In this episode, I talk to Vandana Shiva, the leader of the anti-Monsanto movement in India, and the founder of Nandava, Navdanya, a group dedicated to fighting against the use of genetically modified ( GMO) seeds in food production. Vandana talks about her life and how she became a seed activist, and why she believes in non-violent civil disobedience. She also talks about why she thinks Bill Gates is a monster, and how he needs to be overthrown. And she explains why she's fighting to protect the environment and fight against the corporate greed of multinationals like Monsanto. I hope you enjoy this episode and share it with your friends, family, and loved ones. Thank you so much for being a part of this amazing movement, and for standing up to corporate greed and corporate greed! Peace, Blessings, Cheers, Bobby and Mahesh and Chew Chew - The Green Revolution Project is produced and edited by Bobby Lord and is produced by Shaan Singh. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe and subscribe to our podcast, and leave us a review of our podcast on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your favourite streaming platform. Thank you for listening and sharing the podcast! If you like what you're listening, please consider leaving us a star rating and review! and share the podcast on your social media platforms! if you're a friend, rating, reviewing, rating and reviewing our podcasting platform! We'll be looking out for you in the next week, and we'll be listening out for your comments! - Chew, Chew's next episode will be out on the next episode! . Chew is coming soon! Chew - Thank you Chew & Thank you! Cheweeee - Maheshwari by Cheweeeee. - Bobby Lord - Thankyou, Chewee, Maheshaweee, Thank you, Cheoweeeeee! Thankyou! ( ) , Chewiee, Cheeeeeee, Cheheeee & Cheeee-eee - Cheeee, Maheeee... Thanks, Chereee (Thank you, Thankeee? ) - Cheweed, Cheeese, Chewieeee-ee, Thankyou. Cheeeee
00:02:09.000I was a student and I was volunteering and the leaders were the women and they were my professors.
00:02:16.000I always say the university, I went to Western, University of Western Ontario for my PhD to figure out quantum theory better.
00:02:26.000But I went to the Chipko University to figure out biodiversity.
00:02:30.000And Bobby, just the other day, the mafia has taken hold of poor David Attenborough to launch...
00:02:41.000Portfolio management on biodiversity, like portfolios on land ownership, as if value to biodiversity was not recognized by the Chipko women.
00:02:53.000I think that is the clash we are living through.
00:02:57.000The billionaires wanting to turn everything into their portfolio, and the ordinary people saying, no, we want to protect our land, our farmers.
00:03:07.000Protesting now for six months for the land.
00:03:13.000I apologize for this because I've seen on the international nose these huge, vast gatherings of farmers now in India who are marching on the cities.
00:03:26.000And so tell us, because I know you're right in the middle of that, but let me just introduce a little bit more about you.
00:03:31.000Vandana Shiva is one of the great grassroots Leaders on the planet today, she's won every prize that you can win from people who care about grassroots women's rights, about intellectual property in seeds,
00:03:49.000particularly in GMOs, in forest protection, In chemical agriculture versus the kind of agriculture that Vandana fights for and has led us all in the wars against Monsanto.
00:04:08.000And I've been hanging out with you for many, many years.
00:04:12.000I don't even remember the first time we met, but just an extraordinary, extraordinary leader.
00:04:19.000And I want to talk to you about a Bill Gates tonight.
00:04:23.000And about, you know, his theft of seed and his purchase of the land and his move to create a new feudalism on this planet and get the farmers off the land and the billionaires onto it.
00:04:41.000Let's talk first about current events and about what's happening in India with these marches that you're involved in.
00:04:51.000So, Bobby, you know, my life was around physics and quantum physics.
00:05:16.000And my mother was a refugee from the partition, you know, when India was split by a line drawn on a map.
00:05:26.000And she said, well, I've done everything.
00:05:29.000I've broken every glass ceiling for women and now I'll be a farmer.
00:05:33.000So she became a farmer, and my father was in the forest, and we lived between the farm and the forest.
00:05:38.000And they were wonderful people, you know.
00:05:41.000I mean, their values, their life has given all the values I live, of fearlessness, of truth, of never giving up, and loving nature very deeply.
00:05:55.000But, you know, my involvement in agriculture begins with 1984 when there were similar protests.
