Dr. Vandana Shiva is the author, a physicist, an ecologist, an advocate of biodiversity, conservation, and farmers' rights, and probably the most influential international voice for local agriculture, democratic agriculture, for independent stewardship of the soils, and against the commodification of agriculture and nature by large corporations. Her pioneering work around food sovereignty, traditional agriculture, and women's rights has created fundamental cultural shifts in how the world views these issues. Dr. Shiva founded Navdanya, which is her organization which promotes agroecology, seed freedom, and a vision of Earth democracy, seeking justice for the earth and for all living beings. She has authored more than 20 books, including Reclaiming the Commons, Biodiversity, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Rights of Mother Earth. She is a member of the Scientific Committee on Foundation Ideas, and received the Right Livelihood Award in 1993, an honor known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. Her most recent book is Agro-ecology and Regenerative Agriculture, and it s a synthesis of more than three decades of interdisciplinary research and practice, and provides evidence-based solutions to some of the world s most pressing crises in global ecology and agriculture and public health. In this episode, she talks about how she got her start in the field, why she founded her organization, and why she thinks we should all eat green food, and how she thinks about food sovereignty and biodiversity as a fundamental human right. She also talks about Bill Gates and his vision for the future of the planet. and why we need to eat food that s grown on land that s not by farmers not by multinationals in order to survive in the 21st century, not by big cities by big companies but by people who grow food on their land the food grown by the land we eat it on the land that we grow in the soil or by the soil we use to produce food on our plates . And why we should eat food grown on soil that s nutritious, not in bio-sucrose, not pesticides, not GMO-based fertilizers, not bio-engineered by pesticides, and other things that are sprayed in the name of bio-based food because it s better than other things that s better for us, not just for us than other people so we can eat it, not like other people s diets we can all eat it.
00:00:01.000I'm very, very happy that my guest today is one of my great heroes, Dr.
00:00:07.000Vandana Shiva, who is the author, a physicist, an ecologist, an advocate of biodiversity, conservation, and farmers' rights, probably the most influential international voice for Local agriculture, democratic agriculture, for independent stewardship of the soils and against the commodification of agriculture and of nature by large corporations.
00:00:36.000Her pioneering work around food sovereignty, traditional agriculture and women's rights.
00:00:42.000Created fundamental cultural shifts in how the world views these issues.
00:00:48.000Shiva founded Navdanya, which is her organization which promotes agroecology, seed freedom, and a vision of Earth democracy, seeking justice for Earth and for all living beings.
00:01:00.000She has authored more than 20 books, including Reclaiming the Commons, Biodiversity, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Rights of Mother Earth.
00:01:09.000She is a member of the Scientific Committee on Foundation Ideas, and she has received the Right Livelihood Award in 1993, an honor known as the Alternative Nobel Prize.
00:01:24.000And Dana's most recent book is Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture.
00:01:31.000And it's a synthesis of more than three decades of interdisciplinary research and practice, and it provides evidence-based solutions to some of the world's most pressing crises in global ecology and agriculture and public health.
00:01:51.000So tell us what drove you to write yet another book.
00:01:56.000Well, there was one that came out just before that, which is a compilation of all the movements that are finding out what Bill Gates is doing, which is called Philanthrocapitalism, from the same publisher.
00:02:07.000And that's a movement book, The People Fighting Solar Engineering, Dimming the Sun.
00:02:15.000As a way to solve the climate problem, fake food, control over health, all issues that you deal with.
00:02:23.000The privatization of agriculture and the monopolization of all the agricultural land on Earth, which we're seeing more and more of, and which Gates is driving.
00:02:34.000And also, one thing you didn't just mention is the Eradication of farmworkers and replacing them with robots, which Gates sounds conspiratorial, but he actually has companies that he is developing with Apple and with other large social technology companies to have robots on our farm fields rather than farmers.
00:02:59.000Well, two of his favorite dystopian visions, Farming Without Farmers, which is his one agriculture for the world.
00:03:09.000Actually, just around the time when the COVID was striking, he launched Gates Ag One, one agriculture for the world.
00:03:16.000And you can't do one agriculture for the world through biodiversity with different climates.
00:03:21.000You can only do it through total industrialization, mechanization, robotization.
