About Navdanya

The Practice of Earth Democracy

By Dr. Vandana Shiva

Over the past three decades, I have tried to live by transcending polarities – between people and planet, between modern science and indigenous knowledge, between environment and “development, between north and south, the local and the global.

The institutions and movements I have built once the past decades have been inspired by the urge to seed new imagination and possibilities, open up new spaces and new synergies for planetary citizenship based on one duties and cared for the earth, her ecosystems, her diverse species, including our own.

In 1982, when I left an academic career, to found the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, I was troubled by the Baconian mark of “Knowledge with power”. My involvement with the Chipko movement about which I have written extensively in Staying Alive, had taught us that the powerless are not powerless due to ignorance but due to the appropriation of there resources by the powerful. I have often called Chipko my University of Ecology and the women of Chipko my Professors, even though they had never been to school, and I have a doctorate in Quantum Theory. I learnt in the seventies that literacy is not a pre requisite for knowledge, and ordinary tribals, peasants, women have tremendous ecological experience. They are biodiversity experts, seed experts, soil experts, water experts. The blindness of dominant systems to there knowledge and expertise is not proof of the ignorance of the poor and powerless. It is infact proof of the ignorance of the rich and powerful.

Not only do marginalized have knowledge; they are the only ones who have knowledge about the roots and causes of their marginalisation and poverty. The women of Chipko know that their growing poverty and scarcity of water, fuel and fodder was linked directly to the profits of the logging industry. And that is why they hugged tears to stop the commercial logging. After a decade of resistance, the Government of India and impose a ban on logging about 1000 in the fragile central Himalayas, the source of the mighty rivers Ganga and Yamuna and their tributaries.

The Research Foundation grew out of the confidence and trust that people have expertise and knowledge and participatory research is for work authentic than research carried out in the ivory tower of privileged academic institutions. The foundation was started in my mother’s cow shed, in my birthplace and hometown, Dehradun. I left Bangalore, the “Silicon” Valley of India, returned home to the Himalayas, and started the experiment to connect knowledge and powerless. Instead of deriving supporters’ strength from big money, the Foundation drew its strength and support from local communities, and in turn gave them and their struggles strength and support through research. This mutuality, this connection of research and action, has sustained one work over more than two decades. And it has been effective. We stopped limestone mining in Doon Valley and had the Valley declared a Green Zone. We have changed the forestry, aquaculture and agriculture paradigm from monocultures to diversity, from commerce to sustenance and sustainability. We have challenged the dominant Intellectual Property Rights paradigm and won cases against Neem and Basmati Biopiracy. And the only assed I had was my mother’s cowshed and the partnership with people’s movement.

The experiments with participatory research called out through the Research Foundation did not just have impact at the local and national level. They also had impact at the global level. Our work in India on Social Forestry and Eucalyptus Monocultures had a big role in shaping the World Rain Forest Movement, a global movement to protect the rainforests and resist the World Bank’s Tropical Forest Action Plan, a $ 8 billion plan for tropical deforestation. Similarly our work in India on the Green Revolution became a major input in building the global resistance to genetically engineered crops. We had not just overcome the false divide between knowledge and action. We had also contributed to overcoming the North-South polarization created by capital and colonialism, though new global movements connected through our common concerns and common humanity, knowledge rooted in the earth and in the local had helped nourish a new global solidarity of earth citizenship, based on our care for the earth and the compassion for each other.

Navdanya: Seeds of Freedom, Seeds of Change

1984 was truly or ________

The Green Revolution, awarded a  Nobel Prize for Peace, had let to two social and environmental disasters – the extremist movement and terrorism in  Punjab which led to the military assault on the Golden Temple and finally the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and the gas leak from Carbides Pesticides plant in Bhopal which killed 3,000 people on that tragic night of December 1984. In the two decades since that tragedy, 30,000 people have died in Bhopal due to the leak of the toxic gas from the pesticide plant. The Punjab violence also took the lives of 30,000 people in the years following 1094.

Why did a “Revolution” awarded a Nobel Peace Prize lead to so much violence? The crude linearity failed of the promise of peace through the Green Revolution was Technology  - Prosperity – Peace. The reason this linearity failed was because the technologies of the Green Revolution were technologies of war, and they left nature and society impoverished. To expect prosperity to grow out of violent technologies that destroy the earth, erode biodiversity, deplete and pollute water and leave peasants indebted and in ruins was a false assumption made in the launch of Green Revolution, a false assumption that is being repeated in the launch of the Second Green Revolution, based on biotechnology and genetic engineering.

The “terrorism” and “extremism” in Punjab was born out of the experience of injustice of the Green Revolution as a development model, which centralized power and appropriated resources and earth from the people. As I have quoted in my book, “The Violence of the Green Revolution”, the All Sikh Convention passed a resolution “Gurmata” on 13th April 1986,

“ If the hard-earned income of the people or the natural resources of any nation or the region are forcibly plundered; the goods produced by them are paid at arbitrarily determined prices while the goods bought are sold at higher prices and in order to carry this process of economic exploitation to its logical conclusion, the human rights people or of a nation, region or people. Today, the Sikhs are shackled by the chains of slavery.”

