good for 1.47 hectares. That dichotomy I can’t understand. There are traditional farming systems in India that nobody wants to take on because they think that they are backward. Essentially, the word is they are backward and they are substandard. But if you look at it, 70% of India is still following traditional farming practices. They are the ones who are farming in inhospitable areas. Only 30 percent of India is what is called assured-irrigation. That is the Green Revolution belt. So 70% of India is still following traditional farming practices. Their focus should be to improve those traditional farming practices rather than to displace those farmers or those systems by the modern technology, the so-called high-tech technology. Let me give another comparison here, America America is considered to be a place which has very sophisticated technology. 2002 was a year when America faced the worst drought since the 1930s. 2002 was also a year when India faced the worst drought since the nineteenth century. Both the countries faced a severe drought. It is time to compare these countries. If you look at America, 26 of your 50 states suffered from drought. In India, 13 of the 30 states suffered from drought. In America, America, the agriculture production fell down by 30%. In India it fell down by 18%. I remember going to America and finding that there were farmers praying in churches in rural areas, praying for the rain gods to smile. There were farmers who sold off their ranches. r anches. Farmers who sold off their cattle. There was a terrible shortfall of fodder. fodder. President Bush diverted $150 million of milk to feed the cattle. The so-called precision farming in America collapsed. We talk of precision farming in America, you apply fertilizer and pesticides where it is needed, your rainfall is intermittent throughout the year so there should be no problem of water. You have sprinklers, drip irrigation and so forth. But look at what happened. North Carolina was fighting with South Carolina over water. In a number of states, irrigation of kitchen gardens and washing cars was banned. It didn’t happen in I ndia. Which means that technology is not the one which we should adopt in India. Despite the cost and sophistication, sophistication, it didn’t work in America. America. With one drought it failed. So why do we adopt the same system here? We are sitting right now in Delhi, if you go to the India Agriculture Research Institute they are going to launch a research project for precision farming. They are going to spend three crore rupees, which means 30 million rupees to do a research project on precision farming because because the Americans are doing it. Is that that the requirement for India?
Cyclic Mode of Development
In Motion Magazine: Are there examples of local organizing where people are getting involved in
trying to bring about changes in India using these techniques? Devinder Sharma: Not only in India. If you look around the developing countries, there are many,
many such examples which of course the scientists don’t want to accept. In a place in Bihar, now it has also gone into a state called Jharkand, there is a group of villages, 50-odd villages which have been part of what is called a “Chakriya Vikas Pranali” which means Cyclic Mode of Development. It was started by an amazing person from the same area. It has gone into what is called a “three is to three to three to one system” of sharing the produce and the income from that piece of land. This is with the landless – the work on the land in that area. What I want to say is, in those areas, they look like an oasis in the entire hunger belt of Jharkand, near Bihar. These 50 villages are the areas which look prosperous compared to that area. In an area where rupees-ten is a big income for a day, these are the villages where they have village’s funds of about 100,000 rupees each, that would be only ten percent of what they have earned. And they have done it completely by their own traditional ways.
SEWA And they are not the only villages. If you go around the country, you are going to visit SEWA (Self-Employed ( Self-Employed Women’s Association, Association , Ahmedabad, Gujarat), SEWA is another classic example of how the people have done it by pooling their own capacity as well as their capabilities to ensure that they build up the capabilities of the people to grow using agriculture as a means. They have done it remarkably well.
Self-Employed Women’s Association, Association , Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
You go around in various parts of the country and you will find these kinds of examples. But they are spread all over the country. Nobody wants to bring them together and draw a lesson from them. That is a tragedy because multinational companies come, they have their PR (public relations) units behind them, and they keep on bombarding us with this information that, “You have no other escape but to use this kind of technology.” And, “We will do wonders for economic growth” and so on. We are lured by that. But go to see these examples, There are thousands and thousands of examples. Jules Pretty, Pretty, in one of his publications, has documented many of them. Jules Pretty is a professor at one of the universities in UK. He has written on sustainable farming practices -- where the people have done it.
A real democratic movement In Motion Magazine: Do you think there is a beginning of a real democratic movement that is coming
out of these kinds of organizing efforts, and in contradiction to globalization? globalization? Devinder Sharma: Yes, and what the government says is something different. You will see the
numbers are multiplying. The interesting interesting part is when we started looking at all these things we first thought that they are happening but they will disappear because of the onslaught of the technologybased companies and so on. But, surprisingly, it hasn’t happened. These numbers are multiplying. More and more people are going back to these traditional systems and that’s a great ray of hope for the kind of things we are talking about – sustainable farming, sustainable agriculture, agriculture, a sustainable future. Just to give an example, Punjab is the food bowl of India. Punjab is an area which is ecologically diverse today. 60 percent of the country’s food surplus comes from Punjab, the northwest part of India. But that’s the area where we have reached a second generation bottle-neck as far as environmental damage done -- the water table going down drastically, soil becoming in a pathetically bad situation.
The soil is hungry. The ecology has gone bad. The capacity to produce of the soil has gone down drastically, and so on. But now the farmers are reverting r everting back. Many farmers in that state are reverting back to traditional farming practices. They realize that all these experiments they did in the Green Revolution period have done damage. People are trying to go back. It may be a small experiment but I always believe as Neil Armstrong said, when he stepped on the moon, “A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.” As Hillary Clinton also said once, “It takes a village,” then another village, then another village the multiplier effect- and a revolution is born. I am very hopeful about that.
Village republics In Motion Magazine: So, there’s actual political,
democratic involvement involvement of the individuals within these villages? Devinder Sharma: In the villages? Yes, but not at the
Banner in western Tamil Nadu. Nadu . Photo by Nic PagetClarke.
national scene. In Motion Magazine: It’s growing? Devinder Sharma: Slowly. In Motion Magazine: From active involvement by people? Devinder Sharma: I will give you one example. India has about 600,000 villages. And we know the
condition of the villages. But, can you believe, roughly 1,500-plus of India’s villages have actually put signboards outside their village saying, “If you are a government employee, or a company official, please don’t walk in.” And it hasn’t happened as a movement. It has happened sporadically. They are all spread over the country, these 1,500 villages. These are the villages, which have become complete, what I call, as village republics. They are self-sufficient. They don’t need anybody’s support. And 1500, my God, is not a small number. If that 1,500 multiplies to 3,000 in the years to come, just see what will happen to this country. We don’t need external support. What all those villages are saying is, “Please don’t come up with these external supports to use. We have had enough.”
