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Women
are the leading experts in, and custodians of, biodiversity. They
have been society’s seed-keepers, food processors and healers.
And biodiversity itself has been venerated in female form. The
indigenous communities of the Andes see corn, potato, coca and
quinoa as goddesses. The ancient Rig Veda hymn worships healing
plants as mothers.
Mothers,
you have a hundred forms
and a thousand revelations.
You who have a hundred ways of working,
make this man whole for me.
Be joyful, you plants that bear flowers
and you that bear fruit.
Like mares that win the race together,
the growing plants will carry us to the other side.
You mothers called plants, I say
to you who are goddesses,
let me win a horse, a cow, a robe – and
your very life, O man.
When I take these plants in my hand,
yearning for the victory prize,
the life of the disease vanishes as if before
a hunter holding onto life itself.
From him through whom you plants creep
limb by limb, joint by joint,
you banish disease like a giant
coming between fighters.
Fly away, disease, along with the
blue jay and the jay;
disappear with the howling of the wind,
and with the rain storm.
Let one help the other;
let one stand by the other.
All of you working together, hear
this prayer of the soul.
The
rise of industrial medicine and industrial agriculture was based
on a war against biodiversity and women. The witch-hunts of Europe
were an attack on women as experts. The myth that the scientific
revolution was a universal process of intellectual progress is
constantly undermined by feminist studies and the history of the
science of non-western cultures. These link the rise of
reductionism to the subordination and destruction of women’s
knowledge in the west, and the knowledge of non-western cultures.
The witch-hunts of Europe were largely a process of undermining
the authority and destroying the expertise of European women. In
1511, the English Parliament passed an Act directed against
‘common artificers, as smythes, weavers and women who attempt
great cures and things of great difficulties: in the witch they
partly use sorcerye and witch-craft’. By the 16th
century, women in Europe were totally excluded from the practice
of medicine and healing because ‘wise women’ ran the risk of
being declared witches.
A deeper, more violent form of exclusion of women’s knowledge
and expertise, and of the knowledge of tribal and peasant
cultures, is now under way with the spread of the male-centred
paradigm of science. This marginalises women and destroys
biodiversity. It is pushing millions of people to starvation and
millions of species to extinction.
Who
feeds the world?
My
answer is very different to that given by most people. It is women
and small farmers working with biodiversity who are the primary
food providers in the Third World. Contrary to the popular
assumption, their biodiversity-based small farm systems are more
productive than industrial single crop systems.
Diversity and sustainable systems of food production have been
destroyed in the name of increasing food production. However, the
destruction of diversity is accompanied by the disappearance of
important sources of nutrition. When measured in terms of
nutrition per acre and biodiversity, the so-called ‘high
yields’ of industrial agriculture do not imply more production
of food and better nutrition. ‘Yield’ usually refers to
production per unit area of a single crop. ‘Production’ refers
to the total harvest of several different crops. Planting only one
crop in the entire field as a monoculture will of course increase
its yield. Planting multiple crops in a mixture will entail low
yields of individual crops but a high total production of food.
Yields have been defined in such a way as to eclipse food
production on small farms by small farmers. This obscures the
production by millions of women farmers in the Third World,
farmers like those in my native Himalayas who fought against
logging in the Chipko movement, who in their terraced fields grow
amaranth and various kinds of soybean, millet, beans and peas.
From the point of view of biodiversity, biodiversity-based
productivity is superior to single-crop productivity. I call this
blindness to the high productivity of diversity a ‘monoculture
of the mind’, which creates single crops in our fields.
The Mayan peasants in Chiapas are called unproductive because they
produce only two tons of corn per acre. However, the overall food
output is 20 tons per acre when the variety of beans, squashes,
vegetables and fruit trees is taken into account. In Java, small
farmers cultivate 607 species in their home gardens, with an
overall species diversity comparable to a deciduous tropical
forest. In sub-Saharan Africa, women cultivate as many as 120
different plants in the spaces left among the cash crops. A single
home garden in Thailand has more than 230 species, and African
home gardens have more than 60 species of trees. Rural families in
the Congo eat leaves from more than 50 different species of trees.
A study in eastern Nigeria found that home gardens occupying only
two per cent of a household’s farmland accounted for half of the
farm’s total output. Similarly, home gardens in Indonesia are
estimated to provide more than 20 per cent of household income and
40 per cent of domestic food supplies.
Research done by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has
shown that small biodiverse farms can produce thousands of times
more food than large, industrial monocultures. Diversity is the
best strategy for preventing drought and desertification. What the
world needs to feed a growing population sustainably is more
intense biodiversity, not the increasing use of chemicals or
genetic engineering. Although women and small peasants feed the
world through biodiversity, we are repeatedly told that without
genetic engineering and the globalisation of agriculture the world
will starve. In spite of all empirical evidence showing that
genetic engineering does not produce more food and, in fact, often
leads to a net decline in yields, it is constantly promoted as the
only option to feed the hungry.