The peasants and people of Punjab were clearly not experiencing the Green Revolution as a source of prosperity and freedom. For them it was slavery. The Green Revolution, the social and ecological impacts it had, and the responses it created among an angry and disillusioned peasantry has many lessons for out times, both for understanding the roots of terrorism and searching for solution to violence.

My work on the Green Revolution became the link to the debate and struggles related to the emerging biotechnologies. In 1987, the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, along with RAFI had organized a conference on Biotechnology called “The Laws of Life”. Besides, researchers/activists like me; the participants included UN officials and representatives of the Biotech Industry. From the industry representatives it became clear that they were using genetic engineering as an instrument of control. This is why they were pushing for an intellectual property rights agreement in the GATT. This became the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement of the WTO.

THE SPINNING WHEEL AND THE SEED GANDHI’S LEGACY, HUMANITY’S HOPE

Gandhi Lives – as a perennial source of inspiration and political innovation to defend our freedoms. Globalisation as a project is a plan to extinguish all freedoms of people through the total control of trade, technology and property rights. The freedoms of rivers to flow and organisms to evolve, of farmers to save seeds and grow crops, of consumers to be free to choose what they eat and know how their food is produced. These fundamental freedoms of all species and ordinary humans are being robbed in the name of “free trade” or globalisation.

Globalisation is often presented as a process of new interconnections between societies. However, if it is geographical, it is about the global reach of giant corporations – not about a global joining of the hearts of people worldwide. But the real project of globalisation is colonization and commodification of the very resources and processes that give us life – our biodiversity, our food, our water.

Over the past two decades, my ideas and actions to defend life’s freedom and diversity have come from Gandhi. Without his legacy it would be impossible to even imagine a response to the totalitarianism built into the project of owning life, owning seeds, owning water. Patents on life and the new biotechnologies are today’s tools of imperialism, and they are a core part of the global “constitution” called the W.T.O rules of free trade in the form of Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).  The phrase “Trade Related” had to be forcefully linked to intellectual property precisely because intellectual property has no place in a trade treaty and patents should not have been extended to cover life forms as they were under Act 273(b) of TRIPS which forces countries to patent life forms, in particular micro-organisms and genetically engineered plants and animals. These rules and laws were made by and for corporations. As a Monsanto spokesperson stated about the drafting of TRIPS “we were the patient, the diagnostician, the physician”.

Patents of life are a total control system. They allow corporations to claim ownership over life forms – micro-organisms, plants, animals. They allow corporations to define the acts of saving and sharing seeds as “intellectual property crimes”. Any they allow the crime of biopiracy – the theft of traditional knowledge and biopiracy to be treated as a right.

A patent is an exclusive rights to own, make, sell, produce, use a patented product. A patent on seed implies that a farmer saving seed is an “intellectual property thief”. But it means more. A system in which seed has become a corporate monopoly, a system in which a few companies control the seed supply is in effect a system of slavery for farmers. Where the freedom of seed disappears, the freedom of farmers disappears.

They is why, in 1987, when I first came to know about GATT and TRIPS and Patents on life, I searched for ways to defend the freedom of biodiversity and the freedom of peasants. And Gandhi’s spinning wheel inspired my dedicating my life to saving seeds to save small farmers and protect life.

Spinning Freedom

It was to regenerate livelihoods in India that Gandhi thought of the spinning wheel as a symbol of liberation and a tool for development. Power driven mills were the model of development in that period of early industrialization. However, the hunger of mills for raw material and markets was the reason for a new poverty, created by the destruction of livelihoods either by diverting land and biomass from local subsistence to the factory, or by displacing local production through the market.

Gandhi had said that ‘anything that millions can do together, becomes charged with unique power’. The spinning wheel had become a symbol of such power. ‘The wheel as such is lifeless, but when I invest it with symbolism, it becomes a living thing for me’.

When Gandhi described the charkha in 1908, the Hind Swaraj as a panacea for the growing  pauperism of India, he had never seen a spinning wheel. Even in 1915, when he returned to India from south Africa, he had not actually seen a spinning wheel. But he saw an essential element of freedom from colonialism in discarding the use of mill woven cloth. He set up handlooms in the Satyagraha Ashram at Sabarmati, but could not find a spinning wheel or a spinner, who were normally women.  In 1917, Gandhi’s disciple Ganga Behn Majumdar started a search for the spinning wheel, and found one in Vijapur in the Baroda State. Quite a few people there had spinning wheels in their homes, but had long since consigned them to the lofts as useless lumbers. They now pulled them out, and soon Vijapur Khadi gained a name for itself. And Khadi and the spinning wheel rapidly become the symbol for India’s independence movement.

