Real Food, Real Farming by Dr. Vandana Shiva

foreign [Applause] good evening everybody welcome to this very special public talk on real food real farming by Dr banana Shiva it's so nice to see so many of you here thank you so much for coming uh my name is Ami and I'm a member of the organizing team of the international youth Initiative Program for those of you who don't know Yeti is an apostolically inspired training on societal entrepreneurship which is based on this campus um and at if we work out of the understanding that the world is one interconnected living organism in which everything has an impact and so we also work a lot with the question around the relationship between freedom and responsibility and how we can be in service to the collective while also maintaining our individual sovereignty Dr Shiva also speaks a lot on the scheme of connection and our relationship to food to farming to the animals and to humans and so it's been a great honor to have the privilege of learning with Dr Shiva the last few days on the course that we had at gift titled biodiversity food sovereignty and regeneration and we're so incredibly grateful that she also said yes to doing a public talk tonight so that she could share her wisdom with the wider Community here on a more practical note this event will go until 8 30. Dr Shiva will speak for the first hour and then we'll have 30 minutes for questions um so there won't be any break in between um before I introduce Dr Shiva I also wanted to say a big thank you to the cold turkey set for allowing us to use this beautiful stage to Martin and Peter and the staff of the culture was sent for helping us with the tech and organizing this space I also wanted to say thank you to the green party for supporting us and making this event possible thank you so now I have the great honor of introducing Dr muhammadashiva um Dr banana Shiva is the daughter of the forest conservationist she's a mother a physicist a world-renowned activist speaking up against the big corporations speaking up against the extractive and chemical Industries advocating for the sovereignty of seeds of food fighting for the rights of farmers and for women she's a leading figure in the movement for eco-feminism she's also a writer and has written numerous papers and books she's a speaker an educator and she's also the founder of navdonya which is a movement promoting and protecting the biological and cultural diversity she's received numerous Awards recognizing her work and one of which is the right livelihood award which is considered the alternative mobile prize um and for me personally listening to her speak the last few days I've been moved by your sincere and passionate love of life and in this time when there's so much confusion and so much corruption in the world the piercing Clarity and compassion through which you are yeah working to [Music] um protect the freedom and the liberation of all life is truly inspiring for me and I'm sure for all of us who are here and so yeah I'm just so incredibly grateful that you're here with us tonight um please join me [Applause] thank you and thank you to all of you wonderful to see you for which for me a time that's for me is rather late because India time is four and a half hours ahead uh so when they asked me to for a title for the public talk I said real food real farming because so much of the aggression in our times every newspaper every TV show is talking about saving the world with fake food you know just like a half a century ago they brought fake fertilizer synthetic fertilizers and said we won't be able to feed the world without fake fertilizers and they were synthesized nitrogen by fixing atmospheric nitrogen through burning fossil fuels then they said we won't save the world with without having GMOs and now they're saying we won't save the world without you eating fake food now a if there wasn't a history of the consequences of fake narratives on the one hand and on the other hand so much thinking in science in practice of what food is this exercise of fakeness of saying the those people who are financing this because you know no one shifts to fake food on their own no man shifts to GMOs on their own these are always forced so fake food will have to be forced and and the world view that's being created is farming without farmers food without Farms of course farming is what farmers do and till recently half of humanity anyway I think more than half of humanity even today does agriculture especially if you go to the South in India they've been trying to force the farmers of the land ever since globalization the Green Revolution and yet 60 percent of Indians still are Rural and live on the land of armas are dependent on the land so this farming without farmers and food without Farms basically is food from labs but food from Labs doesn't count have come out of thin air it still needs feedstock and from the experience we have had each escalation of the artificial is an escalation of external inputs you use more resources you use more energy to produce worse outputs so you know India has had deep thinking I mean when I was busy doing quantum theory I wasn't reading all this amazing stuff but when the food question became urgent to me after 1984 when the Green Revolution in Punjab had led to so much destruction that the farmers Rose and Revolt fifteen thousand people were killed in the what happened after that then the golden temple had to be invaded which is a sacred Shrine of the Sikhs and that same year a pesticide plant of Union Carbide leaked in the city of Bhopal who killed thousands the gas just went through in the middle of the night winter night killing and people are still dying and 10 of my sisters have gone on a hunger strike to say when will you give Justice to Baba it's the women who've been couldn't this is 1984 we are in in 20 2023 next year will be 40 years so these two things shook me up and I wanted to understand so I studied the Green Revolution and then I started to follow ecological farming in which there's so many schools with me I think the deepest thinking is in the biodynamic the most organized practices are in the organic because it you know it's got e-form It's got standards it's got certification it had Albert Howard Albert Howard was sent to India by the British in 1905. to improve Indian agriculture because that's what the colonizers had to do to always improve us and he arrived but he was a good scientist and he could see with his eyes these soils are so fertile I cannot teach the peasants how to improve their practices and he found the fields were full of insects but there was no pest damage so he said I'm going to make the pest and the peasant my professor to learn good farming as a result of which he wrote the book the agricultural Testament which is what basically guides the organic movement but