This deliberate blindness to diversity, the blindness to
nature’s production, production by women, and production by
Third World farmers, allows destruction and appropriation to be
projected as creation. Take the case of the much derided ‘golden
rice’, or genetically engineered vitamin A rice as a cure for
blindness. It is assumed that without genetic engineering, we
cannot eliminate vitamin A deficiency. However, nature gives us
many plentiful sources of vitamin A. If rice was not polished,
rice itself would provide vitamin A. If herbicides were not
sprayed on our wheat fields, we would have bathua, amaranth,
mustard leaves as a delicious and nutritious greens. Women in
Bengal use more than 150 plants as greens. Here are a few: hinche
sak (Enhydra fluctuans), palang sak (Spinacea oleracea),
tak palang (Rumex vesicarius), lal sak (Amaranthus
gangeticus), champa note (Amaranthus tristis), gobra
note (Amaranthus lividus), ghenti note (Amaranthus
tennifolius), banspata note (Amaranthus lanceolatus), ban
note (Amaranthus viridis), sada note (Amaranthus blitum),
kanta note (Amaranthus spinosus), bethua sale (Chenopodium
album), brahmi sak (Bacopa monrieri) and sushin sak (Marulea
quadrifolio), to name but a few. But the myth of creation presents
bio-technologists as the creators of vitamin A, denying nature’s
many gifts and women’s knowledge of how to use this diversity to
feed their children and families.
Capitalist
patriarchs
The
most efficient means of bringing about the destruction of nature,
local economies and small autonomous producers is to render their
production invisible. Women are considered by their families and
communities to be ‘non-productive’ and ‘economically
inactive’. The devaluation of women’s work, and of work done
in sustainable economies, is the natural outcome of a system
constructed by a capitalist patriarchy. This is how globalisation
destroys local economies; the destruction itself is counted as
growth. Women themselves are devalued. Because much of their work
in rural and indigenous communities is undertaken in collaboration
with nature, and is often in conflict with the dominant
market-driven development and trade policies, and because work
that satisfies needs and ensures sustenance is devalued in
general, there is less attention given to life and life-support
systems. The devaluation and invisibility of sustainable,
regenerative production is most glaring in the area of food. While
a patriarchal division of labour has assigned women the role of
feeding their families and communities, patriarchal economies and
patriarchal views of science and technology magically make
women’s work in providing food disappear. ‘Feeding the
world’ becomes disassociated from the women who actually do it
and is projected as dependent on global agribusiness and
biotechnology corporations. However, industrialisation, the
genetic engineering of food and the globalisation of trade in
agriculture are recipes for creating hunger, not for feeding the
poor.
Everywhere, food production is becoming a loss-creating economy,
with farmers spending more buying costly inputs for industrial
production than the price they receive for their produce. The
consequence is rising debts and suicides in both rich and poor
countries. Economic globalisation is leading to concentration in
the seed industry, the increased use of pesticides and, finally,
increased debt. Capital-intensive, corporate-controlled
agriculture is spreading into regions where peasants are poor but
had been, until now, self-sufficient in food. In the regions where
industrial agriculture has been introduced through globalisation,
higher costs are making it virtually impossible for small farmers
to survive. The globalisation of non-sustainable industrial
agriculture is decimating the incomes of Third World farmers with
a combination of currency devaluation, increases in production
costs and the collapse of commodity prices.
Farmers everywhere are being paid a fraction of what they received
for the same commodity a decade ago. In the USA, wheat prices at
the farm dropped from USD 5.75 a bushel to USD 2.43; soybean
prices dropped from USD 8.40 to USD 4.29; and corn prices fell
from USD 4.43 to USD 1.72. In India from 1999 to 2000, prices for
coffee dropped from R 60 to R 18 per kilogram while prices of oil
seeds declined by more than 30 per cent. The Canadian National
Farmers Union put it like this in a report to the senate this
year: While the farmers growing cereals — wheat, oats, corn —
earn negative returns and are pushed into bankruptcy, the
companies that make breakfast cereals reap huge profits. In 1998,
cereal companies Kellogg’s, Quaker Oats, and General Mills
enjoyed return on equity rates of 56, 165 and 222 percent,
respectively. While a bushel of corn sold for less than USD 4, a
bushel of cornflakes cost USD 133. In 1998, the cereal companies
were 186 to 740 times more profitable than the farms. Farmers may
be making too little because others are taking too much (National
Farmers Union, 2000).
