The Monoculture of the Mind

Vandana Shiva has been at the forefront in the battle for environmental change, sustainable agriculture and human rights for three decades. Global Knowledge met her in New Delhi. “My entire work is inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and I come back to this memorial each time to say, thank you Gandhi, for having left us this legacy, so we can struggle for freedom in times of food fascism,” says Vandana Shiva.

We meet with the outspoken and controversial 55-year-old scientist, activist and feminist at Raj Gat, the place where Gandhi was cremated following his assassination in 1948. Gathered with her are farmers from India’s five northernmost districts. They have just completed an 18-day protest march to highlight the problems farmers are facing all over the country. Speaking to the farmers, Shiva argues the need for radical change in agricultural practices, and for an end to the hegemony of industrialized corporate farming. She talks about inflation and rising food prices, and says we live under a system designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Vandana Shiva delivers her arguments with a razor-sharp articulacy that makes us grateful we are merely journalists there for an interview, rather than opponents in a public debate. It is easy to understand why the boardroom members of some of the world’s most powerful multinational agribusinesses are likely to answer, ‘Vandana Shiva’, when they are asked who represents the greatest threat to their interests. For, whether you agree with her or not, it is almost impossible not to be challenged by what she is saying. In fact, listening to her may make you rethink many of the world’s established social and political paradigms.

For example, the generally acknowledged argument that the Green Revolution, at the very least, led to an increase in food production is one of them. “No, it did not increase production. Wheat and rice production increased, not the overall food production,” argues Shiva, and launches into a lecture that concludes that whatever increase there was had nothing whatsoever to do with the Green Revolution, and that overall it has been a disaster for agriculture and food security in India.

It’s not the case that the Green Revolution did something wonderful for India. It destroyed our biodiversity, it destroyed our self-reliance, and it put us on the path to non-sustainable agriculture.

Vandana Shiva’s thinking has not always been associated with environmental protection and social justice. With a PhD in quantum theory she started her professional career working in a nuclear reactor. It was her sister, a medical doctor, who convinced her that she was on the wrong track. “I was humbled by my sister, who informed me of the hazards, about which I knew nothing. And I said, oh my god, here I am, with a degree in physics and I have never ever been taught that radiation has something to do with life,” she says.

Shiva thinks her background and education have helped her to see the world in a different way: “I think the sophistication of looking at the world in a quantum way with all its qualities of relatedness and uncertainty is very valuable in science,” she says. She totally understands scientists working on the other side of the fence: “It is exciting to be in a field with so much scientific demand. It is exciting to know your little equations actually deliver a chain reaction, to watch it happen. What a sense of mastery over nature!”

But Shiva no longer has the ambition to master nature. Her new paradigm is all about working with nature, on nature’s terms. “Today I feel excitement working with nature, being a partner and being a co-creator,” she says.

Leaving her nuclear career behind, Vandana Shiva became involved in the non-violent Chipko movement of the late 1970s. The movement adopted the tactic of hugging trees to prevent their felling. In early 1982 she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and started to study the real effects of the Green Revolution in India. She remembers being an outcast, and a loner, in a field where established truths prevailed.

In the two decades since, she has turned her attention to intellectual property rights, biodiversity, genetic engineering, bioethics, globalisation and privatization – to name just a few topics – challenging the established system and practice in every case. She has also written more than 300 articles in leading scientific journals, published more than ten books, and received numerous awards – including the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”.

While Shiva’s opponents claim her ideas would be a disaster for India if implemented, she argues that her ideas have already been tested with great success. Through the movement Navdanya, which she founded, thousands of Indian farmers are now connected together, practicing alternative ways of diverse and organic farming. “Our model is not a utopia. We have tried it and we practice it. We have 300 000 farmers linked in an alternative model. That is not a trivial exercise.”

It’s not the case that the Green Revolution did something wonderful for India. It destroyed our biodiversity, it destroyed our self-reliance, and it put us on the path to non-sustainable agriculture.

When the interview is over, we ask Shiva where she would have been if it had not been for her sister. “I would probably be heading India’s atomic energy commission.” She says, smiling: “For sure, I would probably be negotiating with the United States on the nuclear treaty.”

 

An interview with Vandana Shiva

This is Mahatma Gandhi´s memorial. Why have you and the farmers congregated here?

I have built all my food campaigns on three deep concepts that Gandhi has left us. The first is the concept of Swaraj, the freedom to govern yourself. The second is Swadeshi, the freedom to produce for yourself; and the third is Satyagrahe, the freedom to not obey unjust immoral obscene laws.

Look at the food situation in the world today. Farmers’ freedom is being taken away by patent laws and genetically modified crops. Farmers have no freedom to grow the crops they want, or to save the seeds from their crops.

The global food system is no longer about growing food: More and more food is going to make fuel. This is affecting the price of food. Forty countries have had food riots – 70 people have been killed in Egypt over bread! These are wars, and they are wars created by an economic policy – from the idea that food is not food. It’s just for profit.