we've been eating every every being eats you know to be alive means to eat and when I started to investigate deeper more recently I we I did a whole book on food and health and its links I went back to to writings of people who were looking much more at the spiritual values of food at the ecological values of food and I just want to open by sharing with some quotes so I've come to the conclusion that the web of life is a food web that food is a flow it's a currency food is not stuff food is not a thing food is definitely not junk and food is not a commodity so the web of life is a food web and the cycle of life is a food cycle called the nutrition cycle everyone knows the nutrition cycle is vital it's a food cycle and this is regenerative agriculture so in one of our upanishads it says Anna is food a-n-n-a is a word for food in Hindi in Sanskrit it says for it is of Anna that indeed all beings are born and it is from Anna that they obtain the necessary sustenance for living and having lived it is at the end and that's the soil yeah and the best is everything is food every being is made of food every being is someone else's food immediately we realize we are part of the web of life we are members of an earth family and this you know three four hundred years of craziness of thinking we're top of the pyramid other beings are below us they're just objects to be manipulated objects to be exterminated and pushed to Extinction that thinking is actually not that old that mechanical thinking began with Mr Descartes and Mr bacon and they were given the job of creating Sciences of Conquest bacon was the chancellor of England and in the time when he was the chancellor he was also in charge of the Inquisition the witch hunts so he took that whole interrogating the witches into a scientific method and said it's torture of nature that allows us to know her Secrets you've got to subjugate nature you've got to make her your slave and so we have a very violent way of thinking in a mechanistic way and a reductionist way of course the irony you know I think often how you know this level of arrogance then Finds Its answers so Mr bacon died by stuffing snow into a chicken to see if he could preserve the chicken by filling it with snow Mr bacon got influenza and he died the chicken didn't so not a very you know it's very brutal um experimental method you know brute empiricism and the gentle empiricism that Gertie talked about and other scientists who really see the whole and see all the relationships and I love this one do not look this is food sustains life it says do not look down upon Anna this that is the inviolable discipline of the one who knows Prana you know the breath and life and and I think it's a theater you appreciate in the Mahabharata they say that the highest Dharma Dharma is the right action and the highest Dharma is the growing and giving of good food and that's why India had this amazing tradition you come to someone's house they feed you because they're Dharma for the farmer the Dharma was not doing an agriculture of carelessness I've worked with all kinds of communities in India and I remember a particular time I was helping an indigenous Community who was fighting a bauxite mine on the sacred mountain in giri so I had gone there to support them and I was having meetings with them and at a certain point one of the members just got up and mumbled something left and you know your typical understanding is or something must have happened must be an emergency what he was mumbling and his colleagues told me he was saying now I must go beautify the Earth farming is beautifying the Earth farming in a good way in a non-violent way so the going growing of giving of food is the highest Dharma not growing food or growing food badly or giving people bad food is the highest adharma the opposite so we've of course messed up with the food system first it began with making fake fertilizers because soil fertility is the living process of a living soil soil is living and the life in the soil creates the soil fertility you know this planet was a dead planet but we are a living planet because first the microbes then the plants through photosynthesis could take sunlight and transform it and absorb the carbon dioxide we were a carbon dioxide Rich planet and depleted in oxygen 98 CO2 and and just this photosynthesis process of the green leaf and microbes took the sunlight took the CO2 turned it into carbohydrates that many are now calling the molecule of life and at the same time give us breath give us oxygen no mechanical system can do all this none but those carbohydrates the plant produces are then food for the microbes that turn minerals in soil from the minerals they bring the nutrients to the plant they get the energy from the carbohydrates and then the plants organic matter is recycled and before you know it you're creating soil as a living system by co-creating with living systems and this then created the conditions where our species could arrive the oxygen increased the carbon dioxide decreased the temperatures which used to be how much was it the temperatures came down to 13 degrees from hundreds of degrees came down to a livable temperature for the human species to evolve but this is also where we should be looking how you know the whole what's the Gaia hypothesis the Gaia hypothesis is the Earth is living her living biosphere creates the atmosphere and regulates the atmosphere and that's the reason temperatures came down carbon dioxide came down but what are we doing today industrial agriculture is a destruction of the biosphere and biodiversity and the illusion that somehow fossil fuels will replace it because all synthetic fertilizers you know the fossil fuel based the nitrogen fertilizers one kilogram of fertilizer uses two liters of diesel and then it emits nitrous oxide ninety percent is wasted goes into the waters and this soil organisms cannot live with the salt so you have desertification and these externalities of course once seen you know when I did the book on the Green Revolution on the one hand a lot of people you know started to see these connections and on the other hand those who had pushed the Green Revolution started to panic because the narrative was we feed the world with chemicals and here in Punjab the chemicals were ruining the land killing the water and and our work has shown that you know the synthetic fertilizer use then weakens the plant you use 10 times more water the plant is just water absolute Feast for pests you get more pest attacks so you use more pesticides fertilizer use leads to pesticide use and there's a cancer train that leaves Punjab called the cancer tree its name is the cancer tree because of the heavy pesticide use and yet we're still being told you know the they keep organizing in a new way and right now the way the pesticide industry has organized