A World Bank report has admitted that behind the polarisation of
domestic consumer prices and world prices are large trading
companies in international commodity markets. If farmers earn
less, consumers, especially in poor countries, pay more. In India,
food prices doubled from 1999 to 2000 and consumption of food
cereals dropped by 12 per cent in rural areas, increasing the food
deprivation of the already undernourished and pushing up mortality
rates. Economic growth through global commerce is based on
pseudo-surpluses. More food is being traded while the poor are
consuming less. When growth increases poverty, when real
production becomes a negative economy, and speculators are called
wealth creators, something has gone wrong with the concepts and
categories of wealth and wealth creation. Pushing the real
production by nature and people into a negative economy implies
that production of real goods and services is declining, creating
deeper poverty for the millions who are not part of the dotcom
route to instant wealth.
Women, as I have said, are the world’s primary food producers
and processors. However, their work in production and processing
has now become invisible. According to the McKinsey corporation,
American food giants recognise that Indian agribusiness has lots
of room to grow, especially in food processing. India processes a
minuscule one per cent of the food it grows, compared with 70 per
cent for the US, Brazil and the Philippines. It is not that we
Indians eat our food raw. Global consultants simply fail to see
the 99 per cent food processing done by women at household level,
or by small cottage industries, because they are not controlled by
global agribusiness. Ninety nine per cent of India’s agri-processing
has been deliberately kept at the household level. Now, under the
pressure of globalisation, things are changing. Pseudo-hygiene
laws, which shut down the food economy based on local small-scale
processing under community control, are part of the arsenal of
global agribusiness to establish market monopolies by force and
coercion, not competition. In August 1998, small-scale local
processing of edible oil was banned in India by a packaging order,
which made sale of unpackaged oil illegal, requiring all oil to
packed in plastic or aluminium. This shut down the tiny ghanis,
or cold press mills. It destroyed the market for our various
oilseeds: mustard, linseed, sesame, groundnut and coconut. This
coup by the edible oil industry has affected 10,000,000 million
livelihoods. The substitution atta, or flour, by packaged
and branded flour will influence 100,000,000 people. These
millions are being pushed into a new poverty. Moreover, compulsory
packaging will produce an environmental burden of millions of tons
of plastic and aluminium.
The globalisation of the food system is destroying the diversity
of local food cultures and local food economies. A global
monoculture is being forced on people by classifying everything
that is fresh, local and handmade as health hazards. Human hands
are being defined as the worst contaminants, and work for human
hands is being outlawed, to be replaced by machines and chemicals
bought from global corporations. These are not recipes for feeding
the world, but ways of stealing livelihoods from the poor to
create markets for the powerful.
Biopiracy
Women
farmers in the Third World are mainly small-scale. They provide
the basis of food security, and they provide food security in
partnership with other species. The partnership between women and
biodiversity has kept the world fed through history, feeds it at
present, and will do so in the future. It is this partnership that
needs to be preserved and promoted to ensure food security.
Agriculture based on diversity, decentralisation and improving
small farm productivity by ecological methods is a female-centred,
nature-friendly agriculture. In this women-centred agriculture,
knowledge is shared, other species and plants are kin, not
property, and sustainability is based on renewal of the earth’s
fertility, the regeneration of biodiversity, and the richness of
species on farms to provide farm-grown inputs. In our paradigms,
there is no place for monocultures of genetically engineered crops
and monopolies of intellectual property rights (IPR) to seeds.
Monocultures and monopolies are emblematic of the male-dominated
focus in agriculture. The war mentality underpinning armed forces
and industry is evident from the names given to herbicides that
destroy the economic basis of the survival of the poorest women in
the rural areas of the Third World. Monsanto’s herbicides are
called ‘Roundup’, ‘Machete’ and ‘Lasso’. American Home
Products, which has merged with Monsanto, calls its herbicides
‘Pentagon’, ‘Prowl’, ‘Scepter’, ‘Squadron’,
‘Cadre’, ‘Lightening’, ‘Assert’ and ‘Avenge’. This
is the language of war, not sustainability. Sustainability is
based on peace with the earth. The violence intrinsic to methods
and metaphors used by global agribusiness and biotechnology
corporations is violence against nature’s biodiversity and
women’s expertise and productivity. The violence intrinsic to
the destruction of diversity through monocultures and the
destruction of the freedom to save and exchange seeds through IPR
monopolies is inconsistent with women’s various non-violent ways
of interacting with nature and providing food security. This
diversity of knowledge systems and production systems is the way
forward to ensure that Third World women continue to play a
central role as depositories of knowledge, producers and providers
of food.
One of the varieties we conserve and grow at the Navdanya farm in
Doon Valley is the famous Basmati rice. This rice, which women
farmers like Bija Devi, have been growing in my valley for
centuries, is today being claimed as the recent invention of a
novel type of rice by a US Corporation called RiceTec (patent no.
5,663, 454). The neem that our forebears used for centuries as a
pesticide and fungicide has been patented for these uses by WR
Grace, another US corporation. We have challenged Grace’s patent
at the European Patent Office, with the European Parliament
Greens.
