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An interview with Dr. VandanaShiva

"The deeper you can manipulate livingstructures

the more you can control food andmedicine"

"We have managed to make the celebrationof diversity our mode of resistance."

St. Louis, Missouri

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist,activist, editor, and author of many books. InIndia she has established Navdanya, amovement for biodiversity conservation and

farmers' rights. She directs the ResearchFoundation for Science, Technology andNatural Resource Policy. Her most recent bookis Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. This interview with Dr. VandanaShiva was conducted in St. Louis, Missouri atthe First Grassroots Gathering onBiodevastation: Genetic Engineering, on July18, 1998. Dr. Shiva was the keynote speaker atthe conference. The interview was conductedby In Motion Magazine publisher Nic Paget-Clarke .

• Interview with Vandana Shiva (2003)The Role of Patents in the Rise of GlobalizationNew Delhi, India

• Interview w/ Vandana Shiva (2002)Discussing “Water Wars”.Johannesburg, South Africa

In Motion Magazine: Why are patents the new form of colonialism?

Dr. Vandana Shiva: Patents are a replay of colonization as it took place 500 years ago in a number of ways. Interestingly, even at that time, when Columbus set sail and other adventurers like him, they

also set out with pieces of paper that were called the letters patent which gave the power to theadventurers to claim as property the territory they found anywhere in the world that was not ruled bywhite Christian princes.

Contemporary patents on life seem to be of a similar quality. They are pieces of paper issued bypatent offices of the world that basically are telling corporations that if there's knowledge or livingmaterial, plants, seeds, medicines which the white man has not known about before, claim it on our behalf, and make profits out of it.

That then has become the basis of phenomena that we call biopiracy, where seeds such as theBasmati seed, the aromatic rice from India, which we have grown for centuries, right in my valley isbeing claimed as novel invention by RiceTec.

Neem, which we have used for millennia for pest control, for medicine, which is documented in everyone of our texts, which my grandmother and mother have used for everyday functions in the home, for

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protecting grain, for protecting silks and woolens, for pest control, is treated as invention held byGrace, the chemical company.

This epidemic of piracy is very much like the epidemic of piracy which was named colonialism 500years ago. I think we will soon need to name this round of piracy through patents as recolonializationas a new colonialization which differs from the old only in this - the old colonialization only took over land, the new colonialization is taking over life itself.

In Motion Magazine: Just a moment ago in your speech to the conference, you said you'd like tobring in a third world perspective. Can you bring that into this discussion?

Dr. Vandana Shiva: The third world is that part of the world which became the colonies in the lastcolonialization. It wasn't an impoverished world then, in fact the reason it was colonialized is becauseit had the wealth. Columbus set sail to get control of the spice trade from India, it's just that he landedon the wrong continent and named the original inhabitants of this land Indian thinking he had arrived inIndia. Latin America was colonialized because of the gold it had. None of these countries wereimpoverished. Today they are called the poorer part of the world because the wealth has been drainedout.

People have survived in the third world because in spite of the wealth that has been taken from them,in spite of their gold and their land having been taken from them, they still have biodiversity. They stillhave that last resource in the form of seed, medicinal plants, fodder, which allowed them access toproduction It allowed them to meet their needs of health and nutrition. Now this last resource of thepoor, who had been left deprived by the last round of colonialization is also being taken over throughpatenting. And seeds which peasants have freely saved, exchanged, used, are being treated as theproperty of corporations. New legal property formations are being shaped as intellectual propertyrights treaties, through the World Trade Organization, trying to prevent peasants of the third world fromhaving free access to their own seed, to have free exchange of their own seed. So that all peasants,all farmers around the world would be buying seed every year thus creating a new market for theglobal seed industry.

80 percent of India takes care of its healthneeds through medicinal plants that growaround in back yards, that grow in the fields, inthe forests, which people freely collect. No onehas had to pay a price for the gifts of nature.Today everyone of those medicines has beenpatented and within five, ten years down the linewe could easily have a situation in which thesame pharmaceutical industry that has createdsuch serious health damages and is now shiftingto safe health products in the form of medicinalplant-based drugs, Chinese medicine, aromaticmedicine from India, will prevent the use. Theydon't even have to come and make it illegalbecause long before they have to take that step,they take over the resource base, they take over the plants, they take over the supply, they takeover the markets, and leave people absolutely deprived of access.

What we are seeing right now is a situation in which the third world, which has been the main supplier of biodiversity, the main producer of food in the world, where the majority of people are engaged infood production, is being attempted to be converted into a consumer society. But you can't have aconsumer society with poor people and therefore what you will have is deprivation, destitution,disease, hunger, epidemics, hunger, malnutrition, famine and civil war. What is being sown is thegreed of the corporations of stealing the last resources of the poor. It really is seeds of uncontrollableviolence and decay of societies on a very large scale.

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In Motion Magazine: You touched on it, but what seems key to this takeover is what the RAFI (RuralAdvancement Foundation International) people call the "terminator technology". Can you talk aboutthat?

Dr. Vandana Shiva: When we plant a seed there's a very simple prayer that every peasant in Indiasays: "Let the seed be exhaustless, let it never get exhausted, let it bring forth seed next year."Farmers have such pride in saying "this is the tenth generation seeds that I'm planting," "this is the fifthgeneration seed that I'm planting." Just the other day I had a seed exchange fair in my valley and afarmer brought Basmati aromatic rice seed and he said "this is five generations we've been plantingthis in our family". So far human beings have treated it as their duty to save seed and ensure itscontinuity. But that prayer to let the seed be exhaustless seems to be changing into the prayer, "let thisseed get terminated so that I can make profits every year" which is the prayer that Monsanto isspeaking through the terminator technology -- a technology whose aim is merely to prevent seed fromgerminating so that they don't have to spend on policing.

It's not that they don't yet have means. Hybrid seeds are also not good for saving. It was the first timethey found a tool to force farmers to come back to them. A market every year. But the difference is thathybrid seeds don't give good seed. It's not that they fail to germinate. They will still segregate into their parent lines. They'll still give you some kind of crop. You will not have absolute devastation.

Patents are also a away to prevent farmers from saving seed. But with patents you still have to dopolicing, you still have to mobilize your detectives to ensure that farmers aren't saving seeds. Theterminator is an extremely secure technology for corporations like Monsanto because neither do theyhave to do the policing, nor do they have to worry whether some segregation works, now you justbasically terminate. But this is not just a violence against farmers whose basic right, in my view, isseed saving. A farmer's duty, is protecting the earth, maintaining it's fertility, and maintaining the fertilityof seed. That is part of being a farmer. A farmer is not a low-paid tractor driver, that's a moderndefinition of what a farmer is. The real definition of a farmer is a person who relates to the land andrelates to the seed and keeps it for future generations, keeps renewing it, fertility.

The search for this technology comes out of a violence to that basic ethic that farmers must have if

they are to be good farmers. But it is also even deeper because now it is becoming a violence againstnature because in a way Monsanto is saying we will stop evolution because evolution createsfreedom.

In Motion Magazine: What is the historical connection of genetic engineering to eugenics?

Dr. Vandana Shiva: The image of science, and particularly streams like genetic engineering is alwaysthat somehow these things happen spontaneously, it comes out of human ingenuity and brilliance, andsomeone has a bright idea and new disciplines emerge. Which used to be the case, way back in thepast. But since the period of the industrial revolution when Bacon said there's a marriage betweenknowledge and power that spontaneous emergence of ideas is not the way science has grown.Science has grown through deliberate direction through financing of certain kinds. The roots of geneticengineering go back to the thirties when molecular biology was planted as a new science with nofoundations. They didn't know what it would be. They knew two things. One that eugenics had lostrepute in Europe and the project of eugenics had to have a disguised presentation to the public. Itcouldn't be so overtly social. It had to be rooted in a so-called scientific basis. It had to be rooted morein biology. The entire enterprise was financed through the Rockefeller Foundation. It was called thesocial psychology program. The only thing they knew at that point was let's find something deeper inthe way things work biologically to say that this is inevitable. That selection is inevitable. The selectionof human beings is inevitable because they are the way they are biologically determined to be -- poor,criminals, etc. -- the kind of arguments they had used for the eugenics movement in Europe in thepast.

They first named a theoretical construction biological atoms. They didn't know what it would look like.They just said they are biological atoms that determine traits. It took them fifty years of manipulation,

of rewarding, of giving about ten Nobel prizes to themselves as a club of men doing a certain kind of science, connected to each other through the financing. Then you get Watson and Crick beingrewarded for the DNA structure. But that the DNA structure is an atom that determines all traits was

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named fifty years before. If it wasn't Crick and Watson it would have been another group of scientists.But it was being developed in that way.

The two reasons they went this route were first, as I said, to get away from being accused of havingsocial bias. By putting it in biology and putting it into the atoms of biology they could argue that thiswas in the nature of things. This was the state of affairs and this way they could get away from thepolitical responsibility of engaging in basically political acts and putting it in the domain of science.

The second, and this fed over time into the industrialization of genetic engineering and biotechnology,is that they could see that the deeper you can manipulate living structures the more you can controlfood and medicine. We're getting that new round of propaganda now which is suggesting thatsomehow manipulation at the genetic level always gives you superior products, which is not at all thecase. It could give you higher risks. They are just using the fact that you are intervening at a deeper level in living structures and equating it with superior, with human progress. There is no correlationbetween these two things.

The fact that people are not accepting it is clear from the fact that people are rejecting genetically-engineered foods. They are not treating genetic manipulation as somehow a superior food productionsystem. Are we going to see more and more of these kind of questions? I think it is absolutely key tonot forget that the roots of genetic engineering are in eugenics and as genetic engineering moves fromagriculture to human manipulation we are going to be right back with a very vicious eugenics program.

In Motion Magazine: One of the arguments,when you talk to biogeneticists, is "farmers havebeen historically changing seeds through howthey pick and choose seeds through the years. Allwe're doing is speeding up the process ." What isthe difference?

Dr. Vandana Shiva: It's not true in two ways.First of all, when farmers have been selectingthey have been selecting between twoboundaries and limits that they set for themselves. The first is the ecosystem limit.Farmers select crops according to theecosystems in which they produce. No farmer inthe world has done seed selection sitting intropical Africa and trying to grow crops intemperate Sweden. Africans have bred crops for Africa, and Swedish farmers have evolved crops for Sweden.

The second is related to the fact that they have always worked within the limits set by intra-speciesbreeding. You only work with rice to evolve new rice plants. You work with wheat to evolve new wheatplants. You do not try and cross the species boundaries. In fact, even conventional breeding whichwas not farmers' breeding which had already been taken over by scientists and industry and violatedthe ecosystem boundary because it tried to breed beyond ecosystem adaptation -- it did still respectthe species boundary.

Genetic engineering is violating both boundaries. It's violating the ecosystem boundary. It is generatingcrops to be planted on millions of acres because there's no point in having patents on a particular Btcotton if you are then only going to grow it in twenty acres where it suits that particularly variety. As aMonsanto you have to market around the world to maximize the return on your patents, your revenuesetc. This means you have to grow it everywhere. You have to violate ecosystem boundaries.

But more important than that, for the first time, genetic engineering is doing something different fromwhat conventional breeders have done. And no matter how many times they tell this lie it doesn't make

it a truth. Transgenic organisms are not equivalent to farmers breeding or conventional breedingbecause transgenic by its very definition means something which has crossed species boundaries,something in which an alien gene has been introduced into a plant. In the case of Bt it is the toxic

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bacteria gene. In the case of other crops it will be antibiotic genes. There's something in that plant thatwouldn't have gotten there if you had just done normal breeding that farmers have done. They haven't

just speeded up the process they have crossed a threshold.

In Motion Magazine: Can you talk a little about Navdanya: A Movement for Biodiversity Conservationand Farmers Rights.

Dr. Vandana Shiva: Navdanya is a national program to basically fight the seed monopolies. I started itten years ago when I could see the emergence of this kind of world of total control. Navdanya meansnine seeds. Through it we save native seeds. In India we still have a lot of peasant agriculture. We stillhave a lot of seed diversity. We do not try and do it as a museum activity. I started Navdanya as apolitical act so that farmers would have free seed in their hands, using that free seed they would beable to resist the kind of control system that the new corporations, corporate control, was trying toestablish in India. Through those seeds they can establish sustainable organic agriculture again.

New seeds are bred for heavy chemical influence and even now when Monsanto says that itsgenetically-engineered crops don't need chemicals, we hear every where that there's a doubling of chemicals. If they were to bring these seeds into India there would be a twenty-fold increase of chemicals because they'd introduce chemicals into farms that have never used chemicals.

Through the native seeds we can become free of agri-chemicals, farmers can become free of debt,become free of the kind of burden that high inputs are creating. But we can also create freedom for consumers because frankly there's nothing as delicious as the old varieties that have been evolvedover time.

Our native wheat sells at twice the price that the high-yielding variety wheat flour sells at because it'smuch tastier, much nicer for chapatis. It was evolved for chapati making. Our native legumes sell for much more because not only are they organic they are tastier, they are more nutritious. They arebetter for the earth. They put less pressure on the earth, they put less pressure on the farmer, andthey are safer for consumers. It's crazy to still continue to call these wonderfully nourishing seedsprimitive cultivas.

Part of our battle has been to give respect again to the innovation of farmers and the diversity that theearth has provided. What I often say is that through the seed saving of Navdanya we have managedto make the celebration of diversity our mode of resistance.

In Motion Magazine: How successful has it been?

Dr. Vandana Shiva: It has been very successful. We're in about seven zones now. We have the nativeseed supply taking over. I have just started two new seed banks in the heart of the "Green Revolution",one in western Uttar Pradesh, one in Punjab where about thirty farmers are giving up chemicals andgetting off the chemical tread mill. They are starting to shift to use of native seeds and organicagricultural methods. The wonderful thing about seed is if you have even one, you have the potential

of millions.

Published in In Motion Magazine - August 14, 1998

Interview with Vandana ShivaThe Role of Patents in the Rise of Globalization

“The recovery of economic democracyis at the heart of recovery of democracy itself.”

New Delhi, India

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Dr. Vandana Shiva is founder of both the ResearchFoundation for Science Technology and Ecology, anindependent public industry research group, andNavdanya a grassroots conservation movement inIndia. This interview was conducted by Nic Paget-Clarke on August 27, 2003 for In Motion Magazine in

New Delhi, India. • A twist in the history of patents• Control of the technology• The role of patents• Globalization of U.S. patent laws• Patents regulate life• Medicine: from healing to profits• Ecology and equity• From theoretical physicist to advocate for

biodiversity • Agriculture and violence• Focus on biotechnology and patenting• The influence of Gandhi • The death of economic democracy• The recovery of economic democracy• The flow of wealth from South to North• From ownership of land to ownership of

biodiversity • War is globalization by other means

A twist in the history of patents

In Motion Magazine: I think sometimes people’seyes glaze over when hearing about patents andlegal matters, but in your book “Protect or Plunder –Understanding Intellectual Property Rights” youdescribe some interesting history, about howoriginally patents were used to spread technologybut now they have been turned into their opposite.Could you outline how that twist happened?

Vandana Shiva: In the early days, the word patentwas used for two things. In the case of getting holdof territory, what were issued by kings and queenswere letters-patent, which were open letters. Anyonecould know that Columbus had been given a right byQueen Isabel and King Ferdinand to conquer andtake over any territory on their behalf.

But the second meaning, defined around the sametime by the Venetian laws on patent, which were thefirst patent laws, was that a master craftsman couldbe brought (to a country), because technology atthat time was craft technology, and if a country couldnot make glass they would give to the master craftsman apprentices and say, “Train our people in

this art.” “Train our people to make glass.” “Train our people to make steel.” “Train our people to make

Vandana Shiva at a press conference with other leaders of an anti-WTO march in New Delhi, August 27, 2003 . Allphotos by Nic Paget-Clarke.

Marching with former Indian prime ministers.

A soldier of the Indian Army provides security for the former prime minsiters marching in the anti-WTO rally in New Delhi.

On the march in New Delhi.

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textiles”, and we will give you an exclusive right (to mak e these products) for seven years while youare training people.

The period of the patent was seven years because it too k seven years to learn a craft. After that seve nyears was over, the master craftsman went back to whe rever he belonged and you had all theapprentices available in the country to spread that techn ology as a free public good. This was thepattern throughout the early use of patent law.

Then you get slow shifts with the rise of industrialism. As big industry became a major economicinterest, they started to use technology as an instrumen t of monop oly. Patents became the way to say,“Only we will use this technology”.

The way they expanded this power was, on the one han d, exten ding the life of patents. It went fromseven years to fourteen. Now, under WTO (World Trade Organiz ation), for the first time it is twentyyears -- extendible in a period where technologies are b ecoming so obsolete that if you have that kindof monopoly for twenty years you are totally controlling t he techn ology.

And the second thing is constantly increasing the domai n over which patents will apply. For example,

in India’s patent law agriculture could not be touched. A griculture was free of monopolies. And inmedicine you could not have a product monopoly. You could not monopolize a medicine but you couldmonopolize a method of making a medicine. But, medic ine has b een brought into monopolies. Seedhas been brought into monopolies. Cells have brought i nto mono polies. Genes have been brought intomonopolies. Animals have been brought into monopolie s.

Basically, the ’80s saw a twist in this and a lot of it had t o do with the rise of the big industry and their convergence into one set of giants, which are the health giants, the pharmaceutical giants, t he genegiants controlling all life.

Control of the technology

In Motion Magazine: You’ve also said that with the rise of other countries in the world, with their ownmanufacturing systems, markets started to slip away bu t the dev eloped countries still had control of the technology?

Vandana Shiva: The thing was that when we were livin g in a world based on crafts, transferringtechnology was the objective. But as the world got industrialized, as developing countries shed thecolonial burden, imperialistic patent law started to develop.

For example, again India, under a 1970 law, developed a very stro ng medical sector. And I think if WTO had not come on the horizon, India would be providing cheap medicine to American citizens. It’scapable of doing that. But the American citizens, and the African citizens, and the Brazilian citizens,and in the future the India citizens are being told, “You will only buy from these monopolies.” It was away to de-industrialize Southern countries who had started to build capacity, technological capacity for themselves.

The role of patents

In Motion Magazine: So patents have had a very specific role in the latest version of imperialism, inthis globalization phase?

Vandana Shiva: If you want to have one tool for imperialistic control, it’s patent law under the WTOagreement. It’s in my view the worst of the WTO agreements. It is a totally coercive tool. It has only anegative function: to prevent others from doing their own thing; to prevent people from having food; toprevent people from having medicine; to prevent countries from having technological capacity. It is anegative tool for creating underdevelopment.

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It’s the privatization of knowledge. I have called it the enclosure, the ultimate enclosure. We hadenclosures of land. Now, we are seeing enclosures of biodiversity, life itself. In my book “Biopiracy”,I’ve talked about how this is the last colony. It is the spaces within our minds -- for knowledge. Thespaces within life forms for reproduction. A seed cannot reproduce without permission of the patentholder and the company. Knowledge cannot be transmitted without permission and license collection.It’s rent collection from life. It’s rent collection from being human, and thinking, and knowing.

Globalization of U.S. patent laws

In Motion Magazine: How has the WTO been a forum for the globalization of U.S. patent laws?

Vandana Shiva: The WTO has an agreement called Trade Related Intellectual Property Rightsagreement (TRIPs), which basically is nothing more than globalization of U.S.-style laws. And itsglobalization of U.S.-style laws both in content and in process. In terms of content, in the late ’80swhen this law was drafted, the United States was the only country that granted patents on life forms.This precedent was set in a 1980 decision on a genetically-engineered micro-organism, subsequent towhich was the rise of the biotech industry. The granting of life patents was seen as an imperative bothby the industry as well as the government. The U.S. government actually encouraged life patenting.

The decision-making was set by the courts, rather than by Congress, never with a public debate,never with a public policy decision on the ethical implications, ecological implications, economicimplications of what life patents mean.

The second way in which this is a globalization of U.S. law is the fact that it was really U.S. companieswhich got together, drafted the law, took it to the U.S. administration, then took it to the secretariat of the at-that-time General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), which was the precursor of WTO,and as Monsanto, which was one of the companies in the intellectual property coalition admitted indrafting this law, “We achieved something unprecedented. We were the patient, the diagnostician, andthe physician all in one.

Patents regulate life

With the broadening of patents to life forms, patents do not just regulate technology they regulate life.They regulate economy. They regulate basic needs. A patent is an exclusive right to make, produce,distribute, or sell the patented product. So, if a patent is granted, for example, on seed it means afarmer who grows a seed cannot save seed from the harvested crop because that is constituted asmaking the seed and the exclusive right to the seed belongs to the company. It means seed-saving byfarmers is now defined as intellectual property theft. Many farmers in the United States have beensued by the corporations for doing something normal in farming, which is saving their seed.

Exchanging seed with your neighbor, which is called brown-bagging -- it was not a commercialexercise; it was a mutual give-and-take in society; a social act of exchange for non-profit activity -- hasalso been defined as an infringement because now distributing is covered by a patent, even if it is notcommercial, because the companies interpret that by exchanging seed you are taking the market

away from them.

Medicine: from healing to profits

Also, patents can be given for medicine. For example, in the case of medicine, if there is no patent wecan treat people with AIDS with $200 expenditure per year. Indian companies can make it for that costbecause they can make them as generic drugs. They are not piracy drugs, which is the way the U.S.pharmaceutical industry talks about them. They are generic in the sense that different processes havebeen used. The same medicine, the same retroviral, costs $20,000 in the United States because of patenting -- that is the only difference. Which means something which is being made for $200 is beingsold to consumers for not just ten times but a hundred times the price. As our prime minister said, thebig companies are trying to turn the matter of disease from healing into a matter of profits.

