Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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GIFT OF FOOD: How to solve the agricultural crisis, the health crisis and
the crisis of poverty.
http://resurgence.gn.apc.org/issues/shiva228.htm
Resurgence issue 228 GIFT OF FOOD
By Vandana Shiva, January 2005

THE FIRST THING to recognise about food is that it is the very basis of
life. Food is alive: it is not just pieces of carbohydrate, protein and
nutrient, it is a being, a sacred being. Not only is food sacred, not only
is it living, but it is the Creator itself, and that is why in the poorest
of Indian huts you find the little earthen stove being worshipped; the
first
piece of bread is given to the cow, then you are required to find out who
else is hungry in your area. In the words of the sacred texts of India,
"The
giver of food is the giver of life," and indeed of everything else.
Therefore, one who desires wellbeing in this world and beyond should
especially endeavour to give food.

Because food is the very basis of creation, food is creation, and it is the
Creator. There are all kinds of duties that we should be performing with
respect to food. If people have food it is because society has not
forgotten
those duties. If people are hungry, society has rejected the ethical duties
related to food.

The very possibility of our being alive is based on the lives of all kinds
of beings that have gone before us - our parents, the soil, the earthworm -
and that is why the giving of food in Indian thought has been treated as
everyday sacrifice that we have to perform. It is a ritual embodied in
every
meal, reflecting the recognition that giving is the condition of our very
being. We do not give as an extra, we give because of our interdependence
with all of life.

One of my favourite images in India is the kolam, a design which a woman
makes in front of her house. In the days of Pongal, which is the rice
harvest festival in South India, I have seen women get up before dawn to
make the most beautiful art work outside their houses, and it is always
made
with rice. The real reason is to feed the ants, but it is also a beautiful
art form that has gone on from mother to daughter, and at festival time
everyone tries to make the best kolam as their offering. Thus, feeding the
ants and works of art are integrated.

The indica rice variety's homeland is a tribal area called Chattisgarh in
India. It must be about fifteen years ago that I first went there. The
people there weave beautiful designs of paddy, which they then hang outside
their houses. I thought that this must be related to a particular festival,
and I asked, "What festival is it for?" They said, "No, no, this is for the
season when the birds cannot get rice grain in the fields." They were
putting rice out for other species, in very beautiful offerings of art
work.

Because we owe the conditions of our life to all other beings and all other
creatures, giving - to humans and to non-human species - has inspired
annadana, the gift of food. All other ethical arrangements in society get
looked after if everyone is engaging in annadana on a daily basis.
According
to an ancient Indian saying: "There is no gift greater than annadana, the
giving of food." Or again, in the words of the sacred texts: "Do not send
away anyone who comes to your door without offering him or her food and
hospitality. This is the inviolable discipline of humankind; therefore have
a great abundance of food and exert all your efforts towards ensuring such
abundance, and announce to the world that this abundance of food is ready
to
be partaken by all."

Thus from the culture of giving you have the conditions of abundance, and
the sharing by all.

 IF WE REALLY look at what is happening in the world, we seem to have more
and more food surpluses, while 820 million people still
 go hungry every day. As an ecologist, I see these surpluses as
pseudo-surpluses. They are pseudo-surpluses because the overflowing stocks
and packed supermarket shelves are the result of production and
distribution
systems which take food away from the weak and marginalised, and from
non-human species.

I went through the food department of Marks & Spencer the other day, and I
went dizzy seeing all the food there, because I knew that, for example, a
peasant's rice field would have been converted into a banana plantation to
get luscious bananas to the world's markets. Each time I see a supermarket,
I see how every community and ecosystem's capacity to meet its food needs
is
being undermined, so that a few people in the world can experience food
'surpluses'.

But these are pseudo-surpluses leading to 820 million malnourished people,
while many others eat too much and get ill or obese.

