CARING IN AGRICULTURE
Global agribusiness destroys the beauty of traditional farming. Photograph: Dario Novellino/Still Pictures
We need to move away from the violence of science.
back
to top
SCIENCE AND technology are supposed to improve our lives. Yet dominant
traditions of knowledge generation and dissemination, and technology development
are becoming major sources of violence against humans and other species.
Violence is built into the very metaphors of organizing knowledge. The
tools for genetic engineering are 'gene-guns'. Plants and insects are
enemies, to be exterminated by 'Roundup', 'Avenge', 'Squadron', 'Prowl'.
Even temporary infections like foot-and-mouth disease (fmd) are perceived
as a 'fearful plague', a 'demon', a 'serial killer', a 'predator at large'.
The violence in our dominant knowledge systems emerges from the fear
of everything that is free and alive. It emerges from lack of awareness
of impacts of the modes of thought on nature and people, and it is reinforced
by the ignorance of alternatives - of alternative ways of knowing and
other knowers.
The fear of freedom of autonomous, self-organizing systems, beyond control
and manipulation, and the lack of awareness of alternatives are what has
spurred the UK's 'war' against its farm animals in which more than 3,000,000
animals have been shot and burned in a massive military operation in the
countryside to clean up rural areas of an infection that is not fatal
and is curable. In the mountain villages of my native Garhwal, fmd is
called 'Khurpaka'. It is cured using the plant diversity of our forests
and farms - the bark paste of the bhojpatra, the root paste of buckwheat,
the young shoots of peach.
Diseases and infections are part of human, plant and animal life. Zero-tolerance
to disease generates zero tolerance to life. That is why millions of farm
animals can be killed in the illusory search for a disease-free world.
Yet our systems of technology and trade are creating and spreading disease.
Globalization has been identified as one reason for the rapid and wide
spread of the fmd infection. And the super-inventiveness of grinding up
diseased and infected cows as cattle feed has been identified as being
at the root of Mad Cow Disease. Cows are herbivores, not carnivores. Feeding
them meat is violence. Feeding them infected meat in the form of 'scientific'
feed is multiple violence, a violence that has triggered a chain reaction
in the food chain and infected humans.
'Improved feed' and 'improved seed' are supposedly technological miracles.
Hybrid seeds are also a 'technological breakthrough' with promises of
high yield. But they cannot be saved, and are vulnerable to pests and
disease. As hybrid seeds have flooded India under globalization, farmers
have had to borrow money to buy seeds and pesticides. They have had to
dig tube wells to irrigate the hybrid crops. Pesticide use has gone up
by 2,000% since hybrid cotton seeds entered India. Within a year or two,
farmers are deep in debt. They are committing suicide by drinking the
same pesticides that got them into debt. A technological miracle has led
to a human disaster. Across India one estimate is that 200,000 farmers
have committed suicide.
This human disaster is however a corporate opportunity. The faster small
farmers disappear, the more the dependence on chemicals, genetic engineering
and mechanization will grow.
How ecological destruction is being transformed into an opportunity for
corporate control over agriculture is brutally exemplified in the case
of the Canadian farmer, Percy Schmeiser. Percy has been growing canola
from seed he saved over fifty years. In 1997, Monsanto's Roundup Ready
Canola was introduced in his region. It contaminated his canola crop.
Monsanto hired Robinson Investigation to secretly collect canola samples
from Percy's fields. On the basis of samples collected Monsanto sued Percy
for stealing their genes.
On March 29th, 2001, Judge Andrew Mackay ruled that it did not matterhow
the genes came to be in Percy's field: he had infringed Monsanto's patent
No. 1,313,830. The pollen and seeds arriving in Percy's fields through
genetic pollution was considered an act of theft by Percy. So, Percy's
property rights to his field get no protection, but Monsanto's intellectual
property rights to seed and genes are 'sacred'.
In environmental law and policy, there is a rule called 'The Polluter
Pays Principle'. But with the Mackay decision in the case of Monsanto
v. Percy Schmeiser, the courts have ruled that the polluter will be paid.
Spreading pollution has thus become the genetic engineering industry's
latest means of taking over ownership and control of crops and farms.
The 'Precautionary Principle' is at the heart of ecological security.
Precaution requires that unless there is proof of safety, we should err
on the side of caution. That is why consumer groups, environmental organizations
and farmers' associations are calling for a freeze on the commercialization
of genetic engineering. The Precautionary Principle also calls for the
search and promotion of alternatives. Yet the genetic engineering industry
is rushing untested products to the marketplace, even where safer and
better alternatives exist.
Hundreds of sources of Vitamin A exist in nature's biodiversity, selected
and improved by women farmers over centuries. Dhania, bathna, fenugreek,
drumstick, amaranth, mango, papaya, pumpkin are some of the plants rich
in vitamins. But these plants are invisible to those who are engineering
'golden rice' as a solution to Vitamin A deficiency (vad). If all the
money being spent on 'golden rice' and the scientists promoting it were
to be spent on distributing open pollinated variety seeds of fruits and
vegetables to farmers, we would not just get rid of vad and anaemia, we
would reverse the erosion of biodiversity and the ecological problems
of drought, desertification, pests and diseases that are associated with
it.
Syugenta and Monsanto are rushing ahead with the mapping and patenting of the rice genome. If they could, they would own rice and its genes, even though the 200,000 rice varieties that give us diverse traits have been bred and evolved by rice farmers of Asia collectively over millennia. Their claim to inventing rice is a violence against the integrity of biodiversity and life-forms; it is a violence against the knowledge of Third World farmers.
THESE ISSUES ARE at the heart of nonviolence, of ahimsa, of doing no
harm. Ahimsa in science-technology involves respect for and protection
of life's diversity; it involves respect and recognition of diverse knowledge
systems - on their own terms.
Respect for biodiversity entails a shift to production systems which
maintain life on Earth and do not push it to extinction - the life of
soil organisms, of water systems, of plant and animal diversity. A nonviolent
agriculture would do no harm to bees, butterflies and earthworms. It would
also not falsify the productivity of industrial monocultures which waste
water and energy, need expensive and harmful chemicals, and wipe out life's
abundance. The violence to knowledge is built into the pseudo-productivity
of genetic engineering. A negative economy is being projected as growth,
a culture of scarcity is being projected as abundance. A system of destruction
is being projected as creation.
Another level of violence is being imposed through monopoly rights that are criminalizing farmers and transform agriculture into police states. We need a movement of compassion and caring in agriculture, a movement that celebrates saving and sharing of seed. That is why I started the Bija Vidyapeeth - the School of the Seed - where, beginning in October 2001, we will start courses on Education for Earth Citizenship in collaboration with the Schumacher College in England. o
Vandana Shiva is a physicist and author of Monoculture of the Mind. Bija Vidyapeeth can be contacted at A-60 Hauz Khas, New Delhi, 110 016 India. Email: vshiva@vsnl.com.