00:06:21.000So the World Bank, the USAID, The Rockefellers, they had a package working for a while on how do you get to move these huge amounts of chemicals, the fertilizers, the pesticides, after the wars, you know, those factories should have just shut down.
00:06:44.000And instead, the Rockefellers, who were very much involved in the IG Farben and Hitler experiments, I mean, there's so much reports on there.
00:06:53.000You know, the oil came from the Rockefellers.
00:06:56.000The chemical agriculture is a fossil fuel agriculture.
00:07:04.000And the Rockefellers, also the private bankers, provided the finance.
00:07:09.000And so after the war, it should have been an end to chemical warfare on this planet.
00:07:14.000And instead they worked on saying, how do we change agriculture to make it more Adapted to chemicals.
00:07:23.000And, you know, our plants are bred for multifunctionality.
00:07:27.000So we have tall weeds and tall rices and even our animals are dual purpose.
00:07:32.000The bullocks will pull the plow and the cows will give you milk.
00:07:36.000So we never do one-dimensional thinking in India.
00:07:39.000And the fact that so many Indians are heading so many institutions is they're living on the leftovers of multi-dimensional thinking to push the world into one-dimensional thinking.
00:07:51.000But at that point, Borlo was picked up from DuPont Defense Labs to work on changing the plants.
00:08:01.000Now, you know, the U.S. had stolen some wheat from Japan during the war, and there was rice from Indonesia, and they changed the plant, made the dwarf, in order to not...
00:09:14.000And the laws that the farmers are fighting against are the pound of flesh that the World Bank had demanded in 1991, except that they were pushed back and pushed back and pushed back.
00:10:08.000And we did a, you know, suicide started in the potato bells.
00:10:14.000Pepsi, for a 20 rupee package of potato, the farmer gets 0.04 paisa, which is In significant amount.
00:10:25.000So when it's chemical agriculture, GMO seeds, and globalized trade by agribusiness and agroprocessing industry, in average, farmers get 0.5 to 4% of what a consumer pays.
00:10:40.000But the consumer pays not just the price of their junk food.
00:10:45.000In the package, they're paying for the price of junk food in their health.
00:10:50.000And that's why the work you're doing, Bobby, you know, on the issue of health, particularly children's health, I see the industrial agriculture and industrial processing and the industrial mindset as invasions into our bodies.
00:11:06.000Earlier it was happening indirectly, you know, the cancers, Through the toxics, you've been fighting the case on the Monsanto bio-cancer cases.
00:11:17.000All that is an invasion into the body.
00:11:19.000But now there's a conscious denial that there's a harmony between the soil's health, the plant's health, our health, and our gut microbiome.
00:11:35.000And if it doesn't receive diversity of food, and it doesn't receive fresh food, it is like a war against our gut microbiome, which is 90% of us in terms of biodiversity.
00:11:46.00090% are the beings who keep us healthy, who make us, and the war against our bodies.
00:11:56.000It's at its last stages, but it's happening at a time where awareness on health is growing so much, where awareness of biodiversity is growing so much.
00:12:04.000And now they're thinking, oh, what we did when colonialism started, just changed the mindset.
00:12:28.000And that's what I want to talk to you about.
00:12:29.000And I have a piece that I interviewed you for extensively that's running in The Defender this week about Bill Gates's New feudalism.
00:12:39.000You know, it came out, the U.S. papers finally recognized a little bit the tip of the iceberg of what's happening because they discovered suddenly that he was now the biggest owner of farmland in the United States of America.
00:12:52.000He did this health campaign to take over our farmland.
00:13:55.000They're theirs for humanity, for the commons, and he has taken over that seed bank, consolidated it, and is now privatizing it and changing the genetic makeup of those seeds to make it so that they are chemically dependent, so he can patent all of the life that has been developed Through 20,000 years of agriculture on this planet.
00:14:19.000And you know, I want to start with telling this story about a little bit what happened during the Green Revolution, which was started by the Rockefellers, mainly in India and Mexico.
00:14:31.000Gates moved it in the early 2000s to Africa.
00:14:41.000And they started doing the same thing there, and it's the same thing he did with vaccines.