The spinning wheel symbolized a technology that conserves resources, people’s livelihoods and people’s control over their livelihoods. In contrast to the imperialism of the British textile industry, the ‘Charkha’ was decentred and labour generating, not labour displacing. It needed people’s hands and minds, instead of treating them as surplus, or as mere inputs into an industrial process. This critical mixture of decentralization, livelihood generation, resource conservation and strengthening of self-reliance were essential to undo the waste of centralization, livelihood destruction, resource depletion and creation of economic and political dependence that had been engendered by the industrialization associated with colonialism.

Gandhi’s spinning wheel is a challenge to notions of progress and obsolescence that arise from absolutism and false universalism in concepts of science and technology development. Obsolescence and waste are social constructs that have both a political and ecological component. Politically, the notion of obsolescence gets rid of people’s control over their lives and livelihoods by defining productive work as unproductive and removing people’s control over production in the name of progress. It would rater waste hands than waste time. Ecologically, too obsolescence destroys the regenerative capacity of nature by substituting manufactured uniformity in place of nature’s diversity. This induced dispensability of poorer people on the one hand and diversity on the other constitutes of the political ecology of technological development guided by narrow and reductionist notions of productivity. Parochial notions of productivity, perceived as universal, rob people of control over their means of reproducing life and rob nature of her capacity to regenerate diversity.

Ecological erosion and destruction of livelihoods are linked to one another. Displacement of diversity and displacement of people’s sources of sustenance both arise from a view of development and growth based on uniformity created through centralized control. In this process of control, reductionist science and technology act as handmaidens for economically powerful interests. The struggle between the factory and the spinning wheel continues as new technologies emerge.

As seeds are genetically engineered and patented, a crisis is being engineered for farmers and farming. And the seed becomes the charkha of today. That is why I started Navdanya.

Diversity and Freedom

The Green Revolution was an exemplar of the deliberate destruction of diversity. The new biotechnologies, are repeating and deepening these tendencies, rather than reversing them.

Further, the new technologies in combination with patent monopolies being pushed through intellectual property rights regimes in GATT and other trade platforms as well as the biodiversity convention are threatening to transform the diversity of life forms into mere raw material for industrial production, and limitless profits. They are simultaneously threatening the regenerative freedom of diverse species, and the free and sustainable economy of small peasants and producers, which is based on nature’s diversity and its utilization.

The seed, for example, reproduces itself and multiples. Farmers use seed both as grain as well as for the next year’s crop. Seed is free, both in the ecological sense of reproducing itself, as well as in the economic sense of reproducing the farmers livelihood.

This seed freedom is however a major obstacle for seed corporations. If the market for seed has to be created, the seed has to be transformed materially, so that reproducibility is blocked and its status has to be changed legally, so that instead of being the common property of farming communities, it becomes the patented private property of Seed Corporation.

As my involvement in these issues grew, the seed started to take shape as the site and symbol of freedom in the age of manipulation and monopoly of life in its diversity. Ethically and ecologically, unrestrained biotechnology development gives new tools for manipulation; patents offer new tools for monopoly ownership of that which is by its very nature free. I thought of Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel, which had become such an important symbol of freedom, not because it was big and powerful, but because it was small and could become alive as a sign of resistance and creativity in smallest of huts and poorest of families. In smallness lay its power.

The seed too is small. It embodies diversity. It embodies the freedom to stay alive. And seed is still the common property of small farmers in India. Seed freedom goes far beyond freedom for the farmer from corporations. It indicates freedom of diverse cultures from centralized control. In the seed, ecological issues could combine with social justice. I could see that it was the seed that could play the role of Gandhi’s spinning wheel in this period of recolonisation through “free-trade”.

Inspite of many blocks and pressures, I launched a national programme to save seed diversity in farmers fields in cooperation with the movements I have been working with over many years. We call it “Navdanya”, which literally means nine seeds and is a beautiful symbol of the richness of diversity.

Ours was not the first seed conservation programme. Genetic resources have always been collected for breeding. The risks for breeding towards uniformity led to the emergence of government gene banks in the 1970s. However, while gene banks collect biodiversity from farmers’ fields, they do not conserve it through and with farmers. Instead, diversity flows from farmers’ fields to gene banks and then on to corporate breeders, but is systematically eroded at the source. The farmers then become mere consumers of corporate seed, which in the future will also have IPR protection, thus forcing farmers to buy seed every year. This excludes the farmer from playing the critical role of conserver of genetic diversity and innovator in the utilization and development of seed. It robs farmers of their rights to their biological and intellectual heritage. It also separates conservation from production, and scientists from farmers. We wanted to build a programme in which farmers and scientists relate horizontally rather than vertically, in which conservation of biodiversity and production of food go hand in hand, and in which farmers knowledge is strengthened, not robbed.

While the fundamental changes we are working towards can only be achieved in the long-term, at the small scale level, Navdanya has already had major impact in the villages in which we work. Realizing that our small efforts in the conservation of indigenous seed diversity are not enough, we have also joined hands with the farmers’ movement to urgently mobilize public opinion against the emerging threat of multinational corporations gaining monopoly control on all life through the new biotechnologies and intellectual property rights.