And all this is being done through laws. Seed laws, patent laws, laws that ban us growing our own crops, laws that ban us making our own food. This is what happened in Italy where cheeses were banned because they were hand-made. The human hand, the most creative instrument we have, after the human mind, is being made to look like the most dangerous thing on earth. Plastic, poison, chemicals are safe – the human hand is dangerous.

How do we get safe and sufficient food to everyone in the world?

One way we can not get safe food to everyone in the world is by industrializing the food system. Since agriculture started to become dependent on heavy external inputs – heavy chemicals, heavy fossil fuel use, large mechanization – what we have seen is permanent hunger among a large number of people. A billion people would not be starving today if this food production system had been efficient.

There are major scientific reasons why the industrialization of food will never produce enough food or good food. Energetically it’s an inefficient system. It uses ten times more input than it produces as food. It’s generating waste and pollution. Look at the toxic pollution that has grown as a result of making our food dependent on chemicals, look at the pesticide residues in food, and look at the cancer epidemic. For energy use, look at the external input of fossil fuels, and the fact that 25 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions today are coming from industrialized agriculture production.

So no matter which way we look at it, it’s a system that’s actually reducing our food supply and increasing the pollution of the planet.

How did this dependency come about?

The trick that has been played on humanity is what I have named “the monoculture of the mind”. The “monoculture of the mind” picks one element of a farming system, then talks about increasing the yield of wheat from five to ten per cent, and says we have grown more food. But overall the food basket has shrunk, because your oil seeds have disappeared, your fruits have disappeared, your vegetables have disappeared, and your monoculture system biologically is less productive.

Because you are only looking at one element, one commodity, through the “monoculture of the mind”, you are imagining that you have grown more food. We are now growing four crops for global trade, when humanity has eaten 8500 plants.

We have now reached a point where industrial agriculture is not efficient in producing nutrition.

I just came back from the very place where Gandhi in 1917 gave a call to boycott indigo. The farmers then weren’t allowed to grow food by the British colonizers, they had to grow indigo. They used to have monocultures of indigo a century ago, today they are flourishing farms with 100 species, meeting every need of the village. In the poorest of huts I ate the most abundant meals.

The only way we can feed the world is through what I have called biodiverse ecological farming. Biodiversity produces more; ecological farming reduces costs and increases productivity.

We began the movement Navdanya 20 years ago, and now we have farms that have twice the production of industrial farms. The farmers have three times the income of farmers in chemical agriculture. We work with 300 000 farmers, and in every case, the costs are coming down, and the output is increasing.

If this is the case, why has it not become more widely accepted?

The biggest hurdle we face to ensure food security for all is the scientific myths that have grown through industrializing agriculture. They are blocking people’s minds, and now three generations of scientists can not think in any other way.

Because I was never groomed in this “monoculture of the mind”, I have been able to practice and develop agricultural models based on ancient systems where we can maximize production while minimizing input costs.

We have now reached a point where industrial agriculture is not efficient in producing nutrition. Industrial agriculture does not produce nourishment, it produces commodities for trade. And these commodities for trade are controlled by five or six agribusiness corporations, like Cargill. The seeds for this industrial system are controlled by Monsanto. Monsanto is buying up every seed corporation in the entire world and controls 95 per cent of the newer seeds. When you have that kind of monopoly, there is no way the people’s right to food can be met. This model is a recipe for starvation.

Was there anything good about the Green Revolution in India? Your opponents will say that it increased production, and helped millions out of starvation. Production really increased, didn’t it?

We have been able to show that the increase in rice and wheat can be accounted for 100 per cent by increased land use for rice and wheat production, increased irrigation, and increased prices for wheat and rice. If you remove chemicals and replace the new seeds with indigenous seeds and ecological farming we would have produced the same amount. So it’s not the case that the Green Revolution did something wonderful for India. It destroyed our biodiversity, it destroyed our self-reliance, and it put us on the path to non-sustainable agriculture.

Anyone who is saying India was starving at that time is telling a lie. I have written a book on the subject called The Violence of the Green Revolution. The story of the Green Revolution was that it would produce new prosperity, and prosperous farmers would never take to the gun.

Well, the farmers did take to the gun, because they weren’t prosperous. In 1984 Punjab erupted in the worst extremism you can imagine. 30 000 people were killed. If the Nobel Peace Prize was given to Norman Borlaug for the Green Revolution, how come in the land of the Green Revolution there was no peace? I started to study the Green Revolution as a public intellectual – and found out that in 1965 nobody was starving in India.

Wasn’t there a big drought?

There was a drought, but not leading to starvation. There was no big crisis in rural India. There was a crisis of food prices in urban India. And it hit particularly those areas where new industrial townships were being created, where cheap food was the only way you could attract labour.

