Albert Howard Memorial Lecture

2003

On 2^nd October 2003, Navdanya /Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE) organized the 4^th Albert Howard Memorial lecture, to celebrate the connection of India's non-violent living agriculture with the traditions of peace that we have received from Gandhi, and in the memory of Albert Howard, who came to India in 1905 as the imperial botanist, but as he acknowledged in his book "The Agricultural Testament", that he "came to India basically to teach Indians how to improve agriculture, but found there were no pests in the fields - no lack of fertility in the soil and decided to turn the peasants and the pests into my teachers".  "The Agricultural Testament" consists of the lessons he learnt from the pests and the peasants - how to grow healthy crops and food, and is literally a transfer of sustainable technology from India to the North, examples of which are the Soil Association in U.K. and the Organic Agricultural Movement in U.K.

Navdanya/RFSTE were honored to have Frances Moore Lappe as the speaker for the 4^th Albert Howard Memorial Lecture, as she has been a pioneer against the global design to destroy sustainable agriculture.  As we in India talk of living democracy, so has Frances been talking of living democracy in the North and has questioned why we have hunger while we grow more and more food, and what is the cause that the same technologies and systems that are supposed to solve the problem of hunger are actually starting to create it.  She has written 14 books, "Diet for a Small Planet" in 1971 and has received 16 honorary degrees.  She has founded one of the most important institutions "Food First" in Auckland.  Now, thirty years later, Frances was asked to write "The Next Diet for a Small Planet", which she has written as "Hope's Edge", and in which she has explained why we have reason to hope during the emerging  market - driven food crisis by giving examples around the world which are creating food security and sustainability against all odds.

Frances Moore Lappe started her talk by sharing with the audience a question which had been bothering her for a long while, "How can we understand, how can we make sense of the fact that we are creating a society that which as individuals we abhor?"  Such a world is being created, she said, because the people of this world are allowing a small number of humans to control most of the resources, who then are creating a world that does not align with people's deepest sensibilities.  It is with "the power of ideas" that a small group of people is going about creating a world we abhor, a world in which at least 16,000 children die daily and where icecaps are melting faster than scientists had predicted.  Eric Fromm has written in his book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, "It is man's humanity that makes him so inhumane" by which he means that it is the unique capacity of human beings to create ideas about the world, called the "frames of orientation" which determine what people see, what people cannot see, what people begin to believe themselves to be as human beings, and therefore, what people begin to believe to be possible.  Human beings need to live within any such "a frame of orientation" in order to make sense of reality. 

Today, the "mental map" that is going global is life-destructive and life-destroying.  Therefore, under this dominant mental map that has been thrust on the people,  people have to find themselves and realize that they are unknowingly allowing to create a world which none of us want. 

One of the most destructive "thought traps" of the dominant mental map that keeps people going on this death-march, is global advertising.  The amount that corporations spend on advertising today is equal to the entire income of the bottom fifth of the world's people.  Moment to moment, people are told through global advertising that human beings need to compete with each other and that they are materialistic accumulators.  A child in United States watches 10,000 such advertisement per year.  Such an image is being created of ourselves and people are allowing themselves to be reduced to a shabby caricature of human life.

Frances said that along with advertisements, it is also the way the news is being brought to people that is allowing people to get a wrong notion of themselves.  Not too long ago, an article in New York Times carried a picture of a man in his sixties, on the business page, looking very morose. The article explained that the man was a multimillionaire (during the great boom of dotcoms)  but was terribly upset because there were now billionaires who were much younger to him.  The message that was being conveyed through the news item was that a multimillionaire was terribly depressed, not because he already had millions, but because some one else was making more.  Such images of what people are and what people should be are being presented to us. If people really begin to believe this of themselves,that people should be selfish materialistic accumulators, then people will allow themselves to be ruled by an impersonal force that will sort out outcomes which people themselves will become incapable of handling themselves.  Such a magic of the market is being created that people have started handing over their fate to the market.

Not too long ago, market exchange was embedded in community as part of human intercourse in ritual, family life, religion and other similar values.  Now the market has been ripped out of community and set above all other values.   Now the market is driven by one single driver, one premise only and that premise is highest return to existing wealth.

