An interview with Dr.

Vandana
In Motion Magazine Recommends
Shiva

"The deeper you can manipulate living

structures
the more you can control food and
medicine"
"We have managed to make the celebration
of diversity our mode of resistance."
Water Wars: Privatization, Pol…
Vandana Shiva (Paperback - Feb 2…
$11.20

St. Louis, Missouri

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist, Protect or Plunder?: Understa…

activist, editor, and author of many books. In Vandana Shiva (Paperback - Feb 9,…
India she has established Navdanya, a $20.00
movement for biodiversity conservation and
farmers' rights. She directs the Research
Foundation for Science, Technology and
Natural Resource Policy. Her most recent book
is Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Biopiracy: The Plunder of Natur…
Knowledge. This interview with Dr. Vandana Vandana Shiva (Paperback - Jul 1, …
Shiva was conducted in St. Louis, Missouri at
the First Grassroots Gathering on $10.40
Biodevastation: Genetic Engineering, on July Privacy
18, 1998. Dr. Shiva was the keynote speaker at Amazon.com Widgets
the conference. The interview was conducted
by In Motion Magazine publisher Nic Paget-
Clarke.

• Interview with Vandana Shiva (2003)

The Role of Patents in the Rise of Globalization
New Delhi, India
• Interview w/ Vandana Shiva (2002)
Discussing “Water Wars”.
Johannesburg, South Africa

In Motion Magazine: Why are patents the new form of colonialism?

Dr. Vandana Shiva: Patents are a replay of colonization as it took place 500 years ago in a number of
ways. Interestingly, even at that time, when Columbus set sail and other adventurers like him, they
also set out with pieces of paper that were called the letters patent which gave the power to the
adventurers to claim as property the territory they found anywhere in the world that was not ruled by
white Christian princes.

Contemporary patents on life seem to be of a similar quality. They are pieces of paper issued by
patent offices of the world that basically are telling corporations that if there's knowledge or living
material, plants, seeds, medicines which the white man has not known about before, claim it on our
behalf, and make profits out of it.

That then has become the basis of phenomena that we call biopiracy, where seeds such as the
Basmati seed, the aromatic rice from India, which we have grown for centuries, right in my valley is
being claimed as novel invention by RiceTec.

Neem, which we have used for millennia for pest control, for medicine, which is documented in every
one of our texts, which my grandmother and mother have used for everyday functions in the home, for
protecting grain, for protecting silks and woolens, for pest control, is treated as invention held by
Grace, the chemical company.

This epidemic of piracy is very much like the epidemic of piracy which was named colonialism 500
years ago. I think we will soon need to name this round of piracy through patents as recolonialization
as a new colonialization which differs from the old only in this - the old colonialization only took over
land, the new colonialization is taking over life itself.

In Motion Magazine: Just a moment ago in your speech to the conference, you said you'd like to
bring in a third world perspective. Can you bring that into this discussion?

Dr. Vandana Shiva: The third world is that part of the world which became the colonies in the last
colonialization. It wasn't an impoverished world then, in fact the reason it was colonialized is because
it had the wealth. Columbus set sail to get control of the spice trade from India, it's just that he landed
on the wrong continent and named the original inhabitants of this land Indian thinking he had arrived in
India. Latin America was colonialized because of the gold it had. None of these countries were
impoverished. Today they are called the poorer part of the world because the wealth has been drained
out.

People have survived in the third world because in spite of the wealth that has been taken from them,
in spite of their gold and their land having been taken from them, they still have biodiversity. They still
have that last resource in the form of seed, medicinal plants, fodder, which allowed them access to
production It allowed them to meet their needs of health and nutrition. Now this last resource of the
poor, who had been left deprived by the last round of colonialization is also being taken over through
patenting. And seeds which peasants have freely saved, exchanged, used, are being treated as the
property of corporations. New legal property formations are being shaped as intellectual property
rights treaties, through the World Trade Organization, trying to prevent peasants of the third world from
having free access to their own seed, to have free exchange of their own seed. So that all peasants,
all farmers around the world would be buying seed every year thus creating a new market for the
global seed industry.

80 percent of India takes care of its health

needs through medicinal plants that grow
around in back yards, that grow in the fields, in
the forests, which people freely collect. No one
has had to pay a price for the gifts of nature.
Today everyone of those medicines has been
patented and within five, ten years down the line
we could easily have a situation in which the
same pharmaceutical industry that has created
such serious health damages and is now shifting
to safe health products in the form of medicinal
plant-based drugs, Chinese medicine, aromatic
medicine from India, will prevent the use. They
don't even have to come and make it illegal
because long before they have to take that step,
they take over the resource base, they take over
the plants, they take over the supply, they take
over the markets, and leave people absolutely deprived of access.

What we are seeing right now is a situation in which the third world, which has been the main supplier
of biodiversity, the main producer of food in the world, where the majority of people are engaged in
food production, is being attempted to be converted into a consumer society. But you can't have a
consumer society with poor people and therefore what you will have is deprivation, destitution,
disease, hunger, epidemics, hunger, malnutrition, famine and civil war. What is being sown is the
greed of the corporations of stealing the last resources of the poor. It really is seeds of uncontrollable
violence and decay of societies on a very large scale.
In Motion Magazine: You touched on it, but what seems key to this takeover is what the RAFI (Rural
Advancement Foundation International) people call the "terminator technology". Can you talk about
that?

Dr. Vandana Shiva: When we plant a seed there's a very simple prayer that every peasant in India
says: "Let the seed be exhaustless, let it never get exhausted, let it bring forth seed next year."
Farmers have such pride in saying "this is the tenth generation seeds that I'm planting," "this is the fifth
generation seed that I'm planting." Just the other day I had a seed exchange fair in my valley and a
farmer brought Basmati aromatic rice seed and he said "this is five generations we've been planting
this in our family". So far human beings have treated it as their duty to save seed and ensure its
continuity. But that prayer to let the seed be exhaustless seems to be changing into the prayer, "let this
seed get terminated so that I can make profits every year" which is the prayer that Monsanto is
speaking through the terminator technology -- a technology whose aim is merely to prevent seed from
germinating so that they don't have to spend on policing.

It's not that they don't yet have means. Hybrid seeds are also not good for saving. It was the first time
they found a tool to force farmers to come back to them. A market every year. But the difference is that
hybrid seeds don't give good seed. It's not that they fail to germinate. They will still segregate into their
parent lines. They'll still give you some kind of crop. You will not have absolute devastation.

Patents are also a away to prevent farmers from saving seed. But with patents you still have to do
policing, you still have to mobilize your detectives to ensure that farmers aren't saving seeds. The
terminator is an extremely secure technology for corporations like Monsanto because neither do they
have to do the policing, nor do they have to worry whether some segregation works, now you just
basically terminate. But this is not just a violence against farmers whose basic right, in my view, is
seed saving. A farmer's duty, is protecting the earth, maintaining it's fertility, and maintaining the fertility
of seed. That is part of being a farmer. A farmer is not a low-paid tractor driver, that's a modern
definition of what a farmer is. The real definition of a farmer is a person who relates to the land and
relates to the seed and keeps it for future generations, keeps renewing it, fertility.

The search for this technology comes out of a violence to that basic ethic that farmers must have if
they are to be good farmers. But it is also even deeper because now it is becoming a violence against
nature because in a way Monsanto is saying we will stop evolution because evolution creates
freedom.

In Motion Magazine: What is the historical connection of genetic engineering to eugenics?

Dr. Vandana Shiva: The image of science, and particularly streams like genetic engineering is always
that somehow these things happen spontaneously, it comes out of human ingenuity and brilliance, and
someone has a bright idea and new disciplines emerge. Which used to be the case, way back in the
past. But since the period of the industrial revolution when Bacon said there's a marriage between
knowledge and power that spontaneous emergence of ideas is not the way science has grown.
Science has grown through deliberate direction through financing of certain kinds. The roots of genetic
engineering go back to the thirties when molecular biology was planted as a new science with no
foundations. They didn't know what it would be. They knew two things. One that eugenics had lost
repute in Europe and the project of eugenics had to have a disguised presentation to the public. It
couldn't be so overtly social. It had to be rooted in a so-called scientific basis. It had to be rooted more
in biology. The entire enterprise was financed through the Rockefeller Foundation. It was called the
social psychology program. The only thing they knew at that point was let's find something deeper in
the way things work biologically to say that this is inevitable. That selection is inevitable. The selection
of human beings is inevitable because they are the way they are biologically determined to be -- poor,
criminals, etc. -- the kind of arguments they had used for the eugenics movement in Europe in the
past.

They first named a theoretical construction biological atoms. They didn't know what it would look like.
They just said they are biological atoms that determine traits. It took them fifty years of manipulation,
of rewarding, of giving about ten Nobel prizes to themselves as a club of men doing a certain kind of
science, connected to each other through the financing. Then you get Watson and Crick being
rewarded for the DNA structure. But that the DNA structure is an atom that determines all traits was
named fifty years before. If it wasn't Crick and Watson it would have been another group of scientists.
But it was being developed in that way.

The two reasons they went this route were first, as I said, to get away from being accused of having
social bias. By putting it in biology and putting it into the atoms of biology they could argue that this
was in the nature of things. This was the state of affairs and this way they could get away from the
political responsibility of engaging in basically political acts and putting it in the domain of science.

The second, and this fed over time into the industrialization of genetic engineering and biotechnology,
is that they could see that the deeper you can manipulate living structures the more you can control
food and medicine. We're getting that new round of propaganda now which is suggesting that
somehow manipulation at the genetic level always gives you superior products, which is not at all the
case. It could give you higher risks. They are just using the fact that you are intervening at a deeper
level in living structures and equating it with superior, with human progress. There is no correlation
between these two things.

The fact that people are not accepting it is clear from the fact that people are rejecting genetically-
engineered foods. They are not treating genetic manipulation as somehow a superior food production
system. Are we going to see more and more of these kind of questions? I think it is absolutely key to
not forget that the roots of genetic engineering are in eugenics and as genetic engineering moves from
agriculture to human manipulation we are going to be right back with a very vicious eugenics program.

In Motion Magazine: One of the arguments,

when you talk to biogeneticists, is "farmers have
been historically changing seeds through how
they pick and choose seeds through the years. All
we're doing is speeding up the process ." What is
the difference?

Dr. Vandana Shiva: It's not true in two ways.

First of all, when farmers have been selecting
they have been selecting between two
boundaries and limits that they set for
themselves. The first is the ecosystem limit.
Farmers select crops according to the
ecosystems in which they produce. No farmer in
the world has done seed selection sitting in
tropical Africa and trying to grow crops in
temperate Sweden. Africans have bred crops for
Africa, and Swedish farmers have evolved crops for Sweden.

The second is related to the fact that they have always worked within the limits set by intra-species
breeding. You only work with rice to evolve new rice plants. You work with wheat to evolve new wheat
plants. You do not try and cross the species boundaries. In fact, even conventional breeding which
was not farmers' breeding which had already been taken over by scientists and industry and violated
the ecosystem boundary because it tried to breed beyond ecosystem adaptation -- it did still respect
the species boundary.

Genetic engineering is violating both boundaries. It's violating the ecosystem boundary. It is generating
crops to be planted on millions of acres because there's no point in having patents on a particular Bt
cotton if you are then only going to grow it in twenty acres where it suits that particularly variety. As a
Monsanto you have to market around the world to maximize the return on your patents, your revenues
etc. This means you have to grow it everywhere. You have to violate ecosystem boundaries.

But more important than that, for the first time, genetic engineering is doing something different from
what conventional breeders have done. And no matter how many times they tell this lie it doesn't make
it a truth. Transgenic organisms are not equivalent to farmers breeding or conventional breeding
because transgenic by its very definition means something which has crossed species boundaries,
something in which an alien gene has been introduced into a plant. In the case of Bt it is the toxic
bacteria gene. In the case of other crops it will be antibiotic genes. There's something in that plant that
wouldn't have gotten there if you had just done normal breeding that farmers have done. They haven't
just speeded up the process they have crossed a threshold.

In Motion Magazine: Can you talk a little about Navdanya: A Movement for Biodiversity Conservation
and Farmers Rights.

Dr. Vandana Shiva: Navdanya is a national program to basically fight the seed monopolies. I started it
ten years ago when I could see the emergence of this kind of world of total control. Navdanya means
nine seeds. Through it we save native seeds. In India we still have a lot of peasant agriculture. We still
have a lot of seed diversity. We do not try and do it as a museum activity. I started Navdanya as a
political act so that farmers would have free seed in their hands, using that free seed they would be
able to resist the kind of control system that the new corporations, corporate control, was trying to
establish in India. Through those seeds they can establish sustainable organic agriculture again.

New seeds are bred for heavy chemical influence and even now when Monsanto says that its
genetically-engineered crops don't need chemicals, we hear every where that there's a doubling of
chemicals. If they were to bring these seeds into India there would be a twenty-fold increase of
chemicals because they'd introduce chemicals into farms that have never used chemicals.

Through the native seeds we can become free of agri-chemicals, farmers can become free of debt,
become free of the kind of burden that high inputs are creating. But we can also create freedom for
consumers because frankly there's nothing as delicious as the old varieties that have been evolved
over time.