itself is called the crop life it has nothing to do with crops and has nothing to do with life it's basically companies that produce toxic chemicals to kill insects to kill plants and human beings Bhopal was human beings being killed by pesticides 200 000 Farmers die every year because of pesticide poisoning so this is not a science of life and then you know they they re-engineered their name from the agrochemical industry to the life sciences when they were starting to use GMOs or wanting to use GMOs and that's the second attempt of creating of of basically find way to manipulate and substitute nature and substitute good farming by creating an unnecessary input if synthetic fertilizers were the first unnecessary input manipulating seeds and plants to make GMOs in order to take patterns was the second and you know when people ask me why are you against GMOs I said I'm not against GMOs but I'm against blindly accepting something that has totally failed as a scientist a failed tool cannot constantly be re-tooled as a miracle Mr Gates has recently said the GMOs are Miracle seats magic seeds that are feeding the world but the two Domino when this whole debate started in the 90s and I you know I would debate the World Bank I would debate the industry and they would say yeah yeah the Green Revolution things went wrong but now we have the perfect technology we're going to grow food on the moon in the Sahara and on toxic dumps what did we get now 30 years later all we have is BT toxin crops and herbicide resistant Roundup Ready crops that's it two traits in four crops corn canola soya cotton I know what the BT cotton did to my country because I was forced to go into cotton see if saving seeds training organic farmers helping create economies of weaving and using that organic cotton since globalization we've lost 400 000 Farmers to suicide because of debt of these because this is the government data and the government puts out in this District in this state this many we know that in the districts and states where the cotton is grown because stock cotton doesn't grow everywhere 85 of the 400 000. are in the cotton area and our competition Commission recognized about three years ago I think before buyer took over Monsanto they had recognized that Monsanto had a monopoly on Cotton 95 according to the government data 95 cotton seed in India and I guess the world is gmobility cotton no if you use if you produce a BT toxin plant to control pests the success of that technology is the best get controlled the failure of that technology is you have more pass and the pests you were trying to control is now resistant so you've created a superpass a pest control technology that creates super PES is not effective in the U.S it was mainly Roundup Ready crops to spray more glyphosate kill all plants you know as Monsanto I remember during the negotiations of convention on biological diversity among Santa representative got up and said we have such a smart technology that we can prevent the weeds from stealing the sunshine and and for them then killing all biodiversity except the four plants that they were using was basically a contribution I think this is very clear example of creating a product to kill life on Earth the green leaf that is the basis of the whole cycle of food today half the farmlands of the United States are overtaken by super weeds created by Roundup Ready crops because what was ignored was that plants are intelligent bacteria intelligent and when an insects are intelligent and this constant pressure leads intelligent organisms to evolve resistance so you have super resistant weeds and you have super resistant pests and more toxics are being sprayed and that's why they're rushing for Gene editing which the European court of justice has recognized as a GMO because a GMO is a genitively modified organism where modification is done at the genetic level whether you add a new Gene or you edit a gene the results in both a genetic modification and because all living systems including the seed and the plant are systems which are self-organized complexity autopoiesis as much Rana and Barilla has said and self-organization means an amazing Harmony at every level of the general every element of the genome is linked to other elements of the genome one gene one trait is not true all genes work together to produce one treat and each gene contributes to multiple traits just about because not a linear one-to-one relationship and and they're now calling Gene editing as Precision breeding there's nothing about breeding there and it's definitely not precision because when you're dealing with complexity you don't look for procession you look for balance you look for non-violence and already in the first year and another interesting thing is when molecular biology was created The Rockefellers were funding the whole Gene reductionism you know we want to find genes under the skin because they had been you know Eugenics had been criticized for sexism for racism so they said okay we'll put all this atoms of determinism they called it under the skin and they funded molecular biology to reduce complexity of life to the molecules of determination that's why the ideology of genetic determinism is the gene is a master molecule there's no master in life everything is a network and and all through those years every Nobel Prize was given to people her Rockefeller had funded more recently what happened oh something is that better is it working yeah so Mr Gates funded Gene editing the crispr cast 9 technology and it's interesting you know crispr is that technology of absorbing a virus is the way bacteria deal with viruses so they just saw how nature works and then appropriated as they mentioned and he funded the California scientists and the scientists in Cambridge then they started to fight so he funded both to fight the patent and he has a company called editors that holds Gene editing patterns but he got the Berkeley scientists the Nobel Prize and this at the time when other scientists were finding out that it's such an imprecise and disrupting technology just give you one or two example you know it talks about precision but a study found that a thousand five hundred single nucleotide mutations took place in a hundred larger deletions and insertions when one gene was edited one gene 1500 unpredictable impacts an increasing body of knowledge is showing there is total unpredictability unpredictability in the outcome I remember very clearly they were trying to you know in India we love the horns of cow and biodynamic agriculture So based on the cowhorns and um and we have festivals I think 9 13th on the 14th we have the Festival of the animals not to Pongal and they decorate the horns of the cows and the cows are left free you can't you can't rope them in they won't work they're on a holiday and they go around with