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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] We Need to Reclaim the Food System by Vandana Shiva
  • Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:42:12 -0600


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.






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