Our native wheat sells at twice the price that the high-yielding variety wheat flour sells at because it's
much tastier, much nicer for chapatis. It was evolved for chapati making. Our native legumes sell for
much more because not only are they organic they are tastier, they are more nutritious. They are
better for the earth. They put less pressure on the earth, they put less pressure on the farmer, and
they are safer for consumers. It's crazy to still continue to call these wonderfully nourishing seeds
primitive cultivas.

Part of our battle has been to give respect again to the innovation of farmers and the diversity that the
earth has provided. What I often say is that through the seed saving of Navdanya we have managed
to make the celebration of diversity our mode of resistance.

In Motion Magazine: How successful has it been?

Dr. Vandana Shiva: It has been very successful. We're in about seven zones now. We have the native
seed supply taking over. I have just started two new seed banks in the heart of the "Green Revolution",
one in western Uttar Pradesh, one in Punjab where about thirty farmers are giving up chemicals and
getting off the chemical tread mill. They are starting to shift to use of native seeds and organic
agricultural methods. The wonderful thing about seed is if you have even one, you have the potential
of millions.

Published in In Motion Magazine - August 14, 1998

Interview with Vandana Shiva

The Role of Patents in the Rise of Globalization

“The recovery of economic democracy

is at the heart of recovery of democracy itself.”

New Delhi, India

Dr. Vandana Shiva is founder of both the Research
Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology, an
independent public industry research group, and
Navdanya a grassroots conservation movement in
India. This interview was conducted by Nic Paget-
Clarke on August 27, 2003 for In Motion Magazine in
New Delhi, India.

• A twist in the history of patents

Vandana Shiva at a press conference with other leaders of
• Control of the technology an anti-WTO march in New Delhi, August 27, 2003 . All
photos by Nic Paget-Clarke.
• The role of patents
• Globalization of U.S. patent laws
• Patents regulate life
• Medicine: from healing to profits
• Ecology and equity
• From theoretical physicist to advocate for
biodiversity
• Agriculture and violence
• Focus on biotechnology and patenting
• The influence of Gandhi
• The death of economic democracy
Marching with former Indian prime ministers.
• The recovery of economic democracy
• The flow of wealth from South to North
• From ownership of land to ownership of
biodiversity
• War is globalization by other means

A twist in the history of patents

In Motion Magazine: I think sometimes people’s

eyes glaze over when hearing about patents and
legal matters, but in your book “Protect or Plunder –
Understanding Intellectual Property Rights” you
describe some interesting history, about how
originally patents were used to spread technology
but now they have been turned into their opposite.
Could you outline how that twist happened?

A soldier of the Indian Army provides security for the former

Vandana Shiva: In the early days, the word patent prime minsiters marching in the anti-WTO rally in New Delhi.
was used for two things. In the case of getting hold
of territory, what were issued by kings and queens
were letters-patent, which were open letters. Anyone
could know that Columbus had been given a right by
Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand to conquer and
take over any territory on their behalf.

But the second meaning, defined around the same

time by the Venetian laws on patent, which were the
first patent laws, was that a master craftsman could
be brought (to a country), because technology at
that time was craft technology, and if a country could
not make glass they would give to the master On the march in New Delhi.
craftsman apprentices and say, “Train our people in
this art.” “Train our people to make glass.” “Train our
people to make steel.” “Train our people to make
textiles”, and we will give you an exclusive right (to make these products) for seven years while you
are training people.

The period of the patent was seven years because it took seven years to learn a craft. After that seven
years was over, the master craftsman went back to wherever he belonged and you had all the
apprentices available in the country to spread that technology as a free public good. This was the
pattern throughout the early use of patent law.

Then you get slow shifts with the rise of industrialism. As big industry became a major economic
interest, they started to use technology as an instrument of monopoly. Patents became the way to say,
“Only we will use this technology”.

The way they expanded this power was, on the one hand, extending the life of patents. It went from
seven years to fourteen. Now, under WTO (World Trade Organization), for the first time it is twenty
years -- extendible in a period where technologies are becoming so obsolete that if you have that kind
of monopoly for twenty years you are totally controlling the technology.

And the second thing is constantly increasing the domain over which patents will apply. For example,
in India’s patent law agriculture could not be touched. Agriculture was free of monopolies. And in
medicine you could not have a product monopoly. You could not monopolize a medicine but you could
monopolize a method of making a medicine. But, medicine has been brought into monopolies. Seed
has been brought into monopolies. Cells have brought into monopolies. Genes have been brought into
monopolies. Animals have been brought into monopolies.

Basically, the ’80s saw a twist in this and a lot of it had to do with the rise of the big industry and their
convergence into one set of giants, which are the health giants, the pharmaceutical giants, the gene
giants controlling all life.

Control of the technology

In Motion Magazine: You’ve also said that with the rise of other countries in the world, with their own
manufacturing systems, markets started to slip away but the developed countries still had control of
the technology?

Vandana Shiva: The thing was that when we were living in a world based on crafts, transferring
technology was the objective. But as the world got industrialized, as developing countries shed the
colonial burden, imperialistic patent law started to develop.

For example, again India, under a 1970 law, developed a very strong medical sector. And I think if
WTO had not come on the horizon, India would be providing cheap medicine to American citizens. It’s
capable of doing that. But the American citizens, and the African citizens, and the Brazilian citizens,
and in the future the India citizens are being told, “You will only buy from these monopolies.” It was a
way to de-industrialize Southern countries who had started to build capacity, technological capacity for
themselves.

The role of patents

In Motion Magazine: So patents have had a very specific role in the latest version of imperialism, in
this globalization phase?

Vandana Shiva: If you want to have one tool for imperialistic control, it’s patent law under the WTO
agreement. It’s in my view the worst of the WTO agreements. It is a totally coercive tool. It has only a
negative function: to prevent others from doing their own thing; to prevent people from having food; to
prevent people from having medicine; to prevent countries from having technological capacity. It is a
negative tool for creating underdevelopment.
It’s the privatization of knowledge. I have called it the enclosure, the ultimate enclosure. We had
enclosures of land. Now, we are seeing enclosures of biodiversity, life itself. In my book “Biopiracy”,
I’ve talked about how this is the last colony. It is the spaces within our minds -- for knowledge. The
spaces within life forms for reproduction. A seed cannot reproduce without permission of the patent
holder and the company. Knowledge cannot be transmitted without permission and license collection.
It’s rent collection from life. It’s rent collection from being human, and thinking, and knowing.

Globalization of U.S. patent laws

In Motion Magazine: How has the WTO been a forum for the globalization of U.S. patent laws?

Vandana Shiva: The WTO has an agreement called Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights
agreement (TRIPs), which basically is nothing more than globalization of U.S.-style laws. And its
globalization of U.S.-style laws both in content and in process. In terms of content, in the late ’80s
when this law was drafted, the United States was the only country that granted patents on life forms.
This precedent was set in a 1980 decision on a genetically-engineered micro-organism, subsequent to
which was the rise of the biotech industry. The granting of life patents was seen as an imperative both
by the industry as well as the government. The U.S. government actually encouraged life patenting.
The decision-making was set by the courts, rather than by Congress, never with a public debate,
never with a public policy decision on the ethical implications, ecological implications, economic
implications of what life patents mean.

The second way in which this is a globalization of U.S. law is the fact that it was really U.S. companies
which got together, drafted the law, took it to the U.S. administration, then took it to the secretariat of
the at-that-time General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), which was the precursor of WTO,
and as Monsanto, which was one of the companies in the intellectual property coalition admitted in
drafting this law, “We achieved something unprecedented. We were the patient, the diagnostician, and
the physician all in one.

Patents regulate life

With the broadening of patents to life forms, patents do not just regulate technology they regulate life.
They regulate economy. They regulate basic needs. A patent is an exclusive right to make, produce,
distribute, or sell the patented product. So, if a patent is granted, for example, on seed it means a
farmer who grows a seed cannot save seed from the harvested crop because that is constituted as
making the seed and the exclusive right to the seed belongs to the company. It means seed-saving by
farmers is now defined as intellectual property theft. Many farmers in the United States have been
sued by the corporations for doing something normal in farming, which is saving their seed.

Exchanging seed with your neighbor, which is called brown-bagging -- it was not a commercial
exercise; it was a mutual give-and-take in society; a social act of exchange for non-profit activity -- has
also been defined as an infringement because now distributing is covered by a patent, even if it is not
commercial, because the companies interpret that by exchanging seed you are taking the market
away from them.

Medicine: from healing to profits

Also, patents can be given for medicine. For example, in the case of medicine, if there is no patent we
can treat people with AIDS with $200 expenditure per year. Indian companies can make it for that cost
because they can make them as generic drugs. They are not piracy drugs, which is the way the U.S.
pharmaceutical industry talks about them. They are generic in the sense that different processes have
been used. The same medicine, the same retroviral, costs $20,000 in the United States because of
patenting -- that is the only difference. Which means something which is being made for $200 is being
sold to consumers for not just ten times but a hundred times the price. As our prime minister said, the
big companies are trying to turn the matter of disease from healing into a matter of profits.

There was an attempt made, at the beginning of the TRIPs negotiations, to make it look like the lower-
cost production that could happen in the absence of monopolies was piracy. The industry managed to
define piracy as absence of monopolies. We want to define monopoly as monopoly and recognize that
things like seeds should be accessible to farmers, things like medicine should be accessible to those
who are dying of AIDS, and no regime in the world can put profits above people’s lives.

In Motion Magazine: Are the same corporations controlling food and health?

Vandana Shiva: It’s the same companies. The industry that used to be the chemical industry is also
the pharmaceutical industry, is also the seed industry, is also the biotech industry. There is no
separation -- and agro-chemical industry. It is all one.

Ecology and equity

In Motion Magazine:You made the statement in your book on patents that there’s always a
connection between ecology and equity. Can you talk about that?

Vandana Shiva: Ecology is about interactions in the natural world, sustainability of resources.
Whether you look at water, you look at biodiversity, you look at anything, conservation happens.
Environmental sustainability takes place when people have a stake and a share in the rewards of the
conserved resource. If people have the ability to drink water from a well, and look after that well, and
will suffer the consequences of contamination, they will not contaminate that well. People who pollute
a well or a river are the ones who don’t have to drink from it.

Similarly, when it comes to monopolies on intellectual property, conservation is what is sacrificed. It’s
the small peasants of the world who have conserved biodiversity. If they have to continue conserving
biodiversity, they need to have their rights defended. They need to be able to know that when they
plant basmati rice it will be their reward to harvest that basmati. They will not be treated as pieces of
RiceTec property. And they need to have a market for their produce.

Intellectual property destabilizes both, and in fact, starts to become an incentive for destruction of
biodiversity by pressures of the industry for monocultures, on the one hand, but also by not giving
people a chance to protect the resources from which they make a living because they are no more
their resources.

That is why ecology goes hand-in-hand with equity.

From theoretical physicist to advocate for biodiversity

In Motion Magazine: Could you go over how you started in the field of physics and then ended up
where you are today and how that relates to your organizing?

Vandana Shiva: I chose to be a physicist. I loved physics from an age when I didn’t even know what
the content was but I knew I wanted to figure out how nature works. Einstein was my hero. This is
what inspired me.

I lived through life training to be a physicist, initially training to be a nuclear physicist and then realizing
there’s a dark side to it. I left that to become a theoretical physicist. I worked in foundations of quantum
theory.

As is typical, I was doing my Ph.D. in Canada and everyone who goes from the South as a scientist
stays on and becomes a university professor and I could see, “That’s what I will become.” I wanted to
become that. But I said, “I’m not informed enough about how my society works. There is a question in
my mind. We have the third biggest scientific community in the world. We are among the poorest of
countries. Science and technology is supposed to create growth, remove poverty. Where is the gap?
Why is science and technology not removing poverty?” I wanted to answer that question to myself.

I said, “I will take off three years. Look at science policy issues. Be a little more educated, socially, and
then go back to physics.” That was my chosen life path. I was, in any way, involved in forest protection
in the Himalayas, my home, before I went for a Ph.D. I constantly volunteered with a movement of
women called Chipko .

But when I started to work on science and technology issues, I realized very quickly that they are
about resource control. They are not about efficiency. A big trawler in the sea is not more efficient than
a small boat. It controls more resources. And denies the small boat.

Green Revolution farming is not more efficient. It takes more water and leaves other areas deprived of
financial investment, water inputs, everything else. What you really see is technology acting as, what I
called in that period, a polarizer of resource access. Very quickly I started to realize that technology
issues, ecology issues, social inequality issues, were actually very intimately connected. I did a lot of
analysis/writing at that point and I was invited by the United Nations to carry these issues further.

Meantime, the Ministry of Environment, seeing some of my reports, commissioned me to look at

mining in my valley. I had just had my son, the 21-year-old boy who is walking around (in the office
where this interview took place), and I said “perfect”. I had lost my mother at that time, so I said “I will
go back, look at this mining, make a break in my science policy, also make a short break from my
return to physics. Do the study. He’ll be a little older. But I will also do more work on ecology and the
grassroots movement. Did the study. We stopped the mine.

Agriculture and violence

I started to do the United Nations work and a huge world unfolded. The Punjab crisis burst which
forced me to look at agriculture, ecology issues of agriculture, but also the rise of terrorism linked to
unequal development. I wrote my book called “The Violence of the Green Revolution”.

1984 was the year I started to look very, very closely at those issues because we’d had genocide in
Punjab. We’d lost our prime minister in that terrorism, which eventually killed 30,000 people. And it
was the year of Bhopal. As a result of that gas leak from a pesticide plant, 30,000 people more have
died.