these beautiful and you know they're all over the place these beautifully decorated animals and and when you take animals and put them in a factory farm those horns become a problem you know they start fighting each other just like the pigs tail becomes a problem in Factory condition and the beak of the chicken becomes a problem so they debake they burn the newborn chickens beak so they won't fight each other they detail the pigs so they would they create conditions of violence and then do more violence to solve the problem which can't be solved anyway Gene editing some scientists in California said we will now Gene edit a bull Bill and its animals to be hornless for the meat industry to have more bigger factory farms but from somewhere in these Gene edited animals there was huge bacterial infection and you cannot sell bacteria infected meat so I remember this debate because they tried to get permission to sell it as for beef and they were not allowed so the imprecision is so known and yet the desperation is so huge because why is Gene editing being pushed Gene editing is being pushed because not only can they not work with the old GMOs anymore they're trying very hard to pretend their nature they're trying to pass it as a natural technology so that they can deregulate for biosafety and get out of labeling so once they get Gene editing through as natural it will not require safety so there'll be all the stuff having in your food and you won't know it and you won't be able to make the choice that I don't want to eat this stuff because it will have a label natural yeah so we are at a very dishonest moment extremely dishonest moment in terms of our food and this because movements have been so successful because the organic movement has been so successful because the biodynamic movement has been so successful this is why the aggression to introduce fake Technologies and force it on society is become the single most biggest agenda for the industry when I say industry I mean both the financial part of it and the biotech part of it the part that wants to control the seed and Now to control the food so synthetic fertilizers began with synthetic you knows began the introduction of synthetic elements artificial elements into the food system then you had instead of of breeding of whole organisms with whole organisms you now had genetic engineering to really not have the the clearance of the organism to accept modification it was a forcing of the organism and in the process you actually created fake seed why do I call it fake seed because the nature of seed is to arise the word in India for seed is bija ja is life bija is that which arises on its own forever and ever and ever because the seed doesn't ever get exhausted but that idea of creating Terminator seed non-renewable seeds patented seeds is trying to stop the urge of life from renewal and it's worse than that because not only is it trying to control the seed it's then trying to criminalize the farmers who save seed and exchange seed and this is the reason I save seeds this is the reason I started navdania this is the reason I do the work I do we've created 150 community seed banks in India to reclaim seed as a Commons we've written laws that say seeds and animals and plants are not inventions so in India it's not patentable and we have laws on Farmers rights that farmers are the first breeders and their rights cannot be alienated and I do hope some of you will find your way to navdania and I met some of people who have already been and I know the young people who are going through the course come and visit this this finding ways to extract to make profit and turn renewability of life into non-renewability to turn the abundance of life into scarcity is what the fake food is all about so the fake food begins with you know the high fructose corn syrup made from GMO corn and you never hear of the harm it's doing and because it's addictive it's in the America in America it's put in baby food it's put in sausages it's put in everything because it creates the urge to eat more but now babies and children are getting cirrhosis of the liver because this molecules goes and hits straight away the because food is the currency of life it is the communication between the soil and the plants I want to just share with you my my understanding of this that as food as currency then eating is a conversation and there's actual research being done by brilliant scientists who show the difference between eating fresh organic food and the conversation that goes on between the cells in your gut and food and when they put chemical food the discordance that goes on and through that communication is the disease so I've written eating is a conversation between the soil the plants the cells in our gut the cells in our food and between our gut and our brain eating is an intelligent act at the deepest cellular and microbial level the cellular communication is the basis of health and well-being it is also the root of disease poisoned food creates disease we might be ignorant about the links between Food and Health but our cells are more intelligent a body is more intelligent than the reductionist Mechanical Mind contemporary humans have developed where we think of food as fuel and a body as a machine you know when I go visit schools the first question I ask children is what is food and because they're learning from textbooks not from their grandmothers they get up and say food is the fuel that runs the bodies which is a machine so we have so degraded food and so degraded our bodies to not know anymore what food is and it's in that confusion that the food system is coming in high fructose corn syrup was the first then you might have seen suddenly The Impossible Burger the burger without meat and the person who founded it Pat Brown his name is so I found the most ecological alternative what does he use GMO soya which has killed the monarch butterfly the glyphosate is causing disease and he calls it an ecological alternative and the impossible Burger shows you the future towards which they are going because they are looking at actually um patenting food now elements food because everything if everything you add is synthetic there's a pattern for it 14 patterns on that impossible Burger 40. you're really eating a patent Monopoly Angie masoya but it doesn't stop there it goes further because as long there's an alternative why would people go for rubbish like this so you have to create a narrative just like the narrative that started to make people feel first that organic is backward you know the advertisements in Europe by the industry were it's dirty to use organic manure you know it's black it's dirty and then they'd bring ads to say urea is white it's so clean and that's what changed the mindset and there's an attempt to change our mindset about food and not just accept