Vandana Shiva

Apr 26, 2010
VANDANA1.JPG

Vandana Shiva

A Jurassic Park of GDP monsters

The economic crisis, the ecological crisis and the food crisis are a reflection of an outmoded and fossilised economic paradigm.

GM and the PM

In an interview to the journal Science (Feb. 24 edition), Prime Minister Manmohan Singh chose to focus on two hazardous technologies — genetically engineered seeds and crops in agriculture and nuclear power — as vital to the progress of science in India and the “salvation for finding meaningful new pathways of developing our economy”. He also talked about foreign-funded NGOs that were blocking this development.

Green greed

The world is faced not only with an economic meltdown but also an ecological one. Ecological limits and the universal values of human dignity and equality are being ruthlessly violated. Global financial institutions are asking troubled economies in the West to make adjustments in the face of the economic crisis. While adjustment is imperative, there are vital differences between the adjustment dictated by “one per cent”, that is the rich and the powerful, and the kind of adjustment demanded by the rest, the “99 per cent”. The rich would like to make the poor and working people pay for the adjustment. The populace, on the other hand, wants the rich to pay through higher taxes, like the Tobin tax on financial transactions, and through regulation aimed at stopping the robbery of natural resources and the commons.

The seed emergency

Seed is the first link in the food chain, and seed sovereignty is the foundation of food sovereignty. If farmers do not have their own seed or access to open pollinated varieties that they can save, improve, exchange, they have no seed sovereignty and consequently no food sovereignty.

No therapy in retail

In November 2011, when the UPA government announced in Parliament that it had cleared the entry of big retail chains like Wal-Mart and Tesco into India through 51 per cent FDI in multi-brand retail, i

The 99 per cent

On May 15, 2011, young people occupied the squares of the cities in Spain. They called themselves the “Indignados” — the indignant.

Seeds of injustice

There is an intense scramble for the earth’s resources and ownership of nature. Big oil, big pharma, big food, big seed companies are joining hands to appropriate biodiversity and biomass — the living carbon, thereby extending the age of fossil fuels and dead carbon. Corporations view the 75 per cent biomass used by nature and local communities as “wasted”. They would like to appropriate the living wealth of the planet for making biofuels, chemicals and plastics. This will dispossess the poor of the very sources of their lives and livelihoods.

How green is our economy?

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
— Albert Einstein

Socialism of greed

On June 29, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met with the editors of a few newspapers. When asked about whether he had been putting pressure on the environment ministry (then headed by Jairam Ramesh) to overlook environmental violations of several projects,

A corporate state?

2010 was the year of scams — 2G Spectrum, Commonwealth Games, Adarsh Housing Society etc.
2011 has emerged as the year of the fight against corruption — with social activist Anna Hazare’s fast for a Lokpal Bill and Baba Ramdev’s fast to bring back black money stashed away in foreign banks.

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I want to begin with a little story that was told to me by a leading executive at Aptech. He was exercising in a gym with a lot of younger people.

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