 LET US SEE how food is produced. To have sustainable food supplies we need
our soils to function as living systems: we need all those millions of soil
organisms that make fertility. And that fertility gives us healthy foods.
In
industrial cultures we forget that it is the earthworm that creates soil
fertility; we believe that soil fertility can come from nitrates - the
surplus of explosives factories; that pest-control does not come out of the
balance of different crops hosting different species, but from poisons.
When
you have the right balance, living organisms never become pests: they all
coexist, and none of them destroys your crop.

 The recently released report of the Food and Agriculture Organization has
chart after chart to show how in the last century we increased food
productivity. But all they really calculated is labour displacement. They
only looked at labour productivity - as how much food a human being
produces
by using technologies that are labour-displacing, species-displacing and
resource-destroying. It does not mean that you have more food per acre; it
does not mean that you have more food per unit used of water; it does not
mean that you have more food for all the other species that need food. All
of these diverse needs are being destroyed as we define productivity on the
basis of food production per unit of labour.

We are now working on technologies, based on genetic engineering, which
accelerate this violence towards other beings. On my recent trip to Punjab,
it suddenly hit me that they no longer have pollinators. Those
technologically obsessed people are manipulating crops to put genes from
the
Bt toxin (the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis) into plants, so that
the plant releases toxins at every moment and in every cell: in its leaves,
its roots, its pollen. These toxins are being eaten by ladybirds and
butterflies which then die.

 We do not see the web of life that we are rupturing. We can only see the
interconnections if we are sensitive to them. And when we are aware of them
we immediately recognise what we owe to other beings: to the pollinators,
to
the farmers who have produced the food, and to the people who have
nourished
us when we could not nourish ourselves.

 The giving of food is related to the idea that every one of us is born in
debt to other beings: our very condition of being born depends on this
debt.
So we come with a debt and for the rest of our lives we are paying back
that
debt - to the bees and the butterflies that pollinate our crops, to the
earthworms and the fungi and the microbes and the bacteria in the soil that
are constantly working away to create the fertility that our chemical
fertilisers can never, never replenish.

We are born and live in debt to all Creation, and it becomes our duty to
recognise this. The gift of food is merely a recognition of the need for
constantly paying back that obligation, that responsibility. It is merely a
matter of accepting and endeavouring to repay our debts to Creation, and to
the communities of which we are a part. And that is why most cultures that
have seen ecology as a sacred trust have always spoken of responsibility.
Rights have flowed out of responsibility: once I ensure that everyone in my
sphere of influence is fed, someone in that sphere is also ensuring that I
am fed.

WHEN I LEFT university teaching in 1982, everyone said, "How will you
manage
without a salary?" I replied by saying that if ninety per cent of India
manages without a salary, all I have to do is put my life in the kind of
relationships of trust that they live through. If you give, then you will
receive. You do not have to calculate the receiving: what you have to be
conscious of is the giving.

 In modern economic systems we also have debts, but they are financial
debts. A child born in any Third World country already has millions of
dollars of debt on her or his head owed to the World Bank, which has every
power to tell you and your country that you should not be producing food
for
the earthworms and the birds, or even for the people of the land: you
should
be growing shrimps and flowers for export, because that earns money.

It does not earn very much money, either. I have made calculations that
show
that one dollar of trading by international business, in terms of profit,
leads to $10 of ecological and economic destruction in local ecosystems.
Now
if for every dollar being traded we have a $10 shadow-cost in terms of how
we are literally robbing food from those who need it most, we can
understand
why, as growth happens and as international trade becomes more
'productive',
there is, inevitably, more hunger: because the people who needed that food
most are the ones who are being denied access to it by this new system of
trading. This so-called free trade is taking away from them any way of
looking after others' needs, or their own.

People ask me: "How can we protect biodiversity if we are to meet growing
human needs?" My reply is that the only way to meet growing human needs is
to protect biodiversity, because unless we are looking after the earthworms
and the birds and the butterflies we are not going to be able to look after
people either. This idea that somehow the human species can only meet its
needs by wiping out all other species is a wrong assumption: it is based on
not seeing how the web of life connects us all, and how much we live in
interaction and in interdependence.