“Engineer bureaucrat and contractor friendly” In Motion Magazine: In the implementation of some of these efforts for sustainable development, you
have talked about them disparagingly disparagingly as “engineer bureaucrat and contractor friendly”. What is a better way of developing sustainable agriculture? Devinder Sharma: It has to be based on the local needs, the local environment, the local capacity of
the farmers, and local technology. And that is what has been amply demonstrated. Just to give an example, if you look at WTO negotiations, every time Frank Fischler, the European Union Agriculture Commissioner, talks about the kinds of things that he is doing under WTO, “The developing developing country farmer will gain.” But the tragedy has been that when, two years back, Frank Fischler came to India that was the first time he had ever visited a developing country. He has always been talking about the benefits to developing countries, yet even when he came to India he did not meet farmers. He doesn’t even know what the farmers of India look like. Sitting there in Brussels, or in
Geneva, or in Washington we tend to believe, “This is wonderful. What we are doing will help the farmers.” I think that is the greatest tragedy, because we are basically uneducated and if we go to these farmers we can learn from them. They carry with them hundreds or thousands of years of experience. experience. I think the world should go backwards and learn from them rather than think that they are backward and poor so they need to be taught. That was the biggest tragedy of the Green Revolution model. The Green Revolution Model talked about “lab to land”, it didn’t talk of “land to land”, and that is why you find all these problems coming coming up all over the world wherever Green Revolution is followed. When I was a student of the Green Revolution model, I was taught the land grant model of education, and it tended to believe, “We need to disseminate this information to the farmers.” It takes f armers as a bloc of unread illiterates who don’t know about all these things. “They have to be educated.” Whereas, these people have tremendous wisdom with them. That was what the Green Revolution should have got back. But they didn’t and look where the world is heading. In a country like ours, which is a land of contrasts -- India is truly a subcontinent, as we all know -- you can find all kinds of experiments, which could have been done. You could have answers to all kind of things that you are looking all over the world for. There are sustainable answers with people and we never went back to them. We never want to learn from them. It is shameful if a man with a PhD goes and sits with a farmer and learns something.
Leading the world into two clear halves In Motion Magazine: How would you compare the state of liberalization at the time you wrote the
book, in 1992, and now? Devinder Sharma: When I came out with my book on agriculture and WTO / GATT, it was dubbed as an analysis which was extreme, not true for India, “India is going to gain” and so on and forth. In fact, the Indian Finance Minister subsequently said, “That book has been written by somebody who never read the GATT Agreement.” There were lots of comments about me.
In the subsequent title of this book, the next edition, it was called, “GATT/WTO Seeds of Despair”. I was very clear that there’s going to be a negative thing for us. Interestingly, the government of India, two years back, published a document which was released in Delhi in a forum to which it invited farmer leaders, political leaders and the NGOs. The document says, it was evaluating the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, that all the hopes and expectations from opening up under WTO have been belied. The government government of India took seven or eight years to realize that this was negatively impacting impacting us. I think anyone who had a keen insight into the political economy, the way the world was moving, could see where it was moving. I’m glad now the book is being dug out. Lots of people are taking it out and trying to see what was said there. It is now coming out to be true. In fact, all that I have said is now coming out to be true. It is nothing to be complimenting oneself, oneself, the only thing I am trying tr ying to say is if you are dispassionately trying to analyze the realities, knowing the political situation going on, you can see where the world is moving. The liberalization process process is leading the world into two clear halves, whether it is through WTO or through the financial institutions of World Bank and IMF. It is now forcing the world to move on to a stage where the staple foods will be produced by the OECD countries. The rest of the world will mainly produce products products or crops which will meet the luxury requirements of people in the Western countries.
From staple foods to cash crops In Motion Magazine: Like what?
Devinder Sharma: Like producing cut flowers. Like
producing peas. Like producing tomatoes. Like producing sunflower. Things like that which will meet the luxury requirements of the West. Coffee. And the staple foods will be produced by only America and Europe.
Banana crop. Tamil Tamil Nadu. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
Now, why is it happening? Why I am saying this is based on analysis, based on an understanding. Today, Europe exports about 18% of the world’s agriculture, the European Union. 17% is contributed by America. Add on the Cairns Group (editor: group of 17 agricultural exporting countries, formed in 1986)) as such, as a bloc, they will take another 20%. Which means about 50, 55% is in the hands of 1986 these three blocs – which are essentially the OECD blocs. But, interestingly, through the WTO we are asked to lift up trade barriers, reduce our tariffs, so that the cheaper food can come into our countries. When cheaper food comes the entire focus is on destroying your food self-sufficiency. Once you are not food self sufficient, once you become dependent then you become dependent, for all times to come.
The diversification mantra Look at the other way. The World Bank and IMF, they tell us in India that, “You produce enough wheat and rice, and so on. You need to diversify.” Diversification of agriculture is the new mantra. Whether it is India, whether it is China, whether it is Pakistan, whether it is Philippines or Africa – we should all diversify. Why? Because we are producing too much of grains. Look at the clever intention of the World Bank and IMF. If there is one place or one bloc that should diversify, it is America and Europe. They go on producing soybean after soybean, corn after corn, wheat after wheat. They need to diversify. Nobody tells America to diversify. Nobody tells European Union to diversify. Why is that only we are being told to diversify? And since it comes with money, money, it comes with credit, facilities the World Bank provides -- the countries are moving on it. They are following the diversification mantra. Basically, we are moving from staple foods to cash crops. You will agree cash crops don’t feed you. They can give you the money if you export, but they don’t feed you. In a country like ours where 1.47 hectares is the average landholding size, you need staple foods so that the poor man can at least feed his family first. You cannot export them to America and then get the dollars. That is what is called the Kalahandi Syndrome.
He who controls food controls the world So what are we doing now? Very clearly, the world is full up of nuclear weapons. There’s a tremendous outrage of wars being fought with precision bombs, so the biggest weapon that a country can have is food. Food is the biggest weapon. As long as America and European Union and a few other blocs control food I don’t think they will have any problem. The future of wars will not be fought through the armed forces, to me the food is the biggest weapon. He who controls food controls the world.
Genetically-modified crops In Motion Magazine: Which leads to GMOs What is your opinion to GMOs. Devinder Sharma: The same. This is part of the same paradigm. Genetically-modified Genetically-modified (GM) crops (editor: also read interview with Dr. Doreen Stabinksy) Stabinksy) – one, of course, you are tinkering, whatever you are doing, and the other part is you are controlling the food chain. That is what the GM companies are going to do now. It is part of the same paradigm of World Bank, IMF, GM companies, and the WTO -- if you look at the same liberalization process. process.
What will happen now is the new products that are coming up are also coming up with stronger intellectual property rights. First of all, we don’t have the technology. The technology is in the hands of the Western companies, so the new crop seeds that come from them would have to be bought by us. We have no escape. And they have already ensured things like Terminator ( editor: a geneticallyengineered seed which only produces for one generation ) which is now no longer a concept, it is a product. We will have terminator and seeds that you can program to insure that production goes up or goes down.
Control through research Then you have the control – control through research. One way is you force the countries to open up so that you can remove the barriers -- the trade can push the food grains. But another aspect, which is worrisome for the West is there are countries like India and China that still have a very powerful and formative research infrastructure in the public sector. India has the second biggest research infrastructure in the world after China. This is a system which can use its expertise to grow crops and at least meet the food security requirement. requirement. So, the best way is to dismantle this system. At an international level there is the CGIAR CGIAR,, the Consultative Group on International International Agriculture Research. They are under tremendous attack from the multinational corporations because they find them to be the first fir st obstacle. So they will go. We know that their days are numbered. The next attack is going to be on ICR ICR,, the Indian Council for Agricultural Research, which has about 31 agricultural universities and about 81 national institutes. They have about 30,000 agricultural scientists employed. But that system is being destabilized through intellectual property rights. Let me give you one example. Rice is a crop which originates from India along with the Japanese region. It is Indo-Japanese. That is why it is classified in two categories, indica and japonica. japonica. But now the rice genome has been mapped. We don’t need the varieties that we’ve got in India. What we need now is the genes. The genes are mapped, cloned, and intellectual property rights control exist – they (patents) have been taken out by companies in the Western part of the world. India was recently requiring one gene of rice to be incorporated into rice. We actually went to Japan to buy their gene. We spent 30 lakh rupees which would mean three million rupees to buy one gene. It didn’t work. Imagine if India was to start buying genes in a country where you can’t even pay the staff salaries today. The research infrastructure goes redundant after a few years. We are fast moving to an arena where the research will be stifled, so the private companies take over. We have the entire seed industry moving into India because there is a huge market here. As I said earlier, we have a 110 million landholdings, 557 million farmers, only 10 percent of our farmers replace seed every year which means only ten percent of the farmers buy seed every year. 90 percent still save seed. So, through terminator and other seeds these companies companies control, steer the market. The first Terminator crop will be available on the market in the year 2004.
Profit-securing crops In Motion Magazine: I think you have changed your
opinion on GMOs over the years. You seemed more open to it in your first book?
A large puppet, part of a protest against geneticallyengineered crops at Monsanto's headquarters, St. Louis, Missouri. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
Devinder Sharma: Basically, I am a geneticist. I did
my genetics on plant breeding and I too was very fascinated by this science. Over the years lots of people have asked me this question. Why have I changed my opinion about GMOs? I think as you go along you see what is happening. You see the politics. You see the mischief. You see the manipulations being enacted. You realize that this technology is not for the welfare of the farming
communities communities of the developing countries. Therefore, Therefore, your stand also starts hardening hardening knowing the politics that is prevailing. It is not because of the technology. The technology per se is wonderful and I still have great hopes on that, but the technology has gone into the wrong hands. What do you do with that? The tragedy, tragedy, as I have written in many of my articles, is that the public sector scientists should stand up and say herbicide tolerant plants ( editor: e.g. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybeans ) is not what we require, and they fail to say so. You will have more and more such kinds of products coming into the country which are not required. They doesn’t boost your productivity. They don’t increase your production. They only insure profit for the company – they are basically profit-securing profit-securing crops. It is not f ood security they are talking about it is profit security. security. Scientists have helped the companies profit security – that is what my worry is.
Privatization of research In Motion Magazine: Could you talk some more about the privatization of r esearch, in the context of
the privatization of the world? Why is that significant? Devinder Sharma: It is very significant. When we had the land grant university coming up in America,
India also adopted the land grant model from. The land grant universities in America. were essentially public sector controlled. I read a report, that said there are 535 plant breeders working on corn in America today. Of which only 30 are n the public sector. The rest are in the private sector. This gives you an idea. When I was a student of agriculture, plant breeding, the Mecca of plant breeding was an institute in England called the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge. The Plant Breeding Institute was an institute which was a public sector institute. It was an institute which was getting £6 million from the U.K. government government as support, but returning £10 million a year to the government. government. It was not a loss-making unit. But Margaret Thatcher sold off that institute to Unilever. Unilever sold it off to Monsanto. Today that institute is gone. Imagine when these kinds of privatizations privatizations start taking place all over the world. In India, these public sector institutes are at least covered by the democratic norms. At least the government can tell, “Look, you should be working on wheat. This is a disease that has erupted. You should be working on it.” But tomorrow, tomorrow, if it is privately controlled, who can tell that institute to work? In a country like India, where the crops are so diverse, where the landholding size is so small, where the insect and the pest attack is virulent because we are in a tropical world, we need to have public sector controlled research which looks beyond profits. Unfortunately that is going away. We may be the last bastion left. Essentially, all countries in my neighborhood are also giving up. It is privatization of research and that research will not be on these kinds of crops we are talking about. They will be more acting as a service center for the companies in the Western hemisphere. For instance, Monsanto requires some experiments experiments to be done in India, these will become the service centers to do that research.