00:03:27.000The second thing that he's very fond of saying is food without farms.
00:03:32.000And that's where his idea of fake food...
00:03:35.000Now, Navdanya, for those of your listeners who don't know, means nine seeds.
00:03:41.000And I started this when I found the corporations who were bringing out the poisons and the chemicals now wanted to own the seed, wanted to promote GMOs in order to take a patent.
00:03:53.000And then they wanted an international treaty.
00:03:55.000The GAT and the WTO to force this on the world.
00:03:58.000I happened to be at a meeting where they were talking about this, 1987.
00:04:02.000And that's when I said, no, the seed must be saved.
00:04:05.000And we cannot allow the poison cartel to be the owners of life and take royalties from the farmers.
00:04:11.000This particular book, as you mentioned, is the synthesis of my work that began in 1984.
00:04:18.000You know, my background is in agriculture.
00:04:25.000But the study of what is agriculture was forced on me, literally, by two terrible events in India in 1984.
00:04:34.000One was the land where the so-called Green Revolution, which merely means chemical farming, industrial agriculture, was imposed on India in 1966, the land of Punjab, which means the land of five rivers.
00:04:48.000And let me just interrupt you for a second.
00:04:50.000The Green Revolution was a brainchild of the Rockefeller Foundation, and it was a way to supplant local subsistence, traditional agriculture with chemically-based agriculture, heavy-duty pesticides, heavy-duty carbon-based fertilizers, big machinery, etc., with the claim that we're going to feed the world.
00:05:17.000The Gates Foundation, which has pushed people into starvation with these methods of bringing in Kraft food and McDonald's and Cargill and these big corporations that he has invested in,
00:05:32.000and Monsanto, of course, where he is one of the biggest investors, to create supply chains and to force those governments to force upon their people to Chemically based agriculture that enrich corporations in which he personally is invested.
00:06:57.000And in this book that had just come out in the US, I have a NASA graph Of how Punjab, the land of five rivers, Punj means five, Ab means waters.
00:07:09.000The most prosperous land of the most prosperous farmers and abundant water is today a red zone.
00:07:46.000And my work on agriculture is from 1984 onwards.
00:07:51.000Both the ecological work, the agroecology, the regenerative farming, and all the data that has been generated in the lives of real farmers, our work shows that the more you enrich biodiversity, you intensify biodiversity rather than toxics and chemicals, you actually have more nutrition.
00:08:10.000When you have more nutrition, You can actually have twice the nutritive value grown on the land, for example, for India, by conserving biodiversity, not by creating monocultures.
00:08:22.000So one of my early awakenings was, I said, why do they not see the richness of Of the thousands of crops we grow, the 200,000 rice varieties we grow, what is this monoculture of the mind?
00:08:34.000So from that time onwards, I then realize it has impact on health, something we share in common.
00:08:40.000It has an impact on farmers' livelihoods.
00:08:43.000The fact that small farmers are disappearing everywhere is because of the design of the system.
00:08:51.000Now it's a deliberate design with the World Economic Forums and the Bill Gates and the Dutch farmers' protest.
00:08:58.000Are in fact a response to punishing the farmers for what they were forced to do.
00:09:03.000Use more chemicals, do more factory farming.
00:09:05.000What we need around the world is a five-year, not build back better, but grow more life.
00:09:11.000And we need partners everywhere in every field, including the conventional farmers.
00:09:17.000I think ecological farmers, regenerative farmers must join hands with anyone who's on the land because anyone who's on the land can start taking care of the land.
00:09:27.000And not participate in the destructive war-like activities.
00:09:31.000And today when the farmers are being told you have to disappear, ecological agriculture is the way to not go extinct.
00:09:40.000You mentioned about the difference between food and nutrition.
00:09:43.000And what we don't understand in America is because we are the breadbasket of the world and we have all of these hundreds of tons and thousands of tons of corn.
00:09:54.000And wheat and sorghum and barley and soy, but the plants themselves are devoid of nutrients.
00:10:03.000And so people can now fill their stomach and still be malnourished because the chemicals rob the minerals and the vitamins from the food that we're eating.
00:10:16.000We're eating food that is impoverished nutritionally.
00:10:20.000And that's been something that you've been focused on.
