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VANDANA SHIVA speech at Biodevastation Conf., July 17, 1998 (fwd)



First Grassroots Gathering on Biodevastation: Genetic Engineering
July 17-19
Fontbonne College
St. Louis, Missouri

The Iowa City publishers of a monthly 24-page publication called GREEN
ACRES NEWS crossed state lines to attend the Biodevastation Conference;
the resuting August edition of GAN catches the power of the Conference and
of Vandana Shiva, the principal speaker, who says:

<<I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR YEARS FOR SOME KIND OF ORGANIZED RESPONSE FROM
THIS COUNTRY.  WE ALL HAVE BEEN WAITING.>>

I'm posting this heavily edited Shiva speech with GAN's  agreement. 

This is for all of you to read and to repost to your friends and to all
your consuming acquaintances.

Later I'll also post a more-lightly edited version of the same speech

MichaelP

==================================


I THINK ULTIMATELY, THE TEST OF THIS CONTEST AND THIS STRUGGLE IS GOING TO
BE BETWEEN LOTS OF LIES BACKED BY A VERY HUGE MONEY AND A LOT OF TRUTH
WITH LOTS OF PEOPLE BEHIND IT.  -- VANDANA SHIVA, July 17, 1998

-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0

-- INTRODUCTION BY BETH BURROWS
	"Vandana Shiva is a person impossible to introduce.  She is a
truly great soul.  I know no one who works harder or longer, with more
heart or with greater brilliance than Vandana Shiva.  
	She came here tonight with severe bronchitis.  And it wasn't
anything she mentioned to me, it was her secretary who told me on the
phone, "Beth, the only reason Vandana is coming is because the issue is so
important.  She has come to honor you, the people in St. Louis for your
great struggle." She who would only call herself Vandana, wouldn't
necessarily tell you that she directs a research foundation in India, the
Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in Dehra Dun. 
She's the Director of Navdanya, the seed conservation project.  She
advises more groups, and sits on more Boards of Directors, than anyone I
know on the planet.  She is the co-founder of Diverse Women for Diversity
and I've probably left out a hundred other things she has done.  Read the
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of articles this woman produces.  When
you're tired of reading, and you will tire of reading long before she will
tire of writing, know that she has been honored by everyone who has an
honor to give.  They are honored by having her name attached to their
honor.  Just one, and not necessarily the most recent, Vandana was given
the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize, which is called the Right Livelihood
Award in 1993.  Vandana Shiva is one of the great people of our time. Let
us welcome Vandana Shiva. [applause]

I REALLY SHOULDN'T BE TRAVELING JUST NOW, I SHOULD BE IN BED.  AND IF IT
WAS ANY OTHER MEETING, FRANKLY I WOULD.  REALLY AND TRULY, ANY OTHER
MEETING, I WOULD STAY BACK.  AND THIS IS JUST TO TELL YOU WHAT AN
IMPORTANT EVENT YOU ALL HAVE PUT TOGETHER HERE. 

	Radiant in a golden sari, Vandana Shiva speaks to the group:
	"I think that was just Beth, as an activist who's got too used to
superlatives to get her job done. [laughter] But the only non-exaggeration
is that I really shouldn't be traveling just now, I should be in bed.  And
if it was any other meeting, frankly I would.  Really and truly, any other
meeting, I would stay back.  And this is just to tell you what an
important event you all have put together here. 
	"I've always worked by sixth sense.  I have a good enough brain to
do the linear thinking too, but it seems to me that it is the sixth sense
that has, you know, cued me to get a direction where things are going. 
	"I remember about ten years ago, it was the Sandoz representative
at a meeting organized, (Hope is here in this room), organized by RAFI and
Hope had a very fortunate role in that meeting called Laws of Life.  And
there was a Sandoz representative and during one of the discussions he
said, "By the turn of the century there will just be five of us, and we
have to have patents and we have to have genetic engineering."  And in a
way it was that one sentence that to me triggered a whole re-direction of
what we needed to be addressing and I stopped working on Tropical
Rainforests, which used to be my passion.  I stopped doing many of the
other environmental jobs of that time and just started to going into a
field that frankly I still am not emotively linked to you know, I don't
get thrilled by bugs in the field.  I ran away from my first Biology
lessons.  I never did Biology after that.  Till now.  Till having to
educate oneself to deal with the Biotechnology Industry.  I think the
responsibility that this town has given the people and the Greens of St. 
Louis is a tremendous responsibility and I'm so glad you took it. 