fake food but accept it as the only solution to climate change now this is where it goes crazy because it is you know it is true I've written a book called soil not Isle fifty percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in the world come from a globalized and industrialized food system emissions in the production emissions and the food mart emissions through destroying the forest for soya in Amazon palm oil in Indonesia comes from Packaging processing all of this is usually energy intensive that's 50 percent now will more industrialization more long-distance transport more energy use solve this problem or make it worse it'll make it worse but with it a pseudoscience is being created and that pseudoscience is animals are to blame animals are causing climate change they're not because animals as part of the biosphere they have these short cycles of emitting a little bit methane but that methane comes back to the carbon cycle and in 10 years time there's no methane otherwise you know in India Farmers used to have 20 to 30 head of cattle in each family in the The Plains of America the Bison used to roam you have the reindeer now if animals were constantly emitting methane it was building up we'd have a very stinking planet like a waste dump you know it has a sting or when you go past these factory farms in America they call them kfos the concentrated Animal Farm operations you just go past them there's such a stink that stink is methane but our free-range animals are not stinking there's a little bit but you can see not just the bad signs because the biogenic methane it doesn't build up but you just suddenly out of the blue you know animals are the problem kill them Ireland is talking about killing a million sheep New Zealand is taxing all the animals for their burps and next to you in Netherlands they had this huge attack on farmers and they're using the same excuse and they want one third of the Farms wiped out no the solution is make one make all the farms organic and biodynamic you'll get rid of the nitrogen problem because the nitrogen problem is an industrial agriculture problem the ecological Solutions solve those problems you know on our farm even even the scientists who did the study for us on our farm in um I think we did a 20th year study on the valley and they couldn't believe it you know because everyone thinks you put an input then you have that object so you put nitrogen fertilizer you'll have nitrogen in chemical Source the nitrogen has depleted 22 percent in organic soils we're not applying any external input soil system is creating nitrogen up by 100 percent so I think it's time to get rid of this input output thinking because living systems create what the systems need and what the systems related to them need the mycorrhizal fungi creates through its process what the plant needs our gut processes you know through 100 trillion microbes and your Natasha's here and she'll be having the course on on food and brain but when Roundup started and you know all these chronic diseases started neural neurological disorder started and the graphs were showing it's going that rain every time I showed those grafts the Monsanto lobbyists would attack correlation is not causation so but you know a good scientist says oh if there's a correlation here let me look for what the causation is you don't escape from seeking causation so there's an Empire anti-scientist that have come to know and I said okay but let's begin with autism what are the what are the consequences of glyphosate we know all that what are the symptoms of autism and how are the two related and she did this and Stephanie seneff as a name and she's done a book on glyphosate but Monsanto always used to say that glyphosate is totally safe for us because our cells don't have the Shiki mate pathway and everyone said yeah so it can't do any impact but I know other scientists like Professor huben all who pointed out he said the bacteria in the soil have a shikimate pathway the bacteria in our gut have a sheikhimate pathway and this destruction destruction by glyphosate is having huge increase and and your work Natasha is is showing how much food has related to that so are the bacteria in our gut produce three aromatic amino acids tryptophan tyrosine and phenyla lamine through the Shiki mate pathway since our cells don't have the pathway we have to have these bacteria in order to be able to process all this these essential amino acids are precursors to the neurotransmitters dopamine serotonin melatonin and adrenal as well as thyroid hormone folate and vitamin E the killing of gut bacteria leads to deficiencies in this important biological molecules and impairs a neurological functions now if your entire fake food will be using more GMOs more Roundup more synthetic chemicals added to pretend you know like in this impossible Burger they actually talk they made a fake blood called heme to make it look like meat and I can't understand I said you don't want to eat meat don't eat meat there are lots of vegetables but why do you want to not eat meat attack everyone kill every cow and then say I want blood it doesn't hang together for me for the industry I can understand they'll tell any lie DDT is good for you is how they sell DDT but for the people who are getting convinced by fake food and the fake narrative and the fake science and the fake economics that's what puzzles me and it puzzles me particularly because those people who think really think they're solving the climate problem are running down this false line fastest fake food as a climate solution is a fake solution because it's avoiding the real path we must follow deeper integration between animals plants and trees which is what integrated farming is about more biodiversity if the planet could cool itself through the biosphere then our farming must mimic that process to intensify photosynthesis to intensify biodiversity and our work has shown that the more you intensify biodiversity the more you recycle the carbon and nitrogen the more the soil becomes healthy you produce more nutrition per acre we don't measure yield per acre but what's the point of measuring nutritionally empty commodities food is about eating food is about nourishment and if it's nutritionally empty food you're going to get all kinds of sicknesses and disease because we do the soil work and we had you know in in the chemical Source the the zinc had gone down 34 percent and in the organic soils it had gone up 24 percent so this public health specialist had come and was visiting us in um in navdhania and she saw this data and she says now I understand why are young people are depressed because she does brain chemistry and she found that half of Australia's teenagers were depressed all of them had zinc deficiency but if if there's no zinc in your soil and there's zinc on your food you will