There was an attempt made, at the beginning of the TRIPs negotiations, to make it look like the lower-cost production that could happen in the absence of monopolies was piracy. The industry managed to

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define piracy as absence of monopolies. We want to define monopoly as monopoly and recognize thatthings like seeds should be accessible to farmers, things like medicine should be accessible to thosewho are dying of AIDS, and no regime in the world can put profits above people’s lives.

In Motion Magazine: Are the same corporations controlling food and health?

Vandana Shiva: It’s the same companies. The industry that used to be the chemical industry is alsothe pharmaceutical industry, is also the seed industry, is also the biotech industry. There is noseparation -- and agro-chemical industry. It is all one.

Ecology and equity

In Motion Magazine: You made the statement in your book on patents that there’s always aconnection between ecology and equity. Can you talk about that?

Vandana Shiva: Ecology is about interactions in the natural world, sustainability of resources.Whether you look at water, you look at biodiversity, you look at anything, conservation happens.Environmental sustainability takes place when people have a stake and a share in the rewards of theconserved resource. If people have the ability to drink water from a well, and look after that well, andwill suffer the consequences of contamination, they will not contaminate that well. People who pollutea well or a river are the ones who don’t have to drink from it.

Similarly, when it comes to monopolies on intellectual property, conservation is what is sacrificed. It’sthe small peasants of the world who have conserved biodiversity. If they have to continue conservingbiodiversity, they need to have their rights defended. They need to be able to know that when theyplant basmati rice it will be their reward to harvest that basmati. They will not be treated as pieces of RiceTec property. And they need to have a market for their produce.

Intellectual property destabilizes both, and in fact, starts to become an incentive for destruction of biodiversity by pressures of the industry for monocultures, on the one hand, but also by not giving

people a chance to protect the resources from which they make a living because they are no moretheir resources.

That is why ecology goes hand-in-hand with equity.

From theoretical physicist to advocate for biodiversity

In Motion Magazine: Could you go over how you started in the field of physics and then ended upwhere you are today and how that relates to your organizing?

Vandana Shiva: I chose to be a physicist. I loved physics from an age when I didn’t even know whatthe content was but I knew I wanted to figure out how nature works. Einstein was my hero. This is

what inspired me.

I lived through life training to be a physicist, initially training to be a nuclear physicist and then realizingthere’s a dark side to it. I left that to become a theoretical physicist. I worked in foundations of quantumtheory.

As is typical, I was doing my Ph.D. in Canada and everyone who goes from the South as a scientiststays on and becomes a university professor and I could see, “That’s what I will become.” I wanted tobecome that. But I said, “I’m not informed enough about how my society works. There is a question inmy mind. We have the third biggest scientific community in the world. We are among the poorest of countries. Science and technology is supposed to create growth, remove poverty. Where is the gap?Why is science and technology not removing poverty?” I wanted to answer that question to myself.

I said, “I will take off three years. Look at science policy issues. Be a little more educated, socially, andthen go back to physics.” That was my chosen life path. I was, in any way, involved in forest protection

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in the Himalayas, my home, before I went for a Ph.D. I constantly volunteered with a movement of women called Chipko .

But when I started to work on science and technology issues, I realized very quickly that they areabout resource control. They are not about efficiency. A big trawler in the sea is not more efficient thana small boat. It controls more resources. And denies the small boat.

Green Revolution farming is not more efficient. It takes more water and leaves other areas deprived of financial investment, water inputs, everything else. What you really see is technology acting as, what Icalled in that period, a polarizer of resource access. Very quickly I started to realize that technologyissues, ecology issues, social inequality issues, were actually very intimately connected. I did a lot of analysis/writing at that point and I was invited by the United Nations to carry these issues further.

Meantime, the Ministry of Environment, seeing some of my reports, commissioned me to look atmining in my valley. I had just had my son, the 21-year-old boy who is walking around (in the officewhere this interview took place), and I said “perfect”. I had lost my mother at that time, so I said “I willgo back, look at this mining, make a break in my science policy, also make a short break from myreturn to physics. Do the study. He’ll be a little older. But I will also do more work on ecology and thegrassroots movement. Did the study. We stopped the mine.

Agriculture and violence

I started to do the United Nations work and a huge world unfolded. The Punjab crisis burst whichforced me to look at agriculture, ecology issues of agriculture, but also the rise of terrorism linked tounequal development. I wrote my book called “The Violence of the Green Revolution”.

1984 was the year I started to look very, very closely at those issues because we’d had genocide inPunjab. We’d lost our prime minister in that terrorism, which eventually killed 30,000 people. And itwas the year of Bhopal. As a result of that gas leak from a pesticide plant, 30,000 people more havedied.

So, I was just surrounded by these mega-violent epidemics all linked to agriculture and agriculture thatwas supposed to be progressive. In 1984, I decided that something was wrong and I needed to go tothe roots of it. Why has agriculture gone so violent? Why are we so dependent on pesticides --weapons of mass destruction? The real weapons of mass destruction because they did move from thewar industry into agriculture.

Focus on biotechnology and patenting

After three of four years of looking more closely at agriculture issues, I started to get called intobiotechnology seminars because it was the next step. In ’87, at one of these seminars, the industrylaid out its grand dream of controlling the world. They talked about needing genetic engineering so thatthere’s a technology that they have that peasants can’t use so that they can have a monopoly throughtechnology. Patents. Because without it they cannot consolidate power.

That was said by Sandoz. Sandoz merged later with Ceiber-Geigy. Sandoz and Ceiber-Geigy becameNovartis. Novartis merged with AstroZeneca, which was anyway two independent companies, earlier.All of them merged to become Syngenta. What they had said at that time was, “By the turn of thecentury we will be five.” In ’87, I said, “I don’t want to live in a world where five giant companies controlour health and our food.”

I dropped everything else. I left my work on dams and forests and mines. I was doing very broad-scalework on the environment movement then. Dropped everything else. Handed it over to the nextgeneration -- and they were brilliant activists in India -- and moved into a focus on two things:biotechnology and patenting.

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I tracked the whole TRIPs negotiations through and have followed the biotech industry from the day itwanted to become a giant industry. I have tried to do my best to defend the freedom of people; createseed banks so that farmers have free seed; nature has freedom of diversity; and these monopolies arerestrained.

Since 1987 to now, which is 16 years, I have had a single pointed attention to prevent imperialism over life itself.

The influence of Gandhi

In Motion Magazine: When you are working with the various farmers’ organizations, various massorganizations, specifically in India do people consciously learn from what Gandhi had to say? (Seephoto of Gandhi's working room, the Harijan Ashram by the Sabarmati River, Ahmedabad, Gujarat,India.)

Vandana Shiva: Definitely. People very, very much learn from what Gandhi had said. When I broughtthe TRIPs issues for the first time to farmers’ organizations in India, in ’91 when the first draft of theWTO texts were ready, it was called the Dunkel draft text, I started to tell people what this would imply.

It took no time: by ’92, ’93, we had giant farmer rallies. And the title (of the movement) was the SeedSatyagraha -- the non-violent, non-cooperation with laws that create seed monopolies, inspired totallyby Gandhi walking to the Dandi Beach and picking the salt and saying, “You can’t monopolize thiswhich we need for life.”

On the non-cooperation side we were very inspired by Gandhi. But also on the constructive side, theother side of our work with farmers and farm groups is the creative side of saving seeds, doingagriculture without corporate dependence -- without chemicals, without their seed. All this is talkedabout in the language that Gandhi left us as a legacy.

We work with three key concepts. (One) Swadeshi -- which means the capacity to do your own thing --produce your own food, produce your own goods.

(Two) Swaraj -- to govern yourself. And we fight on three fronts -- water, food, and seed. JalSwaraj --JalSwaraj is water independence -- water freedom and water sovereignty. Anna Swaraj is foodfreedom, food sovereignty. And Bija Swaraj is seed freedom and seed sovereignty.

(In regard to these fronts) Swa means self -- that which rises from the self and is very, very much adeep notion of freedom. I believe that these concepts, which are deep, deep, deep in Indiancivilization, Gandhi resurrected them to fight for freedom. They are very important for today’s worldbecause so far what we’ve had is centralized state rule, giving way now to centralized corporatecontrol, and we need a third alternate. That third alternate is, in part, citizens being able to tell their states, “This is what your function is. This is what your obligations are,” and being able to have their states act on corporations to say, “This is something you cannot do.”

The third component is Satyagraha, non-cooperation, basically saying, “We will do our thing and anylaw that tries to say that us being free is illegal we will have to not cooperate with it. We will defend our freedoms to have access to water, access to seed, access to food, access to medicine.”

The death of economic democracy

In Motion Magazine: Last time we spoke, you were talking about how to make democracy moreviable and you were saying that it comes down to individual participation at an economic level. Howwould that function?

Vandana Shiva: Well, actually any real, true democracy is one in which people can determine theconditions of their living -- their food, their health, their jobs, their livelihoods. These are defined aseconomic issues. They used to be covered by democratic governance of the representative kind to theextent that before globalization, if you voted someone to power you could put demands on that

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representative to say, “We need a school in this community, and if you promise you get us a school weare with you.” By and large, it was possible for politicians to come back and deliver their promisebecause it was within the national sovereign space.

But globalization has meant the erosion of national sovereign space. For example, under theagreement on agriculture nobody can guarantee a price to a farmer. Governments cannot go tofarmers and say, “We will make sure you get a living price for your farm commodities.” They cannot goto a community and say, “We will defend your jobs and prevent them from being undermined andcompanies running off to some cheap overseas site.” They cannot offer guarantees on education, theycannot offer healthcare -- the typical things democracy was made of.

What we’ve seen is a split of democracy. It’s been emptied out of its economic content, been left with arepresentative shell of electoral theatrics -- literally.

Economic decisions have moved out of the hands of citizens and even of the hands of countries andmoved into organizations controlled by corporations like the WTO, and the World Bank, the IMF(International Monetary Fund), and the corporations themselves. What we have is economicdictatorship combined with representative democracy. But representative democracy under economicdictatorship is not able to counter that dictatorship and act as an economic democratic force. (Rather it) moves and leans increasingly into winning votes by polarizing society and dividing society alonglines of race, gender, religion, ethnicity. That is why over the ’90s, as globalization has deepened itsreach in our communities and countries, fundamentalism, communalism, religious hatred have seen arise. Because religious fundamentalism, I believe, is a child of the death of economic democracy.

In Motion Magazine: Because?

Vandana Shiva: Because people without economic rights are left insecure. There is joblessness.They can’t understand the processes leading to it. Ordinary farmers can’t really understand why pricesare going down.

If you can say, “The prices are going down because some other farmer in some other state is doingsomething to you;” or, “Your water is disappearing because some other state is doing something;” or,“Your jobs are going because the Moslems are breeding too much;” or in Europe, “The immigrants arecoming too fast; or in the United States, “The Mexicans are crossing the border;” it takes no timebefore the economic insecurity left as a result of globalization mutates into a ready-made ground for political interests to say, “Your job has been taken away by so and so.” “Your security has been robbedby so and so.” That’s the rhetoric that has filled the space as economic insecurity has grown.

The recovery of economic democracy

In Motion Magazine: How can a farmer, for example, economically become involved?

Vandana Shiva: I think the recovery of economic democracy is at the heart of recovery of democracyitself. And it doesn’t stop at that. It goes further into the creation of peace.

In a way, we really have three combined challenges, just now. We’ve got the threat of war andviolence. We’ve got the threat of economic insecurity, loss of jobs, loss of livelihoods, loss of incomesfor farmers. And thirdly, we’ve got this whole situation that our leaders are not representing our will --the collapse of democracy.

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Ordinary farmers have to get involved, can getinvolved, by engaging in a recovery of economicdemocracy as an everyday practice meaning, as wedo here, with seed Swaraj, with Anna Swaraj, savingseeds, growing your own seed, not going toMonsanto in every season and having your seed

collapse. I was just told, yesterday, that 41 billion rupees of losses have been faced by farmers in one state whowere sold Monsanto corn. We did a calculation thatfarmers of Bt cotton, the genetically-engineeredcotton, lost a billion rupees in one season.

If farmers are saving the seed, growing their crop,they are making reclamation of their economicspace. They are giving up chemicals and thepesticides that have contaminated all sources of water in this country, including the soft drinks now.They are not just saving money. They are savingtheir lives and they are saving public health.

By reaching out to consumers and setting upalternate marketing systems, as we do with the DilliHaat where we have our direct marketing stall, we inNavdanya , my organization, which is the main outletfor organic growers in this country, we bring theproduce directly from farmers, and it’s literally their marketing platform.

The flow of wealth from South to North

In Motion Magazine: The contradiction betweenknowledge, as a collective process, and patentsbeing the opposite of that … do you think that isrelated to the fact that wealth has been flowing fromone half of the world to the other?

Vandana Shiva: North-South inequality is veryclearly a result of imperialistic structures being put inplace that suck wealth out of the South, put it in theNorth. That’s exactly why the North looks rich andthe South looks poor. Not because human beings inthe South don’t know how to create wealth.Everyone knows how to make things, create things.Every one is creative. But when the results of your creativity, productivity are not yours to hold and theresults of your labor and creativity are transferredsomewhere else the one who takes it becomes richand the one who’s left without it is the one whostays poor.

During colonial rule, this extraction was donethrough ownership over land. The British came toIndia to a country, which was richer than England atthat time, and every record tells you that. They used

to exchange pepper with bags of gold. A sack of pepper used to be equal to a sack of gold. Thenthey came in as traders, established themselves as

Making chipatis in Old Delhi.

Making saris.

Sacks of peppers in Old Delhi.

Spices for sale in Old Delhi.

Busy market area in Old Delhi.

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rulers. First as the East India Company, which was thrown out in the 1857 Rebellion and War of Independence, then, as the crown which took over the role of the Company and continued to rule.

The regions that were the richest, such as Bengal, became the poorest. In 1942, two million peopledied of famine in the land where there was no shortage of wheat. Amartya Sen got a Nobel prize for saying something so basic, that people did not die because there was not enough food. They diedbecause they had been robbed of their entitlement. That was the basis of his Nobel prize. That is alsothe basis of noticing inequality.

We (Navdanya) have two books on the history of food and farming and we have tracked in them whatthe wealth of Indian peasants was being used for. Schools were being built in England. Mentalasylums were being run by the transfer of peasant wealth into England. That’s why the colonizingempire constantly grew. That’s what land ownership did at that time, which the British institutionalizedin this country. Before that we had land use. We had use-of-it right. Not private property in land.

The British turned the revenue collectors into landowners and created what they called the permanentsettlement and Zamidari system through which wealth would flow to them. The revenue collectorswere left as landowners. The original cultivators were left as the dispossessed peasants.

From ownership of land to ownership of biodiversity

What ownership over land, a very distorted ownership of a land, did to indigenous communities at thattime of colonialism, ownership over biodiversity, seeds, genes, medicine is doing in today’s world. Thebiodiversity is in what is called the poorer part of the world. We are biodiversity rich but every year,annually, $60 billion worth of wealth-transfer is taking place because the control over the products is inthe hands of the North. Monopolies of patents are in their hands. Monopolies on trade are in their hands.

Coffee -- trade jumped from $40 billion to $70 billion over the last few years so there was literally adoubling of trade. One would have imagined a doubling of trade would have left a doubling of incomesin the hands of those who grew the coffee. The incomes of the coffee producers dropped from $9billion to $5 billion and some of the most dispossessed people of the world today are the coffeegrowers, as also every other commodity grower.

These are amazing mechanisms -- the trade arrangements, trade treaties, intellectual property rightspatent treaties. They are doing, once again, in a deeper way what colonialism did and the projectionsare that 70% of American wealth will be through rent collection, through patents, because the U.Sgovernment is not designing America as a society where people are involved in making things. It hasdismantled manufacture. It has gone off to China. Pick up anything in a supermarket -- it is made inChina. But America would still like to collect returns and that is through intellectual property. So, whilepeople’s jobs are disappearing, the corporate wealth is increasing and then, of course, all the details of the rest of it carry on.

There are all these mechanisms of taking wealth from those who work, those who create, to those whocontrol through extremely coercive instruments of power.

War is globalization by other means

In Motion Magazine: Which is now further enforced by invading other people’s countries?

Vandana Shiva: I have said that war is another name for globalization because if you really look atIraq it wasn’t liberated. American soldiers didn’t come out winning. More of them have died since theso-called war got over. But one thing did happen and that was that corporate America got to enter Iraqand use American tax money in the process. Bechtel got a big contract. Halliburton got a big contract.That is where the whole so-called reconstruction went. This is exactly what globalization does – (for

example) put the water of the world in the hands of Bechtel, Suez (Lyonnaise des Eaux), Vivendi(Environment). Globalization is war by other means and war is globalization by other means.

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In Motion Magazine: It depends on the policy of the leaders of the U.S. at the time?

Vandana Shiva: At this point it so happens America is the empire. But one thing we learned with theBritish Empire is that empires rise and empires sink.

Published in In Motion Magazine March 28, 2004

Interview with Vandana Shiva (2002)

Discussing “Water Wars”

Resurrection of commons, community rights,and direct and basic democracy

Interview by Nic Paget-ClarkeJohannesburg, South Africa

• Introduction

• Anti-poverty movements• Water lessons• Dams• Industrial agriculture and the World Bank• Women organizers and activists• The market paradigm and the ecological

paradigm • Water rights and indigenous communities• Cowboy economics• The Narmada Project / the Baliraja Memorial Dam• Public-private water projects• Corporate states and privatization• Earth democracy• Crop prices fixed by farming communities• The World Summit

Introduction

Dr. Vandana Shiva is founder of both the Research Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology,an independent public industry research group, and Navdanya a grassroots conservation movement inIndia. This interview was conducted by Nic Paget-Clarke on September 1, 2002 at St Stithians, site of the People's Earth Summit parallel event to the United Nations World Summit on SustainableDevelopment in Johannesburg. Her most recent book at the time of the interview is " Water Wars:Privatization, Pollution, and Profit".

• To see our full series of interviews and articles from the United Nations World Summit onSustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, August 26 - September 4, 2002 -click here .

• Also see: Interview with Vandana Shiva (2003)The Role of Patents in the Rise of GlobalizationNew Delhi, India

Anti-poverty movements

Vandana Shiva in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photoby Nic Paget-Clarke.

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In Motion Magazine: One of the things I noticed in your book“Water Wars” is how much mass movements relate to what you talkabout. How do mass movements that you’ve been involved in or learned about inform your analysis?

Vandana Shiva: The book “Water Wars” is a synthesis of thirtyyears of my engagement with communities defending their eco-systems and resources. These movements are called theenvironment movements but they are also the anti-povertymovements because in the South the forces that make people poor are the same forces that destroy their resources. In fact, it’sbecause their resources are either destroyed or taken away peopleare left poor. That is why at this World Summit the environment isbeing made to look like the opposite of poverty. It’s a perspectivefrom the rich and the powerful who would like to take the resourcesof the poor away and make it look like a solution to poverty throughglobalization, financial inputs, etc.

The first movement that taught me about water was the Chipkomovement in the early ’70s. Women came out in the Himalayanvillages hugging trees and said, “We won’t let them be logged. You’llhave to kill us before you kill our trees.” And they were laughed atand the government said, “Logging is a big revenue in theseregions,” and the women said, “Forests do not bare timber and raisethem as revenue.” Their real yield is water and soil conservation andfresh air.

People used to laugh in the early ’70s. But, by the early ’80s, our forest policy had changed to recognize that catchment forests’ firstfunction was water conservation and not revenues through killingthe trees and logging the trees.

Water lessons

We got a logging ban in the High Himalayas because of this direct action over a whole decade.Ordinary village women, no education, not one word can they write, but they taught the world one of the biggest water lessons. Taught me my big water lesson that as you log the forest you get floods anddroughts. Springs dry up. That’s where the water crisis comes from.

The next lesson I learned was when I was commissioned by the Ministry of Environment to look at theimpact of mining in Doon Valley. From a typical sort of bureaucratic-agency scientific perspective theimpact of mining was the superficial impact that you can literally see with your eyes. But when I startedto visit the villages for surveys, the women said, “It’s about water.”

And that’s what took me down the track of recognizing that the limestone was the aquifer, it was thewater body that conserved water that would have been conserved, would have been stored by a twohundred thousand crore, which is twenty thousand million Rupees, investment in a water storagesystem.

That’s what nature and the limestone belt and the mineral deposits were doing for us. It is thewomen’s lessons in hydro-geology rather than the scientists’ lessons in geology that taught me aboutmountains and mining and how mining too is linked to water.

Dams

Then, in the same period, the early ’80s, one by one our rivers started to get dammed –Survernarekha, Narmada – and I started to go to every local community that was protesting againstdisplacement to help them put together their assessments, including the early assessments and

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impact of the Narmada dam, and training the younger generation of activists who then really built amassive movement called the Narmada Bichao Andolan.

I learned there, during that period, that dams are built on the assumption that you augment water. Allyou do is re-direct water. You do not increase the flow of water in a river you merely store it and divertit to places where you can create commercial agriculture, feed industry, feed big towns. And meantimethe areas that were getting water through the river, the wells that were being re-charged by that river,the fisheries that were being supported by that river,are killed. That cost is never taken into account.