Value-added exports In Motion Magazine: You were talking about how the WTO was encouraging diversification among
developing developing countries, is that similar to the British banning, in India, the local manufacture of cloth? Devinder Sharma: You are very right. r ight. That is a legacy which still continues. It is very interesting.
Cotton was not a major crop of India before the British found f ound that America America cotton was not coming. America stopped supplying supplying cotton for the Manchester industry in Britain. So, they diverted attention to India. Cotton erupted in India and it was shipped directly from here to Britain. I think it makes economic sense to have set up a manufacturing manufacturing plant in India rather r ather than to ship it all the way to England. But they didn’t want that profit to be shared with the Indians. Of course, we were a colony at that time and no colonial master will do that, but even now it is not being done. If you look at
the way the way the WTO is doing things, it is just to ensure that the raw material comes from this part of the world. It goes to that part of the world and then it is “value-added” -- the terminology now being used is “value-added” -- and beautifully packed, and then it comes back to us with much more price, and intellectual property rights, and so on, and so forth.
Tea from Luxembourg Let me give you an example. There are three countries which would top the production chart for tea in the world. That is India, Sri Lanka, and Kenya. They are the three countries which are the major producers of tea. But I’m sure if I were to ask you a question, “Which are the major exporters of tea, you will have an answer.” In Motion Magazine: I would think it was India. Devinder Sharma: That is what everybody would think. The biggest exporters of tea are Luxembourg,
Belgium and Britain. They don’t grow tea. In Motion Magazine: So how do they get it there? Devinder Sharma: That is what is very interesting. Because they value add then pack it their value
goes up. They become a big exporter of tea than us. We export the raw material. They pack it. They value add it – you can find hundreds of kinds of tea now if you go to the tea shops anywhere in the West, mango tea, lychee tea, all the flavors – they add those values and they ultimately market it. If you look at oranges, we export orange skin to Holland and Holland makes something and exports it to the rest of the world. They are the kind of valuations that are going on. Interestingly the second biggest exporter of agriculture products in the world is Holland. And And Holland is not even of the size of Punjab. That is the way the world is moving. To us that is a cause for worry because in our country we are not worried about exports we are worried about our food security needs – feeding the poor. Everything is now being looked at by way of how much you can export. It is agribusiness.
Part of our culture, part of their business In India it is agriculture. If you go to Punjab, they say the only culture of Punjab is agriculture. That is what we were actually using agriculture as. It is part of our culture. Whereas, for the West it is part of their business, it is industry, for us, it is part of our livelihood, part of our life. That is the difference and that is why I suppose there is a clash. If you look at rice, for instance, rice doesn’t mean anything to an average American American except for what he gets in the market or what he eats. But in India rice has tremendous cultural, religious roles. I get married and the rice is in every kind of ceremony that I involve – rice is there. It is part of our culture, upbringing. And now we are being asked to diverse from that. Under modern systems – this is all backwards.
One man took up the courage … In Motion Magazine: Indians are in a very good
position to see how the free trade rules are similar to the British rule? Devinder Sharma: That’s right. It is basically divide
and rule. I think the British were very smart. But there is a ray of hope here, again with the British system.
Visiting the Gandhi Samadhi at the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Park, New Delhi. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
And I have always being saying that. The British empire was a very ruthless empire. As we said earlier, the sun would never set on the British empire. But, one man took up the courage, and there was no media like today, one man took up the courage and the empire crumbled. In Motion Magazine: Can you talk a little about his philosophy (Mohandas K. Gandhi) and how that
applies today? Devinder Sharma: I am very hopeful. Lots of people have asked me, the multinationals are a very big
force. I said they are not bigger than the British empire at that time. Not in terms of money, but ruthlessness. What the British had at that time … people could disappear, nobody would ask a question to the British government. But, today, if people disappear there are a whole lot of human rights groups and civil society groups and the media and and so on – it is very difficult. I don’t mean it doesn’t happen but it is very difficult today. And there can be movements born after that. But look at that one man and the empire crumbled. I am very hopeful today it will not be one man, it can be ten men, but the multinational empire can also crumble. That is again a legacy, a lesson that has to be learned. That is why I was very keen that you should see the Mahatma Samadhi (Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Park). That is where you can get some inspiration. Somebody who came from Britain, I had some time, I took him around to Mahatma Samadhi and he sat down with me in that garden, on that lawn, and then he asked me this question: “Is it where you get your inspiration?” inspiration?” I said, “I don’t know about that, but I know one thing, that whenever I come to this place I know if this man could do it, a hundred of us can do it now.” All it needs is one plus one. One plus one becomes eleven. And somebody said, one plus one plus one becomes one hundred and eleven. That’s That’s the way it multiplies. I am very hopeful. Return to Part 1 – From British Colonialism to WTO Rules and Privatization Also see: •
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Assessing the Risks of Genetic Engineering Super weeds, non-target impacts, horizontal gene transfer Interview with plant geneticist Dr. Doreen Stabinsky Auckland, Aotearoa / New Zealand Genetic Engineering index of articles Bill Gates' Rescue Package: Flogging a Dead Horse by Devinder Sharma New Delhi, India Extended series of interviews and articles from the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, August 26 - September 4, 2002
Published in In Motion Magazine November 11, 2003
Interview with Vandana Shiva The Role of Patents in the Rise of Globalization “The recovery of economic democracy is at the heart of recovery of democracy itself.” New Delhi, India
Dr. Vandana Shiva is founder of both the Research Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology, an independent public industry research group, and Navdanya a grassroots conservation movement in India. This interview was conducted by Nic PagetClarke on August 27, 2003 for In Motion Magazine in New Delhi, India. • • • • • • • •
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A twist in the history of patents Control of the technology The role of patents Globalization Globaliza tion of U.S. patent laws Patents regulate life Medicine:: from healing to profits Medicine Ecology and equity From theoretical physicist to advocate for biodiversity Agriculture and violence Focus on biotechnology and patenting The influence of Gandhi The death of economic democracy The recovery of economic democracy The flow of wealth from South to North From ownership of land to ownership of biodiversity War is globalization by other means
Vandana Shiva at a press conference with other leaders of Vandana an anti-WTO march in New Delhi, August 27, 2003 . All photos by Nic Paget-Clarke.