So, I was just surrounded by these mega-violent epidemics all linked to agriculture and agriculture that
was supposed to be progressive. In 1984, I decided that something was wrong and I needed to go to
the roots of it. Why has agriculture gone so violent? Why are we so dependent on pesticides --
weapons of mass destruction? The real weapons of mass destruction because they did move from the
war industry into agriculture.

Focus on biotechnology and patenting

After three of four years of looking more closely at agriculture issues, I started to get called into
biotechnology seminars because it was the next step. In ’87, at one of these seminars, the industry
laid out its grand dream of controlling the world. They talked about needing genetic engineering so that
there’s a technology that they have that peasants can’t use so that they can have a monopoly through
technology. Patents. Because without it they cannot consolidate power.

That was said by Sandoz. Sandoz merged later with Ceiber-Geigy. Sandoz and Ceiber-Geigy became
Novartis. Novartis merged with AstroZeneca, which was anyway two independent companies, earlier.
All of them merged to become Syngenta. What they had said at that time was, “By the turn of the
century we will be five.” In ’87, I said, “I don’t want to live in a world where five giant companies control
our health and our food.”

I dropped everything else. I left my work on dams and forests and mines. I was doing very broad-scale
work on the environment movement then. Dropped everything else. Handed it over to the next
generation -- and they were brilliant activists in India -- and moved into a focus on two things:
biotechnology and patenting.
I tracked the whole TRIPs negotiations through and have followed the biotech industry from the day it
wanted to become a giant industry. I have tried to do my best to defend the freedom of people; create
seed banks so that farmers have free seed; nature has freedom of diversity; and these monopolies are
restrained.

Since 1987 to now, which is 16 years, I have had a single pointed attention to prevent imperialism over
life itself.

The influence of Gandhi

In Motion Magazine: When you are working with the various farmers’ organizations, various mass
organizations, specifically in India do people consciously learn from what Gandhi had to say? (See
photo of Gandhi's working room, the Harijan Ashram by the Sabarmati River, Ahmedabad, Gujarat,
India.)

Vandana Shiva: Definitely. People very, very much learn from what Gandhi had said. When I brought
the TRIPs issues for the first time to farmers’ organizations in India, in ’91 when the first draft of the
WTO texts were ready, it was called the Dunkel draft text, I started to tell people what this would imply.
It took no time: by ’92, ’93, we had giant farmer rallies. And the title (of the movement) was the Seed
Satyagraha -- the non-violent, non-cooperation with laws that create seed monopolies, inspired totally
by Gandhi walking to the Dandi Beach and picking the salt and saying, “You can’t monopolize this
which we need for life.”

On the non-cooperation side we were very inspired by Gandhi. But also on the constructive side, the
other side of our work with farmers and farm groups is the creative side of saving seeds, doing
agriculture without corporate dependence -- without chemicals, without their seed. All this is talked
about in the language that Gandhi left us as a legacy.

We work with three key concepts. (One) Swadeshi -- which means the capacity to do your own thing --
produce your own food, produce your own goods.

(Two) Swaraj -- to govern yourself. And we fight on three fronts -- water, food, and seed. JalSwaraj --
JalSwaraj is water independence -- water freedom and water sovereignty. Anna Swaraj is food
freedom, food sovereignty. And Bija Swaraj is seed freedom and seed sovereignty.

(In regard to these fronts) Swa means self -- that which rises from the self and is very, very much a
deep notion of freedom. I believe that these concepts, which are deep, deep, deep in Indian
civilization, Gandhi resurrected them to fight for freedom. They are very important for today’s world
because so far what we’ve had is centralized state rule, giving way now to centralized corporate
control, and we need a third alternate. That third alternate is, in part, citizens being able to tell their
states, “This is what your function is. This is what your obligations are,” and being able to have their
states act on corporations to say, “This is something you cannot do.”

The third component is Satyagraha, non-cooperation, basically saying, “We will do our thing and any
law that tries to say that us being free is illegal we will have to not cooperate with it. We will defend our
freedoms to have access to water, access to seed, access to food, access to medicine.”

The death of economic democracy

In Motion Magazine: Last time we spoke, you were talking about how to make democracy more
viable and you were saying that it comes down to individual participation at an economic level. How
would that function?

Vandana Shiva: Well, actually any real, true democracy is one in which people can determine the
conditions of their living -- their food, their health, their jobs, their livelihoods. These are defined as
economic issues. They used to be covered by democratic governance of the representative kind to the
extent that before globalization, if you voted someone to power you could put demands on that
representative to say, “We need a school in this community, and if you promise you get us a school we
are with you.” By and large, it was possible for politicians to come back and deliver their promise
because it was within the national sovereign space.

But globalization has meant the erosion of national sovereign space. For example, under the
agreement on agriculture nobody can guarantee a price to a farmer. Governments cannot go to
farmers and say, “We will make sure you get a living price for your farm commodities.” They cannot go
to a community and say, “We will defend your jobs and prevent them from being undermined and
companies running off to some cheap overseas site.” They cannot offer guarantees on education, they
cannot offer healthcare -- the typical things democracy was made of.

What we’ve seen is a split of democracy. It’s been emptied out of its economic content, been left with a
representative shell of electoral theatrics -- literally.

Economic decisions have moved out of the hands of citizens and even of the hands of countries and
moved into organizations controlled by corporations like the WTO, and the World Bank, the IMF
(International Monetary Fund), and the corporations themselves. What we have is economic
dictatorship combined with representative democracy. But representative democracy under economic
dictatorship is not able to counter that dictatorship and act as an economic democratic force. (Rather
it) moves and leans increasingly into winning votes by polarizing society and dividing society along
lines of race, gender, religion, ethnicity. That is why over the ’90s, as globalization has deepened its
reach in our communities and countries, fundamentalism, communalism, religious hatred have seen a
rise. Because religious fundamentalism, I believe, is a child of the death of economic democracy.

In Motion Magazine: Because?

Vandana Shiva: Because people without economic rights are left insecure. There is joblessness.
They can’t understand the processes leading to it. Ordinary farmers can’t really understand why prices
are going down.

If you can say, “The prices are going down because some other farmer in some other state is doing
something to you;” or, “Your water is disappearing because some other state is doing something;” or,
“Your jobs are going because the Moslems are breeding too much;” or in Europe, “The immigrants are
coming too fast; or in the United States, “The Mexicans are crossing the border;” it takes no time
before the economic insecurity left as a result of globalization mutates into a ready-made ground for
political interests to say, “Your job has been taken away by so and so.” “Your security has been robbed
by so and so.” That’s the rhetoric that has filled the space as economic insecurity has grown.

The recovery of economic democracy

In Motion Magazine: How can a farmer, for example, economically become involved?

Vandana Shiva: I think the recovery of economic democracy is at the heart of recovery of democracy
itself. And it doesn’t stop at that. It goes further into the creation of peace.

In a way, we really have three combined challenges, just now. We’ve got the threat of war and
violence. We’ve got the threat of economic insecurity, loss of jobs, loss of livelihoods, loss of incomes
for farmers. And thirdly, we’ve got this whole situation that our leaders are not representing our will --
the collapse of democracy.
Ordinary farmers have to get involved, can get
involved, by engaging in a recovery of economic
democracy as an everyday practice meaning, as we
do here, with seed Swaraj, with Anna Swaraj, saving
seeds, growing your own seed, not going to
Monsanto in every season and having your seed
collapse. Making chipatis in Old Delhi.

I was just told, yesterday, that 41 billion rupees of

losses have been faced by farmers in one state who
were sold Monsanto corn. We did a calculation that
farmers of Bt cotton, the genetically-engineered
cotton, lost a billion rupees in one season.

If farmers are saving the seed, growing their crop,

they are making reclamation of their economic
space. They are giving up chemicals and the
pesticides that have contaminated all sources of
water in this country, including the soft drinks now.
They are not just saving money. They are saving
their lives and they are saving public health.
Making saris.

By reaching out to consumers and setting up

alternate marketing systems, as we do with the Dilli
Haat where we have our direct marketing stall, we in
Navdanya, my organization, which is the main outlet
for organic growers in this country, we bring the
produce directly from farmers, and it’s literally their
marketing platform.

The flow of wealth from South to North

In Motion Magazine: The contradiction between

knowledge, as a collective process, and patents
Sacks of peppers in Old Delhi.
being the opposite of that … do you think that is
related to the fact that wealth has been flowing from
one half of the world to the other?

Vandana Shiva: North-South inequality is very

clearly a result of imperialistic structures being put in
place that suck wealth out of the South, put it in the
North. That’s exactly why the North looks rich and
the South looks poor. Not because human beings in
the South don’t know how to create wealth.
Everyone knows how to make things, create things.
Every one is creative. But when the results of your
creativity, productivity are not yours to hold and the
results of your labor and creativity are transferred Spices for sale in Old Delhi.
somewhere else the one who takes it becomes rich
and the one who’s left without it is the one who
stays poor.

During colonial rule, this extraction was done

through ownership over land. The British came to
India to a country, which was richer than England at
that time, and every record tells you that. They used
to exchange pepper with bags of gold. A sack of
pepper used to be equal to a sack of gold. Then
they came in as traders, established themselves as

Busy market area in Old Delhi.

rulers. First as the East India Company, which was thrown out in the 1857 Rebellion and War of
Independence, then, as the crown which took over the role of the Company and continued to rule.

The regions that were the richest, such as Bengal, became the poorest. In 1942, two million people
died of famine in the land where there was no shortage of wheat. Amartya Sen got a Nobel prize for
saying something so basic, that people did not die because there was not enough food. They died
because they had been robbed of their entitlement. That was the basis of his Nobel prize. That is also
the basis of noticing inequality.

We (Navdanya) have two books on the history of food and farming and we have tracked in them what
the wealth of Indian peasants was being used for. Schools were being built in England. Mental
asylums were being run by the transfer of peasant wealth into England. That’s why the colonizing
empire constantly grew. That’s what land ownership did at that time, which the British institutionalized
in this country. Before that we had land use. We had use-of-it right. Not private property in land.

The British turned the revenue collectors into landowners and created what they called the permanent
settlement and Zamidari system through which wealth would flow to them. The revenue collectors
were left as landowners. The original cultivators were left as the dispossessed peasants.

From ownership of land to ownership of biodiversity

What ownership over land, a very distorted ownership of a land, did to indigenous communities at that
time of colonialism, ownership over biodiversity, seeds, genes, medicine is doing in today’s world. The
biodiversity is in what is called the poorer part of the world. We are biodiversity rich but every year,
annually, $60 billion worth of wealth-transfer is taking place because the control over the products is in
the hands of the North. Monopolies of patents are in their hands. Monopolies on trade are in their
hands.

Coffee -- trade jumped from $40 billion to $70 billion over the last few years so there was literally a
doubling of trade. One would have imagined a doubling of trade would have left a doubling of incomes
in the hands of those who grew the coffee. The incomes of the coffee producers dropped from $9
billion to $5 billion and some of the most dispossessed people of the world today are the coffee
growers, as also every other commodity grower.

These are amazing mechanisms -- the trade arrangements, trade treaties, intellectual property rights
patent treaties. They are doing, once again, in a deeper way what colonialism did and the projections
are that 70% of American wealth will be through rent collection, through patents, because the U.S
government is not designing America as a society where people are involved in making things. It has
dismantled manufacture. It has gone off to China. Pick up anything in a supermarket -- it is made in
China. But America would still like to collect returns and that is through intellectual property. So, while
people’s jobs are disappearing, the corporate wealth is increasing and then, of course, all the details of
the rest of it carry on.

There are all these mechanisms of taking wealth from those who work, those who create, to those who
control through extremely coercive instruments of power.

War is globalization by other means

In Motion Magazine: Which is now further enforced by invading other people’s countries?

Vandana Shiva: I have said that war is another name for globalization because if you really look at
Iraq it wasn’t liberated. American soldiers didn’t come out winning. More of them have died since the
so-called war got over. But one thing did happen and that was that corporate America got to enter Iraq
and use American tax money in the process. Bechtel got a big contract. Halliburton got a big contract.
That is where the whole so-called reconstruction went. This is exactly what globalization does – (for
example) put the water of the world in the hands of Bechtel, Suez (Lyonnaise des Eaux), Vivendi
(Environment). Globalization is war by other means and war is globalization by other means.
In Motion Magazine: It depends on the policy of the leaders of the U.S. at the time?

Vandana Shiva: At this point it so happens America is the empire. But one thing we learned with the
British Empire is that empires rise and empires sink.

Published in In Motion Magazine March 28, 2004

Interview with Vandana Shiva (2002)

Discussing “Water Wars”
Resurrection of commons, community rights,
and direct and basic democracy

Interview by Nic Paget-Clarke

Johannesburg, South Africa

• Introduction

• Anti-poverty movements
• Water lessons
• Dams
• Industrial agriculture and the World Bank Vandana Shiva in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo
by Nic Paget-Clarke.
• Women organizers and activists
• The market paradigm and the ecological
paradigm
• Water rights and indigenous communities
• Cowboy economics
• The Narmada Project / the Baliraja Memorial Dam
• Public-private water projects
• Corporate states and privatization
• Earth democracy
• Crop prices fixed by farming communities
• The World Summit

Introduction

Dr. Vandana Shiva is founder of both the Research Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology,
an independent public industry research group, and Navdanya a grassroots conservation movement in
India. This interview was conducted by Nic Paget-Clarke on September 1, 2002 at St Stithians, site of
the People's Earth Summit parallel event to the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable
Development in Johannesburg. Her most recent book at the time of the interview is "Water Wars:
Privatization, Pollution, and Profit".