Industrial agriculture and the World Bank

It was during that time that the violence in Punjabtaught me that industrial agriculture was a very bigwater destroyer. The economics of industrial agriculturehad always been posed as higher productivity. That thereason you need these seeds, these crops, thesechemicals is to produce more food. But more food with

respect to what was never questioned. Yes, withrespect to labor by getting rid of labor from the land.But not with respect to land because you are notproducing more nutrition per acre. You were destroyingmany crops to create monocultures. Densely mixedfarming produces far more per acre.

But the most important thing was water was never considered. Water was planned for. Inputs wereplanned for. But in the productivity assessment the inefficiency of water use was never considered.And my calculations showed me during that period that many of the wars and civil conflicts of that timewere around rivers because different regions were fighting over the same rivers to feed these thirstycrops. Five times more water is used in industrial agriculture for growing the same amount of wheatand rice than indigenous agriculture. With respect to scarce water you actually had an inefficientrevolution. You had a regressive revolution.

In the ’90s, the early ’90s, women in the coastal areas started to destroy shrimp farms. They called meto help them when they were arrested. I did the studies to file a Supreme Court case in their defenseand those studies showed me that for something simple like shrimp landing on a plate in NorthAmerica … . No one realizes that for one acre of a shrimp farm two hundred acres of eco-systems arebeing destroyed. The waters are being made saline. Sea waters are being polluted.

There are high costs for the Green Revolution -- the Green Revolution is the word for the industrialagriculture in India. And it is not just the dams. Where there were no rivers and there were no dams,the World Bank gave money to pump water from the ground so that today there are places wherewater is being pumped from a thousand to five thousand feet.

I remember two regions in particular where I did surveys for governments when the water started toget scarce and they were wondering, “Why is there no water?” I said, “Show me your plans. Show meyour policies.” I started reading and I found that at a certain point the World Bank had said, “Stopgrowing millet. Start growing sugar cane. Stop growing subsistence crops. Start growing cash crops.”And that shift to very, very water-demanding crops, all World Bank requirements, lead to groundwater being mined and creating water famine.

My dream is one day to make a bill for genocide for the World Bank because more than any other agency it has destroyed the hydrological systems of this planet in its arrogance and blindness.

In Motion Magazine: Why would they suggest these changes?

Vandana Shiva: Because the World Bank only looks at returns on investment. It drags countries intoborrowing. It forces loans on them and then wants to maximize return on loans. Well, loans don’t come

Site of the People's Earth Summit parallel event to theUnited Nations World Summit on SustainableDevelopment in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo byNic Paget-Clarke.

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out of stable eco-systems. Loans come out of cash crops. Loan payments, interest payments. Theyare squeezing out loan re-payments by killing water systems and killing people who depend on them.

Women organizers and activists

In Motion Magazine: How is it that so many of these organizers and activists are women?

Vandana Shiva: Well, for water it is very clear. In the Third World women carry the water to get ithome. They are the ones first to know water is polluted. They are the first to know the well has run dry.They are the first to know water is saline. They are the canary of the eco-crisis.

The market paradigm and the ecological paradigm

In Motion Magazine: What’s the difference between the market paradigm of water security and theecological paradigm?

Vandana Shiva: The ecological paradigm focuses on the water cycle and recognizes that by its very

nature water is a renewable resource. If we respect that cycle and do not interfere in it it’s going togive us abundance forever. But we have to function within it. We have to be bounded by it. Within thatbinding we have limitless water forever.

The market paradigm does not look at the water cycle. It begins with cash. It begins with finance andthen it’s, “How can I invest if I have money to extract water as a raw material and put it into somethingelse that will generate more cash?” When that paradigm starts to create water crises that sameparadigm comes up with a second solution which it is now offering here at the WSSD (World Summiton Sustainable Development). It’s a big offer. “We will now privatize water and commodify it.” Water isbeing exploited because it is being treated as valueless, “Therefore, we will put a price on it,” but valueand price are two very different things.

When you function in an ecological paradigm you value water but you don’t price it. Because it is infact priceless. In a market paradigm you price water but you don’t value it.

Water rights and indigenous communities

In Motion Magazine: Why do collective water rights and management work well in indigenouscommunities?

Vandana Shiva: Well, for example with things like water, water is interconnected. Surface water isconnected intimately with the ground water. You can’t separate the two. Your river flows are connectedwith wells. Your mountain watershed is connected with the waters it receives. And not seeing thatinterconnectedness of water is what has lead to the privatization.

Communities have always recognized two things. First, that which we need for survival should never belong to an individual. It should be the common wealth. Second, it should be managed as thecommon wealth. Therefore, community structures of responsibilities have to be put in place.

The rights are derived from collective responsibility. They are secondary. Primary is the collectiveresponsibility.

If you do not build that storage tank to harvest your monsoons in low-rainfall areas you are never going to have water. And you can’t build a tank alone. You have to join collectively. Once you harvest ittogether, then the only way to make that tank serve you is to have a common regime of what will begrown.

If one individual grows sugar cane and drains that tank dry that is the typical tragedy of the commonsthat Garret Hardin ( The Tragedy of the Commons by Garret Hardin – 1968 Science ) talks about. Butthat is not typical of the commons. That is typical of the destruction of the commons

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The tragedy is that Western individualized, atomized societies and their academics have imposed onthe rest of the world this very false idea that commons by their very nature must degrade. But it isprivatized property by its very nature that must ecologically degrade because it is not being managedfor ecological maintenance. It is being managed for highest returns.

Common property is what has allowed tanks built in India four thousand years ago to still supply water to people.

In Motion Magazine: How big are these tanks?

Vandana Shiva: The tanks are small but in huge chains. I have walked down chains of a thousandtanks in a row. Literally connected with overflow from one to the other, feeding the other. Miraculousengineering that cannot be reproduced by any engineer today.

In Motion Magazine: What dimensions?

Vandana Shiva: Some will be a hundred square feet. Some might be a square mile, depending on thetopography. But in very dry areas, 600, 700 millimeters … they have

been the lifeline in dry regions.

In Motion Magazine: And they are constructed by humans?

Vandana Shiva: They are constructed by humans. And we had, untilthe British tried to destroy it, systems of community management.

If today we have an ecology movement to fight privatizations it isbecause we can tap back into our historical memory, to say, “This ishow this it could be done.”

Cowboy economics

In Motion Magazine: What is cowboy economics?

Vandana Shiva: Cowboy economics is the mentality of, if you getsomewhere first you have absolute rights to rape, plunder, pollute.You have no responsibility for neighbors, for those who came beforeyou, the inhabitants who were there, or those who have to come after you.

It is cowboy economics that is being brought back to the front withprivatization. Cowboy economics was the basis of the water rights inthe western United States. Whoever gets there first has absolute

rights.

Eastern United States had a much more decent form of water distribution -- use-rights based on notdisrupting the river flow so that others’ rights are not interfered in. It took others into account. Cowboyeconomics takes no one else into account – just the cowboy. The cowboy and his gun.

The Narmada Project / the Baliraja Memorial Dam

In Motion Magazine: The Narmada project was financed by the World Bank. Can you explain to methe difference between that and the Baliraja Memorial Dam – conceptually?

Vandana Shiva: The Narmada dam is a giant dam – very, very big. The Naramada Project is 30 big

dams, and about 300 small ones. The Narmada Sagar is the big, first one they built. It is being built for the state and has the highest commercial agriculture and the highest industrialization. All the polluting

A sculpture set up by the internationalNGO Friends of the Earth at the UnitedNations World Summit on SustainableDevelopment (August 26 - September 4, 2002) in Johannesburg, South Africa.Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.

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chemical industry of the world has relocated to that state. It’s the thirst of the polluting petrochemicaland chemical industry for which this dam is being built.

Investors, basically, are looking for returns on investment. What that land did in terms of beingancestral homelands for indigenous people, what that water did, in terms of being a flow down a major,one of India’s most sacred, rivers is not even being considered. It’s based on large amounts of foreigninvestment, whether it was earlier the World Bank, or later bonds raised internationally.

The Baliraja Dam is a small dam in another drought-prone area built with people’s mobilization. Their hands, their labor. It is meant to serve the sustenance needs of people. That is what it is designed for.

In Motion Magazine: There is such a thing as a good dam?

Vandana Shiva: The word dam is applied for any storage. The problem is the mega-dams, the giantdams. When you try and store water by human work there’s a limit of scale. Baliraja is not a giant dam.It’s a small storage system.

The giant dams which are built with huge earth-moving equipment … that’s where the problem starts

because that really disrupts the water cycle. The lesson for the world was the Tennessee Valleycorporation and the Hoover Dam -- these displays of huge power.

Harvesting water with smaller dams has not been a problem. For example, there’s a very famous damsystem in India built during the Vijayanagar Empire (1336-1565) and that dam has never causedwaterlogging. Waterlogging is when too much water gets locked into the ground and the water tablerises and your plants can’t grow because now they are getting suffocated.

But in that same place, the World Bank financed a giant dam for the same amount of irrigation in thesame region. Within a year, there was waterlogging. Within a year, thirteen people were shot dead for protesting against the land being destroyed through waterlogging.

And this was due to the World Bank’s mechanisms. The World Bank leavesinstructions in our countries. We can’t rule ourselves, according to our terms.The Bank tells us, now you will have a department like this, collection of rentslike this, water taxes like this. So when the water tax people went to collecttaxes from these farmers, the people said, “Not only have we received nobenefits, you’ve destroyed our land. We won’t pay you.” And there was theworst form of police action and brutality that created an amazing neworganizing among farmers. They realized suddenly they were into a differentperiod with industrial agriculture and these large dams.

Large dams are twins of polluting industry and industrial agriculture.

Public-private water projects

In Motion Magazine: What are the negative consequences of public-privatewater projects?

Vandana Shiva: There are three negative consequences of public-privatewater projects. The first is it inevitably leads to the privatization of the state. Asis being done here at the World Summit, voluntary agreements are no morepart of policy. They are no more debated through transparency of parliamentarydebates. Executives, individual bureaucrats in power, usually with a kickback or a bribe, sign off something that does not belong to the state. Water. It is not the property of the state.Water belongs to the people and the earth. It is a community resource, common property. Commonproperty cannot become state property. But private-public partnerships assume water to be a state

property, to then be privatized to a private corporation. But the very action privatizes the state andstops it from being a public entity. That to me is the single most crucial damage that it does.

Water Wars:Privatization, Pollution,

and Profit -- by VandanaShiva

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Earth democracy

In Motion Magazine: Do you have ideas on that deep change?

Vandana Shiva: I’ve called it earth democracy. And by that I mean three critical things.

First, recognizing once again that we are just one inhabitant, one species among many on the earth.We have to be responsible to the rest of the earth’s inhabitants. We have to relocate ourselves not inthe global marketplace but in the earth family, in the earth community.

Secondly, to conserve the resources of the earth, and this can only be done through custodianship,guardianship, love and care in concreteness and locally, it is necessary that power-responsibility rightsgo where water can be conserved, seeds can be conserved, biodiversity can be conserved, educationcan be guaranteed, livelihoods can be generated, people can have meaning. The highest powersneed to go right to the bottom.

We’ve had radical shifts in our Indian constitution recognizing this. If you really want to conserveresources you’ve got to put the powers to make decisions about natural resources on the ground. Of course, now that is conflicting with globalization and we have massacres over that conflict right now.But our constitution recognizes that the highest powers must be at the bottom. The right powers mustgo upwards.

So, resurrection of commons, community rights,and direct and basic democracy.

Crop prices fixed by farmingcommunities

The third critical change is a shift in both thepolitics and economic paradigms. Politically, aparadigm based on democracy is bottomupwards. It does not begin with elections, it beginswith decisions on everyday matters. What priceshould crops sell at needs to be fixed by localfarming communities not by Chicago commodityexchange control. Once you have the right prices,everything else will fall into place. Justice will fallinto place. Sustainability will fall into place.

And that will also generate a living economy. Just now, the economy has become an economy of death. Just killing countries. Killing farmers. Killing fisherman. Killing children. Killing women. It isefficient at killing and then saying that is not my responsibility. “You can’t prove it’s because of what I

did.”For example, U.S. farmers have lost a crop. Indian farmers have lost a crop. Southern African farmershave lost a crop. But the oil industry is still not taking responsibility. President Bush is not takingresponsibility. Instead they are taking the damage caused by one irresponsible industry, the oilindustry, through climate change, and saying, “Now, we will use this to blackmail the Africans to buyGM (genetically modified) foods and create a market opportunity for another industry – Monsanto.”

To this, a local democracy, a living democracy would basically say, “No. Our economy, we will shape.We know what we can do and we will tell you what we can’t do. Then we’ll import from you.” It turnsglobalization on its head. You know, we’ve handed over too much power and at this point if we don’ttake back power there will be no humans alive on this planet.

It used to be said, “Bread or freedom”. It used to be either / or. It’s very clearly bread and freedom. If we don’t make ourselves really free we won’t have bread.

A large protest puppet peers over the Monsanto headquarterssign, St Louis, Missouri. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.

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The World Summit

In Motion Magazine: This seems like a critical conference.

Vandana Shiva: Yes.

In Motion Magazine: What is your understanding of what has been going on?

Vandana Shiva: At the formal conference, two opposite things have been happening. On the one handthey’ve got some negotiators busy with working out timelines for real commitments but implementationabout how to get to those objectives is all about WTO (World Trade Organization) globalization.

I just did a count in the negotiations last night. Doha and WTO are mentioned 46 times in theimplementation decision. Rio is mentioned once in one square bracket, which means it coulddisappear. So it is a hijack of the Rio agenda and replacement by the globalization and trade agenda,which means by the corporate agenda.

The countervailing force that international environmental treaties and laws and policies were able tocreate – the attempt here is to totally dismantle it so that in international law we have nothing but thepower of cooperation. That is what is being sought to be done.

Last September 11, there was the hijack of planes which were then rammed into the World TradeCenter towers. What we are seeing is a hijack of world governance and the right to ram into all eco-systems and all people’s lives on this earth. We have to find ways other than summit decisions to findways to protect our lives.

In Motion Magazine: As yet undetermined?

Vandana Shiva: No, I think they are being shaped. I think small invisible gatherings like this People’sEarth Summit, the Children’s Earth Summit, there are places where people are recognizing that wehave to withdraw consent and we have to withdraw engagement, and build alternative systems.

Published in In Motion Magazine, March 6, 2003

"GANGA" is not for sale

Suez - Degrémont andthe Privatization of Ganga Water

by Vandana Shiva, Afsar H. Jafri, Kunwar JaleesNew Delhi, India

• State appropriates people’s resources for corporate profits

• Suez-Degrémont Water Plant at Sonia Vihar • Who is paying for corporate profits?• Water Requirement and Sources of Water in

Delhi • Corruption in Delhi Jal Board's Suez

Degrémont Plant • Destruction of Tehri for Water Supply to Delhi • Tehri Dam built in a seismic fault zone. • Impact of Water Diversion on Agriculture and Food Security• Water Requirements for Different Crops

Vandana Shiva in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photoby Nic Paget-Clarke.

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• Upper Ganga Canal: the lifeline of WesternU.P.

• Water Needs for Different Crops in theregion .

• Water Requirement for Rice• What does diverting water to Delhi mean for

National Food Security? • Alternatives to privatization of Ganga and

meeting Delhi's water needs • Water Liberation• Water Liberation Declaration

• Interview w/ Dr. Vandana Shiva (2002) -Discussing “Water Wars”Resurrection of commons, community rights,and direct and basic democracyJohannesburg, South Africa

On August 9th, 2002, on the eve of the Quit IndiaDay, more than 5000 farmers of Muradnagar andadjoining areas of western Uttar Pradesh gathered ina Rally at Village Bhanera to protest the laying of agiant 3.25 meters-diameter pipeline to supply thewater from the River Ganga to the Sonia Vihar Water Plant for Delhi. The project, which has beencontracted to Suez-Ondeo Degrémont of France bythe Government of Delhi, will deprive the richestfarmlands of India of irrigation water.

The Sonia Vihar water treatment plant, which wasinaugurated on June 21, 2002 by the Chief Minister of Delhi, is designed for a capacity of 635 millionliters a day on a 10 year BOT (build-operate-transfer)basis, at a cost of 1.8 billion rupees (approx. 50million dollars). The contract between Delhi Jal Board(the Water Supply Department of the DelhiGovernment) and the French company OndeoDegrémont (subsidiary of Suez Lyonnaise des EauxWater Division - the water giant of the world), issupposed to provide safe drinking water for the city.

The water for the Suez-Degrémont plant in Delhi will

come from Tehri Dam through the Upper GangaCanal up to Muradnagar in Western Uttar Pradesh(UP) and then through the giant pipeline to Delhi. TheUpper Ganga Canal, which starts at Haridwar andcarries the holy water of Ganga up to Kanpur viaMuradnagar, is the main source of irrigation for thisregion.

The 9th August Rally at Bhanera village was the culmination of the 300 kilometer-long mobilizationdrive along the Ganga by the farmers of Garhwal and inhabitants of the devastated city of Tehri toliberate the river from being privatized. The rally was launched from Haridwar - one of the oldest andholiest cities of India built on the banks of Ganga - where hundreds of farmers, together with priests,citizens and worshippers of Ganga announced that "Ganga is not for Sale", and vowed to defend thefreedom of this holy river. Thousands of farmers and others in villages along the route joined the rallyto declare that they would never allow Suez to take over Ganga waters.

The Descent of the Ganges

This legend relates to the descent of theRiver Ganga from the heavens into theearth.

The ruler of Ayodhya, King Sagar, anancestor of Rama, of the solar raceperformed the Aswamedha Sacrifice 99

times, where each time, the horse that hesent around the earth, returned to hiskingdom unchallenged. Indra the King of Gods, in an act of jealousy, kidnapped andhid the horse in the hermitage of Kapila Muni- when the 100th sacrifice was beingperformed.

The sixty thousand sons of Kapila came tothe hermitage of Kapila in their search for the horse, and mistaking Kapila Muni to bethe abductor, attacked him. An enragedKapila Muni burnt the 60000 princes toashes.

One of the grandchildren of King Sagar,hearing about the plight of his father anduncles, came in search of Kapila Muni andasked him for a solution to the problem, andwas advised that the waters of the River Ganga would miraculously bring back thedead princes to life.

His descendant Bhagirathi, continued hisefforts to bring the Ganga to the earth fromthe heavens to purify the ashes of hisancestors and bring them back to life.Bhagirata's prayers were rewarded and theGanges rushed to the earth; however, themight of the river was too much for the earthto withstand. Fearing a catastrophe,Bhagirata prayed to Shiva, who held out hismatted hair to catch the river as shedescended, and thus softened her journey tothe earth.

Bhagiratha patiently led the river down to thesea from the Himalayas; however, beingunable to locate the exact spot where theashes lay, he requested Ganga to follow her own course. The Ganga, therefore in theregion of Bengal, divided herself into ahundred mouths and formed the Gangesdelta.

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The rallyists joined more than 300 people fromacross the country, representing over a hundredgrassroots groups intellectuals, writers and lawyers,at the 3-day Convention on Earth Democracy -People's Rights to Natural Resources, organized byNavdanya from 10th to 12th August 2002, at Indian

Social Institute, New Delhi. The Convention sought toprovide evidence of the state's violent appropriationof people's land, water and biodiversity, and evolvecommon action plans and strategies to defendcollective community rights to resources.

"There is only one struggle left - the struggle for theright to life", said Magasaysay Award willing writer Mahaswheta Devi. Eminent author Arundhati Royand eminent scientist Vandana Shiva stressed theurgent need to take collective united action to defendpeople's rights to land, water and biodiversity.

State appropriates people’s resources for corporate profits

The farmers of western Uttar Pradesh, Tehri andMuradnagar are not the only ones whose localcommon resource are being appropriated by thestate, to be handed over to corporations for makingcorporate profits. All over India, such appropriation of people's natural resources is taking place, oftenaccompanied by state violence, as a result of unethical practices of globalization being pushedthrough the dictates of the World Bank (WB),International Monetary fund (IMF) and World TradeOrganization (WTO). Globalization for the largemajority of the poor in India has meant losing whatthey have in the form of water, land and biodiversitythrough transferring the common property of thevillagers and tribals to global corporations. This isbeing achieved through water privatization, patentregimes and creating new property rights tobiodiversity and new genetic materials, liberalizationand corporatization of agriculture and liberalization of investment which is alienating land from the poorestin total violation of the Indian Constitution whichguarantee's human rights and natural rights.

Reckless privatization and appropriation of water isrobbing people of water, the very basis of life. TheNew Water Policy is centered around water privatization. In Kerala 300 adivasis of the Coca-ColaVirudha Samara Samithy (Anti Coca-Cola StruggleCommittee) were arrested at a mass rally atPlachimada on 4 August 2002. The people wereprotesting Coca Cola's takeover of common water resources of the village for its water bottling plant.The company has been drawing 15 lakh liters of water per day, which has dried the aquifers within 2years and has polluted the water.

The Haridwar Declaration

Today, the 8th of August 2002, on the eve of the 60th Anniversary of the “Quit IndiaMovement”, we all have gathered here topledge that:

We will never let the river Ganga be sold toany multinational corporations. Ganga isrevered as a mother (Ganga Maa) andprayed to and on its banks importantceremonies starting from birth till death areperformed (according to Hindu religiouspractices). We will never allow our mother or its water to be sold to Suez-Degrémont or any other corporations.

The sacred waters of the Ganga cannot be

the property of any one individual or acompany. Our mother Ganga is not for Sale.