When the government could not assure cheap food, they wanted to import a little more grain or wheat from the United States, largely to manage prices. The World Bank and the government of the United States jointly said: We will only supply wheat to deal with the drought if you change your agricultural pattern. That conditionality was applied to change India’s agriculture.

In agriculture you don’t make changes overnight, it takes time before new land is brought under the new seeds, it takes time before the irrigation is provided, so for them to take instantaneous claims from 1966 onwards about the food performance of India is as much false propaganda as the false propaganda around genetically modified food crops.

The Green Revolution led to protein malnutrition, iron deficiency and vitamin deficiency, because mixed systems were replaced by monocultures. It also meant putting our farmers into a debt trap.

The World Bank gave subsidies and loans in the initial stages. Today the farmers in the Green Revolution pockets, and the globalised cash crop pockets, are committing suicide. 200 000 farmers have killed themselves.

Is there a way to cooperate with the major industrialized companies in changing their way of thinking?

The major corporations are not producing food, they are merely trading food. So why on earth would I ask a non-producer to produce differently?

We can at best ask them to trade differently because these same corporations have twisted the rules of trade to suit themselves, pushing the world into industrial agriculture, pushing the world into a distorted price mechanism.

It’s the distortions in global trade that have made it difficult for small farmers to survive. We have to stop this annihilation of small farmers and we need to make a shift. But the shift will come from democratic forces, not from giant corporations.

There is a new food crisis, and the UN undersecretary has blamed it on a lack of irrigation, bad credit schemes and a lack of investment in agriculture by the government.

The current food crisis of India has nothing to do with production. The current food crisis has to do with India being tied up with the global casino of commodity trading.

I’ll just give you a few examples. India was the biggest source of oil seeds in the world. In 1998 the agribusiness and particularly the soya business manipulated the situation. They opened up India’s market and flooded India with subsidized soya oil which destroyed India’s oil seed production.

Take the case of wheat. Today we are growing 74 million tons of wheat. Our requirement is about 69 million tons, so we have a surplus of wheat. So the price rise in wheat has nothing to do with production. It has everything to do with India importing high-cost wheat, largely under the pressure of the United States, which is largely under the pressure of Cargill, through an agreement called the “US-India Knowledge Agreement on Agriculture” which was signed on the same day as the nuclear treaty. This is the nuclear bomb of India’s agriculture.

Do you see anything good about globalisation?

As an ecologist, the globalisation I seek and work towards is a globalisation I have called “earth democracy”. With “earth democracy” I mean all of us being earth citizens, equal with all other beings. If we can get that sense we will have solved problems of war and hate. We will have solved the problems of non-sustainability because as earth citizens your responsibility is to live by values like sharing, prudence, and the value of living lightly on the planet.

What do you think of globalisation in terms of research and education?

Modern science by its very nature emerges as an international science. I used to sit here as a student, and I used to read every international journal. When I did my PhD in North America I was able to fit instantly into the university system there. That was in the 1970s. So research was always global, it did not need corporate globalisation to become linked.

The Dalai Lama says he will abandon ancient Buddhist traditions if science disproves them. You seem to come the other way. You question science a lot.

I am questioning reductionist science. I take pride in being a scientist. I take pride in being a holistic scientist. I did my PhD in quantum theory and I think the sophistication of looking at the world in a quantum way with all its qualities of relatedness and uncertainty is very valuable in science.

What I am critical of is taking related wholes, chopping them up into pieces and pretending that a piece is the whole. To me that is not science, it’s just stupidity. I think that’s the big difference with the excitement I felt in the nuclear reactor to the excitement I feel when we grow 12 crops in a field. The excitement of a nuclear physicist is as a conqueror of nature. There is no place for the mystery. It’s all about what you can trigger.

The excitement of a nuclear physicist is as a conqueror of nature. There is no place for the mystery.

But when we make a good farm prosper, I am humbled by the life of the soil, I am humbled by the biodiversity of our crops, I am humbled by the weather, that the rain can come when it wants to come. You cannot feel the sense of conquest; you can only feel the sense of service.

Have you ever been proven wrong?

When Monsanto came into India with genetically engineered cotton I sued them and did a huge campaign with the farmers. The farmers were very active, uprooted their crops, and we were proven right in the courts.

But I was proven wrong on the grounds that I did not realize Monsanto’s capacity to corrupt. I thought that if truth stood against lies, then truth would win. But I realized corruption has a better chance. But we persist.

How do you see the future ahead?

For a while governments will use the WTO recipes. But they will collapse and food sovereignty will eventually emerge as the only way to get food to people. Food sovereignty means that we have to recognise that we need farmers to grow food.

We cannot reward farmers in Europe to not grow food.

Democratic societies are going to stand up against corporate greed and secrecy. Real solutions will emerge, and in those real solutions we will be protecting our land, protecting our farmers, making sure we are eating well and growing good food. We have the knowledge to do it.

Next article: Fields of Fuel