• To see our full series of interviews and articles from the United Nations World Summit on
Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, August 26 - September 4, 2002 -
click here.
• Also see: Interview with Vandana Shiva (2003)
The Role of Patents in the Rise of Globalization
New Delhi, India

Anti-poverty movements
 In Motion Magazine Recommends

In Motion Magazine: One of the things I noticed in your book Water Wars: Privatization,
“Water Wars” is how much mass movements relate to what you talk Pol…
about. How do mass movements that you’ve been involved in or Vandana Shiva (Paperback -
learned about inform your analysis?
Feb 2…
Vandana Shiva: The book “Water Wars” is a synthesis of thirty
$11.20
years of my engagement with communities defending their eco-
systems and resources. These movements are called the
environment movements but they are also the anti-poverty
movements because in the South the forces that make people poor
are the same forces that destroy their resources. In fact, it’s
because their resources are either destroyed or taken away people Protect or Plunder?:
are left poor. That is why at this World Summit the environment is Understa…
being made to look like the opposite of poverty. It’s a perspective Vandana Shiva (Paperback -
from the rich and the powerful who would like to take the resources Feb 9,…
of the poor away and make it look like a solution to poverty through
$20.00
globalization, financial inputs, etc.

The first movement that taught me about water was the Chipko
movement in the early ’70s. Women came out in the Himalayan
villages hugging trees and said, “We won’t let them be logged. You’ll
have to kill us before you kill our trees.” And they were laughed at Biopiracy: The Plunder of
and the government said, “Logging is a big revenue in these
regions,” and the women said, “Forests do not bare timber and raise
Natur…
them as revenue.” Their real yield is water and soil conservation and Vandana Shiva (Paperback -
fresh air. Jul 1, …
$10.40
People used to laugh in the early ’70s. But, by the early ’80s, our
Privacy
forest policy had changed to recognize that catchment forests’ first
function was water conservation and not revenues through killing Amazon.com
the trees and logging the trees. Widgets

Water lessons

We got a logging ban in the High Himalayas because of this direct action over a whole decade.
Ordinary village women, no education, not one word can they write, but they taught the world one of
the biggest water lessons. Taught me my big water lesson that as you log the forest you get floods and
droughts. Springs dry up. That’s where the water crisis comes from.

The next lesson I learned was when I was commissioned by the Ministry of Environment to look at the
impact of mining in Doon Valley. From a typical sort of bureaucratic-agency scientific perspective the
impact of mining was the superficial impact that you can literally see with your eyes. But when I started
to visit the villages for surveys, the women said, “It’s about water.”

And that’s what took me down the track of recognizing that the limestone was the aquifer, it was the
water body that conserved water that would have been conserved, would have been stored by a two
hundred thousand crore, which is twenty thousand million Rupees, investment in a water storage
system.

That’s what nature and the limestone belt and the mineral deposits were doing for us. It is the
women’s lessons in hydro-geology rather than the scientists’ lessons in geology that taught me about
mountains and mining and how mining too is linked to water.

Dams

Then, in the same period, the early ’80s, one by one our rivers started to get dammed –
Survernarekha, Narmada – and I started to go to every local community that was protesting against
displacement to help them put together their assessments, including the early assessments and
impact of the Narmada dam, and training the younger generation of activists who then really built a
massive movement called the Narmada Bichao Andolan.

I learned there, during that period, that dams are built on the assumption that you augment water. All
you do is re-direct water. You do not increase the flow of water in a river you merely store it and divert
it to places where you can create commercial agriculture, feed industry, feed big towns. And meantime
the areas that were getting water through the river, the wells that were being re-charged by that river,
the fisheries that were being supported by that river,
are killed. That cost is never taken into account.

Industrial agriculture and the World Bank

It was during that time that the violence in Punjab

taught me that industrial agriculture was a very big
water destroyer. The economics of industrial agriculture
had always been posed as higher productivity. That the
reason you need these seeds, these crops, these
chemicals is to produce more food. But more food with Site of the People's Earth Summit parallel event to the
United Nations World Summit on Sustainable
respect to what was never questioned. Yes, with Development in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo by
respect to labor by getting rid of labor from the land. Nic Paget-Clarke.
But not with respect to land because you are not
producing more nutrition per acre. You were destroying
many crops to create monocultures. Densely mixed
farming produces far more per acre.

But the most important thing was water was never considered. Water was planned for. Inputs were
planned for. But in the productivity assessment the inefficiency of water use was never considered.
And my calculations showed me during that period that many of the wars and civil conflicts of that time
were around rivers because different regions were fighting over the same rivers to feed these thirsty
crops. Five times more water is used in industrial agriculture for growing the same amount of wheat
and rice than indigenous agriculture. With respect to scarce water you actually had an inefficient
revolution. You had a regressive revolution.

In the ’90s, the early ’90s, women in the coastal areas started to destroy shrimp farms. They called me
to help them when they were arrested. I did the studies to file a Supreme Court case in their defense
and those studies showed me that for something simple like shrimp landing on a plate in North
America … . No one realizes that for one acre of a shrimp farm two hundred acres of eco-systems are
being destroyed. The waters are being made saline. Sea waters are being polluted.

There are high costs for the Green Revolution -- the Green Revolution is the word for the industrial
agriculture in India. And it is not just the dams. Where there were no rivers and there were no dams,
the World Bank gave money to pump water from the ground so that today there are places where
water is being pumped from a thousand to five thousand feet.

I remember two regions in particular where I did surveys for governments when the water started to
get scarce and they were wondering, “Why is there no water?” I said, “Show me your plans. Show me
your policies.” I started reading and I found that at a certain point the World Bank had said, “Stop
growing millet. Start growing sugar cane. Stop growing subsistence crops. Start growing cash crops.”
And that shift to very, very water-demanding crops, all World Bank requirements, lead to groundwater
being mined and creating water famine.

My dream is one day to make a bill for genocide for the World Bank because more than any other
agency it has destroyed the hydrological systems of this planet in its arrogance and blindness.

In Motion Magazine: Why would they suggest these changes?

Vandana Shiva: Because the World Bank only looks at returns on investment. It drags countries into
borrowing. It forces loans on them and then wants to maximize return on loans. Well, loans don’t come
out of stable eco-systems. Loans come out of cash crops. Loan payments, interest payments. They
are squeezing out loan re-payments by killing water systems and killing people who depend on them.

Women organizers and activists

In Motion Magazine: How is it that so many of these organizers and activists are women?

Vandana Shiva: Well, for water it is very clear. In the Third World women carry the water to get it
home. They are the ones first to know water is polluted. They are the first to know the well has run dry.
They are the first to know water is saline. They are the canary of the eco-crisis.

The market paradigm and the ecological paradigm

In Motion Magazine: What’s the difference between the market paradigm of water security and the
ecological paradigm?

Vandana Shiva: The ecological paradigm focuses on the water cycle and recognizes that by its very
nature water is a renewable resource. If we respect that cycle and do not interfere in it it’s going to
give us abundance forever. But we have to function within it. We have to be bounded by it. Within that
binding we have limitless water forever.

The market paradigm does not look at the water cycle. It begins with cash. It begins with finance and
then it’s, “How can I invest if I have money to extract water as a raw material and put it into something
else that will generate more cash?” When that paradigm starts to create water crises that same
paradigm comes up with a second solution which it is now offering here at the WSSD (World Summit
on Sustainable Development). It’s a big offer. “We will now privatize water and commodify it.” Water is
being exploited because it is being treated as valueless, “Therefore, we will put a price on it,” but value
and price are two very different things.

When you function in an ecological paradigm you value water but you don’t price it. Because it is in
fact priceless. In a market paradigm you price water but you don’t value it.

Water rights and indigenous communities

In Motion Magazine: Why do collective water rights and management work well in indigenous
communities?

Vandana Shiva: Well, for example with things like water, water is interconnected. Surface water is
connected intimately with the ground water. You can’t separate the two. Your river flows are connected
with wells. Your mountain watershed is connected with the waters it receives. And not seeing that
interconnectedness of water is what has lead to the privatization.

Communities have always recognized two things. First, that which we need for survival should never
belong to an individual. It should be the common wealth. Second, it should be managed as the
common wealth. Therefore, community structures of responsibilities have to be put in place.

The rights are derived from collective responsibility. They are secondary. Primary is the collective
responsibility.

If you do not build that storage tank to harvest your monsoons in low-rainfall areas you are never
going to have water. And you can’t build a tank alone. You have to join collectively. Once you harvest it
together, then the only way to make that tank serve you is to have a common regime of what will be
grown.

If one individual grows sugar cane and drains that tank dry that is the typical tragedy of the commons
that Garret Hardin (The Tragedy of the Commons by Garret Hardin – 1968 Science) talks about. But
that is not typical of the commons. That is typical of the destruction of the commons
The tragedy is that Western individualized, atomized societies and their academics have imposed on
the rest of the world this very false idea that commons by their very nature must degrade. But it is
privatized property by its very nature that must ecologically degrade because it is not being managed
for ecological maintenance. It is being managed for highest returns.

Common property is what has allowed tanks built in India four thousand years ago to still supply water
to people.

In Motion Magazine: How big are these tanks?

Vandana Shiva: The tanks are small but in huge chains. I have walked down chains of a thousand
tanks in a row. Literally connected with overflow from one to the other, feeding the other. Miraculous
engineering that cannot be reproduced by any engineer today.

In Motion Magazine: What dimensions?

Vandana Shiva: Some will be a hundred square feet. Some might be a square mile, depending on the
topography. But in very dry areas, 600, 700 millimeters … they have
been the lifeline in dry regions.

In Motion Magazine: And they are constructed by humans?

Vandana Shiva: They are constructed by humans. And we had, until

the British tried to destroy it, systems of community management.

If today we have an ecology movement to fight privatizations it is

because we can tap back into our historical memory, to say, “This is
how this it could be done.”

Cowboy economics

In Motion Magazine: What is cowboy economics?

Vandana Shiva: Cowboy economics is the mentality of, if you get

A sculpture set up by the international
somewhere first you have absolute rights to rape, plunder, pollute. NGO Friends of the Earth at the United
You have no responsibility for neighbors, for those who came before Nations World Summit on Sustainable
you, the inhabitants who were there, or those who have to come after Development (August 26 - September
4, 2002) in Johannesburg, South Africa.
you. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.

It is cowboy economics that is being brought back to the front with

privatization. Cowboy economics was the basis of the water rights in
the western United States. Whoever gets there first has absolute
rights.

Eastern United States had a much more decent form of water distribution -- use-rights based on not
disrupting the river flow so that others’ rights are not interfered in. It took others into account. Cowboy
economics takes no one else into account – just the cowboy. The cowboy and his gun.

The Narmada Project / the Baliraja Memorial Dam

In Motion Magazine: The Narmada project was financed by the World Bank. Can you explain to me
the difference between that and the Baliraja Memorial Dam – conceptually?

Vandana Shiva: The Narmada dam is a giant dam – very, very big. The Naramada Project is 30 big
dams, and about 300 small ones. The Narmada Sagar is the big, first one they built. It is being built for
the state and has the highest commercial agriculture and the highest industrialization. All the polluting
chemical industry of the world has relocated to that state. It’s the thirst of the polluting petrochemical
and chemical industry for which this dam is being built.

Investors, basically, are looking for returns on investment. What that land did in terms of being
ancestral homelands for indigenous people, what that water did, in terms of being a flow down a major,
one of India’s most sacred, rivers is not even being considered. It’s based on large amounts of foreign
investment, whether it was earlier the World Bank, or later bonds raised internationally.

The Baliraja Dam is a small dam in another drought-prone area built with people’s mobilization. Their
hands, their labor. It is meant to serve the sustenance needs of people. That is what it is designed for.

In Motion Magazine: There is such a thing as a good dam?

Vandana Shiva: The word dam is applied for any storage. The problem is the mega-dams, the giant
dams. When you try and store water by human work there’s a limit of scale. Baliraja is not a giant dam.
It’s a small storage system.

The giant dams which are built with huge earth-moving equipment … that’s where the problem starts
because that really disrupts the water cycle. The lesson for the world was the Tennessee Valley
corporation and the Hoover Dam -- these displays of huge power.

Harvesting water with smaller dams has not been a problem. For example, there’s a very famous dam
system in India built during the Vijayanagar Empire (1336-1565) and that dam has never caused
waterlogging. Waterlogging is when too much water gets locked into the ground and the water table
rises and your plants can’t grow because now they are getting suffocated.

But in that same place, the World Bank financed a giant dam for the same amount of irrigation in the
same region. Within a year, there was waterlogging. Within a year, thirteen people were shot dead for
protesting against the land being destroyed through waterlogging.

And this was due to the World Bank’s mechanisms. The World Bank leaves
instructions in our countries. We can’t rule ourselves, according to our terms.
The Bank tells us, now you will have a department like this, collection of rents
like this, water taxes like this. So when the water tax people went to collect
taxes from these farmers, the people said, “Not only have we received no
benefits, you’ve destroyed our land. We won’t pay you.” And there was the
worst form of police action and brutality that created an amazing new
organizing among farmers. They realized suddenly they were into a different
period with industrial agriculture and these large dams.