have zinc deficiency you will have magnesium deficiency in having attention deficit yeah but the chemical world just wants another chemical solution for each of these things so there's a British meta study covering more than 400 studies that has found that organic foods can have up to 60 percent more beneficial nutrition than chemical food and the the deficiency now you know it's being it's interesting you know a paper comes out in the nutrition journal or in a toxicology Journal for two days it's there measuring the nutritional emptiness of industrial food and how how much more phytochemicals how much more nutrients the real food has and then you cannot Google that article just as much as when the whole issue of immunity came up now everyone that you knows that organisms are healthy when they have immunity any organism if a plant is organically fed it is more resilient and will not be impacted by pests there'd be the same pests in the field but they're chemically grown field will have attack of pests and the organic regrowth field will not have an attack of Base that's what Howard saw when he says lots of insects and no pests so we're growing more and more nutritionally empty commodities at higher and higher cost and then we're turning it in magically into cheap food how can a high cost production system lead to cheap food because the structures of subsidies the structures of trade the structures of 400 billion is the agriculture subsidy that makes industrial food cheap enough to dump on third world countries so they become dependent self-sufficient countries who were growing their own food are now importing and it takes one little instability in the war one collapse in Supply chains for people to have no food so real food real farming for me is the biggest climate solution and we've done this work when you have climate disaster what do you want you want seeds that are resilient and we've saved the seeds that are resilient climate tolerant salt tolerant flood tolerant drought tolerant seeds and they're able to survive and come back after a cyclone after a drought you want good resilience in the soil where there's a resilience of the soil come from in a time where climate change is leading to more floods and more droughts you need better holding of water if your soul can soil can hold more water the flood is not severe the flood is worst in areas where the soil has been totally panned and if there's a drought you want moisture in your soil one percent organic matter holds hundred and sixty percent say 160 000 liters of water in hectare the soil is a water river Healthy Living soils are a water reservoir Healthy Living soils are not just the resilience and adaption to climate change but they're the mitigation and now so many studies are being done on an average basically they're showing that if we stop fossil fuel use in 10 years we can draw down the excess carbon dioxide through intensifying the biosphere capacity to do photosynthesis and the more the fungal population the more the photosynthesis increases so we're in a very exciting moment where the real science is backing real food and real farming making connections between the soil and our gut making connections between the biodiversity outside in the biodiversity within us not just the biodiversity in our gut microbiome but increasingly what's really inspiring me is the shift that is taking place from what I have called the monoculture of the Mind the monoculture of the Mind thinks of only one value soya bean is available just grow soil finish off the Prairies just grow GM soya BT cotton just make everything BT cotton eucalyptus just plant eucalyptus plantations and this monoculture of the mind is what is destroyed biodiversity but that's not how minds are mines because they are the relational world that's in constant co-creation this biodiverse world has abide of us mind and we have biodiverse Minds the ability to see in the whole as well as analyze in the small that's what good science is about to see the system and then look at the part but the illusion is when you only look at the part and deny the whole that's where the destruction starts to happen and that destruction is of course destroying the Earth but worse it is you know I I often feel that the vicious way in which the poison wakers who are killing life on Earth attack those who are protecting life on Earth is like contemporary witch hunts you know 9 14 93 was the papal bull the Justified Columbus's you know going and take say take over the territories on our behalf but I always joke and say you know at that time at least there was a God and then there was a pope and then the Beloved the pope were the kings and queens and then the kings and queens found adventurers like Columbus what do we have now the corporations are the creators they play God they are the government they've hijacked our governments They are Kings and Queens they run everything and they are the merchant adventurers and the Pirates of our time it was more sophisticated but it's the same old thing and and the fact that you know the best practices of organic of biodynamicanders you know I I will be going to getanium for the big celebrations in February I think I have to speak on February 1st because everywhere the biodynamic movement is being attacked in France in Italy cases are being filed when you say your food is healthier you are misleading the public you know so we are living in very obedient times lies are truth and truth are lies health is sickness and sickness is health So In This Moment the real becomes an Awakening but of course the real can be terribly Troublesome in The mechanistic reductionist View because in a mechanistic view we are separate from nature everything is a machine everything's an object and in that dead world you can't create a knowing except through violence that's why bacon suggested violence the orchard of nature but in a living world knowledge is interaction and dialogue like food is a conversation knowing is a conversation between self-organized intelligent beings and at this time there's so many crises are converging which actually have the same roots the same problem the same fossil fuel World creates climate change the same fossil fuel chemicals cause Extinction of species because if insecticides are sprayed to kill insects insects will disappear if herbicides are designed to kill plants the biodiversity of your plants will disappear so the real is the real lived relationships in a living world then the epistemological Gap doesn't happen if we are separate and the object is inert and you're the knowing person you'll always keep thinking how do you know how do you know how do you know and then objective knowledge they call it becomes totally subjective knowledge of projecting onto the world your illusions but in the real world life itself is the teacher in the