00:10:23.000Yeah, it's basically a commodity production system to produce nutritionally empty stuff.
00:10:36.000It comes from the soil to the plants and feeds us and feeds 100 trillion gut microbiomes.
00:10:42.000But this toxic commodity production is nutritionally empty and just in wait to be put on a container ship.
00:10:50.000And the second deceit in this system is that 80% of the corn and soya is not even for human food.
00:10:59.00040% is for biofuel and 40% is for animal feed.
00:11:03.000And this is a very big reason for people being deprived of food.
00:11:07.000So we need to create a food system that takes care of the health Of the soil, health of the plants, health of the animals, health of the farmers, and health of the people who eat.
00:11:18.000And that's what this book is all about, our 35 years of work, to show that not only is it doable, it's not something we're inventing.
00:11:26.000After all, farming is the oldest profession.
00:11:29.000And people forget that places like Australia, the Aboriginal people were farmers.
00:11:34.000You know, I was given a beautiful book when I did the talk at the Sydney Opera House.
00:11:39.000It's called The Greatest Estate on Earth.
00:11:45.000India, 10,000 years of farming experience.
00:11:48.000Albert Howard was sent by the British to improve agriculture.
00:11:52.000And he arrived and said, these soils are so fertile.
00:11:55.000And there are lots of insects, but there are no pests.
00:11:58.000So I'm going to make the pest and the peasant my professor.
00:12:02.000As a result of that, he wrote his book, The Agricultural Testament, which became the foundation of organic farming, with Rodale publishing it in America, Eve Balfour publishing it in England.
00:12:14.000And the organic movement was really a result of finding out that there are better ways to farm.
00:12:21.000You don't have to have chemically doused fields.
00:12:28.000You don't have to have nutritionally empty foods.
00:12:31.000It is possible to do a better agriculture.
00:12:33.000And that's the agriculture they want us to not just be blind to, but erase forever.
00:12:39.000And this period, you know, I think this set, the great reset of 2030, I think our big 2030 vision, and I'm going to be doing a meeting with all the Indian movements, about how by 2030 we build on the movements we've already built, to regenerate biodiversity, to replenish water on our farm.
00:12:57.000We have 70 feet more water, higher level of water, because we grew organic, we conserved the soil organic matter.
00:13:06.000Soil organic matter makes the water a sponge.
00:13:25.000We have to start becoming soil keepers and water keepers in the soil.
00:13:30.000And that is what real agriculture is all about.
00:13:33.000And they would like to take away the land from the farmers, punishing them for what they were forced to do, use chemicals, push animals into factory farms.
00:13:56.000Yeah, and you talked about the Dutch farmers and that revolution, which has been kind of distorted and covered up by the press.
00:14:03.000And it's really a revolution against Bill Gates's vision that the only way to solve the climate crisis It's through these big geoengineering processes and by getting farmers off the farm and stopping people from pursuing their economic self-interest.
00:14:25.000The problem was created, imposed upon them, and now they're being punished for it.
00:14:30.000One of the things that you also talk about is that the way to solve the climate crisis and the overload of carbon in the atmosphere, the principal way is by restoring our soils.
00:14:43.000So, you know, I wrote in the lead-up to the Copenhagen Summit on Climate, I realized that all the talk in the The climate discussion was about consumptive energy, you know, energy that we use to drive our cars to heat our homes.
00:14:59.000And agriculture was being totally neglected.
00:15:02.000So I added up the figures then, and this work has been built up much more since that time, that about 14% emissions come from an industrial farming system.
00:15:11.000You know, the nitrogen fertilizers that lead to nitrous oxide, heavy machinery.
00:15:16.000If I look at the machinery in the Midwest or Brazil, It doesn't look like farming.
00:16:42.000You don't have to ship food thousands of miles, local food systems, and you don't have to ultra-process it, artisanal processing, good processing, and that gets rid of another 20%.
00:16:53.000And because it's local circular economies, you get rid of 4% of the waste.
00:17:18.000The green leaf, the brilliance of the photosynthesis of the green leaf, is the conversion of the sun's energy given in abundance to absorb carbon dioxide.
00:17:28.000And turn that carbon dioxide through the mechanism of the plant's life into carbohydrates, which my dear friend Andre Liu has called the molecule of life.