In 1991, I started to contact the farmers organisations, to alert them on the new trends, to work with them on protecting farmers’ rights to freely conserve use, exchange and modify the seeds. In February 1992, we organised a national conference on GATT and Agriculture with the Karnataka Rajya Ryota Sangha (KRRS). In October 1992, at a massive farmers’ rally in Hospet organised by the KRRS, the Seed Satyagraha was launched following Gandhi’s politics of Satyagraha as a fight for truth based on non-cooperation with unjust regimes. IN March 1993, we held a nationally rally in Delhi at the historic Red Fort under the leadership of the national farmers organisatons, the Bharatiya Kisan Union. Independence Day 15th August, 1993 was celebrated with farmers asserting their ‘Collective Intellectual Property Rights’ (Samuhik Gyan Sanad). On 2nd October, 1993, one year of the seed satyagraha was celebrated in Bangalore with a gathering of 500,000 farmers. WE also had farmers from other Third World countries as well as scientists who work on farmers’ rights and sustainable agriculture in an expression of solidarity. The internationalization of the Seed Satyagraha within one year has given the word globalisation a new meaning. From representing global markets as in the parlance of free trade proponents, it has come to mean from us the globalisation of people’s resistance to centralized control over all aspects of their life.

The native seed has become a system of resistance against monocultures and monopoly rights. The shift from uniformity to diversity respects the rights of all species and is sustainable. Diversity is also a political imperative because uniformity goes hand in hand with centralization, while diversity demands de-centered control.  Diversity as a way of thought and a way of life is what is needed to go beyond the impoverished monocultures of the mind.

For us, protecting native seeds is more than conservation of raw material for the biotechnology industry. The diverse seeds now being pushed to extinction carry within them seeds of other ways of thinking about nature, and other ways of producing for our needs. Uniformity and diversity are not just patterns of land use, they are ways of thinking and ways of living.

Conservation of diversity is, above all, the commitment to let alternatives flourish in society and nature, in economic systems and in knowledge systems. Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times. It is a survival imperative, and the pre-condition for the freedom of all, the big and the small. In diversity, the smallest has a place and significance. Allowing the small to flourish is to me the real test of freedom – in the life of an individual, the life of an organisation, the life of a society, and the life of this planet. It is this connection between diversity, decentredness and democracy which has guided my ideas and actions, at the local as well as the global level.

Seed Saving : Our Ethical Duty, Our Human Right

Seed is the first link in the food chain. In Sanskrit, Bija, the seed, means the source of life. Saving seed is our duty, sharing seed is our culture.

Patents on seeds and genetic resources rob us of our birth right to derive our livelihoods by transforming seed saving and seed sharing into “intellectual property crimes”. This is an assault on our culture, our human rights, our very survival.

Seed patents and seed monopolies are also becoming a major source of seed insecurity and food security. As seed is transformed from the common property of peasant communities into the private property of giant corporations like Monsanto, a number of associated transformations take place.

As seed saving is prevented by patents as well as by the engineering of seed with non-renewable traits, seed has to be bought for every planting season by poor peasants. A free resource available on farm becomes a commodity to which farmers are forced to by every year. This increases poverty and leads to indebtedness. As debts increase and become unpayable., farmers are compelled to sell kidneys or even commit suicide. More than 25,000 peasants in India have taken their lives since 1997 when the practice of seed saving was transformed under globalisation pressures and multinational seed corporations started to take control of the seed supply. Seed saving gives farmers life. Seed monopolies rob farmers of life.

The shift from farm saved seed to corporate monopolies of the seed supply is also a shift from biodiversity to monocultures in agriculture. The District of Warangal in Andhra Pradesh used to grow diverse legumes, millets, oilseeds. Seed monopolies created crop monocultures of cotton, leading to disappearance of millions of natures evolution and farmers breeding.

Monocultures and uniformity increase the risks of crop failure as diverse seeds adapted to diverse ecosystems are replaced by rushed introduction of unadapted and often untested seeds into the market. When Monsanto first introduced Bt Cotton in India in 2002, the farmers lost Rs. 1 billion due to crop failure. Instead of 1,500 Kg / acre as promised by the company, the harvest was as low as 200 kg. Instead of increased incomes of Rs. 10,000 / acre, farmers ran into losses of Rs. 6400 / acre.

In the state of Bihar, when farm saved corn seed was displaced by Monsanto’s hybrid corn, the entire crop failed creating Rs. 4 billion losses and hence increased poverty for desperately poor farmers.

Poor peasants of the South cannot survive seed monopolies. That is why the case of Percy Schmeiser will decide the fate not just of one Canadian farmer but billions of peasants. The unjust and unethical case brought by Monsanto against Percy is a double crime against farmers. Firstly by creating and enforcing illegitimate patent rights to seed, it robs us of our human right and human duty to be seed savers. Secondly, it rewards the polluter with enhanced property rights and profits. The principle of “pollute pays” has been transformed into the “polluter gets paid” principle.

This perverse jurisprudence must be corrected for the sake of all farmers, and all species. Farmers freedoms must come before corporate monopoly. Farmers survival must come before corporate greed. Percy’s future is our future. Percy’s seed freedom is our freedom. Percy’s rights as a farmer are symbolic of the human rights of all farmers.