real world intelligence is distributed and there's such amazing work being done on intelligence of bacteria intelligence of plants intelligence of animals intelligence of soil organism the mycorrhizal fungi is an intelligent organism that's making choices at every moment what mineral to take up what toxics to reject and in this world of vibrant life Rich diversity and deep intelligence living the real defending practicing real farming eating real food in my view becomes a revolutionary Act for Life freedom and health thank you [Applause] thank you very much Dr Shiva um we have about just under half an hour for questions um Tessa and I will be running around with a microphone um but perhaps we can also ask for your support in getting it to the right people um so if you can just if you have a question to raise your hand up high and we'll try and get the mic to you okay thank you it's really interesting so you're talking about the Green Revolution and I wonder what is the biggest difference between the Green Revolution in the 1960s with Norman Bullock in the front line and now the Green Revolution in the African region with Bill Gates in the front line what would you say is the best biggest difference between these two but for one there's a continuity because pore log was not in the front line it was the Rockefeller foundation and the U.S department in usaid and the World Bank he was the scientist who was hired to change the plans to take more chemicals you know as I put in my book The Green Revolution he'd he'd say if I was a parliamentarian in in India I would get up every minute and Shout fertilizers give me my fertilizers and Mr Bill Gates is saying exactly the same right now for Africa he said I love fertilizers at a time when everyone knows the high cost of synthetic fertilizers I think the only difference is India is a large subcontinent but the World Bank and Rockefeller zoomed in on Punjab which was the most fertile and prosperous area in the case of Africa they're wanting to cover all of Africa because they have to do two things first is shift from ecological farming to fertilizer-based synthetic fertilizer and second the seed system you know in India we had a very highly organized seed system including government institutions including Private Industry but Africa most of the seed system is pharmaceutical system so in order to capture that they have to commercialize the seed so right now they are not pushing GMO seeds they're pushing commercialization of the seed system and making local seed illegal I've been to Africa two or three times because law after law is brought I think in Ghana they've just tried it in in another South African country making Farmers Seed saving illegal and you know this is the reason I started navdhani I said no saving seed is our highest Duty how can a duty be converted into a crime I will not accept that so you know and this they tried it in Europe I think it was 2015 where they brought a law called the broad draft law called plant propagation law and my friends in the European Parliament started to ask me and say this this law that's come we can't understand what it's about we don't know if it's about seed so they sent me the text so I wrote back to them immediately I said it is a seed law it's a law to prohibit in seeds that are not registered but Earl you know your systems are natural systems Sweden decides what's in the register Italy decides what's in the register but this new law would have required a Greek Farmer on a small island or someone in the Tuscan Hills who's growing ancient wheat to come to Brussels to take permission for the planting so I wrote a thousand two hundred Corrections sent it back to the parliament and and then did a pilgrimage we did a seed pilgrimage very powerful pilgrimage you know in the southern past the Mediterranean past which are rich which started from Greece Italy to France and and that that law is in deep freeze right now what should be in deep freeze is the swalbard ice which is where Mr Gates has put the seeds but uh that's melting yeah people used to the films have been made on you know navdania's philosophy of living seed conserving it by growing it out and the swalbod through freezing it and I said the two reasons why it won't work because we work with seed and we know what it takes to take this much seed to multiply it enough to give it to 10 farmers and these little packages that are in the Doomsday Mall cannot be multiplied fast enough if there is a disaster but I said anyway those eyes that ice is melting with climate change yeah so how far will they be able to save those seeds but the reason these seeds are not valuable for multiplying they are valuable for digital mapping so there's Gene editing with the manipulation of the plant but there's digital mapping which is Mr Gates attempt to own the seeds through digital Maps so these little packages have in it this corn is drought tolerant it matures into months and it has this flavor but he just had to do a general map and he said I created it and this is how most new patterns are being taken are through digital mapping thank you thank you so much my question is um have you received any resistance on a personal level um as a consequence of you talking about these topics and how do you handle them when it's like a large corporations standing against your message or something yeah it's the first time I received conflicts um was when I was doing a mining study for the government and this was in my Valley so I came back to study and I get called from the miners saying if you go back to the field you'll find your 80 year old dad and your eight-month child dead I came and talked to my dad I said you know this is what they say and it's in the film that was screened that you know and my dad said doing your duty following your conscience is your highest role you must continue and there are higher forces that protect us I mean that's something he always said to me the higher forces that protect us then I filed a case against Monsanto when they brought the GMO cotton illegally and I got massive threats and you know they kept you know one minute one minute the call would come from Paris another minute to come from you know other consequences I would face so what did I do I called my friends and said just photocopy this case and if I don't turn up in the court you deal with the lawyers so multiply multiply the seed teaches us that the best defense is multiply [Applause] foreign I have a question about soils that have been treated with glyphosate is it how long does it take for it to be living again when you know the soil is so powerful as our bodies are you know any living system organizes itself in life and it organizes its healing engineered systems collapse and break down cars break down computers break down a plant doesn't break down it heals itself the