Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Last Word: We Need to Reclaim the Food System
by Vandana Shiva
http://www.panna.org/mag/spring2008/last-word-we-need-to-reclaim-the-food-system

In December of 1984, when the industrial disaster in Bhopal killed 3,000 
people in one night, I was forced to ask: “Why are we involved in an 
agriculture that is killing hundreds of thousands, that is so violent, and 
pretends to be feeding the world?”

Increasingly, I have realized that if farmers in India are getting into debt 
and committing suicide, it’s because of these industrially driven 
agricultural systems that are also destroying the environment. Money is being 
spent on toxic chemicals and costly seeds rather than on feeding children, 
clothing them, and sending them to school.

The majority of the hungry in the world are rural people. They could be 
growing their own food if the food system hadn’t been converted into a market 
for sales of seeds and agrochemicals. Three billion people on this planet are 
being denied their right to healthy, safe, nutritious food because 
agribusiness has turned food into a place for highest returns on profits. The 
entire food system is serving corporations and not people. Chemical 
agriculture is a theft from nature and a theft from the poor. We need to 
reclaim the food system.

Agrochemicals and herbicides were designed for chemical warfare. 2,4-D was 
Agent Orange in the Vietnam War. Today, the tools of warfare have become the 
tools of agriculture. The idea of creating food dependency is also an idea of 
warfare. It came out of the foreign policy of the United States and the 
phrase “use food as a weapon.” The U.S.-India agreement on agriculture is 
trying to create dependency of India on U.S. supplies of food, even though 
we’re growing 74 million tons. This is warfare by another means.

Food is not a commodity. It’s the very basis of life. Food production is not 
industrial activity. It is much more than bringing corn and soya bean and 
wheat and cotton to the marketplace. It is nurturing the land. It is 
conserving resources. It is giving livelihoods. It is shaping a culture. 
Biodiversity (and cultural diversity) is the real capital of food and 
farming. We are richer to the extent we have diversified food cultures in the 
world. We are poorer as the biodiversity of our farms and the cultural 
diversity of our food systems disappears.

Even though people live in cities, they are connected to the land—somewhere, 
somebody produced the food they’re eating. We will all be freer when, around 
every city, there are rural communities where small farmers are able to 
produce food of quality and make a living doing that. We need to move 
taxpayers’ money from subsidizing corporations that bring us junk and poison 
to helping farmers’ markets and small producers connect to people looking for 
more secure, safe, and tasty food.

This planet cannot afford the additional burden of more carbon dioxide, more 
nitrogen oxide, more toxins in our food. Our farmers cannot afford the 
economic burden of these useless toxic chemicals. And our bodies cannot 
afford the bombardment of these chemicals.

Vandana Shiva is a physicist and author of numerous books, the latest of 
which is Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed. This essay was adapted 
from a November 2, 2007 “Living on Earth” radio interview.