I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR YEARS FOR SOME KIND OF ORGANIZED RESPONSE FROM THIS
COUNTRY.  WE ALL HAVE BEEN WAITING. 

	And I remember I think it was you, Beth, who in one of your
articles wrote that when Monsanto and the others were starting to get
organized and they said, "We don't really have to worry about the Greens,
the ecologists have been had, you know.  We'll sell Bio- Tech as green to
them.  It's the consumers who will be the obstacle, let's learn to deal
with the consumers.  And it is true that in North America the green voice
has been slow in emerging, but I'm glad it's finally here; and it might
not be.  I really believe in Ecology in the sense I believe every big oak
tree starts with a tiny seed and the biggest of the rivers that are
flowing past this town start with a trickle at their source.  And this
tiny group of people is a tremendous bunch of activists.  As it is they
have done so much over the past decade and more.  And joined together in
solidarity, I really feel that even though it looks like this monster's
becoming bigger and bigger, and you must have read, I mean I read on my
flight over, the latest acquisition of the plant breeding station of
Unilever, which literally is a public gift because in Thatcher's days
Cambridge University sold it off for next to nothing, the oldest plant
breeding station and collection of germ plant collection to Lever at that
time which is now gone. Gone on to Monsanto.

	And in a way with the emergence of patents on life on the one
hand, and genetic engineering on the other, what we are seeing is a double
plunder of nature and knowledge. 

THE FIRST KIND OF PLUNDER HAS BEEN NAMED MUCH MORE FREQUENTLY, IT'S KNOWN
AS BIOPIRACY. 

We've all, all of us who've worked on patenting issues have worked on it
and I would like to say thank you to the team at RAFI that has played such
a tremendous role in exposing piracy after piracy.  Steve Emmott, who is
here from the European Parliament, who worked so hard with the Greens to
bring in the amendments that would have made piracy illegal and yet the
way the world is going these days you now have a European patent directive
that basically legalizes Biopiracy by not having introduced the amendments
that would have prevented it.  In a way, as I've said in the book, I think
it's available outside, my book Biopiracy, but that idea of being able to
claim other people's creativity or nature's creativity, as if it was an
invention, comes so easily partly because it's been going on for 500
years.  Because it was no different when Columbus arrived in this country,
there were already inhabitants here.  It was called an empty land.  It was
declared a sterile land, as was Australia, as was every other part of the
world that was colonized by Europeans.  And, even my little history book
said Columbus discovered America.  Now that myth of discovery of that
period is the myth of the invention of our period.  The only difference
really is 500 years ago all you needed was the idea of the empty land
partly because the technologies of that time could only exploit land,
could only appropriate surpluses from land. 

WE TODAY HAVE THE ASSUMPTION OF EMPTY LIFE.  THAT EVERY LIVING BEING,
EVERY ORGANISM IS EMPTY UNTIL IT IS MANIPULATED BY A HAND THAT CONTROLS
CAPITAL AND HAPPENS TO BE WHITE. 

	Anyway the knowledge, the idea of the empty word, the empty land,
or empty life is an idea of scarcity.  It is an idea that creates scarcity
so that it can then, given that scarcity, create growth for the colonized
or for the exploited. And you know, you just have to look at some of the
phrases I've been sent and in fact this has been in the media in the U.K. 
that Monsanto is trying to put together an ad with signatures of
third-world people to basically say that these affluent consumers of the
north who want to prevent genetically engineered food are coming in the
way of third-world prosperity.  Here's this food abundance in the north
which is not reaching the starving south, and the caption of this ad for
which

...THEY ARE MOBILIZING SIGNATURES THROUGH A COMPANY THAT HAS ABOUT SEVENTY
EX-U.S. AMBASSADORS AND A HUNDRED AND SEVENTY EX-CIA OFFICIALS.  CAN YOU
IMAGINE IF THEY HAVE TO MOBILIZE THAT KIND OF [GROUP] JUST TO SELL FOOD
HOW ROTTEN IT MUST BE? 