00:17:52.000And then the earth brought the microorganisms, then the plant, increased the photosynthesis, And cooled the planet down to 13 degrees centigrade.
00:18:01.000It's raising again, because not only are we using fossil fuels, we are destroying the biodiversity that would recycle it.
00:18:08.000And the Earth became a carbon-rich planet.
00:18:12.000That is in the capacity of biodiversity.
00:18:14.000We just have to learn those lessons from the Earth, the biosphere, and replicate it in our agriculture.
00:18:20.000And the more we do that, the more carbon there is in the soil.
00:18:23.000The research of many organizations doing regenerative agriculture, organic farming, is showing that you can literally sequester up to 120 gigatons of carbon.
00:19:30.000You know, I could talk to you for weeks, and we have when we're together.
00:19:35.000But these podcasts do better when they're shorter, so I'm going to try to restrict myself.
00:19:41.000But I want to talk about one other issue.
00:19:43.000Many of the people who listen to this podcast have been following the gain-of-function studies.
00:19:50.000In Wuhan, in Ukraine, and all over the world.
00:19:54.000And these efforts by Peter Dezak and Tony Fauci and Michael Callahan and USAID to inventory all the microbes on Earth, all the viruses in the world, in order to create a global archive.
00:20:13.000And then they began doing gain-of-function studies on them so that they can patent them and enrich the pharmaceutical companies.
00:20:21.000This is a very, very close parallel to what Bill Gates did with the global seed inventories.
00:20:30.000And as you know, back in, I think, the 60s and the 70s, we created the United Nations and other global bodies created, I believe, seven seed banks.
00:20:42.000- 25. - Seven major ones, 25 all over the world because they saw the seeds because of monoculture were disappearing in these heritage seeds which had been developed through 60,000 years of agriculture that were brilliantly adopted to local water, to local climate, et cetera, were being eradicated.
00:21:03.000So there was a global effort to say, this is valuable.
00:21:05.000We need to inventory and bank these, and seeds can last for hundreds of years in those seed banks.
00:21:12.000But then Bill Gates came, and those seed banks needed money.
00:21:20.000And now he essentially controls all of the seed banks in the world, and his scientists are now altering those genomes slightly.
00:21:28.000So that they can patent those seeds and really own the life force of global agriculture to privatize the knowledge of 60,000 years of agriculture and turn it into a new financial asset that can be banked, that can support the financial industry.
00:21:50.000Please, I know that's a big question, but talk about how that works.
00:22:29.000They're low-yielding in terms of nutrition, and they're low output when you measure the whole ecosystem, all the production you can have with biodiversity.
00:22:38.000Two years ago, three years ago, When the public funding was going into a crunch, Bill Gates would just give a million here and 50,000 here, and he had the rights to all the seats in these amazing seat banks, which is the heritage of the world.
00:22:56.000Because of his trying to control the world through his digital empire, he is trying to bypass the laws that have been put in place so that companies and countries take permission when they take seed from a country or a farmer.
00:23:14.000And there's something called a seed treaty in the FAO. Now, when I do breeding, I know this is my seed.
00:23:42.000And, you know, because we've saved seeds, and many of these seeds were salt-tolerant, which when the cyclones hit, because we'd saved them, we could distribute them to the farmers, flood-tolerant.
00:23:54.000He claims to have invented, through his foundation, the flood-tolerant seeds by calling it the sub-G. No, he just stole seeds from Indian farmers and then did some breeding.
00:24:09.000But the trait of salt tolerance and the trait of flood tolerance is in breeding and innovation of farmers over thousands of years.
00:24:17.000So not only is he trying to turn this into a financial asset, he is literally a biopirate.
00:24:24.000And talk about how the financial community, the Blackstones of the world, the Goldman Sachs, profit from basically privatizing nature and turning it into a financial asset upon which they can borrow.
00:24:54.000Heads of state used to be heads of state.
00:24:56.000And now a billionaire is bigger than the heads of state, and he's telling them what to do.
00:25:00.000So that's when I wrote the book Oneness Versus 1%, which has been published by Chelsea Green.
00:25:05.000In 2008, when the Wall Street collapsed, These asset management funds, which is the billionaire money, the rich people's money, they weren't big.