In United States, where water was always free, available and common for everyone, it has taken less than 5 years for people to accept they have to buy water. At a train station in Boston recently, Frances  asked for tap water and the lady said, "What's that?" The city of Houston in South Texas realised that people were falling for this idea that they had to purchase water, but the city also knew that its water was the best water anywhere. So, the city of Houston bottled its water and sold it in supermarkets to make money for the city, and people bought it, the same water that was coming out of their taps at home. But this privatisation of everything then follows from this notion that we can reduce life to this market exchange which leads then to the concentration of economic powers and when have enormous wealth in the hands of a few, who then lead the market to the degradation of food itself. Frances focussed on United States because in regard to food and farming, United States is often presented as a success.

Today, if you walk into a typical supermarket in the United States that is supposed to be representative of the great American success and great abundance, you will see 30-40 thousand separate food items, which makes Americans think "Oh, tremendous diversity, tremendous choice I have here." They do not know that a mere ten corporations are responsible for about half of those food items so that if they walk into the store and they buy all their food items, they are buying from one company alone and that company is Philip Morris. We live with illusion of choice not recognising that there are 10 corporations that are responsible for half of those food items. On the Boards of those 10 corporations sit 137 people. If we  think about that for a moment, there are about 270 million Americans, and only 137 people are making the life and death choices about the quality of their food that is essential to  health. It is an extraordinary concentration. As the concentration of control over our food system has gotten narrower and narrower and narrower, Americans have gotten wider and wider and wider, and this is no coincidence that now two-thirds of the US population is either overweight or officially obese. The US food corporations have turned food into the greatest health hazard of the people. Now, this would probably be the first time in the evolution of any species in which food itself is the hazard to health. A recent study has shown that actually the food that we eat (and this overweight is now an epidemic in United States) is contributed more to poor health than smoking in the US. Until very recently people thought of junk food as empty calories. But what is wrong with the term "empty calories"? Empty calories are not really bad, they just displace other things that a person needs. But now we have come to see something much worse. There was great surfeit of corn in US production system, surfeit relative to what people have the income to buy, and there was a need to get rid of it and "high fructose corn syrup" was created.  High fructose corn syrup is now so ubiquitous in the US food supply that on average one in ten of our calories is coming from "high fructose corn syrup". For young people, it can be as high as 20 percent of their daily calories  coming from "high fructose corn syrup", and this is very injurious for health.

Frances explained the way the genetically modified organisms have been pushed through into the US food system without public debate and without scientific review, which is a powerful and frightening example of the undermining of democracy that follows from this thought system. People around the world say, "Well, if in the United States, they are eating GMOs and they have top scientists and they have a Food and Drug Administration that is very strong in terms of drug approval, so if they approve this, then it must be alright". Frances explained what happened in the United States that allowed the genetically modified organisms to now be ubiquitous throughout the food system. This began in the mid-1980s when Monsanto very consciously, using the services of the Arthur Andersen consulting group, came up with a plan. Its goal was to have 100 percent of seeds genetically modified and patented in the world. It set that as its primary goal, but Monsanto knew that it was seriously handicapped in pursuing its agenda because of its public reputation. Monsanto, you many know, was responsible for Agent Orange that wrecked so much damage and so much havoc in people's lives beginning with the Vietnam War. Monsanto was responsible for that and also the horrors of PCBs in the environment. So, Monsanto realised that it would not be very credible to the American public if it came forward and said "Genetically modified organisms are safe, trust us." Monsanto knew that they were not seen as trustworthy. So, they went to the US government and asked them to regulate their industry, to regulate genetically modified organisms, in order to get the stamp of approval of the US government to be able to say that this technology was safe.

This, she explained, was similar to the case in Great Britain where a scientist was sidelined after his experiments on GM potatoes, when he showed that there were immune deficiency irregularities as result of animal studies with GM potatoes. Similarly, within the United States, scientists within regulatory agencies were sidelined. It is important for the world to understand that there was no public discussion and no scientific independent testing before this approval, before the  government said GM foods were just like any other foods and therefore, they did not need special attention or special precautions. Now, a supermarket you walk into has 30-40 thousand food items, and 70 percent of them now contain genetically modified organisms. Most Americans do not believe they have eaten GMOs because most have no labelling. China now requires the labelling of GM foods and yet in the U.S., the world democracy, we have no labelling of GM foods even though there has been massive public outcry in favour of labelling of GM foods. This is invisible to most of humanity, in part because of deliberate obfuscation, deliberate misrepresentation, but also because we lack a language of living democracy, to be able to talk about the kinds of things that we are here tonight to discuss.