The Suicide Economy of Corporate Globalisation

While the government spends millions on advertisements saying “India Shinning”, a large part of India is dying. The Indian peasantry, the largest body of surviving small farmers in the world, today faces a crisis of extinction.

Two thirds of India makes its living from the land. The earth is the most generous employer in this country of a billion, that has farmed this land for more than 5000 years.

However, as farming is delinked from the earth, the soil, the biodiversity, the climate and linked to global corporations and global markets, and the generosity of the earth is replaced by the greed of corporations, the viability of small farmers and small farms is destroyed. Farmers suicides are the most tragic and dramatic symptom of the crisis of survival faced by Indian peasants.

1997 witnessed the first emergence of farm suicides in India. Rapid increase in indebtedness, was at the root of farmers taking their lives. Debt is a reflection of a negative economy, a loosing economy. Two factors have transformed the positive economy of agriculture into a negative economy for peasants – the rising costs of production and the falling prices of farm commodities. Both these factors are rooted in the policies of trade liberalization and corporate globalisation.

In 1998, the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies forced India to open up its seed sector to global corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, Syh genta. The global corporations changed the input economy overnight. Farm saved seeds were replaced by corporate seeds, which needed fertilizers and pesticides and could not be saved.

As seed saving is prevented by patents as well as by the engineering of seed with non-renewable traits, seed has to be bought for every planting season by poor peasants. A free resource available on farm becomes a commodity  which farmers are forced to by every year. This increases poverty and leads to indebtedness. As debts increase and become unpayable, farmers are compelled to sell kidneys or even commit suicide. More than 25,000 peasants in India have taken their lives since 1997 when the practice of seed saving was transformed under globalisation pressures and multinational seed corporations started to take control of the seed supply. Seed saving gives farmers life. Seed monopolies rob farmers of life.

The shift from farm saved seed to corporate monopolies of the seed supply is also a shift from biodiversity to monocultures in agriculture. The District of Warangal in Andhra Pradesh used to grow diverse legumes, millets, oilseeds. Seed monopolies created crop monocultures of cotton, leading to disappearance of millions of natures evolution and farmers breeding.

Monocultures and uniformity increase the risks of crop failure as diverse seeds adapted to diverse ecosystems are replaced by rushed introduction of unadapted and often untested seeds into the market. When Monsanto first introduced Bt Cotton in India in 2002, the farmers lost Rs. 1 billion due to crop failure. Instead of 1,500 Kg / acre as promised by the company, the harvest was as low as 200 kg. Instead of increased incomes of Rs. 10,000 / acre, farmers ran into losses of Rs. 6400 / acre.

In the state of Bihar, when farm saved corn seed was displaced by Monsanto’s hybrid corn, the entire crop failed creating Rs. 4 billion losses and hence increased poverty for desperately poor farmers. Poor peasants of the South cannot survive seed monopolies.

And the crisis of suicides shows how the survival of small farmers is incompatible with the seed monopolies of global corporations.

The second pressure Indian farmers are facing is the dramatic fall in prices of farm produce as a result of free trade policies of the W.T.O. The WTO rules for trade in agriculture are in essence rules for dumping. They have allowed an increase in agribusiness subsidies while preventing countries from protecting their farmers from the dumping of artificially cheap produce. High subsidies of $ 400 billion combined with forced removal of import restrictions is a ready-made recipe for farmers suicides. Global prices have dropped from $ 216 / ton in 1995 to $ 133 / ton in 2001 for wheat, $ 98.2 / ton in 1995 to $ 49.1 / ton in 2001 for cotton, $ 273 / ton in 1995 to $ 178 / ton for soyabean.  This reduction to half the price is not due to a doubling in productivity but due to an increase in subsidies and an increase in market monopolies controlled by a handful of agribusiness corporations.

Thus the U.S government pays $ 193 per ton to US Soya farmers, which artificially lowers the rice of soya. Due to removal of Quantitative Restrictions and lowering of tariffs, cheap soya has destroyed the livelihoods of coconut growers, mustard farmers, producers of sesame, groundnut and soya.

Similarly, cotton producers in the U.S are given a subsidy of $ 4 billion annually to 25000 cotton producers. This has brought the cotton prices down artificially , allowing the U.S to capture world markets which were earlier accessible to poor African countries such as Burkina, Faso, Benin, Mali. The subsidy of $ 230 per acre in the U.S is genocidal for the African farmers. African cotton farmers are loosing $ 250 million every year. That is why small African countries walked out of the Cancun negotiations, leading to the collapse of the W.T.O ministerial.

The rigged prices of globally traded agriculture commodities are stealing incomes from poor peasants of the south. Analysis carried out by the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology shows that due to falling farm prices, Indian peasants are loosing $ 26 billion or Rs. 1.2 trillion annually. This is a burden their poverty does not allow them to bear. Hence the epidemic of farmers suicide.