00:25:13.000I think it was less than a trillion for BlackRock and around that much or a little less for Vanguard.
00:25:30.000And then we found that buyer Monsanto, Coca-Cola, Google, Microsoft, take any company, the big pharma, take anybody.
00:25:40.000The top 75% investments are by these financial asset management funds.
00:25:47.000For them, the world is only financial assets, which they gamble on.
00:25:50.000Speculate on and increase the risks to have their returns.
00:25:55.000Last year, just before the Glasgow summit, The financial world and Rockefeller Foundation again, all the time, they pop up again and again.
00:26:08.000And that, to me, is the tragedy of the way the world is being governed.
00:26:13.000One or two people gang together in a little room, World Economic Forum, and just say, this is what's going to be the constitution of the world, free trade.
00:26:21.000as the Claude Schorke said for the WTO.
00:26:23.000You know, Rockefeller and New York Stock Exchange get together and say, now we're going to create natural asset companies which will own nature.
00:26:33.000Now, one would think, okay, they're just taking it one step beyond, you know, private property and land, trying to privatize seed, privatize water.
00:26:41.000But it's worse because the same system has pushed countries into debt, like they pushed farmers into debt.
00:26:48.000In India, the BT cotton area, you know, is the highest rate of suicides India has lost 400,000 farmers to suicide, most of which are in the GMO cotton belt.
00:26:58.000And our farmers who've left BT cotton using native seed, doing ecological agriculture, are earning two times more.
00:27:05.000So it isn't that ecological agriculture doesn't reward the farmer.
00:27:18.000We are really slipping into a big debt crisis.
00:27:21.000And all it takes is just like Bill Gates went with the one million and said, the seed bank is mine.
00:27:28.000The Black Rocks and the Vanguards and the asset management companies can go to an indebted company and say, okay, yeah, give us your forests and your mountains.
00:27:37.000And here's the money to pay your debt.
00:27:39.000And because we are in a deep crisis, this kind of new enslavement will increase unless we rise up and say nature's not for sale.
00:27:52.000That's what we said at Seattle when we stopped the WTO. Our world is not for sale.
00:27:57.000You know what they're imagining to make, you know, in a crumbling world where there's cost of living marches everywhere, where people aren't being able to pay for food and rent?
00:28:07.000They're talking about an economy of financial assets under their control of $4,000 trillion.
00:28:15.000And a lot of that is just from privatizing nature.
00:28:19.000And, you know, they privatized the seeds.
00:28:22.000Now they're going to privatize the viruses, which are, you know, USAID and NIH and the big financial companies that are going to own them.
00:28:33.000And we're becoming serfs on our own land.
00:28:37.000We're being pushed off the land and it's a new form of serfdom.
00:28:43.000It's the system that in our country, we had the revolution in 1776 to escape European feudalism.
00:28:51.000And now we're having these An aristocracy of billionaires, a plutocracy of billionaires, aligned with the military-industrial complex and the intelligence agencies, who are pushing the world and middle class, eradicating the middle class, creating these huge gaps in wealth that create this global aristocracy, and the rest of us become serfs on our own land, to the extent that we own any land.
00:29:19.000And as the great researcher and Klaus Schaub said, you will own nothing and you will be happy.
00:29:25.000But then he's saying overnight, you know, India was not a land of automobiles.
00:29:29.000We've been forced to become an automobile culture.
00:29:32.000And now you can't go anywhere without a traffic jam.
00:29:35.000No matter how many super highways they build, we are constantly running out of space.
00:29:41.000Now, overnight, the World Economic Forum says no private ownership of cars.
00:29:45.000Well, say that after you have created a public system of transport, You can't shut down the options you forced on people.
00:30:16.000And that's why I always say the extinction crisis is not just about other species.
00:30:22.000It is about us as human beings, not just as a species being, but with our humanity, you know.
00:30:29.000When COVID stuck, I mean, it's amazing.
00:30:31.000That period was a period of such rapid consolidation, you know, patents on vaccines, patents on On the SARS virus, but also a patent in Microsoft's hand on humans as users of machines and the algorithm in their machines will judge our value and assign us a cryptocurrency exactly like the social credit system of the United States.