soil doesn't break down it heals safe so I can tell you from two examples when the tsunami hit I went in to help the Tamil Nadu farmers and the government had said for five years we won't be able to grow food because there's too much salt on the land you know the water that came from that ocean was there's so much toxics in the ocean so this toxic layer and the salt they said it won't be able to solve so we had saved the salt tolerant seeds in our seed bank in Orissa which has a thousand two hundred kinds of seed varieties and we said we'll bring it the bureaucracy of course tried to stop the farmers trucks you know um but eventually you know we got there we distributed and of course we helped the farmers with Organic training very fast we gave the seeds into dogening within a season you know the agriculture bounced back between the season the toxics had been removed and I saw this also in Fukushima I visited Fukushima and then I organized in India conference learning from disasters because we usually Panic with disasters I said what is it that we learn it was amazing you know whether it was the Indian tsunami or the Indian recycling or the disaster in Japan what everyone ended up saying was you you learn that a we are part of Nature and nature is more powerful but the Fukushima research showed scientists worked with organic farmers even the radiation was removed from the soil by the fungi so we I think you know in the course there was some a question about trust I think we made to distrust life and so we always feel in we feel doubt you know we hesitate and life's been around you know and we need to start trusting life and aligning with the processes and that to me is the ecological life hi hi thank you for your and everything I just wonder what's your thoughts on how how biodynamic farming is supplied in in the global south or yes in India which is developed by German in Germany with the German plants or plants that are in that occur in Europe and how do you yeah how do you translate it or what's your thought around using it in This Global South well actually from what I know China came to India and got inspired including learning how to make homeopathic Solutions in the horns of cows yeah so of course so the whole tradition the whole biodynamic farming is based on old traditions from India would you say no elements of it because I think any creative mind takes an insight and then puts it to a deeper learning of course if he's in he he's in Germany and Switzerland he'll use local plants but that doesn't mean there will not be plants in different regions but what's the like if taking the ideas from traditional farming in India for example what do you think that has had another effect on maybe eliminating traditional methods and farming methods no that did not what had the impact of elementing methods was the Green Revolution the Green Revolution said all your indigenous practices are wrong it's not it's not the spreading of knowledge you know that's why I love the seed and I love knowledge if I have seed and I share it with you I can still grow my seed and you can grow yours is the intellectual property that creates poverty making it illegal for us to exchange and for us to save seeds that's where the seed famines start knowledge is the same if I share knowledge I don't have less of it there's more of it in the world but piracy is different yeah if Steiner came to India and then came and said totally my invention and I have intellectual property on it and then prohibit it the Indians who were using those same techniques in an earlier way to prevent them that would be criminal and that's what the seed industry is doing that's what the chemical industry is doing they steal our seeds they steal our knowledge that's what I call biopiracy and then they use intellectual property they take intellectual property by stealing and then say I've invented it and a patent prevents anyone else from making using developing the patented whatever is patented so they can steal our name and come back and say you can't use name that's why I fought the name piracy 11 years 11 years we fought the U.S government and wrbreze and defeated them [Applause] I think I think we have time for two questions there's one here and this lady here was next yeah thank you I have a question have you ever talked to Mr Gates yes I've debated him many times okay and also my question is how do you how do you debate with people that are capitalistic or monoculture that's not the issue the problem is you can't debate with a dumb man [Applause] hello yeah now it works thank you so much I'm deeply touched by everything you've said and by the wisdom you share I just want to ask being you know in a wealthy country educated being probably active we in the public here we in the the audience what would you advise us to do I don't advise but I share and what if I was here in Sweden today with all the qualities that you have said the first thing I would do is build a strong movement of real Farmers real food [Applause] thank you thank you Dr Shiva it's always so good to listen to you sitting in this fantastic Hall more or less handmade around you I have a question you are talking about sharing so how do you think a couple of elements of how could the biodynamic farmings here some specific issues for the future you know Common Revolution for real farming and real food some few examples from you thank you well you know I think the reason there's such an attack on on the biodynamic movement is because the biodynamic movement takes your Consciousness to a higher level and you make your decisions about farming and your food in a much more thoughtful way and much more informed way the second is the biodynamic results are so huge that too I think the entire mechanistic path is to focus on superficial quantity yield of nutritionally empty commodities the power of biodynamic is to focus on the potential and quality and that's the shift we need that's the big movement from obsession with quantity to realizing the quality and uh a shift from objects and stuff and essentialism and inertness and you know staticness to a world of flow of potential of interaction and Oneness [Applause] hello yeah there we go thank you very much Dr banana Shiva for your time and for sharing all of your wisdom with us I saw that there were more questions but unfortunately we're out of time for today um yeah and I just wanted to offer a small token of our gratitude it's from the land here because food is the currency of life and this is uh water from the birch trees to keep you hydrated on your travel okay thank you very much [Music] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: YIP Sweden

Views: 37,465

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Id: xYg1Pt0fcOs

Length: 79min 6sec (4746 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 23 2023