India was among the countries that questioned the unfair rules of W.T.O in agriculture and led the G-22 alliance alongwith with Brazil and China. India with other southern countries addressed the need to safeguard the livelihoods of small farmers from the injustice of free trade based on high subsidies and dumping. Yet at the domestic level, official agencies in India are in deep denial of any links between free trade and farmers survival.
An example of this denial is a Government of Karnataka report on “Farmers suicide in Karnataka – A scientific analysis”. The report while claiming to be “scientific”, makes unscientific reductionist claims that the farm suicides have only psychological causes, not economic ones, and identifies alcoholism as the root cause of suicides. Therefore, instead of proposing changes in agricultural policy, the report recommends that farmers require to boost up their self respect (swabhiman) and self-reliance (swavalambam). And ironically, its recommendations for farmers self-reliance are changes in the Karnataka Land Reforms Act to allow larger land holdings and leasing.  These are steps towards the further decimation of small farmers who have been protected by land “ceilings” (an upper limit on land ownership) and policies that only allow peasants and agriculturalists to own agricultural land (part of the land to the tiller policies of the Devraj Urs government).

While the “expert committee” report identified “alcoholism” as the main cause for suicides, the figures of this “scientific” claim are inconsistent and do not reflect the survey. On page 10, the report states in one place that 68 percent of the suicide victims were alcoholics. Five lines later it states that 17 percent were “alcohol and illicit drinkers”. It also states that the majority of suicide victims were small and marginal farmers and the majority had high levels of indebtedness. Yet debt is not identified as a factor leading to suicide. On page 32 of the report it is stated that of the 105 cases studied among the 3544 suicides which had occurred in five districts during 2000 – 2001, 93 had debts, 54 percent victims had borrowed from private sources and money lenders. More than 90% suicide victims were in debt. Yet a table on page 63 has mysteriously reduced debt as a reason for suicide to 2.6%, and equally mysteriously, “suicide victims having a bad habit” has emerged as the primary cause of farmers suicides.

The government is desperate to delink farm suicides from economic processes linked to globalisation such as rise in indebtedness and increased frequency of crop failure due to higher ecologic vulnerability arising from climate change and drought and higher economic risks due to introduction of untested, unadopted seeds. This is evident in recommendation no. 4.3.24.3 “The government should launch prosecution on the responsible persons involved in misleading the public and government by providing false information about farmers suicide as crop failure or indebtedness” (page 113 of expert committee report).

However, farmers suicides cannot be delinked from indebtedness and the economic distress small farmers are facing. Indebtedness is not new. Farmers have always organised for freedom from debt. In the nineteenth century the so call “Deccan Riots” were farmers protests against the debt trap into which  they had been pushed to supply cheap cotton to the textile mills in Britain. In the eighties they formed peasant organisations to fight for debt relief from public debt linked to Green Revolution inputs. However, under globalisation, the farmer is loosing her / his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a “consumer” of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally. This combination is leading to corporate feudalism, the most inhumane, brutal and exploitative convergence of global corporate capitalism and local feudalism, in the face of which the farmer as an individual victim feels helpless. The bureaucratic  and technocratic  systems of the state are coming to the rescue of the dominant economic interests by blaming the victim.

It is necessary to stop this war against small farmers. It is necessary to re-write the rules of trade in agriculture. It is necessary to change our paradigms of food production. Feeding humanity should not depend on the extinction of farmers and extinction of species. Another agriculture is possible and necessary – an agriculture that protects farmers livelihoods, the earth and its biodiversity and public health.

From the Suicide Economy to Living Economics

Gandhi’s creative vision of swadeshi, swaraj, satyagraha and sarvodaya inspires us to build living economies and living democracies. In his legacy we find hope, we find freedom, we find our own creativity. Gandhi’s philosophy is a living philosophy both because it is not dead and because when it informs our actions, they become charged with life. Only through Gandhi do we begin, with constructive action and turn it into our best resistance. Our seed saving is a resistance to seed monopolies and seed patents. And when our government begins to implement TRIPS as it has done through three amendments of our Patent Act and the creation of a new plant variety legislation, we remember Gandhi’s words  “As long as the superstition that people should obey unjust laws exists, so long will slavery exist”. And we renew our commitment to the Bija Satyagraha. Like Mahatma Gandhi started the Salt Satyagraha to protest against the colonization of salt by the Salt Laws imposed by the British Empire, people’s movement in India are committed to the Bija Satyagraha based on non-cooperation with unjust and immoral IPR laws being imposed on MNCs’ and the rich countries. These laws are :-

1. The protection of plant varieties and farmers rights act which establishes MNC’s monopoly over seeds, makes Indian farmers bio-serfs and robs them of their age old freedoms to save, exchange and sell seeds.
2. The amended patent act which allows seeds, plants, animals, genes and all life forms to be patented and indigenous knowledge to be pirated.
3. The biodiversity act which gives free access to our genetic wealth and indigenous knowledge to biopirates within and outside India.