We boycott the commodification andprivatization of the Ganga and any other water resources.

We pledge to conserve and judiciously useour regional water resources to save our environment and ecology, so that we wouldgift our coming generation a clean andbeautiful environment as well as safeguardtheir right to water resources.

We pledge and declare that the localcommunity will have the right over the localwater resources. It is the duty of the localcommunity to conserve and sensibly utilizetheir resources. Anyone from outside thecommunity whether an individual, anorganization or a corporation have to takethe permission of the Gram Sabha for utilizing these resources.

The river Ganga was brought upon the faceof earth by Bhagirath through his yagna

(prayers) to sustain the existence of life onEarth. The Ganga is now intrinsic to our cultural and a part of our heritage and our civilization. Our life and progress over themillennia has been dependent upon thesacred waters of Ganga. We will fight anymultinational company trying to take awayour right to life by privatizing Ganga waters.

The "Water Liberation Movement" willcontinue till we liberate the sacred waters of Ganga from the clutches of corporations, likeSuez-Ondeo Degrémont.

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The water scarcity has hit the local Adivasi and Dalit community the hardest. The adivasis areasserting their primary rights to water and demanding that the Coca-Cola restore the environment, paycompensation, dose down the factory and quit the country. In another instance, Coca-Cola is alsosucking about 200 cusecs of water every day through four - 20 inches pipes in Khichri Village near NTPC in Ghaziabad for its Kinley brand. Due to this the water level in this region has gone down by 10feet.

It is also known that Coca-Cola factories at Nemam (Madurai), Athur (Chennai), in Thane District,Khammam in Andhra etc have created similar problems. The problem is not isolated nor exclusively toCoca-Cola alone, but is repeated wherever water resources have been handed over to corporationswho are overexploiting it.

Suez-Degrémont Water Plant at Sonia Vihar

Ondeo Degrémont, a subsidiary of Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux Water Division, has been awarded a 2billion rupees contract (almost 50 million dollars) for the design, building and operation (for 10 years)of a 635 million liters/day Drinking Water Production Plant at Sonia Vihar in New Delhi to cater 3million inhabitants of the capital.

Won through the collaboration of all the Group companies, within the context of an international call for tenders, this 2 billion rupees contract is the first contract of this size in India, after Bombay, for Degrémont.

World leader in water treatment engineering, OndeoDegrémont has a turnover of 810 million euros in1999 and it is present in more than 70 countries with3,600 employees while Suez operates in 130counties in all five continents. Out of the 30 water contracts awarded by the big cities as on 1990'swater privatization drive, 20 went to the Suez(http://www.ondeodegremont.com ).

Degrémont, on its web site, proudly state "today, thesupport of Suez enables Degrémont to use its know-how throughout the world: pumping water, treatingand transporting it, collecting, treating and controllingthe pollution of waste water are some of thecompany's oldest skills. This support results in acombination of technical experience and reassuringfinancial basis, which can be made available to fundconstruction and operating contracts".

Construction of the giant 3.2 meter-diameter pipe on

a stretch of 30 kilometers from Muradnagar to SoniaVihar is going on and till date, about 10 kilometers of the pipeline has been laid down.The disastrousimpact of this project on the farmers of Western UP isevident from the fact that this area is totallydependent upon the canal for irrigation. Even beforebeing operationalised to divert 630 million literswater/day from irrigation, farmers are already feelingthe impact of corporate greed for profits - the Upper Ganga Canal is being lined to prevent seepage intothe neighboring fields (an important source of moisture for farming) and recharge of ground water, andfarmers are being prevented from digging wells even as they are reeling under severe drought.

The lining of the canal to prevent recharging of groundwater has terrified the farmers of the wholeregion of western UP. At a meeting organized by Navdanya on 21st July at Chaprauli, the land of Choudhury Charan Singh, ex-Prime Minister, farmers stated, "we will not allow the Canal to be lined

Uneven Distribution of Drinking Water inDelhi

The per capita daily water supply should beat least 150 liters as per the standards setby the Central Public Health and

Environment Engineering Organization of the Union Urban Development Ministry,Govt. of India.

Despite DJB claim of equal allocation of water, supply of drinking water in the Capitalis characterized by vastly unequaldistribution, with posh colonies and VIPareas getting several times more than thesupply given to rural areas and resettlementcolonies.

A recent report reveals that people in

Mehrauli and Narela receive only 29 and 31liters per person per day respectively, thosein the Cantonment Board get 509 liters andLutyen's Delhi 462 liters, The Karol Baghzone receives 337 liters per person per day.It is also estimated that unless the depletedwater table in Mehrauli is maintained or replenished, Mehrauli will experiencedesertification within the next ten years.

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and supply water to Delhi. Instead the government should link the Upper Ganga Canal to the YamunaCanal passing through this area to tackle the severe drought."

Who is paying for corporate profits?

Privatization of water has been justified on the ground that full cost must be paid when water giantsget water markets whereas with water privatization they demand a full price from the people. However,as the case of the Delhi Water plant shows, the corporations get the water for free without paying for full social and environmental cost to those rural communities from whom the water is taken.

The country has got into huge debt for the loanstaken from World Bank for the Ganga Canal. At thesame time the giant 3.25 meter-diameter pipe isbeing built through public finances. In effect thepublic pays the price while transnational companiesmake the profit.

Private Public Partnership is the buzzword in the

water privatization. They are also the dominanttheme on the up coming World Summit for Sustainable Development at Johannesburg, 10 yearsafter the Rio Summit. Delhi water privatization is aclear example that shows that private publicpartnership in water amount to public cost and privategain. Delhi Jal Board's proposal to meet the needs of the entire population of Delhi includes activitiescentered around the public-private partnershipsmodels as propagated by the World Bank, with anemphasis on commercialization and cost recovery.

The enforced process of decentralization is turningdeveloping countries economies into lucrativemarkets for construction and design firms who areseeing business boom from funds earmarked for development projects. With World Bank's and other international financial institutions' funds earmarkedfor water infrastructure investment, in the form of BOT (Build, Operate, Transfer), BOOT and BDO(Build, Design, Operate), India is a buoyant market.The World Bank even states that it can help increasethe international revenues of companies whose activities include wastewater management, via the ‘UNDevelopment Business’ bank.

Delhi Jal Board (DJB) claims that they have no intention of raising the water rates for the time being.However, as has been seen in the case of Enron with electricity, the Orissa Lift Irrigation Corporationin Orissa, and other cases, privatization leads very quickly to a steep rise in the price of water andelectricity. With regards to concession to the poor, DJB said there would be no such proposal. DJB willcontinue to deliver the water to Delhites and maintain infrastructure i.e. burst water pipes, billing etc.Thus the people of Delhi will not just be paying Suez and the Jal Board for the water directly, they willbe paying through taxes to maintain the infrastructure, thus freeing the corporation of any expenseswhich might detract from their profits.

Water Requirement and Sources of Water in Delhi

Delhi is experiencing increasing pressure to meet demand for its water resources. Growingurbanization, improvements in living standards, exploding population are just some of the contributingfactors. The population of Delhi is expected to cross 15 million by the end of 2002. The city, at themoment, requires 3,324 million liters of water a day (MLD) while what it gets stands closer to 2,034

Sale of River Bhavani

The Ganga is not the only river whose water is being privatized to satisfy corporate greed.River Bhavani - an important tributary of Cauvery has been sold by the Tamil Nadugovernment to Kinley - the brand name

under which Coca-Cola sells bottled drinkingwater. This sale has been effected by thegovernment even while the state is reelingunder severe drought, ground water levelshave reached depths of over 1,000 ft., andwater riots and water-related murders havebecome an everyday occurrence.

The sale of the river, which was a major source of water for the people of the region,has been routed through PoonamBeverages, a new firm belonging to theCoimbatore-based Annapooma Hotels, who

will draw 1,00,000 day/day to supply it toKinley, Coca Cola's bottled water. Theannual fees that Poonam Beverage has paidthe government is a mere Rs. 5,00,000, for which hundreds of thousands of people arebeing denied a vital resource, that is their natural right, and without which they cannotsurvive.

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MLD. Average water consumption in Delhi is estimated at being 240 liters per capita per day (lpcd),the highest in the country. The large-scale extraction of groundwater is a result of this widening gapbetween the demand and supply of water. And still worse, serious doubts are also being raised aboutboth the quality and quantity of groundwater.

Delhi receives its water from 3 sources:

• A. Surface Water . 86% of Delhi's total water supply comes from surface water, namely theYamuna River, which equals 4.6% of this resource through interstate agreements.

• B. Sub-surface -- Ranney wells and tubewells. This source, which is met through rainfall(approx. 611.8 mm in 27 rainy days), and unutilized rainwater runoff, is 193 MCM (millioncubic meters).

• C. Graduated Resources. It is estimated at 292 MCM, however current withdrawal equals 312MCM. Salinity and over exploitation has contributed to depletion and drastically effected theavailability of water in different parts of thecity(http://teriin.org/news/terivsn/issue35/water.htm ) However, according to a report

released by the Central Ground Water Board (GCWB), Delhi's ground-water level has gone down by about eightmeters in the last 20 years at the rate of about a foot a year.

Apart from groundwater, Delhi gets its water fromthe Ganga Canal, the western Yamuna canal, theBhakra canal and the Yamuna.

Delhi’s water and wastewater management iscontrolled by the Delhi Jal Board (DJB), which hassigned the contract with Suez Degremont. Withthe demand-supply gap projections for water setto increase in the next ten years, DJB haveidentified new raw water sources including Tehri,Renukal, Kishau Lahawar dams. Plans alsocenter on the construction of new and existingsewage treatment plants (STPs) which will enable an increase in treatment capacity. Rainwater harvesting is another option that DJB is considering.

Corruption in Delhi Jal Board's Suez Degrémont Plant

The process for allotment of contract for the Sonia Vihar Plant to Ondeo Degrémont has not beenwithout controversy and objections by senior DJB members. Of the 3 companies that bid for the

tender, Ondeo Degrémont was chosen despite being higher in cost than the two other contenders, andallegedly an inferior technology. It was also known that Ondeo Degrémont had already experiencedproblems with previous contracts in Surat and Delhi (Ohkla) where they were 2 years behind in theproject.

Jagdish Anand, a member of the Opposition party, has accused senior politicians of trying to bribe himinto silence. “Earlier also I had exposed the irregularities committed by the Jal Board and its officialswith regard to the allotment of Sonia Vihar 140 MGD (million gallons a day) plant ... (they) approachedme on more than one occasion. They independently requested me not to expose the working of theDelhi Jal Board.... They also tried to tempt me with suitable reward and my adjustment in lieu of mynot exposing the irregularities being committed by Delhi Jal Board....” ( The Hindu , New Delhi, Nov.28).

Yet another accusation was against the politicians and senior DJB members of pushing through acontract to Larsen and Toubro for laying of water pipeline in Sonia Vihar at a cost that was approx. Rs

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30 crore more than the justified amount. The clear water transmission mains will supply water fromSonia Vihar Water Treatment Plant to different parts of Trans-Yamuna-Delhi.

Former mayors of Delhi Yog Dhyan Ahuja and Shakuntala Arya (both members of D]B) said thatthough the appropriate amount for laying the 33.94X km long water pipeline within Delhi was about RsX5 crore the contract has been awarded for Rs 111.31 crore.

Out of the four firms that were short listed, two didnot even submit their tenders and the lowesttender bid was as high as Rs 14X crore. Though afinal offer of Rs 111.31 crore was made by Larsenand Toubro only on February 27, 2001, thetechnical committee had already given itsapproval a month earlier.

Destruction of Tehri for Water Supplyto Delhi

Ganga's waters, the lifeline of northern India andIndia’s food security, are being handed over toSuez to quench the thirst of Delhi’s elite even as ahundred thousand people are forcefully andviolently removed from their homes in Tehri for theTehri Dam.

Tehri, the capital of the ancient kingdom of Garhwal on the banks of the Ganga in the Himalayas, is inthe process of being submerged as the tunnels of the controversial Tehri Dam are being closed. Morethan a hundred thousand people have been displaced by the dam, costing thousands of crores. In1994, a budget of Rs. 6000 crores had been earmarked for it. The figure must have escalatedsubstantially since then.

The main stream of the region's Bhagirathi River reversed the direction of its flow after officials shutthe gates of two water tunnels.

Tehri's main town is located uncomfortably close to the swelling waters, which have alreadysubmerged parts of the town. The only bridge linking the old town with the new, and the rest of thecountry, is almost submerged under rising waters. The people of Tehri say dam authorities havestopped the river's natural flow to intimidate them into leaving without staking a claim to a rehabilitationpackage. The 200-year old town of Tehri is expected to be totally submerged by November 2002.Incidentally this part of Uttaranchal's Garhwal region is often referred to as 'Devbhumi' or the "Abodeof the Gods".

The Tehri dam project was first conceived in 1949 and was sanctioned by the Planning Commission in1972. It is located in the outer Himalaya in the Tehri- Garhwal district of Uttaranchal. It is planned to bethe fifth highest dam in the world - 260.5 meters high and spread over an area of 45 square kilometersin the Bhagirathi and Bhilangana valleys near Tehri town. The dam will submerge 4200 hectares of themost fertile flat land in the Bhagirathi and Bhilangana valleys without really benefiting the region in anyway.

Ever since the dam was sanctioned in 1972, local people have been opposing the dam and offeringresistance to its construction. Many scientists and environmentalists have pointed out the grave risksinvolved in building this dam in a highly earthquake-prone zone. But the government dismisses theseallegations of risk, saying that all those who oppose the Tehri dam are "anti-development".

Tehri Dam built in a seismic fault zone

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The huge Tehri dam is located in a seismic fault zone. This area is earthquake prone. Between 1816and 1991, the Garhwal region has witnessed 17 earthquakes, the recent one being the Uttarkashiearthquake of October 1991 and the Chamoli earthquake of 1998.

The International Commission on Large Dams has declared the site ''extremely hazardous".

Geological surveyors have assessed that some of the mountains near the dam are very unstablebecause they do not have any vegetation cover. Incase the dam collapses due to an earthquake or anyother fault, the devastation will be unimaginable. Thehuge reservoir built at such a height will be emptiedin 22 minutes. Within 60 minutes Rishikesh will beunder 260 meters of water. Soon after Haridwar willbe totally submerged under 232 meters with the next23 minutes. Bijnor, Meerut, Hapur and Bulandshahar will be under water within 12 hours (SunderlalBahuguna). Thus the dam is potentially dangerousfor large parts of north-western India, and large areasin the Gangetic plains could be devastated in theevent of a mishap. It is also estimated that the life of the dam could not be more than 30 years because of heavy sedimentation. So far as the electricitygeneration is concerned. Is it worthwhile to have adam spanning 30 years with so much ecologicalinstability and uneconomic viability?

Moreover, with the building of the dam, the River Ganga will become a dead river. Ganga is not justany river; it is a unique symbol of our ancientcivilization and culture. Ganga water has the qualityof remaining fresh for many years and is, therefore,

part of many sacred rituals, including the pouring of afew drops of Ganga Jal into the mouth of a dyingperson. People come from all-over the country toperform asthi pravah in the Ganga at Haridwar. Oncethe Ganga is made to flow through tunnels dammedat Tehri (and also at Bhaironghati Thala dam), thissacred river will soon lose the quality of freshnessand purity it is mainly revered for.

The Tehri Dam is being built to provide water to thetentacled megapolis of Delhi. The Tehri Dam disaster is a microcosm of a violent process which in thename of development, displaces sustainable

communities and destroys their sustainable lifestyles,converting them into environmental refugees who areforced to migrate to large cities and urbansettlements.

However a report by the World Commission on Dams (WCD), published in November 2000, allegesthat "few dams have ever been looked at to see if the benefits - outweigh the costs". According to theUK's New Scientist magazine, these costs include social upheaval, increased flooding, damage tofarmland and the extinction of freshwater fish species. The WCD report also observes that damscause ecological damage and exacerbate flooding, and that many deliver less than half the amount of water expected. The World Bank, the sponsor of the study, is not learning any lessons of the WCDreport.

Ganga at a Glance

Length: 2,525 sq. kmSource: Gaumukh (Gangotri glacier) at4,100 metres above MSL.Ganga Basin: more than one million sq. km(1,060,000 sq. km)Drainage area: 861,404 sq. km (26.2percent of India’s total geographical area)Break up:

Uttar Pradesh: 294,413 sq kmMadhya Pradesh: 201,705 sq. kmBihar: 144,410 sq. kmRajasthan: 107,382 sq. kmWest Bengal: 72,010 sq. kmHaryana: 34,200 sq. kmHimachal Pradesh: 5,799 sq. kmDelhi: 1,485 sq. kmTOTAL: 861,404 sq. km

Annual flow: 468.7 billion cubic metres(25.2 percent of India’s total water resources)

Flow at Rishikesh: 27 billion cubic metresof water.Important stations on the Ganga anddistance from source:Rishikesh 250 km,Balawali 330 km,Garhmukteshwar 440 km,Kachla Bridge 510 km,Fatehgarh 670 km,Kanpur 800 km,Allahbad 1050 km,Mirzapur 1170 km,Varanasi 1295 km,

Buxar 1430 km,Patna 1600 km,Baharampur 2175 km,Nabadwip 2285 km

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Ironically, the disaster management plan submitted by Tehri Project authorities states that Tehri damhas no built-in provision for providing protection against floods and that flood management of thedown-stream area is not the direct responsibility of the project authorities.

Since 10% of the dams in India and abroad have failed or collapsed, it is therefore important to makethe dam break analysis and disaster management reports mandatory. In fact, the disaster management report submitted to the Union Ministry of Environment by the project authorities clearlyemphasizes the need for such reports. Further the Union Ministry of Environment in their conditionalclearance insisted on the preparation of such a report in consultation with the people likely to beaffected in case of a major accident. However, such a report has not yet been prepared and the safetyof the Tehri project have not been properly assessed.

Despite all these huge costs to the people and the government exchequer, Suez-Degrémont is notpaying any of the social, ecological or financial cost for the construction of Tehri Dam. Rather it will getfree water and will sell it to the people of Delhi at a very high cost.

Gangotri glacier recedes fast helping Suez to cash water

"Glaciers in most areas of the world are known to be receding," said Kargel, an internationalcoordinator for Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS), USA. "But glaciers in theHimalaya are wasting at alarming and accelerating rates, as indicated by comparisons of satellite andhistoric data, and as shown by the widespread, rapid growth of lakes on the glacier surfaces."

The Gangotri glacier between Kashmir and Nepal is retreating at an accelerated rate. The Gangotriglacier-and many others-feed the Ganga River Basin, upon which hundreds of millions of people,including those in New Delhi and Calcutta, depend for fresh water. The glacier, spread over an area of 260 sq.km, is of great significance for maintaining the water balance in north India.

Observations on the retreat of the Gangotri go back to 1842, and between 1842 and 1935 the snout of the Gangotri glacier was receding at an average rate of 7.3 m a year.

Indian scientists echoed the same in Current Science January 2001 issue. A group of geologists fromHNB Garhwal University, who conducted the study revealed that the retreat has become much faster than it was before 1971. Reporting their findings the scientists say that data for the last six decades -1936 to 1996, clearly show that the glacier had receded by 1,147 m, with the regression assumingalarming proportions particularly over the last 25 years. It has retreated by more than 850 m between1971 and 1996 alone, as against a total of 2000 m in the last 200 years. The study has also found outsignificant changes in the shape and position of the glacier, which is 30 km long and with a widthvarying from 0.5 to 2.5 km. In May and June 1999, the scientists found that the glacier's snoutchanged its shape every day, with huge blocks of ice getting detached on a daily basis.

The findings of HNB Garhwal University scientists are based on investigations over three and a half years, between May 1996 and October 1999. The aim of the Garhwal University group was to

establish evidence for the increased rate of retreat seen in the earlier data sets of other researchgroups in terms of the geomorphological characteristics of the glacier.

However, some of the regular visitors to Gangotri have also observed the same. According to them the26-km-long Gangotri glacier in Uttaranchal has been shrinking by about 18 metres a year. SwamiSundaranand, a priest and ecologist, who has lived alongside Gangotri for over half a century is one of the first to point out that Gangotri Glacier is retreating. "Over the past five years or so, the Gangotriglacier has annually receded at a rate of nearly 10 metres'', said the Swami.

Geologists do not rule out the possibility of the holiest and greatest of all Indian rivers, Ganga, doing avanishing act in coming years. If the glacier could recede two kilometers over some 150 years, thefuture may be gloomy for the mother of all Indian rivers.

According to climatologists, mountain glaciers, such as those in the Himalayas, are particularlysensitive indicators of climate change. While ice reflects the sun's rays, lake water absorbs and

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transmits heat more efficiently to the underlying ice, kicking off a feedback that creates further melting.According to a 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, scientists estimatethat surface temperatures could rise by 1.4°C to 5.8°C by the end of the century. The researchershave found a strong correlation between increasing temperatures and glacier retreat -(Cynthia.MOCarroll@gsfc.nasa.gov - 29 May 2002).

Glacier changes in the next 100 years could significantly affect agriculture, water supplies,hydroelectric power, transportation, mining, coastlines, and ecological habitats. Melting ice may causeboth serious problems and, for the short term in some regions, helpful increases in water availability,but all these impacts will change with time. This would only benefit Suez Degrémont which wouldencash the increased flow of water in the Ganga and diverting them to Delhi through Upper GangaCanal for selling it to elite Delhities.