00:14:46.000There's a human problem, which he says, hunger, or disease, and I'm going to solve it with my technology, which is GMO crops.
00:14:57.000Patented seed, synthetic foods, chemical agriculture, pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizers, monocultures, and he went into 13 African nations and forced them to do commodity agriculture to accept his inputs, built the supply chain, and now there's 131 million people starving in those nations.
00:15:24.000The starvation rate has gone up by 30%.
00:15:27.000And he's now trying to do the same thing to the rest of the world.
00:15:31.000I know you've been active in Africa and fighting them there for many, many years.
00:15:35.000And, you know, I've really helped alert the world about this.
00:17:05.000I'm going to work with our government.
00:17:06.000On laws that say plants, animals, seeds are not patentable.
00:17:10.000Let me interrupt you for a second because there's a lot of people who listen to this who won't understand why GMO seeds are connected to chemicals.
00:17:21.000What happened is Monsanto bought When DDT was banned in 1974, and it was Monsanto's product, they bought another product called glyphosate.
00:17:39.000Somebody had thrown it out in the backyard and saw it killed all the grass.
00:17:43.000And Monsanto said, this would be a good weed killer.
00:17:48.000It made it a weed killer, marketed as a weed killer, and it had, you know, farmers would have hundreds of farm workers wearing backpacks, sprayers, spraying the weeds in the cornfield before the corn got too big.
00:18:06.000Then, in 1994, Monsanto, somebody put some of this glyphosate on the ground and there was one weed that didn't die.
00:18:20.000Monsanto took a gene out of that weed that made it resistant to glyphosate and they put it in corn.
00:18:30.000And now they had corn, and if you sprayed it with glyphosate, it would not die.
00:18:37.000Now you can fire all those farm workers, and you hire one airplane that saturates the entire landscape with glyphosate, and the only thing that lives is that GMO corn.
00:18:50.000And that now is the biggest pesticide in the world.
00:18:53.000I think 80% of the pesticides in the world are that, and they have now bred all kinds of all of our grains.
00:19:01.000And all of our foodstuffs and fruits are now being genetically engineered so that they are resistant to Roundup.
00:19:09.000You can dump this stuff all over the landscape.
00:19:12.000What we find is the way that it kills plants is it sucks all the minerals out of them and destroys the building blocks of life.
00:19:20.000The food that you get that has that Roundup in it doesn't have the minerals you need.
00:19:40.000So whether it was the Green Revolution in India, where Borlaug married chemical fertilizers to dwarf varieties of plants, or Monsanto steals basically a ready-made Roundup glyphosate, makes Roundup.
00:19:54.000And then they sued every company that was doing genetic engineering so they could buy them out.
00:20:09.000And the genetic engineering and patents and chemicals go together.
00:20:13.000And now the same Rockefellers that started the chemical industry with the IG Farben and also started the entire irresponsible pharmaceuticals.
00:20:44.000Hundred years of bad, you know, what is it called?
00:20:48.000There's a lovely word of oil, snake oil, selling snake oil.
00:20:54.000And now the big farmer, big tech, Big IT and big, they call it FinTech, you know, financial technologies, basically using digital speculative measures and portfolios, turning the land into a portfolio, the biodiversity into a portfolio, and thinking it's some smart economics.
00:21:17.000And sadly, poor Attenberg went and said, ecologists don't know biodiversities.
00:22:31.000I said, why is this man so afraid of the tiniest microbe and so afraid of the tiniest small farmer protesting on the Indian streets today?
00:22:40.000Why is he so afraid of a plant that breathes for free?
00:22:44.000And why is he so afraid of democracy that if India says no to GMO rice, the golden rice, a fake solution to gold blindness, or the BT eggplant which we threw out in 2001 through our government ministry, Through seven public hearings, where the government listened to the farmers and listened to the citizens.
00:23:05.000Those were GMO crops that he tried to force on India, and India threw them out.
00:23:11.000But he moved to Bangladesh and Pakistan with his GMO cotton.
00:23:16.000He doesn't want anything except the GMOs.
00:23:20.000But he also moved with the golden rise to Philippines, for which there's a huge movement, no golden rise.
00:23:26.000And this comes back to the seed issue.