Large dams are twins of polluting industry and industrial agriculture.

Public-private water projects

In Motion Magazine: What are the negative consequences of public-private

water projects?
Water Wars:
Vandana Shiva: There are three negative consequences of public-private Privatization, Pollution,
water projects. The first is it inevitably leads to the privatization of the state. As and Profit -- by Vandana
Shiva
is being done here at the World Summit, voluntary agreements are no more
part of policy. They are no more debated through transparency of parliamentary
debates. Executives, individual bureaucrats in power, usually with a kickback or
a bribe, sign off something that does not belong to the state. Water. It is not the property of the state.
Water belongs to the people and the earth. It is a community resource, common property. Common
property cannot become state property. But private-public partnerships assume water to be a state
property, to then be privatized to a private corporation. But the very action privatizes the state and
stops it from being a public entity. That to me is the single most crucial damage that it does.
Second, it takes what is a community resource and transfers it into a monopoly right. A distortion. First,
a monopoly of the state and then a monopoly of the corporation that takes over.

And the third damage it does, it leaves no accountability system either within a public-oriented state
regulation or commons-oriented community regulation to regulate use. And I’ll give you just two
examples of how this functions.

Someone signed away rights to Coca Cola. Where do they get their bottled water from? Why are they
able to enter the market in such a big way with their Aquafinas and their Kinleys and their whatever
they call them? They are capturing the market because they are getting the water for free. How do
they get the water for free? Because somewhere someone wrote a contract with them. That was a
private-public partnership. They get a piece of land. They start drilling deep – a thousand feet, two
thousand feet deep where there is no pollution. They are not purifying water. They can’t manufacture
water. That’s not for us to manufacture. They steal water.

In the state of Kerala, for example, in a region that has such high rainfall that that region has never
had water scarcity, within one year of a Coca Cola plant coming, pumping up 1.5 million liters a day for
bottling water, three lakes went dry, rivers went dry. The women started to protest. Tribal women.
Three hundred of them are now in jail. We organized a meeting against water privatization three
weeks ago -- they couldn’t join us because they were in jail. That is how the consequences of private-
public partnership end up.

Another example is the case of Suez getting the privatization contract for water in Delhi (linked to
“Suez - Degrémont and the Privatization of Ganga Water” article). Where does it get the water? By
stealing it from the Ganges. Not purifying the Yamuna, which is polluted, but stealing it through a dam
that was built on public cost, a hundred thousand people displaced. This is a bigger disaster than
Narmada, actually, it’s just not been in the world news so much. They divert the water out of irrigation,
635 million liters a day.

Those bureaucrats who signed those contracts never had those rights. That is why private-public
partnerships are in my view illegal both constitutionally, and we are going to file cases on all of these
issues, but also illegal in a system of natural rights. Water has to be governed by natural law, not by
the law of the market.

Corporate states and privatization

In Motion Magazine: You mention corporate states. What do you mean by that?

Vandana Shiva: The oil industry scandals in the United States have made it very clear that as the
nexus between industry and government grows more and more intimate and these kinds of private-
public deals allow decisions to be made in a totally undemocratic way against the interests of people
and against sustainability, what you get is actually one entity. Mr. Bush is both an oilman and the head
of the most powerful state of the world. He is one individual defending the oil industry using state
power. He is the corporate state.

Given the way our representative democracy has been perverted, and is depending so much on
money with no regulation of how much money gets spent and where the money comes from, there
constantly builds up a spiral such that the closer you are to industry, and the more you are industry,
the more money you can mobilize to get yourself into power and the more favors and deals and
private-public partnerships you can strike to make the industry of which you are a part bigger so that
the next time round it can finance you even more against your opponents who might have far more
popular backing but don’t have the mobilizing capacity for elections, given that votes today are bought
not mobilized.

Anyway, private-public partnership, the privatization of the state, the corporatization of the state,
inevitably leads to a situation where electoral democracy also becomes a marketplace and votes
become a commodity. That’s why we need deep change.
Earth democracy

In Motion Magazine: Do you have ideas on that deep change?

Vandana Shiva: I’ve called it earth democracy. And by that I mean three critical things.

First, recognizing once again that we are just one inhabitant, one species among many on the earth.
We have to be responsible to the rest of the earth’s inhabitants. We have to relocate ourselves not in
the global marketplace but in the earth family, in the earth community.

Secondly, to conserve the resources of the earth, and this can only be done through custodianship,
guardianship, love and care in concreteness and locally, it is necessary that power-responsibility rights
go where water can be conserved, seeds can be conserved, biodiversity can be conserved, education
can be guaranteed, livelihoods can be generated, people can have meaning. The highest powers
need to go right to the bottom.

We’ve had radical shifts in our Indian constitution recognizing this. If you really want to conserve
resources you’ve got to put the powers to make decisions about natural resources on the ground. Of
course, now that is conflicting with globalization and we have massacres over that conflict right now.
But our constitution recognizes that the highest powers must be at the bottom. The right powers must
go upwards.

So, resurrection of commons, community rights,

and direct and basic democracy.

Crop prices fixed by farming

communities

The third critical change is a shift in both the

politics and economic paradigms. Politically, a
paradigm based on democracy is bottom
upwards. It does not begin with elections, it begins
with decisions on everyday matters. What price
should crops sell at needs to be fixed by local A large protest puppet peers over the Monsanto headquarters
farming communities not by Chicago commodity sign, St Louis, Missouri. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
exchange control. Once you have the right prices,
everything else will fall into place. Justice will fall
into place. Sustainability will fall into place.

And that will also generate a living economy. Just now, the economy has become an economy of
death. Just killing countries. Killing farmers. Killing fisherman. Killing children. Killing women. It is
efficient at killing and then saying that is not my responsibility. “You can’t prove it’s because of what I
did.”

For example, U.S. farmers have lost a crop. Indian farmers have lost a crop. Southern African farmers
have lost a crop. But the oil industry is still not taking responsibility. President Bush is not taking
responsibility. Instead they are taking the damage caused by one irresponsible industry, the oil
industry, through climate change, and saying, “Now, we will use this to blackmail the Africans to buy
GM (genetically modified) foods and create a market opportunity for another industry – Monsanto.”

To this, a local democracy, a living democracy would basically say, “No. Our economy, we will shape.
We know what we can do and we will tell you what we can’t do. Then we’ll import from you.” It turns
globalization on its head. You know, we’ve handed over too much power and at this point if we don’t
take back power there will be no humans alive on this planet.

It used to be said, “Bread or freedom”. It used to be either / or. It’s very clearly bread and freedom. If
we don’t make ourselves really free we won’t have bread.
The World Summit

In Motion Magazine: This seems like a critical conference.

Vandana Shiva: Yes.

In Motion Magazine: What is your understanding of what has been going on?

Vandana Shiva: At the formal conference, two opposite things have been happening. On the one hand
they’ve got some negotiators busy with working out timelines for real commitments but implementation
about how to get to those objectives is all about WTO (World Trade Organization) globalization.

I just did a count in the negotiations last night. Doha and WTO are mentioned 46 times in the
implementation decision. Rio is mentioned once in one square bracket, which means it could
disappear. So it is a hijack of the Rio agenda and replacement by the globalization and trade agenda,
which means by the corporate agenda.

The countervailing force that international environmental treaties and laws and policies were able to
create – the attempt here is to totally dismantle it so that in international law we have nothing but the
power of cooperation. That is what is being sought to be done.

Last September 11, there was the hijack of planes which were then rammed into the World Trade
Center towers. What we are seeing is a hijack of world governance and the right to ram into all eco-
systems and all people’s lives on this earth. We have to find ways other than summit decisions to find
ways to protect our lives.

In Motion Magazine: As yet undetermined?

Vandana Shiva: No, I think they are being shaped. I think small invisible gatherings like this People’s
Earth Summit, the Children’s Earth Summit, there are places where people are recognizing that we
have to withdraw consent and we have to withdraw engagement, and build alternative systems.

Published in In Motion Magazine, March 6, 2003

"GANGA" is not for sale

Suez - Degrémont and

the Privatization of Ganga Water
by Vandana Shiva, Afsar H. Jafri, Kunwar Jalees
New Delhi, India

• State appropriates people’s resources for

corporate profits
• Suez-Degrémont Water Plant at Sonia Vihar
• Who is paying for corporate profits?
• Water Requirement and Sources of Water in
Delhi Vandana Shiva in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo
by Nic Paget-Clarke.
• Corruption in Delhi Jal Board's Suez
Degrémont Plant
• Destruction of Tehri for Water Supply to Delhi
• Tehri Dam built in a seismic fault zone.
• Impact of Water Diversion on Agriculture and Food Security
• Water Requirements for Different Crops
 The Descent of the Ganges

This legend relates to the descent of the

• Upper Ganga Canal: the lifeline of Western
U.P.
• Water Needs for Different Crops in the
region.
• Water Requirement for Rice
• What does diverting water to Delhi mean for
National Food Security?
• Alternatives to privatization of Ganga and
meeting Delhi's water needs
• Water Liberation
• Water Liberation Declaration
River Ganga from the heavens into the
earth.
The ruler of Ayodhya, King Sagar, an
ancestor of Rama, of the solar race
performed the Aswamedha Sacrifice 99
times, where each time, the horse that he
sent around the earth, returned to his
kingdom unchallenged. Indra the King of
Gods, in an act of jealousy, kidnapped and
hid the horse in the hermitage of Kapila Muni
- when the 100th sacrifice was being
performed.

• Interview w/ Dr. Vandana Shiva (2002) - The sixty thousand sons of Kapila came to
Discussing “Water Wars” the hermitage of Kapila in their search for
Resurrection of commons, community rights, the horse, and mistaking Kapila Muni to be
and direct and basic democracy the abductor, attacked him. An enraged
Johannesburg, South Africa Kapila Muni burnt the 60000 princes to
ashes.
On August 9th, 2002, on the eve of the Quit India
One of the grandchildren of King Sagar,
Day, more than 5000 farmers of Muradnagar and
hearing about the plight of his father and
adjoining areas of western Uttar Pradesh gathered in
uncles, came in search of Kapila Muni and
a Rally at Village Bhanera to protest the laying of a
asked him for a solution to the problem, and
giant 3.25 meters-diameter pipeline to supply the
was advised that the waters of the River
water from the River Ganga to the Sonia Vihar Water
Ganga would miraculously bring back the
Plant for Delhi. The project, which has been
dead princes to life.
contracted to Suez-Ondeo Degrémont of France by
the Government of Delhi, will deprive the richest
His descendant Bhagirathi, continued his
farmlands of India of irrigation water.
efforts to bring the Ganga to the earth from
the heavens to purify the ashes of his
The Sonia Vihar water treatment plant, which was
ancestors and bring them back to life.
inaugurated on June 21, 2002 by the Chief Minister
Bhagirata's prayers were rewarded and the
of Delhi, is designed for a capacity of 635 million
Ganges rushed to the earth; however, the
liters a day on a 10 year BOT (build-operate-transfer)
might of the river was too much for the earth
basis, at a cost of 1.8 billion rupees (approx. 50
to withstand. Fearing a catastrophe,
million dollars). The contract between Delhi Jal Board
Bhagirata prayed to Shiva, who held out his
(the Water Supply Department of the Delhi
matted hair to catch the river as she
Government) and the French company Ondeo
descended, and thus softened her journey to
Degrémont (subsidiary of Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux
the earth.
Water Division - the water giant of the world), is
supposed to provide safe drinking water for the city.
Bhagiratha patiently led the river down to the
sea from the Himalayas; however, being
The water for the Suez-Degrémont plant in Delhi will unable to locate the exact spot where the
come from Tehri Dam through the Upper Ganga ashes lay, he requested Ganga to follow her
Canal up to Muradnagar in Western Uttar Pradesh own course. The Ganga, therefore in the
(UP) and then through the giant pipeline to Delhi. The region of Bengal, divided herself into a
Upper Ganga Canal, which starts at Haridwar and hundred mouths and formed the Ganges
carries the holy water of Ganga up to Kanpur via delta.
Muradnagar, is the main source of irrigation for this
region.