Not only the Gangotri Glacier but also several other Himalayan glaciers are melting fast. The meltingglaciers of Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal have rung alarm bells among environmentalists. Theyfear this might result in unprecedented floods and thereafter acute water scarcity in the plains.

The Bara Shigri glacier in Himachal Pradesh and the Pindari glacier in Uttaranchal are shrinking at analarming rate of about 36 metres and 135 metres per year. The deep cracks in the Chhota Shigriglacier of Himachal indicate that it was receding. Studies indicate that it was shrinking by 6.7 metresper year and the Trilokinath glacier was receding by 15.4 metres. The size of the Bara Shigri glacier reduced by 650 metres between 1997-1995, while the Trilokinath glacier got reduced by 400 metresbetween 1969 to 1995.

Despite a severe winter in 1997, the 5-km-long Dokriani Bamak glacier in Himachal Pradesh shrunk by20 metres, while its average melting rate had been 16.5 metres a year. The glacier might soon vanishin the case it continues to melt.

Studies have indicated that almost all 335 glaciers in the Sutlej, Beas and Spiti basins were receding.These have created artificial lakes which might cause floods in the low-lying areas (Source: TheTribune Online Edition, 26 May 2001).

Impact of Water Diversion on Agriculture and Food Security

Water is a prime resource that fulfills a number of significant functions. It can be used lavishly or efficiently, but cannot be replaced. It is an indispensable, finite and vulnerable resource. Virtually noactivity in society or process in the landscape or in the environment would be possible in the absenceof water.

India is one of the few countries in the world endowed with abundant land and water resources. Water is basically required for domestic consumption and agriculture. Apart from this water is used byindustries. Diverting water from domestic and agriculture to industries poses serious problems.Presently per capita availability is about 2300M 3/p/year, which is going to decline 1400M 3/p/year by

the year 2050.

Of the 187 MHM (million hectare metres) of water 60 MHM of the surface water and 43.2 MHM of ground water are available for use. The present utility is about 60 MHM for various purposes.

Since the population is likely to stabilize at a maximum of 1640 million by 2050, the country will haveto plan for increasing the food grain production from the current level of 200 MT to 450-500 MT by2050. Also the production of vegetables and fruits should be increased as the production at present isnot even sufficient to the minimum requirements of the people. To achieve the objectives, the currentirrigation potential of 96.9 Mha (million hectares) (gross area) will have to be increased to about 140Mha.

Water Requirements for Different Crops

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The plant roots suck or extract water from the soil to live and grow. The main part of this water doesnot remain in the plant, but escapes to the atmosphere as vapor through the plant's leaves and stem.This process is called transpiration. Transpiration happens mainly during daytime. Water from an openwater surface escapes as vapor to the atmosphere during the day. The same happens to water on thesoil surface as to water on the leaves and stem of a plant. This process is called evaporation.

The water need of a crop thus consists of transpiration plus evaporation. Therefore, the crop water isused for "evapotranspiration".

The water need of a crop is usually expressed in mm/day, mm/month or mm/season, or cm/hectare.

Suppose the water need of a certain crop in a veryhot, dry climate is 10 mm/day. This means that eachday the crop needs a water layer of 10 mm over thewhole area on which the crop is grown. This meansthat this 10 mm has to be supplied by rain or irrigation every day.

There is a large variation of the total growing periodnot only between crops, but also within one croptype. In general, it can be assumed that the growingperiod for a certain crop is longer when the climate iscool and shorter when the climate is warm.

Upper Ganga Canal: the lifeline of Western U.P.

Upper Ganga Canal is one of the oldest canals inWestern U.P. Initial discharge of water in the canalwas 6750 cusecs, which was later increased to

10500 cusecs. The length of the canal is about 304km. and it irrigates about 9.24 lac hectares of land inHardwar, Roorkee, Saharanpur, Muzaffar Nagar,Meerut, Ghaziabad, Gautam Budh Nagar,Bulandshar, Aligarh, Mathura, Hathras, Mainpuri andEtah.

As said earlier the 635 million liters daily (MLD) of Ganga water will be diverted from the Upper GangaCanal to Delhi, which would affect the agriculture potential of the canal and the food security of theregion where the canal had been irrigating since more than one century.

Some of the major crops in the area, which is irrigated by Upper Ganga Canal are Wheat, Rice(Basmati), Rice (Coarse), Sugarcane, Maize, Potato, Gram and others.

Briefly, the water requirement for cultivation of any crop and its productivity depends on severalfactors, such as

• a. Climatic conditions• b. Soil composition• c. Micro Nutrients in the Soil• d. Temperature variations• e. Variety of the crops (High yield variety needs more water)• f. Application of fertilizers.

According to experts, it is a complicated procedure to calculate this water requirement for any crop,however an effort has been made to estimate the water requirement to grow different crops on theland irrigated by Upper Ganga Canal. The water requirement to grow 1 kg. of a particular crop would

Facts about Upper Ganga Canal

• Work on the canal started in -- 1837A.D.

• Canal completed in -- 1855 A.D. • Total years to complete the canal --

18 • Initial capacity -- 6750 cusecs • Enhanced capacity (1951) -- 10500

cusecs • Total length -- 189 miles (304 km) • Total length of the channels -- 2650

km • Area irrigated by the canal -- 9.28

hectares

• Districts irrigated by the canal -- 13districts (Hardwar, Roorkee,

Saharanpur, Muzaffar Nagar,Meerut, Ghaziabad, Gautam BudhNagar, Bulandshar, Aligarh,Mathura, Hathras, Mainpuri andEtah district)

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facilitate to estimate the implications on agriculture sustainability if water (6350 lac liters per day) isdrawn from Upper Ganga Canal at Muradnagar.

Water Needs for Different Crops in the region

•

1 kg. of Basmati Rice requires 4200 liters • 1 kg. of coarse rice (long duration) requires 2500 liters• 1 kg. of coarse rice (short duration) requires 2250 liters• 1 kg. Wheat requires 700 liters of water.• 1 kg. of potatoes require 240 liters

A i) Water Requirement to grow wheat in Western UP & Delhi = 30-35 cm-- (6-7 irrigation 5 cm per irrigation)ii) For rice (Basmati) = 140-160 cmiii) Rice (coarse) = 120-150 cmiv) Maize = 30 cmv) Potato = 60 cm

B 1 Hectare = 2.46 Acre1 Acre = .405 hec1 Acre = 4000 sqm1 hec = 1/.405= 2.46 x 4000 = 9840 sqmor 1 hec = 10000 sqm (approx.)

C 1 hec = 100 x 100 m2or 1 hec = 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 cm2

Volume of Water = 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 35 (C.C)

or Volume of water= (100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 35 liters)/1000 = 3500000 liter per hec

Average yield of wheat = 50 quintal per hectare (approx.)

Therefore water requirement per quintal = 3500000/50 = 70000 liters.

Water requirement for wheat per kilogram 3500000/(50 x 100) = 700 liters

or 700 liters water is required to grow = 1 kg of wheat

or 70,000 liters water is needed for = 1 quintal (100 kg.) of wheat

or 7,00,000 = 1 ton

Water Requirement for Rice

Similarly we may calculate the water requirement to grow rice.

• Water requirement for rice (Basmati) = 140 -160 cm per hectareAverage yield of rice Basmati = 35 quintal per hectare(4200 liters of water is needed to grow 1 kg of basmati rice)

• Water requirement for lice (Coarse) = 120 -150 cm per hectare (short duration)Average yield of rice Coarse = 60 quintal per hectare(2250 liters of water is needed to grow, 1 kg of rice (Coarse) (short duration)

• Water requirement for rice (Coarse) = 140 -160 cm per hectare (long duration)Average yield of rice Coarse = 60 quintal per hectare(2500 liters of water is required to grow one kg. Coarse rice of long duration)

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What does diverting water to Delhi mean for National Food Security?

The annual water diverted to Delhi from the Upper Ganga Canal at the rate of 635 million liters per daywill result in critical reduction in the production of food crops in the region, and thus possibledestruction of national food security.

This massive diversion of water would have produced in a year

• 3310550 quintals of wheat• 551150 quintals of rice (Basmati)• 927100 quintals of rice (Coarse)• 9657290 quintals of potato

Alternatives to privatization of Ganga and meeting Delhi's water needs (1)

At present Delhi has allocation of waters from the Yamuna, the Ganga and the Beas (Bhakra project),in addition to ground water resources, with the total availability, as follows:

Water Source Allocated UseableYamuna 0.724 BCM 0.500 BCM

Beas 0.2464 BCM 0.1724 BCMGanga 0.1800 BCM --

Treatedsewage

0.100 BCM --

Ground water Govt. wells0.012 BCM

Private wells0.010 BCM

Total 0.9645 BCM

The above capacity can be reinforced through the following means:

• Flood plain reservoirs at Wazirabad. Barswal. Badapur. Nala Mandela and at Nizamuddinbridge providing additional 0.168 BCM.

• Rain water reservoirs at Tilpat/ Tughlakabad 0.010 BCM • Reservoirs in the NCR at Najafgarh Jheel and Hindon-Ganga bed with the capacity 0.285

BCM. • Harvesting in existing tanks and wells to the extent of 0.010 BCM • Revival of dried up streams (through afforestation) of Delhi with capacity 0.015 BCM • Increased ground water output in government and private wells due to better recharge of

aquifers through greater flow in River Yamuna, yielding additional 0.033 BCM • Greater output of treated sewage-of higher quality in 9 eco-parks designed by Paani Morchato the extent of additional 0.500 BCM.

It can be seen that the above measures would yield an additional 1.011 BCM of usable clean water,giving Delhi sufficient waters to meet its increased requirements of the next century and obviating theneed to bring Tehri dam waters to Delhi.

Water Liberation

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On the eve of Independence Day, 15th August 2002,the Indian people have resolved to defend the realfreedom -- the freedom of access and rights to their own resources - Land, Water and Biodiversity.Movements gathered in Delhi committed themselves toshut these water theft units and rejuvenate alternatives.

In the Resolution issued at this occasion they said,"Water is the essence of life. Its marketization isunacceptable to us. We reject the anti-people water policy. We will fight intrusions of all sorts of companies,national or multination, at every level with all our might".

The Water Liberation Campaign (Jal Swaraj Abhiyan)which had already organized a study tour of farmersfrom Tehri in Uttaranchal to Delhi for World Water Dayis committed to stop the water theft by global water corporations in the name of public private partnership.

Specific demands to the Delhi Government are

• Make the contract with the Suez-Degrémontpublic

• Organize a public hearing on the full cost of water treatment plant at Sonia Vihar, includingcost for both backward and forward linkages.

• Let the public through a democratic process fixthe cost that Suez-Degrémont must share topay compensation to the displaced people of Tehri and the farmers who will loose their landin and around Muradnagar in U.P.

• The government of Delhi must ensure that:a. Water for sustenance which is 50 liters per day is available as a basic right to all.b. Higher use can be charged higher taxes.c. A ceiling must be put on water use so thatthere is no wastage of scarce water resources.

• If hidden cost of bringing water from Tehri toDelhi are not being internalized for theoperation of the Suez-Degrémont plant andwater delivery in Delhi, the Delhi government should give up the project and develop lower cost conservation based water system which have been proposed by many citizensorganizations.

The water liberation movement will continue to carry out independent studies and continue to do publicawareness to ensure that water is not stolen from the rural poor and sold to the urban elite throughwater markets under the control of water giants like Suez.

Navdanya

Navdanya is a programme to conserve agricultural diversity. It places the farmer at the center of conservation and empowers to take control over the political, ecological and economic aspects of agriculture

Navdanya means nine seeds and these represent India's collective source of food security. It connotesa diverse ecological balance at every level, from the ecology of the earth to the ecology of our body.

Email: rfste@vsnl.com

Water Liberation Declaration

Activists from around the world met at Navdanya ' s organic farm on December 16th, 2001 to develop national and global strategies to defend water as a collectivecommunity commons, and drafted theWater Liberation Declaration. TheDeclaration has over five hundred signatories.

Water Liberation Declaration

Water is life. It’s a gift of nature. Theaccess to water is a natural andfundamental right. It is not to be treated asa commodity and traded for profit. Peopleshall have the right to freedom from thirst,and shall have adequate access to safewater for all of their living needs.

Experiences all over the world reveal quiteconvincingly that water which is “life” isbeing privatized and brought under corporate control. This will deprive thepeople of water lifeline for survival. All thewater resources should be owned,controlled, managed and utilized by localcommunities in their natural setting.

We the people from all over the world willnot allow our waters to be made acommodity for profit.

We will work together to liberate water from corporate/private agencies, control

and return it to the people for commongood.

We demand that governments all over theworld should take immediate action todeclare that they accept waters in their territories a public good and exact strongregulatory structure to protect them.

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Footnote 1. This section has been prepared by Cdr. Sureshwar D. Sinha of the Paani Morcha. Delhi,and has been taken from their website www.paanilllorclla.org

Published in In Motion Magazine, October 20, 2002

Interview with Devinder SharmaThe politics of food and agriculture

Part 1 -From British Colonialism to WTO Rules and Privatization

New Delhi, India

Devinder Sharma is an award-winning journalist, writer, and researcher on food and trade policy. He is the author of "GATT and India -- Politicsof Agriculture" (1994) and "In the Famine Trap" (1997). He chairs theNew Delhi-based Forum for Biotechnology & Food Security.Thisinterview was conducted August 25, 2003 by Nic Paget-Clarke for InMotion Magazine in New Delhi, India.

• The Indian Express• Implications of the WTO for agriculture• Corporate Double Standard• The Union Carbide Bhopal disaster •

Cattle feed• Emission standards, recycling plastics, vaccine for cows• The Great Trade Robbery• Market access, domestic support, and domestic subsidies• What happens with these subsidies?• How cows and farmers survive• WTO Negotiations• Privatizing every sphere of activity• The British legacy in India• Divide and rule (the British and the WTO)• The Bengal Famine• Famine amidst food surplus• The Kalahandi Syndrome• Importing Unemployment

• Also, click forward to Part 2 – From Secured-Cash Crops to Village Republics

The Indian Express

In Motion Magazine: Could you please tell me a little about your background and how you came tofocus on hunger and food?

Devinder Sharma: I started off my career as an agricultural scientist. I did my masters in plantbreeding and genetics and then did not take up a research assignment. The first job I landed

Devinder Sharma. Photo by NicPaget-Clarke.

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immediately after my university was with the Indian Express in India. The Indian Express at that time,even now, was the largest selling newspaper in India – a multi-region paper. It is published from about14 places in the country.

When I joined the Indian Express, in 1981, it was a paper which was anti-establishment. It was apaper which for quite some time brought down government after government. It was a paper which gave me training, if you put it likethat, to understand the politics of food and agriculture.

I joined as an agriculture writer of the paper and the advantage I had,compared to others, was that I was given the task to look into the entirecountry, not one region. As an agriculture editor, I had the privilege totravel through the length and breadth of the country and then write myreports -- unlike the other reporters who would be covering one beatand one area, and so on. That gave me a tremendous learningexperience. Nothing else could have given me that kind of exposure.

Once I had done that for about ten years, I left at the stage when Ibecame the development editor for the paper. I left them and I went toNepal for a short while to launch Nepal’s first independent daily, calledThe Kathmandu Post . Today that paper is the largest selling. I left themin ’93.

Implications of the WTO for agriculture

Then, I thought, I will take a sabbatical. It was a time when the Dunkel Draft was very popular. Dunkelwas the first director-general of the WTO (World Trade Organization), at that time it was called GATT(General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade). I thought people would be on the streets here but nobodyunderstood what the implications of WTO and agriculture were. So I thought, I will take a sabbatical,do a book, and then come back to journalism.

I took one year off, and did my book, which is in your hands, the first book. But I never came back to journalism or what you call active journalism. From one to another, I realized the realities are muchdifferent and much in contrast in what you are doing. Hunger in India is at a level today that it veryshameful. We have this hunger existing at a time when we have a mounting food surplus. We have anunmanageable food surplus, which is a record in history, and we also have a record number of hungrywith us today.

This paradox forced me to get into this issue of hunger. There are two ways of looking at it. One, of course, is the grassroots effort that one can do to bring people out of hunger. The other, to myunderstanding, is that hunger is the result of policies, national and international. The basic idea, or thebasic focus, today, is to keep one half of the world hungry, because you can only exploit the hungrystomach. You cannot exploit a full stomach, somebody who is very happy and fed. That is the world’s

effort. And that is very shocking and demeaning, shameful.

That is the focus of my work.

Corporate Double Standard

In Motion Magazine: One of the things you mentionedin one of your essays is the double standard that thecorporate world has in the way it treats the West andthe way it treats the developing world. Could you talkabout that, perhaps in light of the Coke/Pepsi scandal,and also the questions of grain to India and GMOs?

Devinder Sharma: If you look at the double standardsthey are apparent, very clear and very loud.

GATT and India - the Politics of Agriculture by Devinder Sharma.

A Pepsi banner over the streets of New Delhi at thetime of the contamination controversy. Photo by NicPaget-Clarke.

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In the recent cola controversy in India, the companies are saying that, “Your groundwater is pollutedso therefore you can’t blame us that the cola is also contaminated.” This argument has gone on for some time on the television and in print media.

In one of the shows, though, I came out and said, “This is not the issue. If you look at the groundwater in Europe and America, it is much more contaminated than in India. How come in those countries theysell colas which are without any pesticides? They are following double standards.

The Union Carbide Bhopal disaster

If you look back, if you remember the Union Carbide accident that happened in India, the tragedy of Bhopal, the Bhopal plant had lax safety standards, but the same plant in America, they had very tightsafety standards there. The double standard was apparent after the Bhopal disaster struck.

Looking at the cola controversy, we are being told that, “Your pesticide and fertilizer consumption is sohigh in India that obviously the ground water gets contaminated” But let’s look at America and let’slook at Europe.

In India, the average pesticide consumption per hectare is 450 grams per hectare. If you look atHolland, the per hectare pesticide usage or consumption is 11,000 grams per hectare. In Japan it is12,000 grams. In the U.S. it is 3,000 grams. And 99.9% of the pesticides go into the environment,whether they leech into the water or they go into the air. Only 0.01% hits at the target – everyoneknows that. (This is a study done by David Pimentel of Cornell University. ) And they use 700 differentkinds of pesticides. In India, we use 160 different kinds of pesticides.

But now we have reached a stage that we are being told that, “Your water is contaminated”. Andfertilizer, the fertilizer intake in Holland is 495 kg per hectare. In India it is 99 kg per hectare. InAmerica it is 110 kg per hectare. If you look at Japan it is about 350 per hectare. If you look at theEuropean Union as a block then the pesticide usage is 500 grams per hectare. I’m not trying to saythat our water is not polluted, I’m not trying to defend that, but the double standard is very clear. Inthose countries they follow strict health and safety norms, whereas in India they know you can getaway with murder -- as in the classic example of Union Carbide.

Cattle feed

If you look at the grains, we are being told that whatever we export from our country is not of goodquality so, therefore, “You need to have quality norms.” “You can go up to .0001 parts per million for looking at toxin level in grains.” And so on. It’s interesting. And, yes, we all agree that quality isimportant, but let’s look at double standards here. What is going from India meets the quality of theWestern countries, but what comes from the Western countries to India has to be cattle feed. So weare given to understand that, “You are very comfortable with cattle feed so why this problem?”

Now, when I say cattle feed I will give you one example. In 1996, the last time we imported wheat, weimported one million tons from Australia. That wheat, when it came to India, it was cattle feed quality.What they exported to us was rubbish. It came with forty-two weed plants, seven of them new to India.And they didn’t even clean it on the high seas when India said, “You should clean this grain.”

Look at America. At the time that Dan Glickman was the Agriculture Secretary he came to India. Hewent around and met India’s Agriculture Minister and he asked him, “Why did you reject Americanwheat?” because when we selected Australian wheat, which in any case was cattle feed, it was after we rejected the American wheat. He was told that the wheat from America doesn’t conform to thequality standards. The wheat from America actually had a downy mildew, a disease. The incidence of downy mildew was more than .001 parts per million. And you know what he said? He said, “Where inthe world can you find wheat of that quality?” I’m glad our Agricultural Minister stood up and said, “Sir,this is what you had asked the Codex Alimentarius to follow.” (editor: a Rome-based organization, “TheCodex Alimentarius Commission was created in 1963 by FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization] andWHO [World Health Organization] to develop food standards”). And subsequently, it is also being

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reported, the Secretary finally told our Agriculture Minister that, “If you could import all the cattle feedthat we exported at the time of PL480 (U.S. food aid in the ’50s and ’60s) when India was importingwheat from America, what is the problem now?”

Soybeans. Now they are trying to export soybeans tous, and those soybeans come with several viraldiseases and five pests. America is forcing India toaccept this saying that, “These pests are not harmfulfor you.” If we were to export the same soybean backto America, they would reject it. So the doublestandards are very clearly apparent.

Emission standards, recycling plastics,vaccine for cows

And it is not only foodstuffs. If you look at the entireWTO paradigm, the genetic engineering paradigm, thetechnology, what is being developed, today … it is the opposite of technology, which is being dumped

on to us.

Let us take the example of automobiles. The automobiles that are being manufactured in Indiaconform to Euro 1, Euro 2 emission standards. In Europe they follow Euro 4. Because that (Euro 1,Euro 2) technology has become obsolete they must find a market for it. So they dump it on tocountries like us.