As genetic pollution threatens are biodiversity and globalisation threatens are farmers, we create living economies and living democracies based on swadeshi and swaraj. Just as the seed has the potential to germinate and evolve and renew itself perennially, Gandhi’s legacy has the potential to germinate, evolve, and renew our actions and strategies for freedom appropriate to our times and context.

From the seed, our swadeshi efforts have grown to organic farming or jaiv kheti, fair and just trade, and swadeshi in the form of biodiversity conservation has evolved organically into the swaraj of Jaiv Panchayat or living democracy, resting on the resistance of satyagraha – non-cooperation with immoral, unjust laws that force patenting of life.

Gandhi’s legacy lives, and gives us hope to shape ever new instruments to keep life in its diversity and integrity free. Gandhi’s legacy carries the seeds for the freedoms of humans and all species. Gandhi’s legacy is humanity’s hope.

Living Democracy Movement

Revolutions of the twentieth century for social justice and people’s freedom have largely been based on a Cartesian view of the world and of social transformation. Even the metaphors used are Cartesian metaphors. “What is your position on …….?” “What line should we take?!! “Positions” and “Lines” lead to the inevitable arguments, conflicts, and divisions. An example is the deadlock among those who are part of the anti-globalisation, anti-WTO movement getting stick on their “positions” about WTO and agriculture. Positions demand rigidity, a fixity in contexts where we must deal with fluidity and flexibility.

The Quantum view of the world has allowed us to transcend beyond deterministic positions, to indeterminate transitions. It has allowed us to accept uncertainty and non-seperability. It has allowed us to think in terms of fields and spaces, not “positions” and “lines” If even physics has given up on the false certainties of the mechanistic world view, shouldn’t our engagements for sustainability and social justice move beyond the rigidities of the mechanically perceived and articulated ideologies?

The success of movements at Seattle and Cancun, the amazing mobilization for the World Social Forum are examples of an emergent politics – a politics based on diversity and self-organisation, not on monocultures and manipulation. They have thrown up a new model of organizing as control. That it has worked on both the local and global levels is indicative of the potential of self-organisation as a basis of transformation politics at all levels.

The violence of corporate globalisation on the one hand and wars justified on grounds of shallow religions and narrow nationalist identities on the other is demanding a response that is simultaneously local and universal. Local in terms of production, both to reduce our ecological footprint and also to create more livelihood and job opportunity. Local, also in terms of our diverse identities, rooted in biological and cultural diversity, in our sense of place, our send of belonging. But we also share life with the rest of life, and our humanity with all of the humanity.

The dominant form of corporate globalisation takes a narrow, highly localized interest, and imposes it as the “global”, the “universal”. The imposition involves deep structural violence, but it also triggers vicious cycles of violence as identities are threatened securities are eroded, and a backlash emerges in the form of “terrorism”. The universal cannot be a globally imposed local interest. It is the emergent quality of all people living by the universal principles of non-violence – non-violence to non-human life as ecological sustainability, and non-violence to human life as social and economic justice. The universal is the unfolding of the potential of diverse and multiple locals, acting in self-organized ways but guided by the common principles of love and reverence for life. As Tolstoy has written from his deathbed.

“Understanding that welfare for hum beings lies only in their unity, and that unity cannot be attained by violence. Unity can only be reached when each person, not thinking about unity, thinks only about fulfilling the laws of life. Only this supreme law of love, alike for all humans, unifies humanity.”

One of the legacies of the Cartesian mechanistic worldview is its totalitarianism. On the one hand, this allows the violent imposition of ones “Position” on others, with the conviction that this is for the good of the other. The Iraq war is supposed to have been food for the Iraqis. On the other hand, the totalitarianism of mechanistic universal makes ordinary people hesitate from taking initiative for change because in a mechanically defined unity, it is either all or nothing.

As Gandhi observed…

“It is necessary for us to emphasize the fact that no one need wait for anyone else in order to adopt a right course. Man generally hesitate to make a beginning, if they feel that the objective cannot be had in its entirety. Such an attitude of mind is in reality a bar to progress.”
M.K. Gandhi, “Equal Distribution”
Harijan, August 25, 1940.

The Living Democracy movement (Jaiv Panchayat) is based on the acknowledgement that we can begin where we are, and we can imbibe our everyday actions with the broadest of visions, the deepest of values. The principles of Earth Democracy – that we are members of the earth family, our deepest identity is our earth identity and our highest duty is to protect all life on earth  - took the expression of the Jaiv Panchayat (Living Democracy) movement.

From 9th August 1999 onwards hundreds of village communities organised as Jaiv Panchayats served notices to the Director General of WTO, Mike Moore, as part of their campaign against biopiracy.  The text of the letter is reproduced below.

Mike Moore came to India in response. And the Government of India had to acknowledge the problem of imposing TRIPS on local communities in its submission to the WTO related to the review of TRIPS.

More recently we have mobilized local action at globalisation to respond to the undemocratic imposition of GMO’s through the WTO. The citizens GMO challenge is a global response of local and national citizens movements of the U.S. initiated WTO dispute against Europe on GMO’s.