Frances pointed out that now there are a few terms that we have got to be careful in how we use them. One of the most difficult, confusing, and wrong-headed terms that floats in the world today is the term "free trade". Frances suggested that we eliminate the term "free trade" from our vocabulary. There is either fair trade or there is corporate-dominated trade in the world today. Free trade does not exist, and one of the positive outcomes of Cancun was that the editorial columns were pointing out the hypocrisy of the U.S. that talks about free trade - "we are the bearers, we are the standard bearers of free trade". Yet, just to take one case in point of cotton growers, 3 billion to 4 billion dollars a year go to 25,000 cotton producers in the United States, to 25,000 cotton producers that keep the price of cotton artificially low, wiping out the incomes of 10 million cotton farmers throughout the world, particularly in Africa and of some of the poorest people in the world. Yet the U.S. say that they are for free trade while they heavily subsidise. In fact, half of US farm income now comes from payments from the government. So, free trade is a myth and we best just let go of that term. We either have fair trade or we have trade that is dominated by corporate interests. Even the term "globalisation" is problematic because it shifts our attention from this issue of control to the issue of extent, of spread. Often in the U.S. people hear the word globalisation and they think, "Oh, that's great. That means music from Bali and food from India. This is wonderful. Globalisation is a great thing." Therefore we should change the term globalisation to global corporatisation or global corporatism, some term that will focus  more directly on the question of control rather than international exchange because most people think that sharing across borders is a very good idea. So, we have to be very careful in our language.

Frances referred again to Eric Fromm who said, , "To be human is to say I affect, therefore I am." It is a human need to be effective, to make a dent, and therefore, work of Navdanya is not of just a special breed of experts, not just of a special breed of corporate executives, but of each human being with common sense who has experience to draw on. That is why the Navdanya model of having regular farmers working with scientists should be complemented because this is how science can then be made to serve us. We are then rejecting this shabby notion that we are simply selfish accumulators. Navdanya  farmers  are creating the bio-registries to protect their common heritage. People in the U.S. have been very moved to see ordinary farmers standing up for their rights. This has inspired Americans to see people who have such few material resources but have the courage to stand up against patenting of the Neemand to stand up against Monsanto.

On a journey to Kenya,  Frances  related that she met Wangari Maathai, who is  a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award . She was the first PhD in biological sciences in East Africa. In 1977, Wangari Maathai on Earth Day planted seven trees in Kenya to honour seven women environmentalists there. As she was doing this, she began to realise that deforestation was ruining the country of Kenya, which in the long run would mean that food security would be impossible because of the desertification of Kenya. So she went to the government foresters and she said, "Oh, well, if we are to fight  desertification  throughout Kenya, village women have to be planting trees thousands all over Kenya," and the government foresters said," What?  Unschooled  village women planting trees? Oh no, you must be a forester to be able to plant trees." Well, that was 20   million trees ago, all planted by unschooled village women. So, Wangari Maathai did not take a 'no' for an answer, though she walked with fear, got tremendous opposition, tremendous abuse for her strong environmental stance. The movement that she created that  planted these 20 million trees is called the Green Belt Movement.

The  tree was the entry point.  As women began to plant trees, their sense of self shifted. No longer were they simply at the mercy of their husbands who controlled the trees or the tribal leaders or the government. They realised they had some power. They realised power, the word which  in  Latin simply means "to be able to have capacity to act". So they realised they had capacity, and with that, they started shedding the belief that colonialism had taught them that their traditional crops were worthless. They started realising that they been planting coffee year after year and yet were making no money because coffee prices had a 100-year low. And so they started realising that they could return to some of their traditional food crops just as Navdanya is showing it is possible. Frances remembered  the moment when she was  leaving the village, an elder came up to her and  said, "I want you to go back to America and tell people that we had lost our food traditions but we are gaining them back."