Marching with former Indian prime ministers.
A twist in the history of patents In Motion Magazine: I think sometimes people’s
eyes glaze over when hearing about patents and legal matters, but in your book “Protect “ Protect or Plunder – Understanding Understanding Intellectual Property Rights” you describe some interesting history, about how originally patents were used to spread technology but now they have been turned into their opposite. Could you outline how that twist happened? Vandana Shiva: In the early days, the word patent
was used for two things. In the case of getting hold of territory, what were issued by kings and queens were letters-patent, which were open letters. Anyone could know that Columbus had been given a right by Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand to conquer and take over any territory on their behalf. But the second meaning, defined around the same time by the Venetian laws on patent, which were the first patent laws, was that a master craftsman could be brought (to a country), because technology at that time was craft technology, and if a country could not make glass they would give to the master craftsman apprentices and say, “Train our people in this art.” “Train our people to make glass.” “Train our people to make steel.” “Train our people to make
A soldier of the Indian Army provides security for the former prime minsiters marching in the anti-WTO rally in Ne w Delhi.
On the march in New Delhi.
textiles”, and we will give you an exclusive right (to make mak e these products) for seven years while you are training people. The period of the patent was seven years because it took too k seven years to learn a craft. After that seven seven years was over, the master craftsman went back to wherever whe rever he belonged and you had all the apprentices apprentices available in the country to spread that technology techn ology as a free public good. This was the pattern throughout the early use of patent law. Then you get slow shifts with the rise of industrialism. industrialism. As big industry became a major economic interest, they started to use technology as an instrument instrument of monopoly. monopoly. Patents became the way to say, “Only we will use this technology”. The way they expanded this power was, on the one han d, extending extending the life of patents. It went from seven years to fourteen. Now, under WTO (World Trade Organization), Organiz ation), for the first time it is twenty years -- extendible in a period where technologies technologies are b ecoming so obsolete that if you have that kind of monopoly for twenty years you are totally controlling the the technology. technology. And the second thing is constantly increasing the domai n over which patents will apply. For example, in India’s patent law agriculture could not be touched. Agriculture A griculture was free of monopolies. And in medicine you could not have a product monopoly. You could not monopolize a medicine but you could monopolize a method of making a medicine. But, medic ine has been been brought into monopolies. Seed has been brought into monopolies. Cells have brought i nto monopolies. monopolies. Genes have been brought into monopolies. Animals have been brought into monopolie s. Basically, the ’80s saw a twist in this and a lot of it had t o do with the rise of the big industry and their convergence into one set of giants, which are the health giants, the pharmaceutical giants, the t he gene giants controlling all life.
Control of the technology In Motion Magazine: You’ve also said that with the rise of other countries other countries in the world, with their own
manufacturing manufacturing systems, markets started to slip away but bu t the developed developed countries countries still had control of the technology? Vandana Shiva: The thing was that when we were living living in a world based on crafts, transferring technology technology was the objective. But as the world got industrialized, as developing countries shed the colonial burden, imperialistic patent law started to develop.
For example, again India, under a 1970 law, developed a very stro ng medical sector. And I think if WTO had not come on the horizon, India would be providing cheap medicine to American citizens. It’s capable of doing that. But the American citizens, and the African citizens, and the Brazilian citizens, and in the future the India citizens are being told, “You will only buy from these monopolies.” It was a way to de-industrialize Southern countries who had started to build capacity, capacity, technological capacity for themselves.
The role of patents In Motion Magazine: So patents have had a very specific role in the latest version of imperialism, in
this globalization phase? Vandana Shiva: If you want to have one tool for imperialistic control, it’s patent law under the WTO
agreement. agreement. It’s in my view the worst of the WTO agreemen agreements. ts. It is a totally coercive tool. It has only a negative function: function: to prevent others f rom doing their own thing; to prevent people from having food; to prevent people from having medicine; to prevent countries from having technological capacity. It is a negative tool for creating underdevelopment.
It’s the privatization of knowledge. I have called it the enclosure, the ultimate enclosure. We had enclosures of land. Now, we are seeing enclosures of biodiversity, life itself. In my book “Biopiracy”, I’ve talked about how this is the last colony. It is the spaces within our minds -- for knowledge. The spaces within life forms for reproduction. A seed cannot reproduce without permission of the patent holder and the company. Knowledge cannot be transmitted without permission and license collection. It’s rent collection from life. It’s rent collection from being human, and thinking, and knowing.
Globalization of U.S. patent laws In Motion Magazine: How has the WTO been a forum for the globalization of U.S. patent laws? Vandana Shiva: The WTO has an agreement called Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights
agreement agreement (TRIPs), which basically is nothing more than globalization globalization of U.S.-style laws. And its globalization globalization of U.S.-style laws both in content and in process. In terms of content, in the late ’80s when this law was drafted, the United States was the only country that granted patents on life forms. This precedent was set in a 1980 decision on a genetically-engineered micro-organism, subsequent to which was the rise of the biotech industry. The granting of life patents was seen as an imperative both by the industry as well as the government. The U.S. government actually encouraged life patenting. The decision-making decision-making was set by the courts, rather than by Congress, never with a public debate, never with a public policy decision on the ethical implications, ecological implications, implications, economic implications implications of what life patents mean. The second way in which this is a globalization of U.S. law is the fact that it was really U.S. companies which got together, together, drafted the law, took it to the U.S. administration, administration, then took it to the secretariat of the at-that-time General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), which was the precursor of WTO, and as Monsanto, which was one of the companies in the intellectual property coalition admitted in drafting this law, “We achieved something unprecedented. We were the patient, the diagnostician, and the physician all in one.
