Vandana Shiva on industrial agriculture's use of war chemicals and food sovereignty versus the new colonialism

This is an excerpt of Vandana Shiva's talk about the role of war chemicals (pesticides, fertilizers) in industrial agriculture's new colonization in her talk on food and seed sovereignty at the International Meeting on Resisting Hegemony held 2-5 August 2010 in Penang, Malaysia.

I'm going to talk about the work I've been doing for the last 30 years on issues of biodiversity, food, and agriculture, largely because of the recognition this is the cutting edge of the new colonization and the new imperialism...

For me, 1984 was significant because of two major events, both very tragic. One was June 4, when the Sikh shrine, the Golden Temple, was invaded by the Indian Army, largely because of the unrest and the extremism that had built up in Punjab, and the extremists were hiding in the Golden Temple. And, later that year, we had the Bhopal tragedy where the pesticide plant leaked and killed 3,000 people in one night. 25,000 since then...

Bhopal is historically a watershed in terms of the structures. Part of it involves "shedding," First shedding hazards and then shedding liabilities related to hazards. Bhopal is a watershed where sacrificing the rights of people in the time of industrial genocide starts...

Someone mentioned Lawrence Summers who is currently Obama's chief economic advisor. But I first came across Lawrence Summers in 1992 when he was the chief economist of the World Bank because he wrote a memo saying it makes good economic sense to move pollution and hazards to developing countries. First because it's cheaper to find labor and therefore costs come down. And when people fall ill, it's cheaper. And when people die, it's cheaper, because their lives are worth less. So that's 3/5 of a human being on a scale issue. This continues in the contemporary calculus of what is a life worth.

Because of this series of violent episodes, I decided to start looking at what is really happening to agriculture....

Because of this series of these very violent episodes, I decided to start looking at what is really happening to agriculture. And in those days, I was associated with the peace and global transformation program that the CSDS that used to have...I decided to study what happened to Punjab...I was young, an innocent physicist with no idea of what was going on in agriculture...

A series of things I learned during that study. First, that agriculture had become the place to extend the war economy. Every input in agriculture is a war chemical. Every agrichemical is a war chemical. Herbicides were used in Vietnam. Pesticides were used to kill people which is why Bhopal killed people. Fertilizers came out of explosives factories...

The other day I was at some gathering and there was someone who is very close to the U.S. security establishment and they said Iraq was easy because the weapons were very evident. The weapons had been bought on global markets. Afghanistan is tough because the weapons are fertilizer bombs made from the fertilizer the U.S. distributed. So this is, in fact, the fertilizer coming back to its original purpose. And of course, it's not just that these are just war chemicals extending into agriculture.

But bringing them into agriculture is very much part of the new imperialism. The common narrative of the Green Revolution is India chose it. The reality of it is that the defense labs of the U.S. started to work in the '40's on how do you retool these chemicals for agriculture...So you had to change the plants to adapt to the chemicals...

Rather than calling them varieties bred for chemicals, they were now called "high-yielding" varieties. In fact, they were even called "miracle seeds." And the first 12 people they trained were called...the "wheat apostles" introducing these new seeds...

In the colonization through agriculture, land was emptied of its biodiversity...

This whole structure only worked because when these varieties were ready, the U.S. government was waiting for an opportunity to push them. And it was a drought that took place in 1965 that provided that opportunity because the need for additional imports became the time for imposing conditionalities: "We won't send you wheat unless you change our agriculture." Our prime minister at that time said "no." He died soon after, in Tashkent, under very mysterious conditions. And the conditions continued. The two foundations, the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford and the World Bank joined hands to create this package of conditionalities...

You couldn't borrow unless you proved you had taken money and subsidies for chemicals. You couldn't get any benefits from any government program unless you showed you were planting the new seeds. The Green Revolution didn't spread because of the choice farmers were making, but because of conditionalities...

A lot of my work in the Punjab study showed that actually food production went down. Rice and wheat production went up, but only because you displaced all the other crops. In an Indian diet, you need your pulses, your oil seeds, lots of vegetables. All of that disappeared. Now you had a monoculture...

We had a huge decline in pulses, the basic protein for a vegetarian diet. Quite clearly, the West never understood because they never had pulses in their diet...