Look at America, since a few years back they have had a wonderful way of recycling the plastic bottlesin which Pepsi is sold in America, or in India, for that matter. You can’t recycle that in America becauseof the strict human safety norms. So what they are doing is shipping the plastic bottles to Madras inIndia, recycling in Madras and taking it back and selling it for the colas in America. As if the humanshere don’t matter.

One can go on and on with these kinds of examples where the West has demonstrated that it doesn’tgive a damn.

And the worst now is we are always taken as the children of a lesser god, for all these years, but theworst is now apparent and happening. One of the institutes in New Zealand has clearly said that theyare going to develop a genetically-modified vaccine for treating tuberculosis in cows, which is goodnews of course. But they are saying the same vaccine would be applicable for human beings in theThird World countries. What the rich countries need is a different vaccine, is a better vaccine. Whichmeans they are treating animals and human beings in this part of the world as the same.

What more do we need as an example for double standards?

The Great Trade Robbery

In Motion Magazine: How is globalization accelerating the process of marginalization of farmers inthe Third World?

Devinder Sharma: I’m sure, Nic, you have seen a movie called The Great Train Robbery, way back.To me, this is a new edition of the same movie. It can be called The Great Trade Robbery. This is awonderful way of exploiting the Third World countries.

I remember once I had the privilege of sitting with Nelson Mandela. He was chairing one of my talksand he said, “They follow a triple-M approach.” He said, “First, they sent the missionaries. It didn’twork. Then they sent the military. It didn’t work. Now they are sending money – it will work.”

A rally in New Delhi against the WTO, just prior to theSeptember 2003 Cancun ministerial meeting. Photo byNic Paget-Clarke.

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Basically, if you look at the world today, the West has got so used to being a parasite on the ThirdWorld that they cannot imagine they do not do this harm to us. Under one pretext or the other, they aregoing to exploit us. They are going to suck the blood of this part of the world -- in the name of trade, inthe name of growth, in the name of development, in the name of millennium goals, and so on, and soforth.

I’m not being cynical, but let me explain. India is a country, which is one sixth of humanity, and I thinkcan be taken as a symbol or representative of the developing world in many ways. India is a country,which has about 1,000 million plus people today. Out of it, 320 million people still go to bed hungryevery night. That’s a shameful paradox.

But let’s look at the globalization process as far asagriculture is concerned. We have in India 557 millionfarmers, today. At the time of independence, fifty-fiveyears back, the number of farmers in India was 200million. It has grown to 557 million today. The averageland-holding size at that time, fifty-five years back, wasfour hectares for a family. Today, it has come down to1.4 hectares. This is an average for the rest of thedeveloping world, also. And, if you compare this withAmerica, just to compare the two biggest democracies,fifty-five years back in America their population inagriculture was about ten percent of whatever thepopulation at that time was. The average landholdingsize in America at that time was fifty hectares. Today,the average landholding size in America is 200 hectares. The number of farmers in America today is900,000, less than one percent of your population. There are more people in American jails than onAmerican farms. There are 2.1 million people in American jails today and there are 900,000 people onAmerican farms. You can see the contrast between India and America.

Now having said that, the reality is that American agriculture is of course in the hands of the industry,

but the American economy is so dependent upon agriculture and is so weighed down by the artificialsubsidy support that American agriculture has been providing to its agriculture that there is no marketfor your produce, the economy collapses under the artificial weight of subsidies that America hascreated all these years. They have to find a market for it.

The second block is the European Union. They, too, are overburdened with food stocks, especiallyafter the Common Agriculture Policy came in. They, too, face the same problem that America faces.So they join hands. What can you do both of you? Both of the blocks could not dump food into the seanow because international treaties do not allow you to do that. You can’t burn it because again theinternational treaties do not allow you to do that. So you have to find a market. What better way than toforce open the developing countries to ensure that this kind of produce goes into them?

Market access, domestic support, and domestic subsidies

When the WTO came into effect, first the GATT then the WTO, they laid it down very clearly, based onthree pillars - market access, domestic support, and domestic subsidies. These are the three pillars of the WTO Agriculture Agreement. But, at that time, the developing countries didn’t even understandwhat all it meant. So they accepted, signed, and so on. The West, though, was very clear and verysure about what it was doing. They came out with all these parameters, which actually supported or protected their agriculture at the cost of the developing countries’ farmers. Everything was put intoplace and we were supposed to sign -- take it or leave it. And we were also given this promise that if you don’t enter into the WTO it is very difficult to trade bilaterally, and so and so forth. Our politicalleadership accepted that dogma.

Now eight years later, we find that the negative impacts have been so large and so huge it has begun

to show. If you look at the world, today, the American farmers, or let’s us say the OECD countries, (theOrganization for Economic Cooperation and Development), the richest trading bloc, which is 24countries, annually provides subsidies to agriculture to the tune of U.S. $360 billion, which means one

Small farm in western Tamil Nadu, India. Photo by NicPaget-Clarke.

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billion dollars a day. In India, we provide subsidies to our 557 million farmers and the total subsidy isone billion dollars a year.

In the OECD the subsidies are direct. And can you imagine who are the beneficiaries of thesesubsidies? Ted Turner receives subsidies for agriculture in America. David Rockefeller receivessubsidies for agriculture in America. These are the people who get subsidies. They don’t farm. Justbecause they own land they get subsidies.

If you look at India, all the subsidies that we provide areindirect -- by way of cheaper fertilizer, cheaper electricity, cheaper seed, cheaper water. There are nodirect subsidies in India. But the World Bank and theIMF (International Monetary Fund) have asked us toremove subsidies because they are too distorting. Thepoor should not get subsidies, whereas the rich shouldget subsidies.

What happens with these subsidies?

Now what happens with these subsidies? Theycontribute to corporate control of prices.

It should be noted, though, that a major percentage of farmers in the U.S. get no subsidy at all because 70%of U.S. subsidies go to 10% of the recipients who arethe largest farmers and corporations. In addition, U.S. family farmers usually sell their products belowtheir cost of production while corporations sell their meats in the store and their grain for higher pricesthrough processing and export.

Faced with this situation, U.S. family farmers maximize production in order to survive and the excessproduction is then many times dumped around the world where it isn’t needed thanks to bad tradepolicy from the WTO.

No matter the falling global prices, the corporations continue to benefit. The corporations take their agricultural subsidies and trade incentives while they argue against subsidies in the Third World, then,with their increasing level of control, they pump into agriculture such new problems as genetically-modified seeds.

How cows and farmers survive

Look at the inequalities. We are being told that there is a clash of civilizations but the biggest clash of civilizations that I see is when we compare the situation in which the farmer in this part of the world, inthe South, exists and the cows in the North. Every cow in America, Europe, Australia, Canada, allOECD countries, needs a shower, needs a fan, needs a tube light, needs centrally-heated conditions.You will agree all these are luxuries to farmers in this part of the world.

And whenever the cow goes to milk -- milking is done of course by machines, we all know -- I haveseen that every cow wears a strap around its neck. The strap has a chip, computer chip so themoment the cow goes for the feeding bin when it is getting milked that chip matches with a chip on thewall and it tells what exactly is the weight of the cow, what exactly are the protein requirements at thattime of the cow, and only that quantity comes out. In a way, the cow is the most food secure animal onthis earth today.

We all know, at least in India, that 320 million people go to bed hungry every night, and 50% percent of the farming population elsewhere in the world goes to bed hungry every night. A farming family in

India, or in developing countries, survives on less than 1.4 hectares. But if you are rearing one cowyou need an average of 10 hectares of land for the feed and everything that you feed that cow. This

Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment joins a protest at Monsanto corporate headquarters,St. Louis, Missouri. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.

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means for each cow you require about 10 hectares of land. On that 10 hectares five farming familiescan survive. And the inequalities don’t end there.

The first time I wrote about this was in an article in The Ecologist a few years back, and I am gladeveryone is talking about this, but I did an analysis of the cow and of the human being, of a farmer in adeveloping country, and I worked it out that every cow gets a subsidy of two dollars a day whereas fiftypercent of our farming population and the developing world lives on less than one dollar a day. Such isthe quantum of subsidies that you give for cows that you can put every cow into business class andtake it on a round-the-world trip. That’s the kind of subsidies you provide.

Yet we are being told, “You open up (your markets) and you get tremendous opportunity to export andyou’ll gain, and so forth.” Unfortunately, developing countries didn’t realize what this meant then, butI’m sure now that the shoe is pinching, people are beginning to realize and that is what is now gettingreflected in the WTO.

WTO Negotiations

In Motion Magazine: Why are there seemingly permanent negotiations at the WTO? Ever since GATT

and the WTO started it has all been about the negotiations. Can you explain that?

Devinder Sharma: What happened at the WTO was they laid out a phase-out program where youhave to take stock of certain things after a few years. There is a review of the WTO AgricultureAgreement -- it is going on at the moment. There is a review of the WTO TRIPS (Trade-RelatedAspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement also going on. But at the same time, the worldrealized that they haven’t had enough. They needed to exploit the Third World more. They have tobring in new issues. So what are the new issues? The new issues cropped up at Singapore sometimeback and they are called the Singapore Issues : transparency in government procurements, tradefacilitation, investments, and competition policy. These new issues have to be taken on board now.

The new round of negotiations at Cancun will be negotiating these four Singapore Issues. We aretransgressing from the issue of agriculture, patents and so on, into the investment issues and wherethey want to move in the services sector, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Nowyou want education to be privatized. Now you want water to be privatized. Now you want healthservices to be privatized. All these things -- because the economic interest of the corporations in theWest is so dominant now that they are finding all kinds of areas where they can exert influence andexploit the developing countries.

Privatizing every sphere of activity

In Motion Magazine: From reading some of the more recent essays that you have written,globalization has had various definitions over the years, even over the centuries. But it seems thecurrent definition is liberalization -- privatizing the planet?

Devinder Sharma: It is in fact happening. If you look at the recent phenomenon of privatization, whichactually the European Union, America, Japan, and countries like Australia or Switzerland are a partyto, it is because of the dominance of the multinational corporations coming up or the privatecompanies coming up and occupying almost every sphere of activity.

So much so the politics. There was a time, if you remember, when Abraham Lincoln gave his famousquote to all of us saying that democracy is of the people, by the people, and for the people. If you lookat today, I’m sure Abraham Lincoln is turning in his grave because democracy has changed, becausedemocracy’s definition has changed. Democracy is of the industry, by the industry, for the industry.Whether it is (U.S. President) George Bush, whether it is (U.K. Prime Minister) Tony Blair, whether is(Indian Prime Minister) Atal Bihari Vajpayee, all that they have been doing is to represent industry. If you look at WTO, or NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), the entire focus has been to

promote the interests of industry, multinational corporations and so on.

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President Bill Clinton has gone on record, when he was the president, saying that Monsanto is thecompany which will take us into the 21st century. So we know what is happening. We know the Iraqwar, why it happened -- the oil corporations wanted more oil. That kind of thing is happening andthere’s always justification. The kind of education that is being forced onto us in India is privatized andthen goes into corporate hands. Specifically, it is all a game for control. It is a game for control andmonopoly.

Earlier, when we were faced with the colonialization era, it was the governments which were incontrolling, but today control is in the hands of corporates and they are trying to extract as much aspossible.

There was a time, and I’m sure you remember, when the sun would never set on the British Empire.When you talk of globalization today, I think oneindicator is the sun never sets on the multinationalcorporations. That gives an indication of howglobalized the corporations are, of the phenomenonwhich is the using of democratic institutions, so calleddemocratic institutions, like WTO, or the financialinstitutions, to force the banks of multinationalcorporations or the private corporations onto us. It is anissue of control and dominance. A few people arecontrolling the entire global wealth and that controlcomes through corporations.

The British legacy in India

In Motion Magazine: What is the legacy of the Britishin India, if there’s a way of summarizing it?

Devinder Sharma: Nobody wants to talk about it now.Maybe it is politically incorrect. But what the British didto India is very apparent. There was a time, if you remember, when Columbus sailed to look for Indiaand landed in America, 500 years back. Then came Vasco da Gama who landed in India, eventually,from Europe and the world became exposed to India. That was a time when India was called, if youlook at Indian literature, we were called a golden bird. That’s why all these fellows were looking for India. Not searching for America or anybody else.

Then, the British stepped in to India and when they left India was a poverty-stricken country. That isthe legacy of Britain.

If you look at Europe, Europe survives today because of their colonial past. Nobody wants to talkabout it now because nobody wants to rake up those memories, but if you look at India and if you lookat Indian history, you’ll find ample examples of how they looted India.

In fact the viceroys, the people who were appointed viceroys, would advance based on how much theylooted. There was an era in Indian history when you find that the one who gave the best or highestbooty to the emperor became the viceroy.

Divide and rule (the British and the WTO)

They followed the divide and rule policy. One of the British legacies is the divide and rule policy, whichthey did remarkably well in India. They took almost all of India as their colony because of the divideand rule policy, which is now being followed exactly by the WTO.

If you look at global politics now they are actually following divide and rule. Why are developing

countries not there as a block, it is because now the divide and rule policy says you should be havingissue-based coalitions. What is an issue-based coalition? It is that on agriculture I don’t agree with

Gateway of India, in Mumbai, erected by Britishcolonial authorities to "Commemorate the landing inIndia of their Imperial Majesties King George VI andQueen Mary". Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.

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Malaysia but on investment use I would agree with Malaysia. So India and Malaysia would go together on the issues of investment but not go together on agriculture. So we are divided, you know.

The West has been very clearly using the same kind of legacy of divide and rule in commercial termsor economic terms, and doing it very effectively. Developing countries stand isolated, or let’s sayseparate and not as a bloc ,as the E.U. (European Union) would be, or for that matter as the U.S. andE.U. together. Developing countries do not bloc because we have been put against the same formulaof divide and rule and we haven’t learned our lesson.

Another part of the legacy is in India, the British, whatever they left us with, unfortunately, the samesystem prevails in India. We follow the same systems, political, bureaucratic, constitutional, all thesame systems the British left us with. The British left us with more problems but we continue withthem. We haven’t tried to set our house in order the way Mahatma Gandhi would have liked the houseto be. But that is the way people want it, or whatever you can say.

The Bengal Famine

But going back to your question of the British legacy, I just have to give you one example. In 1943, the

year when the world was shocked by the Bengal famine, the Bengal famine killed about three millionpeople. It was a time when India was under British dominance and there was enough food, but foodwas diverted by the British to the armies which were fighting the Second World War. People died inBengal, but not because of the loss of production, because there was the loss of production in 1941,that was a bad year, and there was no famine. 1943 was a better year but there was a famine in 1943.And the interesting part is the then-viceroy of India gave a report to the Emperor, (and we all know of Amartya Sen’s Theory of Entitlement which talks about the Bengal Famine), but what is not known isthat letter actually said that concerning the three million people who died, those are the people who inany case would have died. They were of the lowest strata of life -- urchins and so on. Laborers, poor,beggars, they should have in any case died. So, we should not have any regret.

Look at the way they have treated us. And when I say us I mean the Third World and the First World.Ireland was also under British governance. Ireland had the infamous Irish Potato Famine in thenineteenth century. Tony Blair went and apologized for the Irish Potato Famine. Yet, he has come toIndia a number of times, and so has the Queen, and they have never apologized for the 28 faminesthat occurred during the British rule in India. And 28 were man-made famines. That is the way theyhave treated us.

But I think we have to blame ourselves, also.

Famine amidst food surplus

In Motion Magazine: You wrote an article about the famines in Kalahandi and Koraput. What sort of system allows for massive crop production, even export, while the people living around the food aredying? How is that structured?

Devinder Sharma: This is the greatest tragedy I would say in this century. The stark reality of India.You talk about Kalahandi but let me first give you a little picture of the India scenario.

We today have 50 million tons of food surplus, wheat and rice stocked in the open. You can go aroundthe country and see it stocked in the open. I think at least 50 percent of it has already turned into cattlefeed. It cannot be consumed by human beings. And there are 320 million people who go to bed hungryevery night in India. One third of the world’s 800,000 people who go to bed hungry every night are inIndia.

But it is not that only India’s political masters or Indian elite is unconcerned or criminally apathetic tothe realities of hunger. The international community is equally to blame. They are talking about

removing half the world’s hunger by the year 2015 and they are talking about the 800 million peoplewho go to bed hungry, so we should be moving at least, – but all they have done is to say that we willremove half the world’s hunger by 2015. If they were really honest, the international community, they

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This kind of Catch 22 situation has never been explained by the economists, has never been askedand understood by the economists. And because the poor and hungry have no voice, nobody is talkingabout them. That’s the biggest tragedy. To me, this is the greatest challenge for us in the country andthat is why a few of us have got together to set up a small center we are calling the World Hunger Institute. We think we are technically qualified to call it the World Hunger Institute because we havethe largest number of hungry in the world with us and we want to launch a direct assault on feeding

the hungry. Not as charity but as something that can build up their capacity to be food secure for theyears to come.

Interview with Devinder SharmaThe politics of food and agriculture

Part 2From secured-cash crops to village republics

New Delhi, India

Devinder Sharma is an award-winning journalist, writer, and researcher on food and trade policy. He is the author of "GATT and India -- Politicsof Agriculture" (1994) and "In the Famine Trap" (1997). He chairs theNew Delhi-based Forum for Biotechnology & Food Security.Thisinterview was conducted August 25, 2003 by Nic Paget-Clarke for InMotion Magazine in New Delhi, India.

• Water conservation• Agriculture technology

• Micro-credit • Traditional farming practices• Cyclic Mode of Development • SEWA• A real democratic movement • Village republics• “Engineer bureaucrat and contractor friendly”• Leading the world into two clear halves• From staple foods to cash crops• The diversification mantra• He who controls food controls the world• Genetically-modified crops• Control through research• Profit-securing crops• Privatization of research• Value-added exports• Tea from Luxembourg• Part of our culture, part of their business• One man took up the courage …

• Also see Part 1 – From British Colonialism to WTO Rules and Privatization

Water conservation

Devinder Sharma. Photo by NicPaget-Clarke.

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In Motion Magazine: You have written about some possibletechniques or strategies for change: traditional farming practices,tuning agriculture technology to the needs of people, micro-credit,and water conservation. Can you talk about them?

Devinder Sharma: There is no denying that these four sectors arevery important. But if you look at it the way we are being told to, weshould not follow our own traditionally applicable and time-testedtechnologies and methodologies, which are suitable to the country’sneeds and to the environment.

Let’s look at water. We have in India a watershed program whichtalks about conserving water. In India, the rainwater comes in ahundred hours, in the three months of the monsoon season, that iswhere we get 90% of our rainfall. In America, it’s intermittentthroughout the year. For us, it is very important to conserve that rainwater, so we are saying that weshould follow water harvesting technologies. But the tragedy is the water harvesting methodologies wefollow in India are actually borrowed from America.

The Tennessee Valley Authority in America has a water harvesting structure, which is called “ridge tovalley”. That model was adopted by India. Since 1982, we have been propagating this water-harvesting model, supported by the World Bank and IMF and it has spread throughout the country. Butthe tragedy is that model is alien technology for India. It can never work for an Indian environmentbecause it is not suitable for India. It was suitable for American conditions. And look at the irony, todaythe American Texas A&M University is using the water harvesting model of Chennai (south-easternIndia) in their own research farms whereas we are using the American technology.

So, unfortunately, we have no faith in our technologies. When I was taught agriculture, all that I wastaught was that, “Your agriculture is substandard. Your agriculture is backward. Your agriculture isdependent on monsoon. The only way for you to grow is to follow the American or developed model of agriculture.” So, the mindset has been tuned to that. For us, all that we did in Indian agriculture was

backward. But these (developed) technologies have caused lots of problems as we all know, now.

Agriculture technology

Number two is the system of agriculture technology. We are being told that the world needs to producefor a world population that will go up to 1.4 billion by year 2015. Therefore, the world needs to producemore and therefore you need genetic engineering. This is going on all over the world. But the reality isin a country like India, we are asking our farmers not to produce more because they have no place tokeep it.

In India, there is a new phenomenon, which has begun called “produce and perish”. Farmers produceand because there are no buyers they perish. They commit suicide. And we are being told we have to

produce more. There is something wrong somewhere. Both things don’t go side by side. So,agriculture technology, again it has to come from the Western companies, the Western NGOs.

Micro-credit

Self-help groups, the women groups are something which came up from Grameen Bank, and so on,and we have taken that thing (micro-credit) and multiplied it without even realizing whether it was goodor bad. I see no reason why the poor should get a loan, a credit from the bank at 24%, which theGrameen Bank provides. I see no reason why the corporate houses in India should get a credit at 6%rate of interest. The more they are poor, the higher the rate of interest.

There was a debate in parliament, two days back, and in that debate one of our ex-Prime Ministers

was very emotionally talking about the farmers getting credit at 14%, whereas the rich or middle classis getting the credit at 6 to 8 %. I told him subsequently that you are worried about 14%, which thefarmers are getting, which of course is bad, but look at the tribals in the Kalahandi belt. Nobody can

A villager collecting water from a wellin western Tamil Nadu. Photo by NicPaget-Clarke.

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imagine that those poor who are hungry, who die of starvation and hunger, when they go to themoney-lenders to take credit, the rate of interest is 460%. I’m sure even if Monsanto was to pay a rateof interest of 460% the company would collapse. And we expect those poor to come out of the povertytrap?

All our focus is to ensure that the rich get the credit much cheaper, and then we believe in the trickle-down effect. It is the poor who are being taxed, whoare being exploited in all these games. If you are ableto pass on that benefit to the poor, I’m sure the poor can do miracles. But that is not happening

Traditional farming practices

The last issue you mentioned was traditional farmingpractices – which they think is a bad idea. “It is notsustainable. It will not feed the country.” We have beengiven to understand that, “Your food production willcollapse if you go in for traditional farming practices.”

