Book Review
Introduction
In Part 3 of Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed we learn that: “In India we deeply believe that this amazing universe, this amazing planet, this amazing earth is connected through the web of food, the web of life.” “In India we have an Upanishad that says, ‘If you give bad food you sin.’ The highest karma is the production of food in abundance and the giving of good food in generosity.” “Food has become the place for fascism to act. This fascism is seen where the seed is patented and turned into a monopoly property of a handful of corporations – 95% of genetically modified (GM) seeds are controlled by one corporation, Monsanto.” “In India, as the new GM seeds have moved in and as the corporations have started to control the seed supply, hundreds of thousands of farmers have become indebted and ended their lives with suicides. More than 150,000 Indian farmers have been driven to suicide. Monsanto’s profits are becoming more valued than human life. We must change that.” “Terra Madre is a source of freedom, and that is what is so beautiful about Terra Madre as an event. Here you will not find three corporations sitting with three governments and telling the world that from now on seeds will be the intellectual property of Monsanto and that trade-related intellectual property rights agreements will govern the world.” “Instead, in open dialogue, we proclaim freedom. Freedom of the seed; freedom of the farmers to save seed; freedom of farmers to breed new varieties; freedom from privation, patenting, and biopiracy; freedom of farmers to exchange and trade seeds – because seed is a commons, meant to be exchanged, meant to be shared; freedom of access to open source seed, seed that can be reproduced and regenerated; freedom from genetic contamination and GMOs – which means GMO-free zones in agriculture at the regional level, the national level, the earth level. That’s where we need to move.
MANIFESTOS ON THE FUTURE OF FOOD AND SEED
EDITED BY VANDANA SHIVA
SOUTH END PRESS 2007
PART III
Chapter 3: Farmer, Chef, Storyteller: Building New Food Chains by Michael Pollan
Chapter 4: For the Freedom of Food by Vandana Shiva
FELLOW EARTH CITIZENS, children of Terra Madre, I’m sure all of you feel like I do that we are creating another world. We are creating a world beyond the Washington consensus, which we should call the Washington fiction. A fiction that says the $3 trillion of fictitious money moving around the world is real wealth. A fiction that assumes that creating war undemocratically is democracy.
In India we deeply believe that this amazing universe, this amazing planet, this amazing earth is connected through the web of food, the web of life. Food – everything is food, and everything that eats that food is someone else’s food. That’s what connects us. We are food: we eat food, we are made of food, and our first identity, our first wealth, our first health, comes from making, creating, giving of good food. In India we have an Upanishad that says, “If you give bad food you sin.” The highest karma is the production of food in abundance and the giving of good food in generosity.
Terra Madre is the birth of a new freedom movement. Nothing should be able to push human life to indignity, degradation, and extinction. We are being pushed into, and in many places living in, a food fascism. Food has become the place for fascism to act. This fascism is seen where the seed is patented and turned into a monopoly property of a handful of corporations – 95% of genetically modified (GM) seeds are controlled by one corporation, Monsanto. Monsanto then uses the fictitious democracy that created the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the financial conditionalities of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to force us to give up our freedoms, to give up our biodiversity, and to deny the richness of our resources – reducing us to biodiversity serfs.
In India, as the new GM seeds have moved in and as the corporations have started to control the seed supply, hundreds of thousands of farmers have become indebted and ended their lives with suicides. More than 150,000 Indian farmers have been driven to suicide. Monsanto’s profits are becoming more valued than human life. We must change that.
But food fascism isn’t just in the seed; it’s in the methods of production as well. You cannot not use GM seeds. I was told by a farmer from Germany that a potato seed called “Linda” is being banned just because companies can’t make profits from it anymore. Instruments of seed registration, licensing, seed replacement, patenting – there are all kinds of new fascist rules. Europe made the choice to be genetically modified organisms (GMOs)-free, and the WTO was used to tell Europe, “You will have to grow and eat this rot.” But the WTO itself, as we know, is dying; it’s in intensive care. Russia has said it won’t join. We need to use this moment of WTO weakness to tell that fictitious world capital, “Your immoral rule – whether it is farmers being prevented from growing their crops or distributing their seed – is over.” And we need to look deeply at the issue of food safety and how it is being used. Take the avian flu: it is identified with wild birds and free-range birds, but that is not where it started. These birds were the victims of a disease that emerged from factory farms. And yet instead of addressing the breeding ground of the disease, we have these people around the world in moon suits, going out and grabbing chickens from women’s backyards to kill them. This is another element of food fascism – the fear of the small, the decentralized, the local, the free.
In fact, I would say fascism is about fear of freedom. And we are about love of freedom – passionate, deep, uncompromising love of freedom – the self-organized freedom that Terra Madre is about.
Today Brasil has become the biggest producer of genetically engineered soya beans. We need to tell President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva: “Stop the destruction of the Amazon, and stop converting your country into the cutting edge of food fascism.” What we have been building in Terra Madre is unique. It’s unique because it is the defense of the local through a global alliance. It is a defense of diversity through a joining together. And I think one of the self-organized contributions that has propelled some of this process has come from the International Commission on the Future of Food.
- If the next step of food freedom is to be taken, eaters of food and producers of food, ecological movements, and movements of gastronomy have to come together.
- The commission’s new report, the “Manifesto on the Future of Seed,” is, I believe, the manifesto of Terra Madre.
- It is diversity that we celebrate in the “Manifesto on the Future of Food.” We celebrate and protect diversity of our cultures, the diversity of innovation and knowledge. Terra Madre is also a source of freedom, and that is what is so beautiful about Terra Madre as an event.
- Here you will not find three corporations sitting with three governments and telling the world that from now on seeds will be the intellectual property of Monsanto and that trade-related intellectual property rights agreements will govern the world.
Instead, in open dialogue, we proclaim freedom. Freedom of the seed; freedom of the farmers to save seed; freedom of farmers to breed new varieties; freedom from privation, patenting, and biopiracy; freedom of farmers to exchange and trade seeds – because seed is a commons, meant to be exchanged, meant to be shared; freedom of access to open source seed, seed that can be reproduced and regenerated; freedom from genetic contamination and GMOs – which means GMO-free zones in agriculture at the regional level, the national level, the earth level. That’s where we need to move.
But the most important freedom of seed is the freedom to reproduce – that’s what seed means. Seeds are the embodiment of the future, the unfolding of life, the potential to keep reproducing, and yet new technologies, like the “terminator technology,” like hybrid seeds, are designed to prevent seed from giving rise to seed. The freedom of seeds to reproduce means we will not accept terminator seeds and sterile seeds, which cannot grow.
The seeds of slavery have been bred to respond to chemicals. They have been bred for the convenience of giant machines that need huge amounts of oil. They have been bred for corporate profits. The seeds of the future will be bred by the food communities and the scientists gathered at Terra Madre, and those whom we will work with, and by women – because women are the keepers of the seed. We will breed them to eliminate toxic inputs, to eliminate dependence on fossil fuels and the emission of greenhouse gases. We will breed seeds not for uniformity and monocultures, but for diversity and, most important, for freedom. That’s what we are sowing – the seeds of freedom. I hope all of you will join this manifesto – will you?