MICHAEL SPECTER - Seeds of Doubt: An activist’s controversial crusade against genetically modified crops.
Early this spring, the Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva
led an unusual pilgrimage across southern Europe .
Beginning in Greece ,
with the international Pan-Hellenic Exchange of Local Seed Varieties Festival,
which celebrated the virtues of traditional agriculture, Shiva and an entourage
of followers crossed the e Adriatic and travelled
by bus up the boot of Italy ,
to Florence , where she spoke at the
Seed, Food and Earth Democracy Festival. After a short planning meeting in Genoa ,
the caravan rolled on to the South of France, ending in Le Mas d’Azil, just in time
to celebrate International Days of the Seed.
Shiva’s fiery opposition to globalization and to the use of
genetically modified crops has made her a hero to anti-G.M.O. activists
everywhere. The purpose of the trip through Europe , she
had told me a few weeks earlier, was to focus attention there on “the voices of
those who want their agriculture to be free of poison and G.M.O.s.” At each
stop, Shiva delivered a message that she has honed for nearly three decades: by
engineering, patenting, and transforming seeds into costly packets of
intellectual property, multinational corporations such as Monsanto, with
considerable assistance from the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the
United States government, and even philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation, are attempting to impose “food totalitarianism” on the world.
She describes the fight against agricultural biotechnology as a global war
against a few giant seed companies on behalf of the billions of farmers who
depend on what they themselves grow to survive. Shiva contends that nothing
less than the future of humanity rides on the outcome.
“There are two trends,” she told the crowd that had gathered
in Piazza Santissima Annunziata, in Florence ,
for the seed fair. “One: a trend of diversity, democracy, freedom, joy,
culture—people celebrating their lives.” She paused to let silence fill the
square. “And the other: monocultures, deadness. Everyone depressed. Everyone on
Prozac. More and more young people unemployed. We don’t want that world of
death.” The audience, a mixture of people attending the festival and tourists
on their way to the Duomo, stood transfixed. Shiva, dressed in a burgundy sari
and a shawl the color of rust, was a formidable sight. “We would have no hunger
in the world if the seed was in the hands of the farmers and gardeners and the
land was in the hands of the farmers,” she said. “They want to take that away.”
Shiva, along with a growing army of supporters, argues that
the prevailing model of industrial agriculture, heavily reliant on chemical
fertilizers, pesticides, fossil fuels, and a seemingly limitless supply of
cheap water, places an unacceptable burden on the Earth’s resources. She
promotes, as most knowledgeable farmers do, more diversity in crops, greater
care for the soil, and more support for people who work the land every day.
Shiva has particular contempt for farmers who plant monocultures—vast fields of
a single crop. “They are ruining the planet,” she told me. “They are destroying
this beautiful world.”
The global food supply is indeed in danger. Feeding the
expanding population without further harming the Earth presents one of the
greatest challenges of our time, perhaps of all time. By the end of the
century, the world may well have to accommodate ten billion inhabitants—roughly
the equivalent of adding two new Indias .
Sustaining that many people will require farmers to grow more food in the next
seventy-five years than has been produced in all of human history. For most of
the past ten thousand years, feeding more people simply meant farming more
land. That option no longer exists; nearly every arable patch of ground has
been cultivated, and irrigation for agriculture already consumes seventy per
cent of the Earth’s freshwater.
The nutritional demands of the developing world’s rapidly
growing middle class—more protein from pork, beef, chicken, and eggs—will add
to the pressure; so will the ecological impact of climate change, particularly
in India and
other countries where farmers depend on monsoons. Many scientists are convinced
that we can hope to meet those demands only with help from the advanced tools
of plant genetics. Shiva disagrees; she looks upon any seed bred in a
laboratory as an abomination.
The fight has not been easy. Few technologies, not the car,
the phone, or even the computer, have been adopted as rapidly and as widely as
the products of agricultural biotechnology. Between 1996, when genetically
engineered crops were first planted, and last year, the area they cover has
increased a hundredfold—from 1.7 million hectares to a hundred and
seventy million. Nearly half of the world’s soybeans and a third of its corn
are products of biotechnology. Cotton that has been engineered to repel the
devastating bollworm dominates the Indian market, as it does almost everywhere
it has been introduced.
Those statistics have not deterred Shiva. At the age of
sixty-one, she is constantly in motion: this year, she has travelled not only
across Europe but throughout South Asia ,
Africa , and Canada ,
and twice to the United States .
In the past quarter century, she has turned out nearly a book a year, including
“The Violence of the Green Revolution,” “Monocultures of the Mind,” “Stolen
Harvest,” and “Water Wars.” In each, she has argued that modern agricultural
practices have done little but plunder the Earth... read more:
