GM war Jaspreet Kindra The real political contest today is between the Opower of people and the power of corporationsO, pronounces Dr Vandana Shiva, the fiery activist from India. Shiva, one of the stalwarts of the anti- biotech movement launched over a decade ago, is here to help kick-start the South African campaign against genetically modified (GM) organisms, led by the South African Freeze Alliance on Genetic Engineering.
South Africa is going to be the African launching pad for mass GM seed trials. OThe tragedy of South Africa is that agriculture became the white peopleOs option and the original black farmers were turned into labour supply for the mines, plantations and the white farms,O she says. Thus it is Onot an accident that the biotechnology industry wants to launch from South Africa they have very easy access to the large farms with which they have a shared capital mindset.O Shiva recently began a global campaign against Monsanto, one of the worldOs biggest GM seed corporations. The physicist-turned-activist reassures you that activism is finding its feet after decades of apathy. OThere is a different mood. It is becoming clear to ordinary people that it is either them or the corporations.O
Along with her long-time partner in ecological campaigns Ethiopian environment minister Tewolde Egziabher Shiva was responsible for AfricaOs input at the first world Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The focus of the campaign she spearheads in India is the protection of the rights of small-scale farmers, who are being lured into buying neo-hybrid seeds from multinationals.
The neo-hybrid seeds, products of biotechnology, are as harmful to small- scale farmers as GM seeds, she says. Navdanya, a movement she founded in 1991 to promote the diversity of native seeds, helps set up community seed banks and supports conversion to organic agriculture. OThere are 4 000 villages in India who have declared themselves as biodiverse republics. Our biodiversity is our sovereign wealth: you cannot patent it and cannot introduce genetic engineering to our ecosystems,O she says. The founding of Navdanya coincided with the seed corporationsO entry into India after the deregulation of the market for seed, which had until then been sold solely by the government. With the help of an aggressive advertising campaign farmers in India were coaxed into buying neo-hybrid seeds, she says. Suppliers claimed these resisted disease and pests and were cost-effective which was untrue, she says. Since the seeds are nurtured in laboratory conditions very different from the climatic and farming conditions prevailing across India they often fail. Farmers ended up spending huge amounts on chemicals and fertilisers, pushing them into debt. In the past three years she says her Delhi-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology has recorded 25 000 suicides concentrated in areas where farmers have been buying seeds from the multinationals. Three years ago, her movement managed to bar the GM seeds marketed by the companies that had been selling the neo-hybrids. And the Indian experience relates to most of Africa, where neo-hybrid seeds are being marketed by the same corporations. Shiva cites the recent failure of the maize crop in Kenya as an example. She gives advice to a group of South African organic farmers black and white: OWe need to tell the corporations: we donOt need your seeds we can do it ourselves ecologically and organically.O