Monocultures produce more monocultures, but they do not produce more
nutrition. If you take a field and plant it with twenty crops, it will have
a lot of food output, but if any one of those individual yields - say of
corn or wheat - is measured in comparison with that of a monoculture field,
of course you will have less, because the field is not all corn. So just by
shifting from a diversity-based system into a monoculture industrially
supported with chemicals and machines, you automatically define it as more,
even though you are getting less! Less species, less output, less
nutrition,
less farmers, less food, less nourishment. And yet we have been absolutely
brainwashed into believing that when we are producing less we are producing
more. It is an illusion of the deepest kind.

Trade today is no longer about the exchange of things which we need and
which we cannot produce ourselves. Trade is an obligation to stop producing
what we need, to stop looking after each other, and to buy from somewhere
else.

 In trade today there are four grain giants. The biggest of them, Cargill,
controls seventy per cent of the food traded in the world; and they fix the
prices. They sell the inputs, they tell the farmer what to grow, they buy
cheaply from the farmer, then they sell it at high cost to consumers. In
the
process they poison every bit of the food chain. Instead of giving, they
are
thinking of how they can take out that last bit, from ecosystems, other
species, the poor, the Third World.

 In the early 1990s Cargill said, "Oh, these Indian peasants are stupid.
They do not realise that our seeds are smart: we have found new
technologies
that prevent the bees from usurping the pollen." Now the concept of 'the
gift of food' tells us that pollen is the gift that we must maintain for
pollinators, and therefore we must grow open-pollinated crops that bees and
butterflies can pollinate. That is their food and it is their ecological
space. And we have to make sure that we do not eat into their space.

Instead, Cargill says that the bees usurp the pollen - because Cargill have
defined every piece of pollen as their property. And in a similar way,
Monsanto said: "Through the use of Roundup we are preventing weeds from
stealing the sunshine." The entire planet is energised by the life-giving
force of the sun, and now Monsanto has basically said that it is Monsanto
and the farmers in contract with Monsanto that, alone on the planet, have
the right to sunshine - the rest of it is theft.

So what we are getting is a world which is absolutely the opposite to the
'giving of food'. Instead, it is the taking of food from the food chain and
the web of life. Instead of gift we have profit and greed as the highest
organising principle. Unfortunately, the more the profit, the more hunger,
illness, destruction of Nature, of soil, of water, of biodiversity, the
more
non-sustainable our food systems become. We then actually become surrounded
by deepening debt: not the ecological debt to Nature, to the Earth and to
other species, but the financial debt to the money-lenders and to the
agents
of chemicals and seeds. The ecological debt is in fact replaced by this
financial debt: the giving of nourishment and food is replaced by the
making
of more and more profits.

WHAT WE NEED to do now is to find ways of detaching ourselves from these
destructive arrangements. It is not just replacing free trade with fair
trade: unless we see how the whole is leading to the poisoning and
polluting
of our very beings, of our very consciousness, we will not be able to make
the deeper shifts that allow us to create abundance again. In taking all
from nature, without giving, we are not creating abundance; we are creating
scarcity.

 Growing world hunger is part of that scarcity. And the growing diseases of
affluence are a part of that scarcity too. If we relocate ourselves again
in
the sacred trust of ecology, and recognise our debt to all human and
non-human beings, then the protection of the rights of all species simply
becomes part of our ethical norm and our ethical duty. And as a result of
that, those who depend on others for feeding them and for bringing them
food
will get the right kind of food and the right kind of nourishment. So, if
we
begin with the nourishment of the web of life, we actually solve the
agricultural crisis of small farms, the health crisis of consumers, and the
economic crisis of Third World poverty.

Vandana Shiva is Director of Bija Vidyapeeth, the International College for
Sustainable Living, in Dehra Dun, India.

Vandana Shiva will speak at a conference on The Future of Food in London on
22nd January 2005. For further details tel: +44(0)208 809 2391.