Patents regulate life With the broadening of patents to life forms, patents do not just regulate technology they regulate life. They regulate economy. They regulate basic needs. A patent is an exclusive right to make, produce, distribute, or sell the patented product. So, if a patent is granted, for example, on seed it means a farmer who grows a seed cannot save seed from the harvested crop because that is constituted as making the seed and the exclusive right to the seed belongs to the company. It means seed-saving by farmers is now defined as intellectual property theft. Many farmers in the United States have been sued by the corporations for doing something normal in farming, which is saving their seed. Exchanging seed with your neighbor, which is called brown-bagging -- it was not a commercial exercise; it was a mutual give-and-take in society; a social act of exchange for non-profit activity -- has also been defined as an infringement because now distributing is covered by a patent, even if it is not commercial, because the companies interpret that by exchanging seed you are taking the market away from them.
Medicine: from healing to profits Also, patents can be given for medicine. For example, in the case of medicine, if there is no patent we can treat people with AIDS with $200 expenditure per year. Indian companies can make it for that cost because they can make them as generic drugs. They are not piracy drugs, which is the way the U.S. pharmaceutical industry talks about them. They are generic in the sense that different processes have been used. The same medicine, the same retroviral, costs $20,000 in the United States because of patenting -- that is the only difference. Which means something which is being made for $200 is being sold to consumers for not just ten times but a hundred times the price. As our prime minister said, the big companies are trying to turn the matter of disease from healing into a matter of profits. There was an attempt made, at the beginning of the TRIPs negotiations, to make it look like the lowercost production that could happen in the absence of monopolies was piracy. The industry managed to
define piracy as absence of monopolies. We want to define monopoly as monopoly and recognize that things like seeds should be accessible to farmers, things like medicine should be accessible to those who are dying of AIDS, and no regime in the world can put profits above people’s lives. In Motion Magazine: Are the same corporations controlling food and health? Vandana Shiva: It’s the same companies. The industry that used to be the chemical industry is also
the pharmaceutical industry, is also the seed industry, is also the biotech industry. There is no separation -- and agro-chemical industry. It is all one.
Ecology and equity In Motion Magazine:You made the statement in your book on patents that there’s always a
connection between ecology and equity. Can you talk about that? Vandana Shiva: Ecology is about interactions in the natural world, sustainability of resources.
Whether you look at water, you look at biodiversity, you look at anything, conservation happens. Environmental sustainability takes place when people have a stake and a share in the rewards of the conserved resource. resource. If people have the ability to drink water from a well, and look after that well, and will suffer the consequences of contamination, they will not contaminate that well. People who pollute a well or a river are the ones who don’t have to drink from it. Similarly, when it comes to monopolies on intellectual property, conservation is what is sacrificed. It’s the small peasants of the world who have conserved biodiversity. If they have to continue conserving biodiversity, they need to have their rights defended. They need to be able to know that when they plant basmati rice it will be their reward to harvest that basmati. They will not be treated as pieces of RiceTec property. And they need to have a market for their produce. Intellectual Intellectual property destabilizes both, and in fact, starts to become an incentive for destruction of biodiversity by pressures of the industry for monocultures, monocultures, on the one hand, but also by not giving people a chance to protect the resources from which they make a living because they are no more their resources. That is why ecology goes hand-in-hand with equity.
From theoretical physicist to advocate for biodiversity In Motion Magazine: Could you go over how you started in the field of physics and then ended up
where you are today and how that relates to your organizing? Vandana Shiva: I chose to be a physicist. I loved physics from an age when I didn’t even know what
the content was but I knew I wanted to figure out how nature works. Einstein was my hero. This is what inspired me. I lived through life training to be a physicist, initially training to be a nuclear physicist and then realizing there’s a dark side to it. I left that to become a theoretical physicist. I worked in foundations of quantum theory. As is typical, I was doing my Ph.D. in Canada and everyone everyone who goes from the South as a scientist stays on and becomes a university professor and I could see, “That’s what I will become.” I wanted to become that. But I said, “I’m not informed enough about how my society works. There is a question in my mind. We have the third biggest scientific community in the world. We are among the poorest of countries. Science and technology is supposed to create growth, remove poverty. Where is the gap? Why is science and technology not removing poverty?” I wanted to answer that question to myself. I said, “I will take off three years. Look at science policy issues. Be a little more educated, socially, and then go back to physics.” That was my chosen life path. I was, in any way, way, involved in forest protection
in the Himalayas, my home, before I went for a Ph.D. I constantly volunteered with a movement of women called Chipko . But when I started to work on science and technology issues, I realized very quickly that they are about resource control. They are not about efficiency. A big trawler in the sea is not more efficient than a small boat. It controls more resources. And denies denies the small boat. Green Revolution farming is not more efficient. It takes more water and leaves other areas deprived of financial investment, investment, water inputs, everything else. What you really see is technology acting as, what I called in that period, a polarizer of resource access. Very quickly I started to realize that technology issues, ecology issues, social inequality issues, were actually very intimately connected. I did a lot of analysis/writing at that point and I was invited by the United Nations to carry these issues further. Meantime, Meantime, the Ministry of Environment, seeing some of my reports, commissioned me to look at mining in my valley. I had just had my son, the 21-year-old boy who is walking around (in the office where this interview took place), and I said “perfect”. I had lost my mother at that time, so I said “I will go back, look at this mining, make a break in my science policy, also make a short break from my return to physics. Do the study. He’ll be a little older. But I will also do more work on ecology and the grassroots movement. Did the study. We stopped the mine.
Agriculture and violence I started to do the United Nations work and a huge world unfolded. The Punjab Punjab crisis burst which forced me to look at agriculture, ecology issues of agriculture, but also the rise of terrorism linked to unequal development. I wrote my book called “The Violence of the Green Revolution”. 1984 was the year I started to look very, very closely at those issues because we’d had genocide in Punjab. We’d lost our prime minister in that terrorism, t errorism, which eventually killed 30,000 people. people. And it was the year of Bhopal. As a result of that gas leak from a pesticide plant, 30,000 people more have died. So, I was just surrounded by these mega-violent epidemics epidemics all linked to agriculture and agriculture that was supposed to be progressive. In 1984, I decided that something was wrong and I needed to go to the roots of it. Why has agriculture gone so violent? Why are we so dependent on pesticides -weapons of mass destruction? The real weapons of mass destruction because they did move from the war industry into agriculture.
