Patrick Pittman on Vandana Shiva

There Are Forces of nature, and Then There Is Vandana Shiva. Hers Is a Name Close to the Lips of Anybody Engaged in Questions of Sustainable agriculture, of Social justice, of Globalisation

do the work of Navdanya from ‘87 onwards, to a very global level of public understanding. You know. There are people who are doing seed saving. There are people who are fighting patents. There are individuals and small groups. But the juggernaut of destruction is so huge, and now country after country is passing laws to criminalise farmers’ seeds. To collect royalties from anything a farmer grows, whether it was bought from Monsanto or not. And in effect, it is to strangle every alternative.

I’ve seen this happen to Germany and France this year. We have fought this kind of law from 2004 and resisted it in India. So we’ve started the Seeds of Freedom campaign, a global movement. And what I really want to do over the next three years—I don’t know what the outcome will be, but I feel the imperative to do it—is that the issue of patenting gets understood by a lot more people. So that a lot more people start to realise that this is so wrong, and start to take actions. Not just the farmer who was saving seeds who is today being criminalised, but every organic grower, every organic eater. The little restaurant that wants to get good delicious vegetables and knows that tomorrow this will be impossible and all you will get is Monsanto seeds. So to really create a very broad wave of both awareness and outrage. And to call for no patents on seed. And to create actions that allows it to happen.

Why do I take even hope in this? Because we’ve done it in India. When I started seed saving, I did it to fight patents. And I took inspiration from Gandhi. Facets of Gandhi. Gandhi didn’t have just one facet. He didn’t just resist. He created and resisted. He said, ‘If you don’t create an alternative, your resistance will never be strong.’ So I took inspiration from the spinning wheel.

That’s why I started saving seeds, I asked, ‘Gandhi fought the British Empire with a spinning wheel, so what’s the spinning wheel of today?’

And the seed is what came to my mind. And on the other side, I said, They’re not going to stop making laws just because some of us think it’s an outrage that you haven’t invented the seed and you call it your invention. Something’s going wrong very deeply. And then you collect royalties, and we’ve seen this for fifteen years, you collect royalties that kill farmers. It was always an ethical outrage but now it’s becoming a social human rights abuse.

Gandhi said to the British, when the salt laws were being enforced, that, ‘We have a duty to continue to make our salt, we won’t obey your law.’ So that day onwards, from 1987, we said, ‘We’re going to save seeds, but we’re going to save seeds with the declaration that we do not obey, we do not respect patents on seeds because it’s a brute law. It’s an unjust law. And it’s our duty to not obey.’

All our members, our 650,000 people who are associated with Navdanya—in campaign movements, seed saving, organic farming—all take this simple pledge: we received our seeds from nature and our ancestors, we’ve got to pass them on to future generations. We will not respect any law that makes this illegal.