00:23:29.000So when the Green Revolution was started and the Rockefeller and the World Bank were taking all the seeds from farmers to force them to have the Green Revolution seeds with chemicals, these 15 seed banks were created.
00:23:45.000Now, Gates has taken control of this public system of seeds.
00:23:50.000And the rice seed bank in Philippines, where the work on golden rice is being done, the GMO golden rice, the reason it's important for following that is one, all the seeds of rice are there.
00:24:04.000We bought 200,000 varieties of rice and our top seed Each scientist refused to part with the seeds.
00:24:39.000This year, World Food Day, 16th October, or before that food summit, which he has hijacked.
00:24:46.000Let us do a civil disobedience against force feeding of bad food, whether it be lab food like Impossible Burger, etc., or it be golden rice, because he's preparing for biofortification to be made compulsory.
00:25:00.000Let me explain what Vendetta is saying about the food summit.
00:25:09.000And most of the people who watch this show know that in 2010, 2009, Bill Gates went in front of the United Nations, pledged $10 billion to the World Health Organization.
00:25:25.000Most of it ended up coming from government, not from him, but he put in a couple billion.
00:25:34.000He was the first unelected official No diplomatic portfolio.
00:25:40.000He appeared before the United Nations, and he made this declaration.
00:25:45.000Immediately, he started putting all of these wheels spinning.
00:25:50.000He created all of these groups that fight anti-vaccination, and he started promoting vaccines all over the world.
00:25:58.000And in 2019, nine years later exactly, The World Health Organization, he created all of these quasi-governmental organizations, CEPI and PATH and GAVI, that everybody thinks are government, but they're just Bill Gates.
00:26:15.000He took over the World Health Organization during this decade.
00:26:20.000Even the Financial Times said no decision is made at the World Health Organization that is not run through the Gates Foundation first.
00:26:29.000And then in 2019, the World Health Organization comes out in January and says that vaccine hesitancy is one of the 10 greatest threats to global health.
00:26:42.000Did they offer any scientific study to prove that?
00:26:48.000Immediately, the world fell in order in 150 countries.
00:26:54.000Legislatures, politicians who are on the payroll of Big Pharma began pushing vaccine mandates and abolishing exemptions.
00:27:05.000In the United States, within three months, 100 bills in 50 states have been entered into the legislative process to mandate vaccines and to ban exemptions.
00:27:20.000Months later, Adam Schiff, who'd been taking money from Gates, the head of the Intelligence Committee, comes forward and says, tells the social media CEOs, Pinterest, Facebook, Google, all of them, Instagram, YouTube, you've got to start censoring vaccine misinformation.
00:27:43.000And then we had to roll up to 2020 and 2020 in January, right on time for his decade of vaccines.
00:27:51.000We get COVID. Fauci, who's his partner, puts $48 billion into pushing vaccines.
00:28:00.000Gates gets on TV every day saying, we cannot, until everybody gets vaccinated, we have to stay locked down.
00:28:06.000We're going to crash the global economy.
00:28:09.000All of you do what you're told and get your vaccine.
00:28:13.000He paid for studies to kill ivermectin, to kill hydroxychloroquine, to discredit them, and to develop.
00:28:24.000We spent in our country zero dollars on antivirals, on off-the-shelf antivirals, researching them, vitamin D, all the things we know that Reduce fatalities for COVID. None of that was studied.
00:28:39.000None of it was recommended instead of all of the money, 48 billion into vaccines.
00:29:02.000He owns Impossible Burgers, Beyond Beef, all these things which are loaded with pesticides.
00:29:09.000And he's trying to make, and he's getting the farmers off the farms, he's taking over the farms with his robots and his artificial intelligence in India, in Africa, and now in the United States.
00:29:22.000And giving us unhealthy food that is contributing to the chronic illnesses that are going to make us addicted to his medications.
00:29:32.000Oh, you know the rest of the story, and you tell it better than anybody.
00:29:39.000Well, I think what people who love life and love freedom should be preparing for now is A, the fact that yes, with his Gates Ag, one, he wants one agriculture on a planet with so much diversity.
00:29:55.000Our wetlands with rice are very different from our drylands with millets.
00:30:00.000Our pond systems of Bengal are very different from the desert systems of Rajasthan.