	Whether it is Monsanto's ads, or you know there's an ad DuPont
puts out in India these days about it's herbicide, and you know, we eat on
a banana leaf and it's got beautiful rice on the banana leaf and it says
fragrant rices brought to you from DuPont because nature can only do so
much. [laughter] The entire cosmology's based on a deficient nature and a
deficient creation.  And I think that's where Monsanto is getting into
real problems , because on the one hand, it has to say it's improving on
nature and then on the other hand it has to keep saying but it's doing
what nature does.  And I think that's precisely our opening for
mobilization on the ecological front.  It's not just DuPont that is
saying, you know, we are doing better on nature, there's this campaign we
have, RAFI's launched it, we've launched it, of the patenting of basmati. 
The patent claim begins with the fact that first of all it's a claim for
an aromatic rice who's name is basmati and basmati is a word from India
which by it's very name says the rice which has aroma built into it.  Now
here they're claiming a patent on a rice that's known, has existed, is not
just known to have existed, but is recognized as being linked to the best
quality rices from the South Asian subcontinent, particularly from the
Himalayan foothills and they talk about it as an instant invention of a
novel rice line.  Now when RAFI did the work on tracing, where the
original basmatis that they have used had come from, because they had used
about 22 collections of basmati to then breed the basmati 837 or 867.  The
patent claim goes on to say, and "...any other rice that is functionally
equivalent to this will be covered by this patent and therefore will be
treated as an infringement." 

...WHICH MEANS THE ORIGINAL GROWERS OF BASMATI CAN BE TREATED AS
INFRINGERS OF A PATENT.

	The whole issue of, I mean no matter where I talk, and no matter
what subject I have to talk on in India, it could be in a village, it
could be the university, it could be in the Parliament.  Irrespective of
the theme of the talk, at the end of it hands will come up and say, "And
what's the latest on the neem case?" and "What's the latest on the basmati
case?" because it's obviously preoccupying people so much.  A Civilization
of more than 5,000 years, of one billion people all of whom use neem and
basmati in their daily lives having to adjust to the fact that some
company somewhere has claimed to have invented what they have used and are
using even now.  There's a patent on pepper.  I wish I had a pepper,
that's very good cure for a bad throat.  The US company that has the
patent on the pepper recently tried to say that any export by other
companies in India of extracts from pepper would be a patent infringement. 
So you have that kind of obvious piracy which takes the creation of
knowledge by other societies or creativity of Nature herself and claims
that creativity to be put in there by an inventor.  I believe that is
flawed even if other cultures have none of the knowledge.  Because I do
not think plants and microorganisms and animals are made in the way
machines are made.  They are not makeable things.  They are
self-organized.  They are living because they're self-organized.  And I
think this jump of treating people who use extremely crude and very
violent tools in a tiny fragment of living material and imagine they are
creating wholes, that they are creating the full mammal, that they are
creating the full plant, that they are creating the full microbe.  That
shift of who is the creator, is probably the most fundamental blunder
taking place in the Biopiracy domain.  The piracy from creation itself. 

A CIVILIZATION OF MORE THAN 5,000 YEARS, OF ONE BILLION PEOPLE ALL OF WHOM
USE NEEM AND BASMATI IN THEIR DAILY LIVES HAVING TO ADJUST TO THE FACT
THAT SOME COMPANY SOMEWHERE HAS CLAIMED TO HAVE INVENTED WHAT THEY HAVE
USED AND ARE USING EVEN NOW.