00:30:54.000And one of the other really troubling things for me is we did all this work on soil We talked about how important it was to enrich the soil carbon because chemical agriculture had destroyed soil carbon.
00:31:08.000Now, exactly this work is being hijacked.
00:31:52.000And, you know, the people in Silicon Valley are jumping onto fake food.
00:31:55.000They are, of course, controlling all the discourse, all the discourse of what is knowledge, especially since I respond to crises that have huge implications for nature and huge implications for humanity.
00:32:05.000I find it fascinating that the mainstream media It has not a word about the human crisis that we are living through.
00:32:13.000It doesn't have a word about the alternatives that people are building all over the world.
00:32:17.000It has not a word about the connections between soil and plants and our food or food and health and food and freedom.
00:32:25.000You know, let me ask you something else that I think is troubling both you and me, because we both came out of an environmental movement.
00:32:33.000And a lot of the mainstream environmental movement today, you know, the big groups that were always on the side of the poor, that were on the side of working people and, you know, the majority of people...
00:32:46.000Many of them are kind of hypnotized by Gates' vision and his supposed commitment to climate change when he talks about it is palaver.
00:32:58.000And they're missing some of these really important developments that are occurring with the privatization, with the emergence of climate change.
00:33:06.000The dominance by this alliance between large corporations and the military industrial complex, the intelligence agencies and the big media, those have become the enemy of humanity.
00:33:18.000And a lot of our friends in the environmental movement are missing that.
00:33:23.000Well, you know, when I left academics in 1982, before that my mother had said, anytime you want to leave an institutional job, the cow shed is waiting for you.
00:33:34.000And my office, where I'm sitting now, the Research Foundation, is my mother's cows.
00:33:39.000There used to be cows in this place when we were children.
00:33:41.000And my mother reminded me that to do good work, you need good commitment, you need passion.
00:33:49.000And she said, here's the cow shed, never chased the money.
00:33:52.000She gave me freedom, you know, so I didn't have to look for rents, I didn't have to look for office space.
00:33:57.000I think what has happened to a large part of the very big environmental NGOs, They are so addicted to very large funding.
00:34:07.000And in this world of impoverishment, the only people who have large money are the billionaires.
00:34:13.000So one has to be creative in order to mobilize the resources outside the billionaire trap.
00:34:20.000Because I've watched, I've been part of the biodiversity movement and the climate movement since 1992 when we wrote the treaties.
00:34:27.000But I've seen how the climate movement has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk narrower and narrower.
00:34:33.000First, they forgot everything about the phenomena of climate disturbance.
00:34:37.000I call it the metabolic disorder of the planet.
00:34:40.000Just like junk food gives us metabolic disorders like diabetes and obesity, when you give junk a diet of energy, which doesn't belong to the Earth's cycles with fossil fuels, you're going to have a metabolic disorder.
00:34:52.000And I think the two things missing in the bigger organizations, I won't call them movements, because when something runs on money, it is not linked to the grassroots.
00:35:07.000There's so much talk on science, including during the COVID, so much talk on science, climate, but I find the basic science of how did the Earth cool herself and what can we learn from the Earth to cool her now?
00:36:07.000The power it has is the power to challenge dominant concepts that are the root of destruction, dominant patterns of production and consumption, and find better ways to commit yourself to do it.
00:36:25.000And build back better is about buildings.
00:36:27.000We need to turn to life in our abundance.
00:36:30.000And Dana Sheeva, please get her new book, Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture, and tell us, tell our listeners how they can support you, Vandana.
00:36:40.000Well, they can support us by supporting Navdanya, and we have an organization in the U.S., the 501c3, called Friends of Navdanya.
00:36:48.000Friends of Navdanya, if you look for it, you'll be able to find their website, and you'll be able to find...
00:38:11.000Or nav can be new, and dan can be the gift.
00:38:14.000So we basically see Navdanya as both a protector of biodiversity, but also the new gift of the recovery of the commons.
00:38:23.000Because the roots of Navdanya are in the fight against patenting life.
00:38:28.000So sharing living systems, sharing seeds, creating community seed banks, sharing knowledge, sharing ways of living on this beautiful planet.
00:38:36.000And we have to make a commitment that by 2030 we will not go to extinction.