Mar. 26 2000 / Toronto Star / Michele Landsberg
The beginning of a fine meal in a fancy restaurant, according to columnist Landsberg: gleam of fresh table linen, tinkle of ice cubes in glasses. You pluck one pink prawn from the shrimp cocktail appetizer and sink your teeth into its plump flesh.
Landsberg says that if you thought long and hard about that shrimp, if you could follow it back to its source and calculate its true cost, you might well hit upon one of the most exciting movements in the world today - the movement for food democracy.
Vandana Shiva, described as one of the world's most admired crusading environmentalists, was quoted as saying in an interview last week that, "It's gathering momentum. We saw its power in Seattle, we'll see busloads of youth at the Biodevastation protests in Boston this weekend, and next it will be Washington in April when the World Bank meets."
Shiva believes that the revolt against "food dictatorship," in which a handful of monster corporations control the global food supply, is the springboard for ending globalization.
An Indian physicist, activist, world lecturer, a winner of the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel, and a steady voice raised up against biotech totalitarianism, Shiva was in Toronto to lecture about her book Stolen Harvest, The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (South End Press).
In Stolen Harvest, Shiva illustrates her case with the example of the heavily subsidized U.S. soy industry, and how it was able to "force-feed" India - wiping out the age-old mustard-seed oil industry in a single year, displacing 750 million indigenous farmers, and imposing a costly monoculture of genetically altered soybean on one of the most biologically diverse countries in the world.
Meanwhile, even as it pushed mustard seed close to extinction, a Monsanto-owned company quietly picked up a patent on that same mustard seed plant. If Indian farmers ever want to reclaim their beloved native crop, they'll have to pay through the nose.
Landsberg goes on to say that although these havoc-wreaking trade imperialists seem to have supreme power, Shiva is calmly confident that a different power base is building and connecting geometrically.
(Interestingly, says Landsberg, many of the leaders are women, including Shiva herself, Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians, Mae Wan Ho of World Scientists, Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Mathai, not to mention Canadian women scientists who blew the whistle on genetically modified foods and untested drugs, like Dr. Ann Clark of Guelph and Michelle Brill-Edwards, formerly of Canada's Health Protection Branch).
Only a year ago, in India, Shiva helped found the Zones for Food Freedom, which has already mushroomed to include 4,000 villages where local farmers pledge to reject chemicals, genetically modified seeds and life-form patents. Her Navdanya group collects and conserves seeds of India's biodiversity; her global alliance of women's groups, called Diverse Women for Diversity, will link food security groups around the world. (Connect with any of these groups by writing Navdanya at Sectt.A-60, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, 110 016, fax 91-11-656-2093)
Shiva's next project, says Landsberg, is to unmask the truth about the costs of genetically engineered crops. Shiva was quoted as saying, "We will knit the world together with this truth. When small-scale farmers in North America and India see that big U.S. soya growers sell on the world market for $155 a ton, while receiving U.S. subsidies of $192 a ton on top of that, not to mention the export credits that agribusiness gets, they'll no longer believe in the supposed economic benefits of agricultural imperialism."
(posted without permission)