The 9th August Rally at Bhanera village was the culmination of the 300 kilometer-long mobilization
drive along the Ganga by the farmers of Garhwal and inhabitants of the devastated city of Tehri to
liberate the river from being privatized. The rally was launched from Haridwar - one of the oldest and
holiest cities of India built on the banks of Ganga - where hundreds of farmers, together with priests,
citizens and worshippers of Ganga announced that "Ganga is not for Sale", and vowed to defend the
freedom of this holy river. Thousands of farmers and others in villages along the route joined the rally
to declare that they would never allow Suez to take over Ganga waters.
The rallyists joined more than 300 people from
across the country, representing over a hundred
grassroots groups intellectuals, writers and lawyers,
at the 3-day Convention on Earth Democracy -
People's Rights to Natural Resources, organized by
Navdanya from 10th to 12th August 2002, at Indian
Social Institute, New Delhi. The Convention sought to
provide evidence of the state's violent appropriation
of people's land, water and biodiversity, and evolve
common action plans and strategies to defend
collective community rights to resources.
"There is only one struggle left - the struggle for the
right to life", said Magasaysay Award willing writer
Mahaswheta Devi. Eminent author Arundhati Roy
and eminent scientist Vandana Shiva stressed the
urgent need to take collective united action to defend
people's rights to land, water and biodiversity.
State appropriates people’s resources for
corporate profits
The farmers of western Uttar Pradesh, Tehri and
Muradnagar are not the only ones whose local
common resource are being appropriated by the
state, to be handed over to corporations for making
corporate profits. All over India, such appropriation of
people's natural resources is taking place, often
accompanied by state violence, as a result of
unethical practices of globalization being pushed
through the dictates of the World Bank (WB),
International Monetary fund (IMF) and World Trade
Organization (WTO). Globalization for the large
majority of the poor in India has meant losing what
they have in the form of water, land and biodiversity
through transferring the common property of the
villagers and tribals to global corporations. This is
being achieved through water privatization, patent
regimes and creating new property rights to
biodiversity and new genetic materials, liberalization
and corporatization of agriculture and liberalization of
investment which is alienating land from the poorest
in total violation of the Indian Constitution which
guarantee's human rights and natural rights.
Reckless privatization and appropriation of water is
robbing people of water, the very basis of life. The
New Water Policy is centered around water
privatization. In Kerala 300 adivasis of the Coca-Cola
Virudha Samara Samithy (Anti Coca-Cola Struggle
Committee) were arrested at a mass rally at
Plachimada on 4 August 2002. The people were
protesting Coca Cola's takeover of common water
resources of the village for its water bottling plant.
The company has been drawing 15 lakh liters of
water per day, which has dried the aquifers within 2
years and has polluted the water.
The Haridwar Declaration
Today, the 8th of August 2002, on the eve of
the 60th Anniversary of the “Quit India
Movement”, we all have gathered here to
pledge that:
We will never let the river Ganga be sold to
any multinational corporations. Ganga is
revered as a mother (Ganga Maa) and
prayed to and on its banks important
ceremonies starting from birth till death are
performed (according to Hindu religious
practices). We will never allow our mother or
its water to be sold to Suez-Degrémont or
any other corporations.
The sacred waters of the Ganga cannot be
the property of any one individual or a
company. Our mother Ganga is not for Sale.
We boycott the commodification and
privatization of the Ganga and any other
water resources.
We pledge to conserve and judiciously use
our regional water resources to save our
environment and ecology, so that we would
gift our coming generation a clean and
beautiful environment as well as safeguard
their right to water resources.
We pledge and declare that the local
community will have the right over the local
water resources. It is the duty of the local
community to conserve and sensibly utilize
their resources. Anyone from outside the
community whether an individual, an
organization or a corporation have to take
the permission of the Gram Sabha for
utilizing these resources.
The river Ganga was brought upon the face
of earth by Bhagirath through his yagna
(prayers) to sustain the existence of life on
Earth. The Ganga is now intrinsic to our
cultural and a part of our heritage and our
civilization. Our life and progress over the
millennia has been dependent upon the
sacred waters of Ganga. We will fight any
multinational company trying to take away
our right to life by privatizing Ganga waters.
The "Water Liberation Movement" will
continue till we liberate the sacred waters of
Ganga from the clutches of corporations, like
Suez-Ondeo Degrémont.
The water scarcity has hit the local Adivasi and Dalit community the hardest. The adivasis are
asserting their primary rights to water and demanding that the Coca-Cola restore the environment, pay
compensation, dose down the factory and quit the country. In another instance, Coca-Cola is also
sucking about 200 cusecs of water every day through four - 20 inches pipes in Khichri Village near
NTPC in Ghaziabad for its Kinley brand. Due to this the water level in this region has gone down by 10
feet.

It is also known that Coca-Cola factories at Nemam (Madurai), Athur (Chennai), in Thane District,
Khammam in Andhra etc have created similar problems. The problem is not isolated nor exclusively to
Coca-Cola alone, but is repeated wherever water resources have been handed over to corporations
who are overexploiting it.

Suez-Degrémont Water Plant at Sonia Vihar

Ondeo Degrémont, a subsidiary of Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux Water Division, has been awarded a 2
billion rupees contract (almost 50 million dollars) for the design, building and operation (for 10 years)
of a 635 million liters/day Drinking Water Production Plant at Sonia Vihar in New Delhi to cater 3
million inhabitants of the capital.

Won through the collaboration of all the Group companies, within the context of an international call for
tenders, this 2 billion rupees contract is the first contract of this size in India, after Bombay, for
Degrémont.

World leader in water treatment engineering, Ondeo

Degrémont has a turnover of 810 million euros in
1999 and it is present in more than 70 countries with
3,600 employees while Suez operates in 130
counties in all five continents. Out of the 30 water
contracts awarded by the big cities as on 1990's
water privatization drive, 20 went to the Suez
(http://www.ondeodegremont.com).
Degrémont, on its web site, proudly state "today, the
support of Suez enables Degrémont to use its know-
how throughout the world: pumping water, treating
and transporting it, collecting, treating and controlling
the pollution of waste water are some of the
company's oldest skills. This support results in a
combination of technical experience and reassuring
financial basis, which can be made available to fund
construction and operating contracts".
Uneven Distribution of Drinking Water in
Delhi
The per capita daily water supply should be
at least 150 liters as per the standards set
by the Central Public Health and
Environment Engineering Organization of
the Union Urban Development Ministry,
Govt. of India.
Despite DJB claim of equal allocation of
water, supply of drinking water in the Capital
is characterized by vastly unequal
distribution, with posh colonies and VIP
areas getting several times more than the
supply given to rural areas and resettlement
colonies.

Construction of the giant 3.2 meter-diameter pipe on A recent report reveals that people in
a stretch of 30 kilometers from Muradnagar to Sonia Mehrauli and Narela receive only 29 and 31
Vihar is going on and till date, about 10 kilometers of liters per person per day respectively, those
the pipeline has been laid down.The disastrous in the Cantonment Board get 509 liters and
impact of this project on the farmers of Western UP is Lutyen's Delhi 462 liters, The Karol Bagh
evident from the fact that this area is totally zone receives 337 liters per person per day.
dependent upon the canal for irrigation. Even before It is also estimated that unless the depleted
being operationalised to divert 630 million liters water table in Mehrauli is maintained or
water/day from irrigation, farmers are already feeling replenished, Mehrauli will experience
the impact of corporate greed for profits - the Upper desertification within the next ten years.
Ganga Canal is being lined to prevent seepage into
the neighboring fields (an important source of moisture for farming) and recharge of ground water, and
farmers are being prevented from digging wells even as they are reeling under severe drought.

The lining of the canal to prevent recharging of groundwater has terrified the farmers of the whole
region of western UP. At a meeting organized by Navdanya on 21st July at Chaprauli, the land of
Choudhury Charan Singh, ex-Prime Minister, farmers stated, "we will not allow the Canal to be lined
and supply water to Delhi. Instead the government should link the Upper Ganga Canal to the Yamuna
Canal passing through this area to tackle the severe drought."

Who is paying for corporate profits?

Privatization of water has been justified on the ground that full cost must be paid when water giants
get water markets whereas with water privatization they demand a full price from the people. However,
as the case of the Delhi Water plant shows, the corporations get the water for free without paying for
full social and environmental cost to those rural communities from whom the water is taken.

The country has got into huge debt for the loans
taken from World Bank for the Ganga Canal. At the
same time the giant 3.25 meter-diameter pipe is
being built through public finances. In effect the
public pays the price while transnational companies
make the profit.
Private Public Partnership is the buzzword in the
water privatization. They are also the dominant
theme on the up coming World Summit for
Sustainable Development at Johannesburg, 10 years
after the Rio Summit. Delhi water privatization is a
clear example that shows that private public
partnership in water amount to public cost and private
gain. Delhi Jal Board's proposal to meet the needs of
the entire population of Delhi includes activities
centered around the public-private partnerships
models as propagated by the World Bank, with an
emphasis on commercialization and cost recovery.
The enforced process of decentralization is turning
developing countries economies into lucrative
markets for construction and design firms who are
seeing business boom from funds earmarked for
development projects. With World Bank's and other
international financial institutions' funds earmarked
for water infrastructure investment, in the form of
BOT (Build, Operate, Transfer), BOOT and BDO
(Build, Design, Operate), India is a buoyant market.
The World Bank even states that it can help increase
the international revenues of companies whose activities include wastewater management, via the ‘UN
Development Business’ bank.
Sale of River Bhavani
The Ganga is not the only river whose water
is being privatized to satisfy corporate greed.
River Bhavani - an important tributary of
Cauvery has been sold by the Tamil Nadu
government to Kinley - the brand name
under which Coca-Cola sells bottled drinking
water. This sale has been effected by the
government even while the state is reeling
under severe drought, ground water levels
have reached depths of over 1,000 ft., and
water riots and water-related murders have
become an everyday occurrence.
The sale of the river, which was a major
source of water for the people of the region,
has been routed through Poonam
Beverages, a new firm belonging to the
Coimbatore-based Annapooma Hotels, who
will draw 1,00,000 day/day to supply it to
Kinley, Coca Cola's bottled water. The
annual fees that Poonam Beverage has paid
the government is a mere Rs. 5,00,000, for
which hundreds of thousands of people are
being denied a vital resource, that is their
natural right, and without which they cannot
survive.

Delhi Jal Board (DJB) claims that they have no intention of raising the water rates for the time being.
However, as has been seen in the case of Enron with electricity, the Orissa Lift Irrigation Corporation
in Orissa, and other cases, privatization leads very quickly to a steep rise in the price of water and
electricity. With regards to concession to the poor, DJB said there would be no such proposal. DJB will
continue to deliver the water to Delhites and maintain infrastructure i.e. burst water pipes, billing etc.
Thus the people of Delhi will not just be paying Suez and the Jal Board for the water directly, they will
be paying through taxes to maintain the infrastructure, thus freeing the corporation of any expenses
which might detract from their profits.

Water Requirement and Sources of Water in Delhi

Delhi is experiencing increasing pressure to meet demand for its water resources. Growing
urbanization, improvements in living standards, exploding population are just some of the contributing
factors. The population of Delhi is expected to cross 15 million by the end of 2002. The city, at the
moment, requires 3,324 million liters of water a day (MLD) while what it gets stands closer to 2,034
MLD. Average water consumption in Delhi is estimated at being 240 liters per capita per day (lpcd),
the highest in the country. The large-scale extraction of groundwater is a result of this widening gap
between the demand and supply of water. And still worse, serious doubts are also being raised about
both the quality and quantity of groundwater.

Delhi receives its water from 3 sources:

• A. Surface Water. 86% of Delhi's total water supply comes from surface water, namely the
Yamuna River, which equals 4.6% of this resource through interstate agreements.
• B. Sub-surface -- Ranney wells and tubewells. This source, which is met through rainfall
(approx. 611.8 mm in 27 rainy days), and unutilized rainwater runoff, is 193 MCM (million
cubic meters).
• C. Graduated Resources. It is estimated at 292 MCM, however current withdrawal equals 312
MCM. Salinity and over exploitation has contributed to depletion and drastically effected the
availability of water in different parts of the
city
(http://teriin.org/news/terivsn/issue35/wat
er.htm) However, according to a report
released by the Central Ground Water
Board (GCWB), Delhi's ground-water
level has gone down by about eight
meters in the last 20 years at the rate of
about a foot a year.

Apart from groundwater, Delhi gets its water from

the Ganga Canal, the western Yamuna canal, the
Bhakra canal and the Yamuna.

Delhi’s water and wastewater management is

controlled by the Delhi Jal Board (DJB), which has
signed the contract with Suez Degremont. With
the demand-supply gap projections for water set
to increase in the next ten years, DJB have
identified new raw water sources including Tehri,
To see a larger version of this chart - click here.
Renukal, Kishau Lahawar dams. Plans also
center on the construction of new and existing
sewage treatment plants (STPs) which will enable an increase in treatment capacity. Rainwater
harvesting is another option that DJB is considering.

Corruption in Delhi Jal Board's Suez Degrémont Plant

The process for allotment of contract for the Sonia Vihar Plant to Ondeo Degrémont has not been
without controversy and objections by senior DJB members. Of the 3 companies that bid for the
tender, Ondeo Degrémont was chosen despite being higher in cost than the two other contenders, and
allegedly an inferior technology. It was also known that Ondeo Degrémont had already experienced
problems with previous contracts in Surat and Delhi (Ohkla) where they were 2 years behind in the
project.

Jagdish Anand, a member of the Opposition party, has accused senior politicians of trying to bribe him
into silence. “Earlier also I had exposed the irregularities committed by the Jal Board and its officials
with regard to the allotment of Sonia Vihar 140 MGD (million gallons a day) plant ... (they) approached
me on more than one occasion. They independently requested me not to expose the working of the
Delhi Jal Board.... They also tried to tempt me with suitable reward and my adjustment in lieu of my
not exposing the irregularities being committed by Delhi Jal Board....” (The Hindu, New Delhi, Nov.
28).

Yet another accusation was against the politicians and senior DJB members of pushing through a
contract to Larsen and Toubro for laying of water pipeline in Sonia Vihar at a cost that was approx. Rs
30 crore more than the justified amount. The clear water transmission mains will supply water from
Sonia Vihar Water Treatment Plant to different parts of Trans-Yamuna-Delhi.