	And it hasn't even reached the stage of a technology, I call it a
Wall Street Science.  Because it has never matured in the land, it is only
trying to mature very fast on Wall Street.  And you've never had that in
history before.  I mean, No matter how long you wait with the nuclear
part, you at least went through those decades of working the land with
teams of scientists who weren't first and foremost interested in war, who
weren't first and foremost interested in bomb.  But today we have a
technology that's been born literally in the commercial domain.  It' s
never had, it's never had an incubation, it's never had a life the way it
should have had.  In universities in public domains with social control,
with opportunity to have debates.  All of that has been absolutely
scrapped because it's a science that's been born and is literally sort of
been made to grow faster than it's normal epistemological growth into
being the future of the world, and not being one little element of various
choices which you constantly check out and say, "How well is it doing?" 
It's been sold as the only future and part of the desperation.  I believe,
of Monsanto in pushing in buying up every seed company they can lay their
hands on comes from the insecurity of that science.  If they were more
confident, they'd be able to take slower steps.  It's because they know
that unless they can lie, unless they can deceive, and unless they can
have total control on the message of what's being sold, they will never
really be able to get this technology accepted.  At any point in the
debate on biotechnology you'll get a response, "...oh, but you know
without the green revolution, India would have starved."  At some point or
the other, the only justification they have for pushing genetic
engineering today is the miracle, the so-called miracle of 65-66.  Let me
tell you it was in America.  '66 we had a drought, the US used this as a
condition early to impose chemical agriculture.  Basically we were told we
wouldn't get wheat shipments, President Johnson said you won't get wheat
shipments, unless you totally change your agriculture policy according to
how we tell you.  You'll have to import chemicals, you'll have to import
pesticides, you'll have to import seeds.  You give that commitment, we'll
send you wheat.  In sixty-five, we had a drought, we needed extra wheat. 
Now, you know the food crop of India goes that way, with a little blip in
'66, it goes down in '66.  They usually measure the tip of that low
production of '66 due to the drought and make it look like they lifted
food production out of it.  If you take that as the base year, you get a
23% growth, if you take '65 as the base year, you get a 2% growth, and we
have anyway had a 5% growth without the green revolution in the pre-green
revolution period and after it.  And that growth could be accounted for
just by the investments made in agriculture by the irrigation provided to
farmers, by the markets guaranteed to the farmers, you just remove these
so called miracle seeds and give the rest, you'll still have that kind of
growth. 

...ON A ONE ACRE, TWO ACRE PLOT, YOU COULD NEVER MAKE A LIVING ON A
MONO-CULTURE.  BUT YOU CAN MAKE ENOUGH OF A LIVING WITH A MIXTURE.  WITH A
MIXTURE OF DIFFERENT KINDS OF GRAINS THAT YOU NEED TO GROW, YOUR
VEGETABLES, A FEW CASH CROPS PRODUCED IN TINY QUANTITIES.

	98% of farming in the third world is peasant farming.  98% is
below 5 acres.  The average is 1 acre, two acres.  Now, on a one acre, two
acre plot, you could never make a living on a mono-culture.  But you can
make enough of a living with a mixture.  With a mixture of different kinds
of grains that you need to grow, your vegetables, a few cash crops
produced in tiny quantities.  And the figures are that for a poly-culture
you merely need five units of input to produce 100 units of food.  For an
industrial farming system you need 300 units of input to produce the same
100 units of food.  And we're always told that the system that wastes 295
units is producing more food?  Those 295 units could have fed 6,000 more
people.  And if you just keep looking at how the focus on a single
commodity has created the illusion of more.  You just think of this entire
state being covered, I'm sure it's covered by a mono-culture.  Is it under
cotton nowadays?  Is it one of he BT areas? [speaker from audience says
corn and beans] Corn and Soya bean, eh?  You'll have automatic surpluses. 
So the whole creation of surpluses of four or five commodities is made to
look like more productivity.  But it is in the nature of a mono-culture to
have surpluses because you have to sell the surplus and that's the very
reason it was designed.  But after you've sold what's grown, you have to
buy everything else back.  Now, for the farmers of industrialized
societies the worst that happened is they moved into cities, 2% were left
on the land.  For farmers in third world countries particularly today
where under globalization the situation is not comfortable in urban areas
either, there's no growth of employment, we are being de-industrialized,
our options in the economy at the urban level are also closing.  In this
last season, more than 3000 farmers in India have committed suicide.  And
the region where the news of suicides started to come first was Wallenberg
which is a drought prone area, it's hardly 600 millimeters of rainfall
used to grow subsistence crops, milletts, pulses, legumes, oilseeds. 