Please tell me where in the world, and I’m talking of the rich world, do we have a technology which suits afarmer in 1.47 hectares? And still we are being toldthat technology which is applicable for 200 hectares isgood for 1.47 hectares. That dichotomy I can’t understand.

There are traditional farming systems in India that nobody wants to take on because they think thatthey are backward. Essentially, the word is they are backward and they are substandard. But if youlook at it, 70% of India is still following traditional farming practices. They are the ones who are farmingin inhospitable areas. Only 30 percent of India is what is called assured-irrigation. That is the GreenRevolution belt. So 70% of India is still following traditional farming practices. Their focus should be toimprove those traditional farming practices rather than to displace those farmers or those systems bythe modern technology, the so-called high-tech technology.

Let me give another comparison here, America is considered to be a place which has verysophisticated technology. 2002 was a year when America faced the worst drought since the 1930s.2002 was also a year when India faced the worst drought since the nineteenth century. Both thecountries faced a severe drought. It is time to compare these countries. If you look at America, 26 of your 50 states suffered from drought. In India, 13 of the 30 states suffered from drought. In America,the agriculture production fell down by 30%. In India it fell down by 18%.

I remember going to America and finding that there were farmers praying in churches in rural areas,praying for the rain gods to smile. There were farmers who sold off their ranches. Farmers who sold off their cattle. There was a terrible shortfall of fodder. President Bush diverted $150 million of milk to feedthe cattle. The so-called precision farming in America collapsed. We talk of precision farming inAmerica, you apply fertilizer and pesticides where it is needed, your rainfall is intermittent throughoutthe year so there should be no problem of water. You have sprinklers, drip irrigation and so forth. Butlook at what happened. North Carolina was fighting with South Carolina over water. In a number of states, irrigation of kitchen gardens and washing cars was banned. It didn’t happen in India. Whichmeans that technology is not the one which we should adopt in India. Despite the cost andsophistication, it didn’t work in America. With one drought it failed.

So why do we adopt the same system here? We are sitting right now in Delhi, if you go to the IndiaAgriculture Research Institute they are going to launch a research project for precision farming. Theyare going to spend three crore rupees, which means 30 million rupees to do a research project onprecision farming because the Americans are doing it. Is that that the requirement for India?

Cyclic Mode of Development

Farming in western Tamil Nadu. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.

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The soil is hungry. The ecology has gone bad. The capacity to produce of the soil has gone downdrastically, and so on.

But now the farmers are reverting back. Many farmers in that state are reverting back to traditionalfarming practices. They realize that all these experiments they did in the Green Revolution period havedone damage. People are trying to go back.

It may be a small experiment but I always believe as Neil Armstrong said, when he stepped on themoon, “A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.” As Hillary Clinton also said once, “It takes avillage,” then another village, then another village -the multiplier effect- and a revolution is born. I amvery hopeful about that.

Village republics

In Motion Magazine: So, there’s actual political,democratic involvement of the individuals within these

villages?

Devinder Sharma: In the villages? Yes, but not at thenational scene.

In Motion Magazine: It’s growing?

Devinder Sharma: Slowly.

In Motion Magazine: From active involvement by people?

Devinder Sharma: I will give you one example. India has about 600,000 villages. And we know thecondition of the villages. But, can you believe, roughly 1,500-plus of India’s villages have actually putsignboards outside their village saying, “If you are a government employee, or a company official,please don’t walk in.”

And it hasn’t happened as a movement. It has happened sporadically. They are all spread over thecountry, these 1,500 villages. These are the villages, which have become complete, what I call, asvillage republics. They are self-sufficient. They don’t need anybody’s support.

And 1500, my God, is not a small number. If that 1,500 multiplies to 3,000 in the years to come, justsee what will happen to this country. We don’t need external support. What all those villages aresaying is, “Please don’t come up with these external supports to use. We have had enough.”

“Engineer bureaucrat and contractor friendly”

In Motion Magazine: In the implementation of some of these efforts for sustainable development, youhave talked about them disparagingly as “engineer bureaucrat and contractor friendly”. What is abetter way of developing sustainable agriculture?

Devinder Sharma: It has to be based on the local needs, the local environment, the local capacity of the farmers, and local technology. And that is what has been amply demonstrated.

Just to give an example, if you look at WTO negotiations, every time Frank Fischler, the EuropeanUnion Agriculture Commissioner, talks about the kinds of things that he is doing under WTO, “Thedeveloping country farmer will gain.” But the tragedy has been that when, two years back, Frank

Fischler came to India that was the first time he had ever visited a developing country. He has alwaysbeen talking about the benefits to developing countries, yet even when he came to India he did notmeet farmers. He doesn’t even know what the farmers of India look like. Sitting there in Brussels, or in

Banner in western Tamil Nadu . Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.

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Geneva, or in Washington we tend to believe, “This is wonderful. What we are doing will help thefarmers.”

I think that is the greatest tragedy, because we are basically uneducated and if we go to these farmerswe can learn from them. They carry with them hundreds or thousands of years of experience. I thinkthe world should go backwards and learn from them rather than think that they are backward and poor so they need to be taught.

That was the biggest tragedy of the Green Revolution model. The Green Revolution Model talkedabout “lab to land”, it didn’t talk of “land to land”, and that is why you find all these problems coming upall over the world wherever Green Revolution is followed.

When I was a student of the Green Revolution model, I was taught the land grant model of education,and it tended to believe, “We need to disseminate this information to the farmers.” It takes farmers asa bloc of unread illiterates who don’t know about all these things. “They have to be educated.”Whereas, these people have tremendous wisdom with them. That was what the Green Revolutionshould have got back. But they didn’t and look where the world is heading.

In a country like ours, which is a land of contrasts -- India is truly a subcontinent, as we all know -- youcan find all kinds of experiments, which could have been done. You could have answers to all kind of things that you are looking all over the world for. There are sustainable answers with people and wenever went back to them. We never want to learn from them. It is shameful if a man with a PhD goesand sits with a farmer and learns something.

Leading the world into two clear halves

In Motion Magazine: How would you compare the state of liberalization at the time you wrote thebook, in 1992, and now?

Devinder Sharma: When I came out with my book on agriculture and WTO / GATT, it was dubbed as

an analysis which was extreme, not true for India, “India is going to gain” and so on and forth. In fact,the Indian Finance Minister subsequently said, “That book has been written by somebody who never read the GATT Agreement.” There were lots of comments about me.

In the subsequent title of this book, the next edition, it was called, “GATT/WTO Seeds of Despair”. Iwas very clear that there’s going to be a negative thing for us. Interestingly, the government of India,two years back, published a document which was released in Delhi in a forum to which it invitedfarmer leaders, political leaders and the NGOs. The document says, it was evaluating the WTOAgreement on Agriculture, that all the hopes and expectations from opening up under WTO have beenbelied.

The government of India took seven or eight years to realize that this was negatively impacting us. Ithink anyone who had a keen insight into the political economy, the way the world was moving, couldsee where it was moving. I’m glad now the book is being dug out. Lots of people are taking it out andtrying to see what was said there. It is now coming out to be true. In fact, all that I have said is nowcoming out to be true. It is nothing to be complimenting oneself, the only thing I am trying to say is if you are dispassionately trying to analyze the realities, knowing the political situation going on, you cansee where the world is moving.

The liberalization process is leading the world into two clear halves, whether it is through WTO or through the financial institutions of World Bank and IMF. It is now forcing the world to move on to astage where the staple foods will be produced by the OECD countries. The rest of the world will mainlyproduce products or crops which will meet the luxury requirements of people in the Western countries.

From staple foods to cash crops

In Motion Magazine: Like what?

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What will happen now is the new products that are coming up are also coming up with stronger intellectual property rights. First of all, we don’t have the technology. The technology is in the hands of the Western companies, so the new crop seeds that come from them would have to be bought by us.We have no escape. And they have already ensured things like Terminator ( editor: a genetically-engineered seed which only produces for one generation ) which is now no longer a concept, it is aproduct. We will have terminator and seeds that you can program to insure that production goes up or

goes down.

Control through research

Then you have the control – control through research. One way is you force the countries to open upso that you can remove the barriers -- the trade can push the food grains. But another aspect, which isworrisome for the West is there are countries like India and China that still have a very powerful andformative research infrastructure in the public sector. India has the second biggest researchinfrastructure in the world after China. This is a system which can use its expertise to grow crops andat least meet the food security requirement. So, the best way is to dismantle this system.

At an international level there is the CGIAR, the Consultative Group on International Agriculture

Research. They are under tremendous attack from the multinational corporations because they findthem to be the first obstacle. So they will go. We know that their days are numbered.

The next attack is going to be on ICR, the Indian Council for Agricultural Research, which has about31 agricultural universities and about 81 national institutes. They have about 30,000 agriculturalscientists employed. But that system is being destabilized through intellectual property rights.

Let me give you one example. Rice is a crop which originates from India along with the Japaneseregion. It is Indo-Japanese. That is why it is classified in two categories, indica and japonica. But nowthe rice genome has been mapped. We don’t need the varieties that we’ve got in India. What we neednow is the genes. The genes are mapped, cloned, and intellectual property rights control exist – they(patents) have been taken out by companies in the Western part of the world.

India was recently requiring one gene of rice to be incorporated into rice. We actually went to Japan tobuy their gene. We spent 30 lakh rupees which would mean three million rupees to buy one gene. Itdidn’t work. Imagine if India was to start buying genes in a country where you can’t even pay the staff salaries today. The research infrastructure goes redundant after a few years. We are fast moving to anarena where the research will be stifled, so the private companies take over. We have the entire seedindustry moving into India because there is a huge market here.

As I said earlier, we have a 110 million landholdings,557 million farmers, only 10 percent of our farmersreplace seed every year which means only ten percentof the farmers buy seed every year. 90 percent stillsave seed. So, through terminator and other seeds

these companies control, steer the market. The firstTerminator crop will be available on the market in theyear 2004.

Profit-securing crops

In Motion Magazine: I think you have changed your opinion on GMOs over the years. You seemed moreopen to it in your first book?

Devinder Sharma: Basically, I am a geneticist. I didmy genetics on plant breeding and I too was very fascinated by this science. Over the years lots of

people have asked me this question. Why have I changed my opinion about GMOs? I think as you goalong you see what is happening. You see the politics. You see the mischief. You see themanipulations being enacted. You realize that this technology is not for the welfare of the farming

A large puppet, part of a protest against genetically-engineered crops at Monsanto's headquarters, St. Louis,Missouri. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.

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communities of the developing countries. Therefore, your stand also starts hardening knowing thepolitics that is prevailing. It is not because of the technology. The technology per se is wonderful and Istill have great hopes on that, but the technology has gone into the wrong hands. What do you do withthat? The tragedy, as I have written in many of my articles, is that the public sector scientists shouldstand up and say herbicide tolerant plants ( editor: e.g. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybeans ) is notwhat we require, and they fail to say so.

You will have more and more such kinds of products coming into the country which are not required.They doesn’t boost your productivity. They don’t increase your production. They only insure profit for the company – they are basically profit-securing crops. It is not food security they are talking about it isprofit security. Scientists have helped the companies profit security – that is what my worry is.

Privatization of research

In Motion Magazine: Could you talk some more about the privatization of research, in the context of the privatization of the world? Why is that significant?

Devinder Sharma: It is very significant. When we had the land grant university coming up in America,

India also adopted the land grant model from. The land grant universities in America. were essentiallypublic sector controlled.

I read a report, that said there are 535 plant breeders working on corn in America today. Of which only30 are n the public sector. The rest are in the private sector. This gives you an idea.

When I was a student of agriculture, plant breeding, the Mecca of plant breeding was an institute inEngland called the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge. The Plant Breeding Institute was an institutewhich was a public sector institute. It was an institute which was getting £6 million from the U.K.government as support, but returning £10 million a year to the government. It was not a loss-makingunit. But Margaret Thatcher sold off that institute to Unilever. Unilever sold it off to Monsanto. Todaythat institute is gone. Imagine when these kinds of privatizations start taking place all over the world.

In India, these public sector institutes are at least covered by the democratic norms. At least thegovernment can tell, “Look, you should be working on wheat. This is a disease that has erupted. Youshould be working on it.” But tomorrow, if it is privately controlled, who can tell that institute to work?

In a country like India, where the crops are so diverse, where the landholding size is so small, wherethe insect and the pest attack is virulent because we are in a tropical world, we need to have publicsector controlled research which looks beyond profits. Unfortunately that is going away. We may bethe last bastion left. Essentially, all countries in my neighborhood are also giving up. It is privatizationof research and that research will not be on these kinds of crops we are talking about. They will bemore acting as a service center for the companies in the Western hemisphere. For instance, Monsantorequires some experiments to be done in India, these will become the service centers to do thatresearch.

Value-added exports

In Motion Magazine: You were talking about how the WTO was encouraging diversification amongdeveloping countries, is that similar to the British banning, in India, the local manufacture of cloth?

Devinder Sharma: You are very right. That is a legacy which still continues. It is very interesting.Cotton was not a major crop of India before the British found that America cotton was not coming.America stopped supplying cotton for the Manchester industry in Britain. So, they diverted attention toIndia. Cotton erupted in India and it was shipped directly from here to Britain.

I think it makes economic sense to have set up a manufacturing plant in India rather than to ship it allthe way to England. But they didn’t want that profit to be shared with the Indians. Of course, we were acolony at that time and no colonial master will do that, but even now it is not being done. If you look at

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the way the way the WTO is doing things, it is just to ensure that the raw material comes from this partof the world. It goes to that part of the world and then it is “value-added” -- the terminology now beingused is “value-added” -- and beautifully packed, and then it comes back to us with much more price,and intellectual property rights, and so on, and so forth.

Tea from Luxembourg

Let me give you an example. There are three countries which would top the production chart for tea inthe world. That is India, Sri Lanka, and Kenya. They are the three countries which are the major producers of tea. But I’m sure if I were to ask you a question, “Which are the major exporters of tea,you will have an answer.”

In Motion Magazine: I would think it was India.

Devinder Sharma: That is what everybody would think. The biggest exporters of tea are Luxembourg,Belgium and Britain. They don’t grow tea.

In Motion Magazine: So how do they get it there?

Devinder Sharma: That is what is very interesting. Because they value add then pack it their valuegoes up. They become a big exporter of tea than us. We export the raw material. They pack it. Theyvalue add it – you can find hundreds of kinds of tea now if you go to the tea shops anywhere in theWest, mango tea, lychee tea, all the flavors – they add those values and they ultimately market it.

If you look at oranges, we export orange skin to Holland and Holland makes something and exports itto the rest of the world. They are the kind of valuations that are going on. Interestingly the secondbiggest exporter of agriculture products in the world is Holland. And Holland is not even of the size of Punjab.

That is the way the world is moving. To us that is a cause for worry because in our country we are not

worried about exports we are worried about our food security needs – feeding the poor. Everything isnow being looked at by way of how much you can export. It is agribusiness.

Part of our culture, part of their business

In India it is agriculture. If you go to Punjab, they say the only culture of Punjab is agriculture. That iswhat we were actually using agriculture as. It is part of our culture. Whereas, for the West it is part of their business, it is industry, for us, it is part of our livelihood, part of our life. That is the difference andthat is why I suppose there is a clash.

If you look at rice, for instance, rice doesn’t mean anything to an average American except for what hegets in the market or what he eats. But in India rice has tremendous cultural, religious roles. I get

married and the rice is in every kind of ceremony that Iinvolve – rice is there. It is part of our culture,upbringing. And now we are being asked to diversefrom that. Under modern systems – this is allbackwards.

One man took up the courage …

In Motion Magazine: Indians are in a very goodposition to see how the free trade rules are similar tothe British rule?

Devinder Sharma: That’s right. It is basically divideand rule. I think the British were very smart. But thereis a ray of hope here, again with the British system.

Visiting the Gandhi Samadhi at the Mahatma GandhiMemorial Park, New Delhi. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.

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And I have always being saying that. The British empire was a very ruthless empire. As we saidearlier, the sun would never set on the British empire. But, one man took up the courage, and therewas no media like today, one man took up the courage and the empire crumbled.

In Motion Magazine: Can you talk a little about his philosophy (Mohandas K. Gandhi) and how thatapplies today?

Devinder Sharma: I am very hopeful. Lots of people have asked me, the multinationals are a very bigforce. I said they are not bigger than the British empire at that time. Not in terms of money, butruthlessness. What the British had at that time … people could disappear, nobody would ask aquestion to the British government. But, today, if people disappear there are a whole lot of humanrights groups and civil society groups and the media and so on – it is very difficult. I don’t mean itdoesn’t happen but it is very difficult today. And there can be movements born after that.

But look at that one man and the empire crumbled. I am very hopeful today it will not be one man, itcan be ten men, but the multinational empire can also crumble. That is again a legacy, a lesson thathas to be learned. That is why I was very keen that you should see the Mahatma Samadhi (MahatmaGandhi Memorial Park). That is where you can get some inspiration.

Somebody who came from Britain, I had some time, I took him around to Mahatma Samadhi and hesat down with me in that garden, on that lawn, and then he asked me this question: “Is it where youget your inspiration?” I said, “I don’t know about that, but I know one thing, that whenever I come tothis place I know if this man could do it, a hundred of us can do it now.” All it needs is one plus one.One plus one becomes eleven. And somebody said, one plus one plus one becomes one hundred andeleven. That’s the way it multiplies. I am very hopeful.

Return to Part 1 – From British Colonialism to WTO Rules and Privatization

Also see:

• Assessing the Risks of Genetic EngineeringSuper weeds, non-target impacts, horizontal gene transfer Interview with plant geneticist Dr. Doreen StabinskyAuckland, Aotearoa / New Zealand

• Genetic Engineering index of articles

• Bill Gates' Rescue Package: Flogging a Dead Horseby Devinder SharmaNew Delhi, India

• Extended series of interviews and articles from the United Nations World Summit onSustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, August 26 - September 4, 2002

Published in In Motion Magazine November 11, 2003

Interview with Vandana ShivaThe Role of Patents in the Rise of Globalization

“The recovery of economic democracyis at the heart of recovery of democracy itself.”

New Delhi, India

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Dr. Vandana Shiva is founder of both the ResearchFoundation for Science Technology and Ecology, anindependent public industry research group, andNavdanya a grassroots conservation movement inIndia. This interview was conducted by Nic Paget-Clarke on August 27, 2003 for In Motion Magazine in

New Delhi, India. • A twist in the history of patents• Control of the technology• The role of patents• Globalization of U.S. patent laws• Patents regulate life• Medicine: from healing to profits• Ecology and equity• From theoretical physicist to advocate for

biodiversity • Agriculture and violence• Focus on biotechnology and patenting• The influence of Gandhi • The death of economic democracy• The recovery of economic democracy• The flow of wealth from South to North• From ownership of land to ownership of

biodiversity • War is globalization by other means

A twist in the history of patents

In Motion Magazine: I think sometimes people’seyes glaze over when hearing about patents andlegal matters, but in your book “Protect or Plunder –Understanding Intellectual Property Rights” youdescribe some interesting history, about howoriginally patents were used to spread technologybut now they have been turned into their opposite.Could you outline how that twist happened?

Vandana Shiva: In the early days, the word patentwas used for two things. In the case of getting holdof territory, what were issued by kings and queenswere letters-patent, which were open letters. Anyonecould know that Columbus had been given a right byQueen Isabel and King Ferdinand to conquer andtake over any territory on their behalf.

But the second meaning, defined around the sametime by the Venetian laws on patent, which were thefirst patent laws, was that a master craftsman couldbe brought (to a country), because technology atthat time was craft technology, and if a country couldnot make glass they would give to the master craftsman apprentices and say, “Train our people in

this art.” “Train our people to make glass.” “Train our people to make steel.” “Train our people to make

Vandana Shiva at a press conference with other leaders of an anti-WTO march in New Delhi, August 27, 2003 . Allphotos by Nic Paget-Clarke.

Marching with former Indian prime ministers.

A soldier of the Indian Army provides security for the former prime minsiters marching in the anti-WTO rally in New Delhi.

On the march in New Delhi.

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textiles”, and we will give you an exclusive right (to mak e these products) for seven years while youare training people.

The period of the patent was seven years because it too k seven years to learn a craft. After that seve nyears was over, the master craftsman went back to whe rever he belonged and you had all theapprentices available in the country to spread that techn ology as a free public good. This was thepattern throughout the early use of patent law.

Then you get slow shifts with the rise of industrialism. As big industry became a major economicinterest, they started to use technology as an instrumen t of monop oly. Patents became the way to say,“Only we will use this technology”.

The way they expanded this power was, on the one han d, exten ding the life of patents. It went fromseven years to fourteen. Now, under WTO (World Trade Organiz ation), for the first time it is twentyyears -- extendible in a period where technologies are b ecoming so obsolete that if you have that kindof monopoly for twenty years you are totally controlling t he techn ology.

And the second thing is constantly increasing the domai n over which patents will apply. For example,

in India’s patent law agriculture could not be touched. A griculture was free of monopolies. And inmedicine you could not have a product monopoly. You could not monopolize a medicine but you couldmonopolize a method of making a medicine. But, medic ine has b een brought into monopolies. Seedhas been brought into monopolies. Cells have brought i nto mono polies. Genes have been brought intomonopolies. Animals have been brought into monopolie s.