Focus on biotechnology and patenting After three of four years of looking more closely at agriculture issues, I started to get called into biotechnology biotechnology seminars because it was the next step. In ’87, at one of these seminars, the industry laid out its grand dream of controlling the world. They talked about needing genetic engineering so that there’s a technology that they have that peasants can’t use so that they can have a monopoly through technology. Patents. Because without it they cannot consolidate power. That was said by Sandoz. Sandoz merged later with Ceiber-Geigy. Sandoz and Ceiber-Geigy became Novartis. Novartis merged with AstroZeneca, AstroZeneca, which was anyway two independent companies, earlier. earlier. All of them merged to become Syngenta. What they had said at that time was, “By the turn of the century we will be five.” In ’87, I said, “I don’t want to live in a world where five giant companies companies control our health and our food.” I dropped everything else. I left my work on dams and forests and mines. I was doing very broad-scale work on the environment movement then. Dropped everything else. Handed it over to the next generation generation -- and they were brilliant activists in India -- and moved into a focus on two things: biotechnology and patenting.
I tracked the whole TRIPs negotiations through and have followed the biotech industry from the day it wanted to become a giant industry. I have tried to do my best to defend the freedom of people; create seed banks so that farmers have free seed; nature has freedom of diversity; and these monopolies are restrained. Since 1987 to now, which is 16 years, I have had a single pointed attention to prevent imperialism over life itself.
The influence of Gandhi In Motion Magazine: When you are working with the various farmers’ organizations, organizations, various mass organizations, organizations, specifically in India do people consciously learn from f rom what Gandhi had to say? (See photo of Gandhi's working room, the Harijan Ashram by the Sabarmati River, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India.) Vandana Shiva: Definitely. People very, very much learn from what Gandhi had said. When I brought
the TRIPs issues for the first time to farmers’ organizations in India, in ’91 when the first draft of the WTO texts were ready, it was called the Dunkel draft text, I started to tell people what this would imply. It took no time: by ’92, ’93, we had giant farmer rallies. And the title (of the movement) was the Seed Satyagraha Satyagraha -- the non-violent, non-cooperation non-cooperation with laws that create seed monopolies, inspired totally by Gandhi walking to the Dandi Beach and picking the salt and saying, “You can’t monopolize this which we need for life.” On the non-cooperation non-cooperation side we were very inspired by Gandhi. But also on the constructive side, the other side of our work with farmers and farm groups is the creative side of saving seeds, doing agriculture without corporate dependence dependence -- without chemicals, without their seed. All this is talked about in the language that Gandhi left us as a legacy. We work with three key concepts. (One) Swadeshi -- which means the capacity to do your own thing -produce your own food, produce your own goods. (Two) (Two) Swaraj -- to govern yourself. And we fight on three fronts -- water, water, food, and seed. JalSwaraj -JalSwaraj is water independence -- water freedom and water sovereignty. Anna Swaraj is food freedom, food sovereignty. And Bija Swaraj is seed freedom and seed sovereignty. (In regard to these fronts) Swa means self -- that which rises fr om the self and is very, very much a deep notion of freedom. I believe that these concepts, which are deep, deep, deep in Indian civilization, Gandhi Gandhi resurrected them to f ight for freedom. They are very important for today’s world because so far what we’ve had is centralized state rule, giving way now to centralized corporate control, and we need a third alternate. That third alternate is, in part, citizens being able to tell their states, “This is what your function is. This is what your obligations are,” and being able to have their states act on corporations to say, “This is something you cannot do.” The third component is Satyagraha, non-cooperation, basically saying, “We will do our thing and any law that tries to say that us being free is illegal we will have to not cooperate with it. We will defend our freedoms to have access to water, access to seed, access to food, access to medicine.”
The death of economic democracy In Motion Magazine: Last time we spoke, you were talking about how to make democracy more
viable and you were saying that it comes down to individual participation at an economic level. How would that function? Vandana Shiva: Well, actually any real, true democracy is one in which people can determine the
conditions conditions of their living -- their food, their health, their jobs, their livelihoods. These These are defined as economic issues. They used to be covered by democratic governance of the representative kind to the extent that before globalization, if you voted someone to power you could put demands on that
representative to say, “We need a school in this community, and if you promise you get us a school we are with you.” By and large, it was possible for politicians to come back and deliver their promise because it was within the national sovereign space. But globalization has meant the erosion of national sovereign space. For example, under the agreement on agriculture nobody can guarantee a price to a farmer. Governments cannot go to farmers and say, “We will make sure you get a living price for your farm commodities.” They cannot go to a community and say, “We will defend your jobs and prevent them from being undermined and companies running off to some cheap overseas site.” They cannot offer guarantees on education, they cannot offer healthcare healthcare -- the typical things democracy was made of. What we’ve seen is a split of democracy. It’s been emptied out of its economic content, been left with a representative representative shell of electoral theatrics -- literally. literally. Economic decisions have moved out of the hands of citizens and even of the hands of countries and moved into organizations controlled by corporations like the WTO, and the World Bank, the IMF (International (International Monetary Fund), and the corporations themselves. What we have is economic dictatorship combined with representative democracy. But representative democracy under economic dictatorship is not able to counter that dictatorship and act as an economic democratic force. (Rather it) moves and leans increasingly into winning votes by polarizing society and dividing society along lines of race, gender, religion, ethnicity. That is why over the ’90s, as globalization has deepened its reach in our communities and countries, fundamentalism, communalism, religious hatred have seen a rise. Because religious fundamentalism, I believe, is a child of the death of economic democracy. In Motion Magazine: Because? Vandana Shiva: Because people without economic rights are left insecure. There is joblessness.
They can’t understand the processes leading to it. Ordinary farmers can’t really understand why prices are going down. If you can say, “The prices are going down because some other farmer in some other state is doing something to you;” or, “Your water is disappearing because some other state is doing something;” or, “Your jobs are going because the Moslems are breeding too much;” or in Europe, “The immigrants are coming too fast; or in the United States, “The Mexicans are crossing the border;” it takes no time before the economic insecurity left as a result of globalization mutates into a ready-made ground for political interests to say, “Your job has been taken away by so and so.” “Your security has been robbed by so and so.” That’s the rhetoric that has filled the space as economic insecurity has grown.