THEY ARE SPRAYING 25 TIMES, 30 TIMES IN A SEASON, PEASANTS WHO HAVE NO
CAPITAL AT ALL. 

	And about a decade ago, the cotton industry started to move into
this area.  It's still primarily a rain-fed area.  Farmers of one acre,
half-acre, two acres, many farmers leasing land and growing and its such a
painful sight to see the growing hybrid cotton four foot by four foot
apart, taking care of these individual plants, as if they were babies,
because they're so fragile, you know literally, weeding each one of them
individually, putting urea individually, and the pesticide industry has
managed to convince them that every living thing is a pest so they spray
at the lady bugs and they spray at the spiders and I realized that because
when I was walking in the fields with them and I saw a lady bug and they
said , "That one we must dead!" and they started spraying stuff.  I said,
"No, that's the one that'll eat your aphids!"  And I turned the leaf and
you know they started spraying one week after planting that's what the
industry tells them.  They are spraying 25 times, 30 times in a season,
peasants who have no capital at all.  They are into 75,000 rupees debt,
100,000 rupees debt. 

THE SALESMEN OF THE CHEMICAL INDUSTRY HAVE BECOME THE MONEY LENDERS AND
THE EXPERTS IN ONE. 

	And it's not just one bunch of farmers that's behaving stupid,
globalization has made the public extension system withdraw from
agriculture.  Salaries are not being paid to government staff to go and do
extension work.  The salesmen of the chemical industry have become the
money lenders and the experts in one.  And in a way, that is the context
in which genetic engineering will be deployed in the third world.  Within
that context of total unaccountability and deep poverty.  As usual they
tried to say that this is happening because the people of Baringle didn't
really have long term experience in industrial agriculture.  But I went to
Punjab also because of suicides, 170 farmers have committed suicide in
Punjab and the farmers, they have called me to Sungrew to hold a meeting
with them and we are now doing a follow up study.  Just a week ago this
came in the newspaper; Punjab is the only really mechanized state, it's
the only place where farmers can afford tractors, you know, they've had
the green revolution for 30 years. [Shiva holds up a picture from an
Indian newspaper] It's a row of tractors that Punjab farmers are selling
at cabari rates, you know cabari is the Indian system of recycling. For
the first time, tractors are starting to go for their metal value, to the
recycling system.  Even while in the global media the green revolution has
told the myth of this miracle that has made Punjab a prosperous island in
India, as has been told, the Punjab farmers are going through the same
crisis as the farmers in every region of India. 

FOR THE FIRST TIME, TRACTORS ARE STARTING TO GO FOR THEIR METAL VALUE, TO
THE RECYCLING SYSTEM. 

	The more recent co-option they've attempted and lie they've told,
is through the establishment of what they are calling The Grameen Monsanto
Center in Bangladesh.  Of course, Bangladesh has always been the image of
this breadbasket, you know, this impoverished country. 

MICRO-CREDIT IS A SYSTEM THAT HAD A GOOD BEGINNING OF TINY LOANS TO WOMEN. 
IT'S BASICALLY IN MY VIEW PRESENTLY A SYSTEM THAT IS THE OLD SYSTEM IN A
NEW GARB. 

	Micro-credit is a system that had a good beginning of tiny loans
to women.  It's basically in my view presently a system that is the old
system in a new garb.  CGIAR is the world bank-controlled international
agricultural research system that was behind the launching of the green
revolution.  And the green revolution that has been made to appear merely
like a technology twas not just a technology, the technology couldn't have
done anything because it was a capital-intensive technology.  It meant
more inputs, it meant more expenses on pesticides, chemicals, oils, fossil
fuel. 

MICRO-CREDIT HAS BECOME THE WORLD BANK'S MAJOR ROUTE OF FINANCING IN THE
THIRD WORLD. 