Basically, the ’80s saw a twist in this and a lot of it had t o do with the rise of the big industry and their convergence into one set of giants, which are the health giants, the pharmaceutical giants, t he genegiants controlling all life.

Control of the technology

In Motion Magazine: You’ve also said that with the rise of other countries in the world, with their ownmanufacturing systems, markets started to slip away bu t the dev eloped countries still had control of the technology?

Vandana Shiva: The thing was that when we were livin g in a world based on crafts, transferringtechnology was the objective. But as the world got industrialized, as developing countries shed thecolonial burden, imperialistic patent law started to develop.

For example, again India, under a 1970 law, developed a very stro ng medical sector. And I think if WTO had not come on the horizon, India would be providing cheap medicine to American citizens. It’scapable of doing that. But the American citizens, and the African citizens, and the Brazilian citizens,and in the future the India citizens are being told, “You will only buy from these monopolies.” It was away to de-industrialize Southern countries who had started to build capacity, technological capacity for themselves.

The role of patents

In Motion Magazine: So patents have had a very specific role in the latest version of imperialism, inthis globalization phase?

Vandana Shiva: If you want to have one tool for imperialistic control, it’s patent law under the WTOagreement. It’s in my view the worst of the WTO agreements. It is a totally coercive tool. It has only anegative function: to prevent others from doing their own thing; to prevent people from having food; toprevent people from having medicine; to prevent countries from having technological capacity. It is anegative tool for creating underdevelopment.

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It’s the privatization of knowledge. I have called it the enclosure, the ultimate enclosure. We hadenclosures of land. Now, we are seeing enclosures of biodiversity, life itself. In my book “Biopiracy”,I’ve talked about how this is the last colony. It is the spaces within our minds -- for knowledge. Thespaces within life forms for reproduction. A seed cannot reproduce without permission of the patentholder and the company. Knowledge cannot be transmitted without permission and license collection.It’s rent collection from life. It’s rent collection from being human, and thinking, and knowing.

Globalization of U.S. patent laws

In Motion Magazine: How has the WTO been a forum for the globalization of U.S. patent laws?

Vandana Shiva: The WTO has an agreement called Trade Related Intellectual Property Rightsagreement (TRIPs), which basically is nothing more than globalization of U.S.-style laws. And itsglobalization of U.S.-style laws both in content and in process. In terms of content, in the late ’80swhen this law was drafted, the United States was the only country that granted patents on life forms.This precedent was set in a 1980 decision on a genetically-engineered micro-organism, subsequent towhich was the rise of the biotech industry. The granting of life patents was seen as an imperative bothby the industry as well as the government. The U.S. government actually encouraged life patenting.

The decision-making was set by the courts, rather than by Congress, never with a public debate,never with a public policy decision on the ethical implications, ecological implications, economicimplications of what life patents mean.

The second way in which this is a globalization of U.S. law is the fact that it was really U.S. companieswhich got together, drafted the law, took it to the U.S. administration, then took it to the secretariat of the at-that-time General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), which was the precursor of WTO,and as Monsanto, which was one of the companies in the intellectual property coalition admitted indrafting this law, “We achieved something unprecedented. We were the patient, the diagnostician, andthe physician all in one.

Patents regulate life

With the broadening of patents to life forms, patents do not just regulate technology they regulate life.They regulate economy. They regulate basic needs. A patent is an exclusive right to make, produce,distribute, or sell the patented product. So, if a patent is granted, for example, on seed it means afarmer who grows a seed cannot save seed from the harvested crop because that is constituted asmaking the seed and the exclusive right to the seed belongs to the company. It means seed-saving byfarmers is now defined as intellectual property theft. Many farmers in the United States have beensued by the corporations for doing something normal in farming, which is saving their seed.

Exchanging seed with your neighbor, which is called brown-bagging -- it was not a commercialexercise; it was a mutual give-and-take in society; a social act of exchange for non-profit activity -- hasalso been defined as an infringement because now distributing is covered by a patent, even if it is notcommercial, because the companies interpret that by exchanging seed you are taking the market

away from them.

Medicine: from healing to profits

Also, patents can be given for medicine. For example, in the case of medicine, if there is no patent wecan treat people with AIDS with $200 expenditure per year. Indian companies can make it for that costbecause they can make them as generic drugs. They are not piracy drugs, which is the way the U.S.pharmaceutical industry talks about them. They are generic in the sense that different processes havebeen used. The same medicine, the same retroviral, costs $20,000 in the United States because of patenting -- that is the only difference. Which means something which is being made for $200 is beingsold to consumers for not just ten times but a hundred times the price. As our prime minister said, thebig companies are trying to turn the matter of disease from healing into a matter of profits.

There was an attempt made, at the beginning of the TRIPs negotiations, to make it look like the lower-cost production that could happen in the absence of monopolies was piracy. The industry managed to

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define piracy as absence of monopolies. We want to define monopoly as monopoly and recognize thatthings like seeds should be accessible to farmers, things like medicine should be accessible to thosewho are dying of AIDS, and no regime in the world can put profits above people’s lives.

In Motion Magazine: Are the same corporations controlling food and health?

Vandana Shiva: It’s the same companies. The industry that used to be the chemical industry is alsothe pharmaceutical industry, is also the seed industry, is also the biotech industry. There is noseparation -- and agro-chemical industry. It is all one.

Ecology and equity

In Motion Magazine: You made the statement in your book on patents that there’s always aconnection between ecology and equity. Can you talk about that?

Vandana Shiva: Ecology is about interactions in the natural world, sustainability of resources.Whether you look at water, you look at biodiversity, you look at anything, conservation happens.Environmental sustainability takes place when people have a stake and a share in the rewards of theconserved resource. If people have the ability to drink water from a well, and look after that well, andwill suffer the consequences of contamination, they will not contaminate that well. People who pollutea well or a river are the ones who don’t have to drink from it.

Similarly, when it comes to monopolies on intellectual property, conservation is what is sacrificed. It’sthe small peasants of the world who have conserved biodiversity. If they have to continue conservingbiodiversity, they need to have their rights defended. They need to be able to know that when theyplant basmati rice it will be their reward to harvest that basmati. They will not be treated as pieces of RiceTec property. And they need to have a market for their produce.

Intellectual property destabilizes both, and in fact, starts to become an incentive for destruction of biodiversity by pressures of the industry for monocultures, on the one hand, but also by not giving

people a chance to protect the resources from which they make a living because they are no moretheir resources.

That is why ecology goes hand-in-hand with equity.

From theoretical physicist to advocate for biodiversity

In Motion Magazine: Could you go over how you started in the field of physics and then ended upwhere you are today and how that relates to your organizing?

Vandana Shiva: I chose to be a physicist. I loved physics from an age when I didn’t even know whatthe content was but I knew I wanted to figure out how nature works. Einstein was my hero. This is

what inspired me.

I lived through life training to be a physicist, initially training to be a nuclear physicist and then realizingthere’s a dark side to it. I left that to become a theoretical physicist. I worked in foundations of quantumtheory.

As is typical, I was doing my Ph.D. in Canada and everyone who goes from the South as a scientiststays on and becomes a university professor and I could see, “That’s what I will become.” I wanted tobecome that. But I said, “I’m not informed enough about how my society works. There is a question inmy mind. We have the third biggest scientific community in the world. We are among the poorest of countries. Science and technology is supposed to create growth, remove poverty. Where is the gap?Why is science and technology not removing poverty?” I wanted to answer that question to myself.

I said, “I will take off three years. Look at science policy issues. Be a little more educated, socially, andthen go back to physics.” That was my chosen life path. I was, in any way, involved in forest protection

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in the Himalayas, my home, before I went for a Ph.D. I constantly volunteered with a movement of women called Chipko .

But when I started to work on science and technology issues, I realized very quickly that they areabout resource control. They are not about efficiency. A big trawler in the sea is not more efficient thana small boat. It controls more resources. And denies the small boat.

Green Revolution farming is not more efficient. It takes more water and leaves other areas deprived of financial investment, water inputs, everything else. What you really see is technology acting as, what Icalled in that period, a polarizer of resource access. Very quickly I started to realize that technologyissues, ecology issues, social inequality issues, were actually very intimately connected. I did a lot of analysis/writing at that point and I was invited by the United Nations to carry these issues further.

Meantime, the Ministry of Environment, seeing some of my reports, commissioned me to look atmining in my valley. I had just had my son, the 21-year-old boy who is walking around (in the officewhere this interview took place), and I said “perfect”. I had lost my mother at that time, so I said “I willgo back, look at this mining, make a break in my science policy, also make a short break from myreturn to physics. Do the study. He’ll be a little older. But I will also do more work on ecology and thegrassroots movement. Did the study. We stopped the mine.

Agriculture and violence

I started to do the United Nations work and a huge world unfolded. The Punjab crisis burst whichforced me to look at agriculture, ecology issues of agriculture, but also the rise of terrorism linked tounequal development. I wrote my book called “The Violence of the Green Revolution”.

1984 was the year I started to look very, very closely at those issues because we’d had genocide inPunjab. We’d lost our prime minister in that terrorism, which eventually killed 30,000 people. And itwas the year of Bhopal. As a result of that gas leak from a pesticide plant, 30,000 people more havedied.

So, I was just surrounded by these mega-violent epidemics all linked to agriculture and agriculture thatwas supposed to be progressive. In 1984, I decided that something was wrong and I needed to go tothe roots of it. Why has agriculture gone so violent? Why are we so dependent on pesticides --weapons of mass destruction? The real weapons of mass destruction because they did move from thewar industry into agriculture.

Focus on biotechnology and patenting

After three of four years of looking more closely at agriculture issues, I started to get called intobiotechnology seminars because it was the next step. In ’87, at one of these seminars, the industrylaid out its grand dream of controlling the world. They talked about needing genetic engineering so thatthere’s a technology that they have that peasants can’t use so that they can have a monopoly throughtechnology. Patents. Because without it they cannot consolidate power.

That was said by Sandoz. Sandoz merged later with Ceiber-Geigy. Sandoz and Ceiber-Geigy becameNovartis. Novartis merged with AstroZeneca, which was anyway two independent companies, earlier.All of them merged to become Syngenta. What they had said at that time was, “By the turn of thecentury we will be five.” In ’87, I said, “I don’t want to live in a world where five giant companies controlour health and our food.”

I dropped everything else. I left my work on dams and forests and mines. I was doing very broad-scalework on the environment movement then. Dropped everything else. Handed it over to the nextgeneration -- and they were brilliant activists in India -- and moved into a focus on two things:biotechnology and patenting.

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I tracked the whole TRIPs negotiations through and have followed the biotech industry from the day itwanted to become a giant industry. I have tried to do my best to defend the freedom of people; createseed banks so that farmers have free seed; nature has freedom of diversity; and these monopolies arerestrained.

Since 1987 to now, which is 16 years, I have had a single pointed attention to prevent imperialism over life itself.

The influence of Gandhi

In Motion Magazine: When you are working with the various farmers’ organizations, various massorganizations, specifically in India do people consciously learn from what Gandhi had to say? (Seephoto of Gandhi's working room, the Harijan Ashram by the Sabarmati River, Ahmedabad, Gujarat,India.)

Vandana Shiva: Definitely. People very, very much learn from what Gandhi had said. When I broughtthe TRIPs issues for the first time to farmers’ organizations in India, in ’91 when the first draft of theWTO texts were ready, it was called the Dunkel draft text, I started to tell people what this would imply.

It took no time: by ’92, ’93, we had giant farmer rallies. And the title (of the movement) was the SeedSatyagraha -- the non-violent, non-cooperation with laws that create seed monopolies, inspired totallyby Gandhi walking to the Dandi Beach and picking the salt and saying, “You can’t monopolize thiswhich we need for life.”

On the non-cooperation side we were very inspired by Gandhi. But also on the constructive side, theother side of our work with farmers and farm groups is the creative side of saving seeds, doingagriculture without corporate dependence -- without chemicals, without their seed. All this is talkedabout in the language that Gandhi left us as a legacy.

We work with three key concepts. (One) Swadeshi -- which means the capacity to do your own thing --produce your own food, produce your own goods.

(Two) Swaraj -- to govern yourself. And we fight on three fronts -- water, food, and seed. JalSwaraj --JalSwaraj is water independence -- water freedom and water sovereignty. Anna Swaraj is foodfreedom, food sovereignty. And Bija Swaraj is seed freedom and seed sovereignty.

(In regard to these fronts) Swa means self -- that which rises from the self and is very, very much adeep notion of freedom. I believe that these concepts, which are deep, deep, deep in Indiancivilization, Gandhi resurrected them to fight for freedom. They are very important for today’s worldbecause so far what we’ve had is centralized state rule, giving way now to centralized corporatecontrol, and we need a third alternate. That third alternate is, in part, citizens being able to tell their states, “This is what your function is. This is what your obligations are,” and being able to have their states act on corporations to say, “This is something you cannot do.”

The third component is Satyagraha, non-cooperation, basically saying, “We will do our thing and anylaw that tries to say that us being free is illegal we will have to not cooperate with it. We will defend our freedoms to have access to water, access to seed, access to food, access to medicine.”

The death of economic democracy

In Motion Magazine: Last time we spoke, you were talking about how to make democracy moreviable and you were saying that it comes down to individual participation at an economic level. Howwould that function?

Vandana Shiva: Well, actually any real, true democracy is one in which people can determine theconditions of their living -- their food, their health, their jobs, their livelihoods. These are defined aseconomic issues. They used to be covered by democratic governance of the representative kind to theextent that before globalization, if you voted someone to power you could put demands on that

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representative to say, “We need a school in this community, and if you promise you get us a school weare with you.” By and large, it was possible for politicians to come back and deliver their promisebecause it was within the national sovereign space.

But globalization has meant the erosion of national sovereign space. For example, under theagreement on agriculture nobody can guarantee a price to a farmer. Governments cannot go tofarmers and say, “We will make sure you get a living price for your farm commodities.” They cannot goto a community and say, “We will defend your jobs and prevent them from being undermined andcompanies running off to some cheap overseas site.” They cannot offer guarantees on education, theycannot offer healthcare -- the typical things democracy was made of.

What we’ve seen is a split of democracy. It’s been emptied out of its economic content, been left with arepresentative shell of electoral theatrics -- literally.

Economic decisions have moved out of the hands of citizens and even of the hands of countries andmoved into organizations controlled by corporations like the WTO, and the World Bank, the IMF(International Monetary Fund), and the corporations themselves. What we have is economicdictatorship combined with representative democracy. But representative democracy under economicdictatorship is not able to counter that dictatorship and act as an economic democratic force. (Rather it) moves and leans increasingly into winning votes by polarizing society and dividing society alonglines of race, gender, religion, ethnicity. That is why over the ’90s, as globalization has deepened itsreach in our communities and countries, fundamentalism, communalism, religious hatred have seen arise. Because religious fundamentalism, I believe, is a child of the death of economic democracy.

In Motion Magazine: Because?

Vandana Shiva: Because people without economic rights are left insecure. There is joblessness.They can’t understand the processes leading to it. Ordinary farmers can’t really understand why pricesare going down.

If you can say, “The prices are going down because some other farmer in some other state is doingsomething to you;” or, “Your water is disappearing because some other state is doing something;” or,“Your jobs are going because the Moslems are breeding too much;” or in Europe, “The immigrants arecoming too fast; or in the United States, “The Mexicans are crossing the border;” it takes no timebefore the economic insecurity left as a result of globalization mutates into a ready-made ground for political interests to say, “Your job has been taken away by so and so.” “Your security has been robbedby so and so.” That’s the rhetoric that has filled the space as economic insecurity has grown.

The recovery of economic democracy

In Motion Magazine: How can a farmer, for example, economically become involved?

Vandana Shiva: I think the recovery of economic democracy is at the heart of recovery of democracyitself. And it doesn’t stop at that. It goes further into the creation of peace.

In a way, we really have three combined challenges, just now. We’ve got the threat of war andviolence. We’ve got the threat of economic insecurity, loss of jobs, loss of livelihoods, loss of incomesfor farmers. And thirdly, we’ve got this whole situation that our leaders are not representing our will --the collapse of democracy.

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Ordinary farmers have to get involved, can getinvolved, by engaging in a recovery of economicdemocracy as an everyday practice meaning, as wedo here, with seed Swaraj, with Anna Swaraj, savingseeds, growing your own seed, not going toMonsanto in every season and having your seed

collapse. I was just told, yesterday, that 41 billion rupees of losses have been faced by farmers in one state whowere sold Monsanto corn. We did a calculation thatfarmers of Bt cotton, the genetically-engineeredcotton, lost a billion rupees in one season.

If farmers are saving the seed, growing their crop,they are making reclamation of their economicspace. They are giving up chemicals and thepesticides that have contaminated all sources of water in this country, including the soft drinks now.They are not just saving money. They are savingtheir lives and they are saving public health.

By reaching out to consumers and setting upalternate marketing systems, as we do with the DilliHaat where we have our direct marketing stall, we inNavdanya , my organization, which is the main outletfor organic growers in this country, we bring theproduce directly from farmers, and it’s literally their marketing platform.

The flow of wealth from South to North

In Motion Magazine: The contradiction betweenknowledge, as a collective process, and patentsbeing the opposite of that … do you think that isrelated to the fact that wealth has been flowing fromone half of the world to the other?

Vandana Shiva: North-South inequality is veryclearly a result of imperialistic structures being put inplace that suck wealth out of the South, put it in theNorth. That’s exactly why the North looks rich andthe South looks poor. Not because human beings inthe South don’t know how to create wealth.Everyone knows how to make things, create things.Every one is creative. But when the results of your creativity, productivity are not yours to hold and theresults of your labor and creativity are transferredsomewhere else the one who takes it becomes richand the one who’s left without it is the one whostays poor.

During colonial rule, this extraction was donethrough ownership over land. The British came toIndia to a country, which was richer than England atthat time, and every record tells you that. They used

to exchange pepper with bags of gold. A sack of pepper used to be equal to a sack of gold. Thenthey came in as traders, established themselves as

Making chipatis in Old Delhi.

Making saris.

Sacks of peppers in Old Delhi.

Spices for sale in Old Delhi.

Busy market area in Old Delhi.

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rulers. First as the East India Company, which was thrown out in the 1857 Rebellion and War of Independence, then, as the crown which took over the role of the Company and continued to rule.

The regions that were the richest, such as Bengal, became the poorest. In 1942, two million peopledied of famine in the land where there was no shortage of wheat. Amartya Sen got a Nobel prize for saying something so basic, that people did not die because there was not enough food. They diedbecause they had been robbed of their entitlement. That was the basis of his Nobel prize. That is alsothe basis of noticing inequality.

We (Navdanya) have two books on the history of food and farming and we have tracked in them whatthe wealth of Indian peasants was being used for. Schools were being built in England. Mentalasylums were being run by the transfer of peasant wealth into England. That’s why the colonizingempire constantly grew. That’s what land ownership did at that time, which the British institutionalizedin this country. Before that we had land use. We had use-of-it right. Not private property in land.

The British turned the revenue collectors into landowners and created what they called the permanentsettlement and Zamidari system through which wealth would flow to them. The revenue collectorswere left as landowners. The original cultivators were left as the dispossessed peasants.

From ownership of land to ownership of biodiversity

What ownership over land, a very distorted ownership of a land, did to indigenous communities at thattime of colonialism, ownership over biodiversity, seeds, genes, medicine is doing in today’s world. Thebiodiversity is in what is called the poorer part of the world. We are biodiversity rich but every year,annually, $60 billion worth of wealth-transfer is taking place because the control over the products is inthe hands of the North. Monopolies of patents are in their hands. Monopolies on trade are in their hands.

Coffee -- trade jumped from $40 billion to $70 billion over the last few years so there was literally adoubling of trade. One would have imagined a doubling of trade would have left a doubling of incomesin the hands of those who grew the coffee. The incomes of the coffee producers dropped from $9billion to $5 billion and some of the most dispossessed people of the world today are the coffeegrowers, as also every other commodity grower.

These are amazing mechanisms -- the trade arrangements, trade treaties, intellectual property rightspatent treaties. They are doing, once again, in a deeper way what colonialism did and the projectionsare that 70% of American wealth will be through rent collection, through patents, because the U.Sgovernment is not designing America as a society where people are involved in making things. It hasdismantled manufacture. It has gone off to China. Pick up anything in a supermarket -- it is made inChina. But America would still like to collect returns and that is through intellectual property. So, whilepeople’s jobs are disappearing, the corporate wealth is increasing and then, of course, all the details of the rest of it carry on.

There are all these mechanisms of taking wealth from those who work, those who create, to those whocontrol through extremely coercive instruments of power.

War is globalization by other means

In Motion Magazine: Which is now further enforced by invading other people’s countries?

Vandana Shiva: I have said that war is another name for globalization because if you really look atIraq it wasn’t liberated. American soldiers didn’t come out winning. More of them have died since theso-called war got over. But one thing did happen and that was that corporate America got to enter Iraqand use American tax money in the process. Bechtel got a big contract. Halliburton got a big contract.That is where the whole so-called reconstruction went. This is exactly what globalization does – (for

example) put the water of the world in the hands of Bechtel, Suez (Lyonnaise des Eaux), Vivendi(Environment). Globalization is war by other means and war is globalization by other means.

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In Motion Magazine: It depends on the policy of the leaders of the U.S. at the time?

Vandana Shiva: At this point it so happens America is the empire. But one thing we learned with theBritish Empire is that empires rise and empires sink.

Published in In Motion Magazine March 28, 2004