Vandana Shiva, ecofeminism against poverty
Audio 03:41
Vandana Shiva visited the French countryside in 2015. © DR éditions Actes Sud.
By: Agnès Rougier
16 mins
For half a century, Indian activist, ecofeminist and anti-globalization activist Vandana Shiva has been fighting to help peasants in southern countries escape poverty.
A fight that involves safeguarding biodiversity and empowering women.
Publicity
“
I grew up in the forest
”, says Vandana Shiva, “
the forest is my“ nature teacher
”
and I realized that not only is it beautiful, but it is also our means. subsistence!
"
Daughter of a forester, Vandana Shiva was born in 1952 in Uttarakhand, northern India, and grew up in the forests of the Himalayas.
Her grandfather, hired to defend girls' education, dies after a hunger strike to defend the village school.
In the 1970s, the young woman studied theoretical physics.
As she prepares to go to the University of Western Ontario, Canada, for her Doctorate in Philosophy of Science, she discovers that “
… (her) favorite forest, populated by ancient oaks, had been nearly razed to the ground by loggers.
".
Vandana Shiva
then joined the
Chipko women's movement
, which fights against deforestation through non-violence, by protecting trees from their bodies.
In 1982, the young doctor Shiva created the Foundation for Scientific, Technological and Natural Resources
Research
-
Research Foundation
for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy
-.
India, 1984, a dark year
Vandana Shiva is then in Punjab, where the green revolution and the intensification of agriculture were established in the 60s. She meets peasants riddled with debt, on land made sterile by intensive agriculture. When, on the night of December 3, a leak at the pesticide plant of the American company
Union Carbide in Bhopal
poisoned and killed thousands of people, she wondered: "
I wanted to understand why we practice agriculture that kill thousands of people. I looked for solutions and I turned to non-violent breeding and agroecology
”.
The activist leaves for Bhopal to support the women who fight for justice, then for Kerala, where the women, once again, lead a fight - victorious - against the Coca-Cola factory which empties the water table to the detriment of the agriculture, to sell bottled soda.
Her activism takes her to all parts of India where industrial agriculture is rampant, and she says that everywhere, she sees the same thing: women, responsible for food in families, are the first affected by the poverty.
GMOs, a prison for peasants
In March 1987, Vandana Shiva accompanied her sister to a seminar on genetics and living things, in Haute-Savoie, France, which brought together experts from 19 countries. For her biographer, Lionel Astruc, this is the most important moment of her life: “
She understood, by joining in the conversations, that we were going to turn the seed market into a captive market, that patents were going to take control. on living things and appropriate the seeds, the fruit of centuries of peasant selection
”.
Vandana Shiva's analysis is relentless: if American companies want to patent plants that Indians have harvested and used for centuries - such as neem or basmati rice - it is to be able to modify them through biotechnology, then resell them to farmers use GMO seeds - non-reproducible - and associated herbicides, such as glyphosate.
It is the construction of a vicious circle which will imprison the Indian peasants.
The activist then takes her pilgrim's staff and travels through Indian villages to inform the peasants and begins to save seeds.
At the same time, she is involved at the international level for legislation that controls the patenting of living organisms.
The seeds of freedom
Vandana Shiva has an idea: to keep seeds in the hands of farmers, community seed banks need to be set up, libraries where seeds can be stored alive.
In 1991, she created the network of
Navdanya seed banks
and an agricultural training center:
"Navdanya means the 9 seeds together"
explains the activist
, "together for biodiversity but it is also the new gift, that of the common goods, because patents and intellectual property want to privatize the common knowledge of indigenous knowledge
”
.
In 1993, the alternative Nobel Prize -
Rights Livelihood Award
- was awarded to Vandana Shiva "
for having put women and ecology at the heart of modern development
".
The anti-globalization activist remembers that during the cotton crisis of 2009 in Maharashtra, "
farmers had become dependent on GM cotton, but it didn't work because it couldn't withstand heavy rains."
Opposite, the peasants of Navdanya, who had planted organic cotton seeds, resistant to the floods,
“did not have the cotton crash that GMO farmers suffered,
” she says.
►
Also to listen
: "biodiversity is a common good"
Ecofeminism, a major breakthrough
In her book
Who Really Feeds Humanity
(2015) Vandana Shiva wants to demonstrate the clash of two food paradigms: on the one hand, the laws of domination and exploitation, rooted in violence and war, of the other, the perspective of an agroecology and a living economy based on reciprocity.
Against globalized industrial agriculture, which is, for the feminist activist, a pyramidal construction of men's power, this economy of reciprocity will be able to develop thanks to the ecological fight led by women.
For Lionel Astruc, author of interviews between Vandana Shiva and Nicolas Hulot
, The Virtuous Circle
, the convergence of struggles is at the heart of the fight: “
In half a century of militancy and activism, it has shown its capacity for synthesis by bringing together social and environmental struggles, and his intuition to put ecofeminism at the heart of the fight was a major step forward
”.
Ecology and non-violence
While the seriousness of her work is questioned by the promoters of GMOs, she is regularly threatened in return for her radical positions, Vandana Shiva assumes a struggle inspired by the principles of "non-violence" and "truth. Inherited from Gandhi, which results in civil disobedience, training and communication.
Author, in 2019, of the
1%
essay
Take back power in the face of the omnipotence of the rich
, the ecofeminist activist, who analyzes the Covid health crisis as the consequence of the globalized economy and the destruction of the environment , pleads for the decrease and the restoration of harmony with nature, in an ethic of
care
- taking care of society, people and the environment -.
And when asked to sum up half a century of activism, Vandana Shiva replies: “
I save seeds and biodiversity, I do agricultural research, I work with farmers so that they do not incur debt, that they protect soils and biodiversity, so that everyone has something to eat… and when necessary, I watch what Monsanto and Bill Gates are doing because they work in lies and violence
”.
Find out more
:
1% Take back power in the face of the omnipotence of the rich
, Vandana Shiva, 2019, rue de l'Echiquier editions
Who really feeds humanity?
, Vandana Shiva, 2015, Actes Sud editions, 2020
The virtuous circle
, Nicolas Hulot, Vandana Shiva, interviews with Lionel Astruc, Actes Sud editions, 2018
Ecofeminism
, Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, 1999, éditions de l'Harmattan
Ethics and agro-industry, Hand on life
, Vandana Shiva, Harmattan editions, 1996
The Navdanya network: http://www.navdanya.org/site/
The right livelihood prize: https://rightlivelihood.org/what-we-do/the-right-livelihood-award/ https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/vandana-shiva /
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