As the government did not act to implement what was in the constitution, this movement of poor people was able to use civil disobedience techniques based on what was already in the constitution. This has been a courageous movement that has meant the death of many members of the movement. More have died in this process, violence by landowners and by the police than were disappeared under the military dictatorship. But that did not stop them. People with 5^thgrade education gave detailed, very intelligent critique of the neo-liberal model of economics. They  explained  how they were building an education system that would allow their children to take pride in agriculture as a way of life, and using corn-growing for example as an instruction instead of just having textbooks that make the urban life look good. Frances was  particularly struck when they told  that they were developing the first organic seed-line in Brazil. When asked, "Well, are you moving toward organic production because you don't want to be afflicted by pesticides?" since these were all people who had been landless workers before and had experienced poisoning by pesticides, they replied,  "You just don't get it. You think that we would have risked our lives, that we would have gone to all of this work to create these new communities and not only risked our lives, but lost our comrades in the process only then to create a product that might be harmful to a consumer?" They also said "Yes, now that I am in-charge, I am not a victim any longer, I have land, I am creating this community together, I am setting the rules".

In 1993, Belo Horizonte, the 4th largest city in Brazil, looked like any capitalist city in the world with a enormous gap between rich and poor, but now Belo Horizonte has declared food a right of citizenship. Frances was curious to find out what does this mean to this city. They said, "Well, essentially what it means is that if you are too poor to buy food in the marketplace, you are still a citizen and we, the city government, are therefore still accountable to you. And therefore, it is our duty to make sure that good healthy food, not just any food, but good healthy food is made available." And so, what they did is to bring together civil society organisations and church and labour and all sorts of groups together to come up with ideas. They came up with dozens and dozens of innovations, very simple innovations, such as they took small plots of land and made them available to local organic farmers if they would keep the price in these inner city stalls within the reach of the poorest people in the inner city so they had access to good healthy organic food. They posted the cheapest price for 45 food commodities in the bus stops and they named the stores over the radio so that people could see where to get the cheapest of 45 basic food commodities. They created liaisons between the hospitals and restaurants and schools with local organic farmers so that instead of going to corporate processed food, they were buying locally. In fact, they took the amount of money that was given from the federal government for each school child for school lunch and instead of buying corporate processed food with that, they bought local organic food with good nutritional value and already they could see the health of the children improving. And with this new lens of hunger, as food as the human right, they started seeing new dimensions. Things that they had thrown out were seen as great nutrition and they grounded it into a powder and added it to flour and created rolls for all the school children in nursery schools in the city, These innovations cost the city one percent of the city budget, because the city was playing this role of intermediary, bringing the people together to create these solutions.

Frances asked Adriana Aranha, who was in charge of coordinating these initiatives, "Adriana, do you realise how out of step you are?  The whole world is saying the market place is god, market can do no harm, the government can do no good, and you have done the opposite, you are actually saying that the government has a role to play in making the market work.  Do you realise how out of step Belo Horizonte is?"  And Adriana said, "Yes,  I understood how out of step we were and are.  I understand how much hunger there is in the world. What I did not know until we began this, and what upsets me so much, is how easy, how very easy it is to end it."  What Adriana meant was "It is easy if we can break free of this destructive mental map that tells us that we are powerless in face of this market, this fetish of the market. If we understand and work from this understanding, that people can    come together and find the solutions,  we will have the courage to act."

No one could have thought there was a possibility that a worker, an uneducated worker, affectionately called Lula, could become the President of Brazil, because he put "zero hunger" as his top priority. As Brazilians danced with joy in the streets, the first Act of the government was shifting 600 million dollars from fighter airplanes to fighting hunger. When Francis was presented with a T - shirt by a friend, the ad on the shirt simply said  (in Portuguese)  "Hope triumphed over fear_ Lula, President of Brazil".

The lesson learnt through this process is that it is never possible to know what is possible, and therein lies our freedom to create the world we want. Frances noted that none of the things she has talked about in Hope's Edge could have ever been believed to be possible 30 years ago. So this is an extraordinary moment in human history. We are the first of our species to be alive when we are conscious that the choices that we are making are really the ultimate choices. One choice is the dominant mental map, which is taking us further and further on this death march, that  is killing us both by what we do not eat and by what we do eat. It is a death march. We can choose death or we can choose life, as people here in Navdanya are choosing. We can choose to understand that human beings are much more complex than this shabby caricature, that we are deeply connected to one another, and that we have this deep need to connect in real community and to affect that which is beyond ourselves. We must learn to repeat this theme that hope is not what we have in evidence, it is not something that we seek out in proof. Hope is what we become in action. People around the world, who had the greatest odds against them, were the most hopeful people because they were in action. This is the extraordinary privilege to be alive at this time. It is extraordinary that we can see this choice that is before us. The T-shirts of the women tree planters of Kenya carry the slogan, which simply says, "As for me, I've made my choice.