Former mayors of Delhi Yog Dhyan Ahuja and Shakuntala Arya (both members of D]B) said that
though the appropriate amount for laying the 33.94X km long water pipeline within Delhi was about Rs
X5 crore the contract has been awarded for Rs 111.31 crore.

Out of the four firms that were short listed, two did
not even submit their tenders and the lowest
tender bid was as high as Rs 14X crore. Though a
final offer of Rs 111.31 crore was made by Larsen
and Toubro only on February 27, 2001, the
technical committee had already given its
approval a month earlier.

Destruction of Tehri for Water Supply

to Delhi

Ganga's waters, the lifeline of northern India and

India’s food security, are being handed over to
Suez to quench the thirst of Delhi’s elite even as a
hundred thousand people are forcefully and
violently removed from their homes in Tehri for the To see a larger version of this diagram - click here.
Tehri Dam.

Tehri, the capital of the ancient kingdom of Garhwal on the banks of the Ganga in the Himalayas, is in
the process of being submerged as the tunnels of the controversial Tehri Dam are being closed. More
than a hundred thousand people have been displaced by the dam, costing thousands of crores. In
1994, a budget of Rs. 6000 crores had been earmarked for it. The figure must have escalated
substantially since then.

The main stream of the region's Bhagirathi River reversed the direction of its flow after officials shut
the gates of two water tunnels.

Tehri's main town is located uncomfortably close to the swelling waters, which have already
submerged parts of the town. The only bridge linking the old town with the new, and the rest of the
country, is almost submerged under rising waters. The people of Tehri say dam authorities have
stopped the river's natural flow to intimidate them into leaving without staking a claim to a rehabilitation
package. The 200-year old town of Tehri is expected to be totally submerged by November 2002.
Incidentally this part of Uttaranchal's Garhwal region is often referred to as 'Devbhumi' or the "Abode
of the Gods".

The Tehri dam project was first conceived in 1949 and was sanctioned by the Planning Commission in
1972. It is located in the outer Himalaya in the Tehri- Garhwal district of Uttaranchal. It is planned to be
the fifth highest dam in the world - 260.5 meters high and spread over an area of 45 square kilometers
in the Bhagirathi and Bhilangana valleys near Tehri town. The dam will submerge 4200 hectares of the
most fertile flat land in the Bhagirathi and Bhilangana valleys without really benefiting the region in any
way.

Ever since the dam was sanctioned in 1972, local people have been opposing the dam and offering
resistance to its construction. Many scientists and environmentalists have pointed out the grave risks
involved in building this dam in a highly earthquake-prone zone. But the government dismisses these
allegations of risk, saying that all those who oppose the Tehri dam are "anti-development".

Tehri Dam built in a seismic fault zone

The huge Tehri dam is located in a seismic fault zone. This area is earthquake prone. Between 1816
and 1991, the Garhwal region has witnessed 17 earthquakes, the recent one being the Uttarkashi
earthquake of October 1991 and the Chamoli earthquake of 1998.

The International Commission on Large Dams has declared the site ''extremely hazardous".

Geological surveyors have assessed that some of the mountains near the dam are very unstable
because they do not have any vegetation cover. In
case the dam collapses due to an earthquake or any Ganga at a Glance
other fault, the devastation will be unimaginable. The
huge reservoir built at such a height will be emptied Length: 2,525 sq. km
in 22 minutes. Within 60 minutes Rishikesh will be Source: Gaumukh (Gangotri glacier) at
under 260 meters of water. Soon after Haridwar will 4,100 metres above MSL.
be totally submerged under 232 meters with the next Ganga Basin: more than one million sq. km
23 minutes. Bijnor, Meerut, Hapur and Bulandshahar (1,060,000 sq. km)
will be under water within 12 hours (Sunderlal Drainage area: 861,404 sq. km (26.2
Bahuguna). Thus the dam is potentially dangerous percent of India’s total geographical area)
for large parts of north-western India, and large areas Break up:
in the Gangetic plains could be devastated in the Uttar Pradesh: 294,413 sq km
event of a mishap. It is also estimated that the life of Madhya Pradesh: 201,705 sq. km
the dam could not be more than 30 years because of Bihar: 144,410 sq. km
heavy sedimentation. So far as the electricity Rajasthan: 107,382 sq. km
generation is concerned. Is it worthwhile to have a West Bengal: 72,010 sq. km
dam spanning 30 years with so much ecological Haryana: 34,200 sq. km
instability and uneconomic viability? Himachal Pradesh: 5,799 sq. km
Delhi: 1,485 sq. km
Moreover, with the building of the dam, the River TOTAL: 861,404 sq. km
Ganga will become a dead river. Ganga is not just
any river; it is a unique symbol of our ancient Annual flow: 468.7 billion cubic metres
civilization and culture. Ganga water has the quality (25.2 percent of India’s total water
of remaining fresh for many years and is, therefore, resources)
part of many sacred rituals, including the pouring of a Flow at Rishikesh: 27 billion cubic metres
few drops of Ganga Jal into the mouth of a dying of water.
person. People come from all-over the country to Important stations on the Ganga and
perform asthi pravah in the Ganga at Haridwar. Once distance from source:
the Ganga is made to flow through tunnels dammed Rishikesh 250 km,
at Tehri (and also at Bhaironghati Thala dam), this Balawali 330 km,
sacred river will soon lose the quality of freshness Garhmukteshwar 440 km,
and purity it is mainly revered for. Kachla Bridge 510 km,
Fatehgarh 670 km,
The Tehri Dam is being built to provide water to the Kanpur 800 km,
tentacled megapolis of Delhi. The Tehri Dam disaster Allahbad 1050 km,
is a microcosm of a violent process which in the Mirzapur 1170 km,
name of development, displaces sustainable Varanasi 1295 km,
communities and destroys their sustainable lifestyles, Buxar 1430 km,
converting them into environmental refugees who are Patna 1600 km,
forced to migrate to large cities and urban Baharampur 2175 km,
settlements. Nabadwip 2285 km

However a report by the World Commission on Dams (WCD), published in November 2000, alleges
that "few dams have ever been looked at to see if the benefits - outweigh the costs". According to the
UK's New Scientist magazine, these costs include social upheaval, increased flooding, damage to
farmland and the extinction of freshwater fish species. The WCD report also observes that dams
cause ecological damage and exacerbate flooding, and that many deliver less than half the amount of
water expected. The World Bank, the sponsor of the study, is not learning any lessons of the WCD
report.
Ironically, the disaster management plan submitted by Tehri Project authorities states that Tehri dam
has no built-in provision for providing protection against floods and that flood management of the
down-stream area is not the direct responsibility of the project authorities.

Since 10% of the dams in India and abroad have failed or collapsed, it is therefore important to make
the dam break analysis and disaster management reports mandatory. In fact, the disaster
management report submitted to the Union Ministry of Environment by the project authorities clearly
emphasizes the need for such reports. Further the Union Ministry of Environment in their conditional
clearance insisted on the preparation of such a report in consultation with the people likely to be
affected in case of a major accident. However, such a report has not yet been prepared and the safety
of the Tehri project have not been properly assessed.

Despite all these huge costs to the people and the government exchequer, Suez-Degrémont is not
paying any of the social, ecological or financial cost for the construction of Tehri Dam. Rather it will get
free water and will sell it to the people of Delhi at a very high cost.

Gangotri glacier recedes fast helping Suez to cash water

"Glaciers in most areas of the world are known to be receding," said Kargel, an international
coordinator for Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS), USA. "But glaciers in the
Himalaya are wasting at alarming and accelerating rates, as indicated by comparisons of satellite and
historic data, and as shown by the widespread, rapid growth of lakes on the glacier surfaces."

The Gangotri glacier between Kashmir and Nepal is retreating at an accelerated rate. The Gangotri
glacier-and many others-feed the Ganga River Basin, upon which hundreds of millions of people,
including those in New Delhi and Calcutta, depend for fresh water. The glacier, spread over an area of
260 sq.km, is of great significance for maintaining the water balance in north India.

Observations on the retreat of the Gangotri go back to 1842, and between 1842 and 1935 the snout of
the Gangotri glacier was receding at an average rate of 7.3 m a year.

Indian scientists echoed the same in Current Science January 2001 issue. A group of geologists from
HNB Garhwal University, who conducted the study revealed that the retreat has become much faster
than it was before 1971. Reporting their findings the scientists say that data for the last six decades -
1936 to 1996, clearly show that the glacier had receded by 1,147 m, with the regression assuming
alarming proportions particularly over the last 25 years. It has retreated by more than 850 m between
1971 and 1996 alone, as against a total of 2000 m in the last 200 years. The study has also found out
significant changes in the shape and position of the glacier, which is 30 km long and with a width
varying from 0.5 to 2.5 km. In May and June 1999, the scientists found that the glacier's snout
changed its shape every day, with huge blocks of ice getting detached on a daily basis.

The findings of HNB Garhwal University scientists are based on investigations over three and a half
years, between May 1996 and October 1999. The aim of the Garhwal University group was to
establish evidence for the increased rate of retreat seen in the earlier data sets of other research
groups in terms of the geomorphological characteristics of the glacier.

However, some of the regular visitors to Gangotri have also observed the same. According to them the
26-km-long Gangotri glacier in Uttaranchal has been shrinking by about 18 metres a year. Swami
Sundaranand, a priest and ecologist, who has lived alongside Gangotri for over half a century is one of
the first to point out that Gangotri Glacier is retreating. "Over the past five years or so, the Gangotri
glacier has annually receded at a rate of nearly 10 metres'', said the Swami.

Geologists do not rule out the possibility of the holiest and greatest of all Indian rivers, Ganga, doing a
vanishing act in coming years. If the glacier could recede two kilometers over some 150 years, the
future may be gloomy for the mother of all Indian rivers.

According to climatologists, mountain glaciers, such as those in the Himalayas, are particularly
sensitive indicators of climate change. While ice reflects the sun's rays, lake water absorbs and
transmits heat more efficiently to the underlying ice, kicking off a feedback that creates further melting.
According to a 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, scientists estimate
that surface temperatures could rise by 1.4°C to 5.8°C by the end of the century. The researchers
have found a strong correlation between increasing temperatures and glacier retreat -
(Cynthia.MOCarroll@gsfc.nasa.gov - 29 May 2002).

Glacier changes in the next 100 years could significantly affect agriculture, water supplies,
hydroelectric power, transportation, mining, coastlines, and ecological habitats. Melting ice may cause
both serious problems and, for the short term in some regions, helpful increases in water availability,
but all these impacts will change with time. This would only benefit Suez Degrémont which would
encash the increased flow of water in the Ganga and diverting them to Delhi through Upper Ganga
Canal for selling it to elite Delhities.

Not only the Gangotri Glacier but also several other Himalayan glaciers are melting fast. The melting
glaciers of Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal have rung alarm bells among environmentalists. They
fear this might result in unprecedented floods and thereafter acute water scarcity in the plains.

The Bara Shigri glacier in Himachal Pradesh and the Pindari glacier in Uttaranchal are shrinking at an
alarming rate of about 36 metres and 135 metres per year. The deep cracks in the Chhota Shigri
glacier of Himachal indicate that it was receding. Studies indicate that it was shrinking by 6.7 metres
per year and the Trilokinath glacier was receding by 15.4 metres. The size of the Bara Shigri glacier
reduced by 650 metres between 1997-1995, while the Trilokinath glacier got reduced by 400 metres
between 1969 to 1995.

Despite a severe winter in 1997, the 5-km-long Dokriani Bamak glacier in Himachal Pradesh shrunk by
20 metres, while its average melting rate had been 16.5 metres a year. The glacier might soon vanish
in the case it continues to melt.

Studies have indicated that almost all 335 glaciers in the Sutlej, Beas and Spiti basins were receding.
These have created artificial lakes which might cause floods in the low-lying areas (Source: The
Tribune Online Edition, 26 May 2001).

Impact of Water Diversion on Agriculture and Food Security

Water is a prime resource that fulfills a number of significant functions. It can be used lavishly or
efficiently, but cannot be replaced. It is an indispensable, finite and vulnerable resource. Virtually no
activity in society or process in the landscape or in the environment would be possible in the absence
of water.

India is one of the few countries in the world endowed with abundant land and water resources. Water
is basically required for domestic consumption and agriculture. Apart from this water is used by
industries. Diverting water from domestic and agriculture to industries poses serious problems.
Presently per capita availability is about 2300M3/p/year, which is going to decline 1400M3/p/year by
the year 2050.

Of the 187 MHM (million hectare metres) of water 60 MHM of the surface water and 43.2 MHM of
ground water are available for use. The present utility is about 60 MHM for various purposes.

Since the population is likely to stabilize at a maximum of 1640 million by 2050, the country will have
to plan for increasing the food grain production from the current level of 200 MT to 450-500 MT by
2050. Also the production of vegetables and fruits should be increased as the production at present is
not even sufficient to the minimum requirements of the people. To achieve the objectives, the current
irrigation potential of 96.9 Mha (million hectares) (gross area) will have to be increased to about 140
Mha.

Water Requirements for Different Crops

The plant roots suck or extract water from the soil to live and grow. The main part of this water does
not remain in the plant, but escapes to the atmosphere as vapor through the plant's leaves and stem.
This process is called transpiration. Transpiration happens mainly during daytime. Water from an open
water surface escapes as vapor to the atmosphere during the day. The same happens to water on the
soil surface as to water on the leaves and stem of a plant. This process is called evaporation.