	The only way the package could have worked was the world Bank
providing the loans to third world governments, so that the governments
could then pay the farmers to buy the pesticides, they were tied loans,
the farmers could not do anything else with this.  And the money actually
never reached them.  In the banks would be their accounts and against
their loan subsidies, etc. they could go and lift their sack of urea and
then PK or their tin of pesticide. 

IN THE VERY SAME WAY, THE NEW MICRO-CREDIT ENTERPRISE THAT'S BEING PUT IN
PLACE IS PREPARING A NEW ROUND OF ADDICTIONS,...

	The only difference now, there's absolutely no difference between
how the public finances directed into the international financial system
were turned into subsidies for global corporations, chemical and seed
businesses at that time and how it's happening now, except that now the
focus is on the micro-credit rather than the macro credit.  But the credit
is still macro.  Micro-credit has become the World Bank's major route of
financing in the third world.  For two reasons, first because the big
projects and the centralized funding have come under so much attack.  And
the World Bank wants to be more invisible.  The second of course, is
related to this new language of doing away with governments and having
more NGO participation etc. so it looks like you've done away with big
loans, but all you're doing is putting the small receiver of the loan
up-front.  If you take the green revolution it was also micro-credits
because the individual farmer used to get a few dollars of loans but it
was enough to make him addicted, an addicted buyer of the agri-chemical
complex.  In the very same way, the new micro-credit enterprise that's
being put in place is preparing a new round of addictions, this time the
addictions being disciplined with the patent regimes, with the terminator
technology, with the concentration of power where Monsanto is also
Cargill, is also Mahiko, and there's no competitor, you know. 
Interestingly, I just found in my recent field trip that these big mobile
corporations are buying up seeds from the Indian public sector selling at
lower prices to grab the market, because farmers are used to that seed. 
They are literally undercutting the public sector supply to kill it off
and turn it into a totally privatized supply.  I want to start wrapping up
with where I hope we'll go with this conference.  I know there are plans,
actions that you're all engaged in and I'm not going to try to and repeat
that which I know is sort of in the air and we are involved in.  But I
think there are definitely two dimensions we need to take on if we are to
make the full circle of activism.  And get the pincer movement.  I think
it is very, very clear that the strong protests have emerged in Europe
where it has really become a common public concern.  Genetic engineering
is no more Steve Emmott's concern, it literally is a public concern.  The
way that will be handled is through the guilt of preventing food from
going to the third world.  And I think all that needs is a lot more
exchange between us, to know that neither today or in the past has
industrial agriculture fed the world.  That it has created new scarcities,
those scarcities were hidden , it has created illusions of growth, it did
not feed more people, whether you look at the production or the
distribution there was less food available as a result of a system that
used more resources to produce the same quantity of food and took food out
of the reach of the poorest people because it had now become far more
capital intensive.  In fact, we are just doing an analysis that in the
last four months the consumer in India is paying nearly twice as much for
food.  And the peasants of India are paying about twice as much for
inputs.  And so you have from both ends literally a doubling of the
marketplace but a squeeze in consumption terms and in terms of the
livelihoods of the peasants of India.  So we won't be writing a
sustainable policy for the 98%.  How do we keep 98% of India alive?  You
can't dump them in the Indian ocean, they happen to live on land, they
happen to be small peasants and they can't just be wished away and you
can't suddenly imagine that they should be the 1,000 acre farmers of the
United States.  They're not. 

...AT EVERY LEVEL, PUBLIC SUBSIDY BEING GIVEN TO OPEN UP MARKETS, BECAUSE
LIKE THE GREEN REVOLUTION THERE WAS NOT A NATURAL MARKET IN THE THIRD
WORLD... 