The living democracy movement is based on a local-global, micro-macro symbiosis. I could not have had the knowledge or inspiration to start Navdanya without the participation in the Laws of Life Conference at the global level in 1987. And the movements to resist TRIPS, and GMO’s at the global level would not have emerged in the form they did without the new possibilities and potentials opened up by Navdanya’s action on the ground of indigenous crops, ecological farming methods as superior alternatives to genetic engineering, golden rice, protein potatoes, of sharing knowledge seeds, biodiversity as a superior culture to the culture of enclosures. Our work on the articulation and defense of biodiversity and knowledge as a living commons through common intellectual rights, community seed banks, Jaiv Panchayats, has created alternatives, not just for local communities, but for all societies. We refused to allow an enclosure of our last freedoms. And our resistance has opened up spaces in different spheres and different places for others.

Bija Vidyapeeth: Education for Earth Citizenship

9/11 was a product of hate. The response to 9/11 was the globalisation of culture of hatred and fear. We need to keep other cultures alive. We need to keep the culture of love and compassion and sharing alive.

That is why, in 2002 we started Bija Vidyapeeth – the school of the seed – on the Navdanya Farm. Satish Kumar, the Founder of the Green College, Schemacher College in U.K., had  been urging us to start a sister institute for a few years. 9/11 became the compulsion. It was inaugurated by Mohd. Idus, the Founder of Third World Network, Edward Goldsmith, Founder Editor of Ecologist, Sulah Swareksha, a Buddhist Scholar/activist from Thailand.

We called it the School of the Seed, both because of place and concept. It is located at our community seed and biodiversity conservation farm, and the perennial potential of seed to renew itself is the inspiration for our education for earth democracy and earth citizenship. The participants come from across the world, and they learn universal principles through the specificity of biodiversity, the soild, the water, the people of the Navdanya farm in Doon Valley.

Not only is there a global/local convergence there is also a convergence of reflection and action of intellectual growth and physical worth – cooking, cleaning, and farming. What Bija teaches is love and reverence for all life, and respect and involvement in all aspects of human activity. It teaches reciprocity and mutuality, and participation not just in intellectual exploration but participation in the work that maintains and sustains life. This is the work that has been treated as “menial”  - it is the work of the peasants, of workers, of women. All of human progress has been designed as escape from the physical work of sustenance and service. Yet this “escape” is at the root of human alienation and exploitation, non sustainable use of the earth’s resources, and problems of human health arising from our working against our species identity and human needs of connection, of meaning.

Human identity has become so fragmented and narrow, it is defined in terms of professions, religions, countries – labels that divide us from ourselves, each other and the earth. Bija is education for our full human identity – as an earth identity, of our commonality with other humans who share our species being in terms of dependence on the same are, the same soil, the same water, the same biodiversity. But are earth identity is not just about our being a member of the human species. We are members of the Earth Family – of life in all its diversity. All beings are related to us – they are our kin. Our fate is their fate, their fate is our fate. These lessons for earth citizenship are only partly taught intellectually through the best minds of our lives. They are also taught experientially through participation in the life of earthworms and butterflies, through the amazing wonder of 600 crop varieties growing in partnership and harmony, not conflict and competition. Bija is lived experience that teaches that the cooperation, not conflict, is the human feature.

Embodied learning – learning through the body, learning from the earth, opening up to learning in all the dimension, all the processes that have been shut out in a Cartesian world of separation, division, objectification, and a commodified world in which nothing has value outside the market.

Learning from nature and biodiversity about earth citizenship is based on engagement in practices that embody ecological values – connection, openness, generosity appreciation, partnership, inquiry, dialogue, celebration, conservation, protection. This practice-based learning has been devalued but it is essential to one’s survival.

Fril of Capra “The process of knowing is the process of life….. The organizing activity of living systems, at all levels of life, is mental activity”/ The Hidden connections, Doubleday, 2002, p.34

Consciousness is the “frames” or mental structures through which we interpret our world, understand ourselves, find meaning. Enclosures of the mind, our thoughts, our consciousness are inner enclosures, just as enclosures of the commons – of the land and pastures, of rives and biodiversity are external enclosures.

Education has increasingly shrunk our learning, by shrinking the frames of our consciousness. Education as conventionally understood has been the conventional dissemination of knowledge that has been generated through formal research and education. The learner is an empty mind, loches’ “tabula rasa” and education is a “filling” into the emptiness. But all minds are full with preconceived assumption, and frames of consciousness. Education is a transformation of this consciousness through practice. This ecological view of education is the ground on which Bija is built, because not only is the mechanistic metaphor of knowledge, education, organizing less and less effective in addressing issued of our times, it is in fact feeding and fuelling vicious cycles of violence and alienation.

As the self is defined at war with nature and society, rather than as part of nature and society, alienation and violence become “natural” to being. Peace and recovery of our ecological selves needs re-embedding ourselves in the web of life and web of social relationships. That re-embedding is Bija’s invitation to learning for an ecological consciousness, education for earth citizenship.