The recovery of economic democracy In Motion Magazine: How can a farmer, for example, economically become involved? Vandana Shiva: I think the recovery of economic democracy is at the heart of recovery of democracy
itself. And it doesn’t stop at that. It goes further into the creation of peace. In a way, we really have three combined challenges, just now. We’ve got the threat of war and violence. We’ve got the threat of economic insecurity, insecurity, loss of jobs, loss of livelihoods, loss of incomes for farmers. And thirdly, thirdly, we’ve got this whole situation that our leaders are not representing our will -the collapse of democracy.
Ordinary farmers have to get involved, can get involved, by engaging in a recovery of economic democracy as an everyday practice meaning, as we do here, with seed Swaraj, with Anna Swaraj, saving seeds, growing your own seed, not going to Monsanto in every season and having your seed collapse.
Making chipatis in Old Delhi.
I was just told, yesterday, that 41 billion rupees of losses have been faced by farmers in one state who were sold Monsanto corn. We did a calculation that farmers of Bt cotton, the genetically-engineered genetically-engineered cotton, lost a billion rupees in one season. If farmers are saving the seed, growing their crop, they are making reclamation of their economic space. They are giving up chemicals and the pesticides that have contaminated all sources of water in this country, including the soft drinks now. They are not just saving money. They are saving their lives and they are saving public health.
Making saris.
By reaching out to consumers and setting up alternate marketing marketing systems, as we do with the Dilli Haat where we have our direct marketing stall, we in Navdanya,, my organization, which is the main outlet Navdanya for organic growers in this country, we bring the produce directly from farmers, and it’s literally their marketing platform.
The flow of wealth from South to North In Motion Magazine: The contradiction between
knowledge, knowledge, as a collective process, and patents being the opposite of that … do you think that is related to the fact that wealth has been flowing from one half of the world to the other?
Sacks of peppers in Old Delhi.
Vandana Shiva: North-South inequality inequality is very
clearly a result of imperialistic structures being put in place that suck wealth out of the South, put it in the North. That’s exactly why the North looks rich and the South looks poor. Not because human beings in the South don’t know how to create wealth. Everyone knows how to make things, create things. Every one is creative. But when the results of your creativity, productivity are not yours to hold and the results of your labor and creativity are transferred somewhere else the one who takes it becomes rich and the one who’s left without it is the one who stays poor.
Spices for sale in Old Delhi.
During colonial rule, this extraction was done through ownership ownership over land. The British came to to India to a country, which was richer than England at that time, and every record tells you that. They used to exchange pepper with bags of gold. A sack of pepper used to be equal to a sack of gold. Then they came in as traders, established themselves themselves as Busy market area in Old Delhi.
rulers. First as the East India Company, which was thrown out in the 1857 Rebellion and War of Independence, then, as the crown which took over the role of the Company and continued to rule. The regions that were the richest, such as Bengal, became the poorest. In 1942, two million people died of famine in the land where there was no shortage of wheat. Amartya Sen got a Nobel prize for saying something so basic, that people did not die because there was not enough food. They died because they had been robbed of their entitlement. That was the basis of his Nobel prize. That is also the basis of noticing inequality. We (Navdanya) have two books on the history of food and farming and we have tracked in them what the wealth of Indian peasants was being used for. Schools were being built in England. Mental asylums were being run by the transfer of peasant wealth into England. That’s why the colonizing empire constantly grew. grew. That’s what land ownership did at that time, which the British institutionalized in this country. Before that we had land use. We had use-of-it right. Not private property in land. The British turned the revenue collectors into landowners and created what they called the permanent settlement and Zamidari system through which wealth would flow to them. The revenue collectors were left as landowners. The original cultivators were left as the dispossessed peasants. peasants.
From ownership of land to ownership of biodiversity What ownership over land, a very distorted ownership of a land, did to indigenous communities at that time of colonialism, ownership over biodiversity, seeds, genes, medicine is doing in today’s world. The biodiversity is in what is called the poorer part of the world. We are biodiversity rich but every year, annually, $60 billion worth of wealth-transfer is taking place because the control over the products is in the hands of the North. Monopolies of patents are in their hands. Monopolies on trade are in their hands. Coffee -- trade jumped from $40 billion to $70 billion billion over the last few years so there was literally a doubling of trade. One would have imagined a doubling of trade would have left a doubling of incomes in the hands of those who grew the coffee. The incomes of the coffee producers dropped from $9 billion to $5 billion and some of the most dispossessed people of the world today are the coffee growers, as also every other commodity grower. These are amazing mechanisms -- the trade arrangements, trade treaties, intellectual property rights patent treaties. They are doing, once again, in a deeper way what colonialism did and the projections are that 70% of American wealth will be through rent collection, through patents, because the U.S government government is not designing America as a society where people are involved in making things. It has dismantled dismantled manufacture. It has gone off to China. Pick up anything in a supermarket -- it is made in China. But America would would still like to collect returns and that is through intellectual property. property. So, while people’s people’s jobs are disappearing, disappearing, the corporate wealth is increasing and then, of course, all the details of the rest of it carry on. There are all these mechanisms of taking wealth from those who work, those who create, to those who control through extremely coercive instruments of power.
War is globalization by other means In Motion Magazine: Which is now further enforced by invading other people’s countries? Vandana Shiva: I have said that war is another name for globalization because if you really look at
Iraq it wasn’t liberated. American soldiers didn’t come out winning. More of them have died since the so-called war got over. But one thing did happen and that was that corporate America got to enter Iraq and use American American tax money in the process. Bechtel got a big contract. Halliburton got a big contract. That is where the whole so-called reconstruction went. This is exactly what globalization does – (for example) put the water of the world in the hands of Bechtel, Suez (Lyonnaise des Eaux), Vivendi (Environment). (Environment). Globalization is war by other means and war is globalization by other means.
In Motion Magazine: It depends on the policy of the leaders of the U.S. at the time? Vandana Shiva: At this point it so happens America America is the empire. But one thing we learned with the
British Empire is that empires rise and empires sink. Published in In Motion Magazine March 28, 2004