The biopiracy, by which western corporations steal centuries of
collective knowledge and innovation carried out by Third World
women, is now reaching epidemic proportions. It is now being
justified by Monsanto in the guise of a ‘partnership’ between
agribusiness and Third World women. For us, theft cannot be the
basis of partnership. Partnership implies equality and mutual
respect. This means that there is no room for biopiracy: those who
have engaged in such piracy should apologise to those they have
stolen from and whose intellectual and natural creativity they
want to undermine through IPR monopolies. Partnership with Third
World women requires changes to the WTO-TRIPs agreement that
protects the pirates and punishes the original innovators, as in
the case of the US-India TRIPs dispute. It will also involve
changes in the US Patent Act, which allows the blatant theft of
our biodiversity-related knowledge. These changes are essential to
ensure that collective knowledge and innovation is protected and
women are recognised and respected as depositaries of knowledge
and biodiversity experts.
Women farmers have been the seed-keepers and seed-growers for
millennia. Basmati is just one of 100,000 varieties of rice
developed by Indian farmers. Diversity and perpetuity are the main
features of our seed culture. In Central India, which is the
Vavilov centre for rice diversity, at the beginning of the
agricultural season, farmers gather before the village deity,
offer their varieties of rice and then share the seeds. This
annual festival of Akti reaffirms the duty of saving and sharing
seed among farming communities. It establishes partnership among
farmers and with the earth.
IPRs on seeds are, however, criminalising this duty to the earth
and to each other by making seed saving and seed exchange illegal.
The attempt to prevent farmers from saving seed is not just being
made through the new genetic engineering technologies. Delta and
Pine Land, now owned by Monsanto, and the US Department of
Agriculture (USDA) have established new partnership through a
jointly held patent (no. 5,723,785) for seed which has been
genetically engineered to ensure that it does not germinate on
harvest, thus forcing farmers to buy seed at each planting season.
Termination of germination is a means for capital accumulation and
market expansion. However, abundance in nature and for farmers
shrinks as markets grow for Monsanto. When we sow seed, we pray,
“May this seed be inexhaustible”. Monsanto and the USDA on the
other hand are saying, “Let this seed be terminated so that our
profits and monopoly are inexhaustible”. There can be no
partnership between the terminator logic that destroys nature’s
renewability and the commitment to continuity of life held by
women farmers of the Third World. The two worldviews do not merely
clash. They are mutually exclusive. There can be no partnership
between the logic of death on which Monsanto bases its expanding
empire and the logic of life on which women farmers in the Third
World base their partnership with the earth to provide food
security for their families and communities.
Genetic engineering and IPRs will rob Third World women and
impoverish their creativity, innovation and decision-making power
in agriculture. Instead of women deciding what is grown in fields
and served in kitchens, agriculture based on globalisation,
genetic engineering and corporate monopolies on seeds will
establish a food system and worldview in which the men in charge
of global corporations control what is grown in our fields and
what we eat. Corporate executives investing capital in theft and
biopiracy will pose as the givers and owners of life. We will not
be partners in this violent usurpation of the creativity of nature
and Third World women by global biotechnology corporations.
Calling themselves life sciences industry, they push millions of
species and millions of small farmers closer to extinction.
And it is not just other species, but the females of the human
species that are being pushed to extinction. The violence
unleashed by the Green Revolution and new agricultural
technologies is also evident in the emergence and growth of female
feticide in Punjab, the home of the Green Revolution. I first
noted this connection in Staying Alive. The prosperous
northwestern states have only 17 per cent of India’s population
but account for 80 percent of its female feticides. The juvenile
sex ratio has dropped to 927 girls for every 1,000 boys,
indicating that 250,000 female feticides take place every year. I
wrote in Staying Alive that women were becoming the
disposable sex in a world where cash is the only measure of worth.
Of women, as of everything else.
The future of biodiversity and the future of food security rests
on bringing women and small farmers back to the centre of food
systems. Women live by the culture of conservation and sharing.
The world can be fed only by nourishing all the world’s
creatures. By giving food to other creatures and other species, we
maintain conditions for our own food security. By feeding the
earthworms, we feed ourselves. By feeding cows, we feed the soil
and in providing food for the soil, we provide food for humans.
This worldview of abundance is based on sharing and on a deep
awareness of humans as members of the earth’s great family.
Awareness that in impoverishing other beings, we impoverish
ourselves, and in nourishing other beings, we nourish ourselves.
That is the basis of sustainability. It was to defend biodiversity
and protect women’s creativity and knowledge that I set up
Navdanya in India. We have also initiated a global movement,
Diverse Women for Diversity, for the safeguarding of biological
and cultural diversity. Without diversity there can be no peace,
no sustainability and no justice.
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