00:30:08.000And the one agriculture he wants is this externally driven system where to the chemicals after the wars are added the GMOs, Which became our post 1990s with the WTO and they were spread and with the patenting.
00:30:27.000And now he wants to add digital agriculture farming without farmers.
00:30:32.000And of course the narrative today just like then it was we grow bread from air because we fix nitrogen by burning fossil fuels.
00:31:30.000So no commons, no public good, no shared values, just money, money, money in their hands and them being an extractive machine.
00:31:39.000So because since 91, everything has been tried.
00:31:45.000In the era that created the gates, he wasn't as rich as he was, till the deregulation of finance and deregulation of IT. The first WTO meeting, he managed to become duty free and tax free for trade in information.
00:32:01.000That's how all of these tech giants became so rich.
00:32:05.000So now, at that time, the WTO said seeds will be patented before that, and most seeds are not.
00:32:12.000The second thing was the cargills will trade in agriculture, and there'll be no national sovereignty system to protect the rights to food.
00:32:20.000That's what our Indian farmers are fighting against right now.
00:32:23.000And the third was what they call sanitary and phytosanitary measures, which is ban good food and make junk food the only option.
00:32:33.000Now Gates is taking all this to the next step.
00:32:36.000Oh, there were laws created to prevent me from stealing.
00:32:39.000I'll do digital genomic mapping and undercut all the international laws.
00:32:43.000And on international trade in food, if movements are growing for real food and food sovereignty, Let me create fake food in the labs and create starvation and hunger through lockdown so there is no food and destroy the farmers and do farming without farmers.
00:33:00.000And why worry only about Pepsi and junk food and Coca-Cola, who are also the world's biggest polluters in plastic?
00:33:09.000What we'll now do is make totally fake food and we'll make the right to good food a crime.
00:33:16.000Just like a right to know your health, the right to have the right medicine, the right for entire societies to have deep medical knowledge, that all that is turned into a crime.
00:34:01.000What Gates is doing now, all across Africa and all across the world, is he's passing laws.
00:34:06.000He's buying off politicians and forcing through mandates for fortified food so that you will not be able to sell food in markets in Africa unless it's fortified.
00:34:21.000Well, the food, the goat cheese that the farmer makes in Maasai Mar in Kenya, It does not need fortification.
00:34:34.000It already has all the nutrients we want in it.
00:34:37.000But that farmer will not be able to sell that goat cheese in his local market.
00:34:43.000Instead, Cheez Whiz will be the monopoly there.
00:34:46.000And that's one of the ways that he's using what Antonin is saying about him illegalizing health or making outlawing healthy food.
00:34:57.000To open up these markets and compel us to eat his dirty, filthy, poisonous food.
00:35:08.000You know, Philip Morris was also the responsible for the high fructose corn syrup that's totally synthetic sugar that has caused cirrhosis in the liver in babies and is added to every food because it's addictive.
00:35:23.000The second is, you know, India is such a land of diversity and richness.
00:35:27.000We always say in Hindustan, you know, diversity is our way.
00:35:31.000We have so many snacks and so many Mithais and so many foods.
00:35:35.000You can't taste the same thing in three places, you know.
00:35:54.000So it's important to learn the lessons of the Green Revolution, of globalization, and now see how the concentration of all this in the hands of a Bill Gates is accelerating what was put in place.
00:36:06.000And we should do everything we've done to prevent a total takeover of our seed, our food, our food.
00:36:18.000Tell people how they can support you and your work.
00:36:23.000Well, for anyone who's listening, the first is, earlier at the farm, we had learning experiences of how to learn from the earth and grow good food.
00:36:33.000But we, right now, are having these Zoom courses.
00:36:37.000And you can go to the website of navdanya.org.
00:36:43.000You can become a seed warrior, a food warrior.
00:36:49.000Write to me at vandana.shiva at gmail.com.
00:36:53.000And we also have an international program called Navdanya International where we've just done a report, Gates to a Global Empire.
00:37:01.000You want to know more about what Gates is up to, read that report.
00:37:07.000And let us make this year the year of transition away from the Gates Empire to the freedom of all life on this planet and all people of this planet in all their freedoms and in all their diversity.