	They will not become that, and they have to be dealt with as what
they are, farmers with no capital, usually on marginal lands, having their
biodiversity, their soil, their water, and their own skills, literally as
the ultimate resource which produces food.  I think the second thing we
really need to take up very seriously, is these very clever ways (the
micro-credit is just one example) but there are many other examples, the
Cornell Center for Technology Transfer of , what's the name of that center
in Cornell?  It's basically, it uses public finances to pay for what looks
like a transfer of technology, but is really opening of markets for
genetic engineering.  But at every level, public subsidy being given to
open up markets, because like the green revolution there was not a natural
market in the third world, because the peasants could not afford the
chemicals and fertilizers.  Genetic engineering is a non-market in the
third world.  Left to itself it would never emerge.  It's only through the
subsidies that will be provided that it will take birth but those
subsidies will be provided through public money which is yours.  And I
think, in our country it will be provided through public money that is
ours. Just today there's news of kick-backs in the World Bank, well the
World Bank officials have been receiving kick-backs for projects, I always
suspected it.  But it's the first time it's come in the media.  I think we
can really go for this being yet another form of corruption.

I THINK WE HAVE TO FIND WAYS TO GET MONSANTO OFF ALL ETHICAL INVESTMENT
LISTINGS. 

	 I think we have to find ways to get Monsanto off all ethical
investment listings.  And I think that's where we really need to do very
quick, very rapid work, we might not get the kind of advertisement space
that Monsanto can buy in newspapers, but I think through friends who have
tiny, and all these things begin small, but if 5 ethical investments firms
get Monsanto off the list, it'll start trickling.  The news will start to
move.  And I think that's a very, very important area of work.  To get
literally a disinvestment out of Monsanto. 

A PHENOMENON THAT WAS NOT BEING NAMED HAS BEEN NAMED.  AND HAVING BEEN
NAMED, IT BECOMES THAT MUCH EASIER FOR PEOPLE TO RELATE TO. 

	At a meeting we were having some months ago, a Costa Rican farmer
had said, "You know Monsanto in Spanish means My Saint.  And Monsanto is
no saint.  We should call it the Non-santo campaign." [laughter] Every
time I read a lie, and in fact everything that's coming out of Monsanto is
a lie, I both feel stronger and I feel more angry.  And I think of, you
know, of old Ghandi, who named peoples troubles "the struggle for truth". 
I think the least we can do is go away with the recognition and with the
commitment that with their efforts you all put together to make this First
Gathering on Biodevastation happen.  A phenomena that was not being named
has been named.  And having been named, it becomes that much easier for
people to relate to.  You might have noticed about two days, three days
ago your government said that they would withdraw the sanctions with
respect to agricultural products to India and Pakistan, related to the
nuclear bomb.  And I just said to myself here, "You know, now they want to
unleash the genetic bomb.  And they are in such a mad hurry that they are
finding their own sanctions coming in the way." [laughter] So they are
saying, "Okay, we'll tolerate your nuclear explosions as long as you give
us the opportunity to flood the world with genetic bombs."  In my view,
genetic engineering in agriculture unleashed at the scale and pace at
which it is being unleased, is nothing less than a genetic bomb. It is
definitely the hottest issue that a serious ecological movement should
take up in today's time.  In my view, it's also the subject of the peace
movement for today, given that they are trying to co-opt women it's the
new challenge to feminism, it's right on for agriculture movements and
sustainable agriculture and farmer's movements.  For consumers and the
health issue around food safety and as far as the third world is
concerned, this is precisely the issue where our larger political debates
are being structured and will be structured in the next few years.  I
think ultimately, the test of this contest and this struggle is going to
be between lots of lies backed by a very huge money and a lot of truth
with lots of people behind it.  Thank you. [extensive applause, shouts,
standing ovation]
		=============
Postscript: You've probably heard that the Grameen Bank withdrew from its
agreement with Monsanto after hearing from Vandana - and others. But that
doesn't negate what she says about credit-based farming.
(MichaelP)

Unfortunately, due to space constraints, Vandana's speech has been heavily
edited.  If you want to read the entire speech, let us know and we'll
either e-mail or snail mail it to you.  -- JT and GT


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Reprinted from Green Acre News, August 1998, 
Greg and Jean Thompson, 
4222 Harmony Lane SE, Iowa City, IA 52240-9385, 
Phone: 319-337-7722, 

JTGardens@aol.com.
=================================================

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