The water need of a crop thus consists of transpiration plus evaporation. Therefore, the crop water is
used for "evapotranspiration".

The water need of a crop is usually expressed in mm/day, mm/month or mm/season, or cm/hectare.

Suppose the water need of a certain crop in a very Facts about Upper Ganga Canal
hot, dry climate is 10 mm/day. This means that each
day the crop needs a water layer of 10 mm over the
whole area on which the crop is grown. This means • Work on the canal started in -- 1837
that this 10 mm has to be supplied by rain or A.D.
irrigation every day. • Canal completed in -- 1855 A.D.
• Total years to complete the canal --
There is a large variation of the total growing period 18
not only between crops, but also within one crop • Initial capacity -- 6750 cusecs
type. In general, it can be assumed that the growing • Enhanced capacity (1951) -- 10500
period for a certain crop is longer when the climate is cusecs
cool and shorter when the climate is warm. • Total length -- 189 miles (304 km)
• Total length of the channels -- 2650
Upper Ganga Canal: the lifeline of km
Western U.P. • Area irrigated by the canal -- 9.28
hectares
Upper Ganga Canal is one of the oldest canals in
Western U.P. Initial discharge of water in the canal • Districts irrigated by the canal -- 13
was 6750 cusecs, which was later increased to districts (Hardwar, Roorkee,
10500 cusecs. The length of the canal is about 304 Saharanpur, Muzaffar Nagar,
km. and it irrigates about 9.24 lac hectares of land in Meerut, Ghaziabad, Gautam Budh
Hardwar, Roorkee, Saharanpur, Muzaffar Nagar, Nagar, Bulandshar, Aligarh,
Meerut, Ghaziabad, Gautam Budh Nagar, Mathura, Hathras, Mainpuri and
Bulandshar, Aligarh, Mathura, Hathras, Mainpuri and Etah district)
Etah.

As said earlier the 635 million liters daily (MLD) of Ganga water will be diverted from the Upper Ganga
Canal to Delhi, which would affect the agriculture potential of the canal and the food security of the
region where the canal had been irrigating since more than one century.

Some of the major crops in the area, which is irrigated by Upper Ganga Canal are Wheat, Rice
(Basmati), Rice (Coarse), Sugarcane, Maize, Potato, Gram and others.

Briefly, the water requirement for cultivation of any crop and its productivity depends on several
factors, such as

• a. Climatic conditions
• b. Soil composition
• c. Micro Nutrients in the Soil
• d. Temperature variations
• e. Variety of the crops (High yield variety needs more water)
• f. Application of fertilizers.

According to experts, it is a complicated procedure to calculate this water requirement for any crop,
however an effort has been made to estimate the water requirement to grow different crops on the
land irrigated by Upper Ganga Canal. The water requirement to grow 1 kg. of a particular crop would
facilitate to estimate the implications on agriculture sustainability if water (6350 lac liters per day) is
drawn from Upper Ganga Canal at Muradnagar.

Water Needs for Different Crops in the region

• 1 kg. of Basmati Rice requires 4200 liters

• 1 kg. of coarse rice (long duration) requires 2500 liters
• 1 kg. of coarse rice (short duration) requires 2250 liters
• 1 kg. Wheat requires 700 liters of water.
• 1 kg. of potatoes require 240 liters

A i) Water Requirement to grow wheat in Western UP & Delhi = 30-35 cm

-- (6-7 irrigation 5 cm per irrigation)
ii) For rice (Basmati) = 140-160 cm
iii) Rice (coarse) = 120-150 cm
iv) Maize = 30 cm
v) Potato = 60 cm
B 1 Hectare = 2.46 Acre
1 Acre = .405 hec
1 Acre = 4000 sqm
1 hec = 1/.405
= 2.46 x 4000 = 9840 sqm
or 1 hec = 10000 sqm (approx.)
C 1 hec = 100 x 100 m2
or 1 hec = 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 cm2

Volume of Water = 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 35 (C.C)

or Volume of water= (100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 35 liters)/1000 = 3500000 liter per hec

Average yield of wheat = 50 quintal per hectare (approx.)

Therefore water requirement per quintal = 3500000/50 = 70000 liters.

Water requirement for wheat per kilogram 3500000/(50 x 100) = 700 liters

or 700 liters water is required to grow = 1 kg of wheat

or 70,000 liters water is needed for = 1 quintal (100 kg.) of wheat

or 7,00,000 = 1 ton

Water Requirement for Rice

Similarly we may calculate the water requirement to grow rice.

• Water requirement for rice (Basmati) = 140 -160 cm per hectare

Average yield of rice Basmati = 35 quintal per hectare
(4200 liters of water is needed to grow 1 kg of basmati rice)
• Water requirement for lice (Coarse) = 120 -150 cm per hectare (short duration)
Average yield of rice Coarse = 60 quintal per hectare
(2250 liters of water is needed to grow, 1 kg of rice (Coarse) (short duration)
• Water requirement for rice (Coarse) = 140 -160 cm per hectare (long duration)
Average yield of rice Coarse = 60 quintal per hectare
(2500 liters of water is required to grow one kg. Coarse rice of long duration)
What does diverting water to Delhi mean for National Food Security?

The annual water diverted to Delhi from the Upper Ganga Canal at the rate of 635 million liters per day
will result in critical reduction in the production of food crops in the region, and thus possible
destruction of national food security.

This massive diversion of water would have produced in a year

• 3310550 quintals of wheat

• 551150 quintals of rice (Basmati)
• 927100 quintals of rice (Coarse)
• 9657290 quintals of potato

Alternatives to privatization of Ganga and meeting Delhi's water needs (1)

At present Delhi has allocation of waters from the Yamuna, the Ganga and the Beas (Bhakra project),
in addition to ground water resources, with the total availability, as follows:

Water Source Allocated Useable

Yamuna 0.724 BCM 0.500 BCM
Beas 0.2464 BCM 0.1724 BCM
Ganga 0.1800 BCM --
Treated 0.100 BCM --
sewage
Ground water Govt. wells Private wells
0.012 BCM 0.010 BCM
Total 0.9645 BCM

The above capacity can be reinforced through the following means:

• Flood plain reservoirs at Wazirabad. Barswal. Badapur. Nala Mandela and at Nizamuddin
bridge providing additional 0.168 BCM.
• Rain water reservoirs at Tilpat/ Tughlakabad 0.010 BCM
• Reservoirs in the NCR at Najafgarh Jheel and Hindon-Ganga bed with the capacity 0.285
BCM.
• Harvesting in existing tanks and wells to the extent of 0.010 BCM
• Revival of dried up streams (through afforestation) of Delhi with capacity 0.015 BCM
• Increased ground water output in government and private wells due to better recharge of
aquifers through greater flow in River Yamuna, yielding additional 0.033 BCM
• Greater output of treated sewage-of higher quality in 9 eco-parks designed by Paani Morcha
to the extent of additional 0.500 BCM.

It can be seen that the above measures would yield an additional 1.011 BCM of usable clean water,
giving Delhi sufficient waters to meet its increased requirements of the next century and obviating the
need to bring Tehri dam waters to Delhi.

Water Liberation
 Water Liberation Declaration

Activists from around the world met at

Navdanya's organic farm on December
16th, 2001 to develop national and global
On the eve of Independence Day, 15th August 2002, strategies to defend water as a collective
the Indian people have resolved to defend the real community commons, and drafted the
freedom -- the freedom of access and rights to their Water Liberation Declaration. The
own resources - Land, Water and Biodiversity. Declaration has over five hundred
Movements gathered in Delhi committed themselves to signatories.
shut these water theft units and rejuvenate alternatives.
In the Resolution issued at this occasion they said, Water Liberation Declaration
"Water is the essence of life. Its marketization is
unacceptable to us. We reject the anti-people water Water is life. It’s a gift of nature. The
policy. We will fight intrusions of all sorts of companies, access to water is a natural and
national or multination, at every level with all our fundamental right. It is not to be treated as
might". a commodity and traded for profit. People
shall have the right to freedom from thirst,
The Water Liberation Campaign (Jal Swaraj Abhiyan) and shall have adequate access to safe
which had already organized a study tour of farmers water for all of their living needs.
from Tehri in Uttaranchal to Delhi for World Water Day
is committed to stop the water theft by global water Experiences all over the world reveal quite
corporations in the name of public private partnership. convincingly that water which is “life” is
being privatized and brought under
Specific demands to the Delhi Government are corporate control. This will deprive the
people of water lifeline for survival. All the
• Make the contract with the Suez-Degrémont water resources should be owned,
public controlled, managed and utilized by local
communities in their natural setting.
• Organize a public hearing on the full cost of
water treatment plant at Sonia Vihar, including
cost for both backward and forward linkages. We the people from all over the world will
• Let the public through a democratic process fix not allow our waters to be made a
commodity for profit.
the cost that Suez-Degrémont must share to
pay compensation to the displaced people of
Tehri and the farmers who will loose their land We will work together to liberate water
in and around Muradnagar in U.P. from corporate/private agencies, control
• The government of Delhi must ensure that: and return it to the people for common
a. Water for sustenance which is 50 liters per good.
day is available as a basic right to all.
b. Higher use can be charged higher taxes. We demand that governments all over the
c. A ceiling must be put on water use so that world should take immediate action to
there is no wastage of scarce water resources. declare that they accept waters in their
• If hidden cost of bringing water from Tehri to territories a public good and exact strong
Delhi are not being internalized for the regulatory structure to protect them.
operation of the Suez-Degrémont plant and
water delivery in Delhi, the Delhi government should give up the project and develop lower
cost conservation based water system which have been proposed by many citizens
organizations.

The water liberation movement will continue to carry out independent studies and continue to do public
awareness to ensure that water is not stolen from the rural poor and sold to the urban elite through
water markets under the control of water giants like Suez.

Navdanya

Navdanya is a programme to conserve agricultural diversity. It places the farmer at the center of
conservation and empowers to take control over the political, ecological and economic aspects of
agriculture

Navdanya means nine seeds and these represent India's collective source of food security. It connotes
a diverse ecological balance at every level, from the ecology of the earth to the ecology of our body.

Email: rfste@vsnl.com
Footnote 1. This section has been prepared by Cdr. Sureshwar D. Sinha of the Paani Morcha. Delhi,
and has been taken from their website www.paanilllorclla.org

Published in In Motion Magazine, October 20, 2002

Interview with Devinder Sharma

The politics of food and agriculture

Part 1 -
From British Colonialism to WTO Rules and Privatization

New Delhi, India

Devinder Sharma is an award-winning journalist, writer, and researcher

on food and trade policy. He is the author of "GATT and India -- Politics
of Agriculture" (1994) and "In the Famine Trap" (1997). He chairs the
New Delhi-based Forum for Biotechnology & Food Security.This
interview was conducted August 25, 2003 by Nic Paget-Clarke for In
Motion Magazine in New Delhi, India.

• The Indian Express Devinder Sharma. Photo by Nic

Paget-Clarke.
• Implications of the WTO for agriculture
• Corporate Double Standard
• The Union Carbide Bhopal disaster
• Cattle feed
• Emission standards, recycling plastics, vaccine for cows
• The Great Trade Robbery
• Market access, domestic support, and domestic subsidies
• What happens with these subsidies?
• How cows and farmers survive
• WTO Negotiations
• Privatizing every sphere of activity
• The British legacy in India
• Divide and rule (the British and the WTO)
• The Bengal Famine
• Famine amidst food surplus
• The Kalahandi Syndrome
• Importing Unemployment

• Also, click forward to Part 2 – From Secured-Cash Crops to Village Republics

The Indian Express

In Motion Magazine: Could you please tell me a little about your background and how you came to
focus on hunger and food?

Devinder Sharma: I started off my career as an agricultural scientist. I did my masters in plant
breeding and genetics and then did not take up a research assignment. The first job I landed
immediately after my university was with the Indian Express in India. The Indian Express at that time,
even now, was the largest selling newspaper in India – a multi-region paper. It is published from about
14 places in the country.

When I joined the Indian Express, in 1981, it was a paper which was anti-establishment. It was a
paper which for quite some time brought down government after
government. It was a paper which gave me training, if you put it like
that, to understand the politics of food and agriculture.

I joined as an agriculture writer of the paper and the advantage I had,

compared to others, was that I was given the task to look into the entire
country, not one region. As an agriculture editor, I had the privilege to
travel through the length and breadth of the country and then write my
reports -- unlike the other reporters who would be covering one beat
and one area, and so on. That gave me a tremendous learning
experience. Nothing else could have given me that kind of exposure.

Once I had done that for about ten years, I left at the stage when I
became the development editor for the paper. I left them and I went to
Nepal for a short while to launch Nepal’s first independent daily, called
The Kathmandu Post. Today that paper is the largest selling. I left them
in ’93.
GATT and India - the Politics of
Agriculture by Devinder Sharma.
Implications of the WTO for agriculture

Then, I thought, I will take a sabbatical. It was a time when the Dunkel Draft was very popular. Dunkel
was the first director-general of the WTO (World Trade Organization), at that time it was called GATT
(General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade). I thought people would be on the streets here but nobody
understood what the implications of WTO and agriculture were. So I thought, I will take a sabbatical,
do a book, and then come back to journalism.

I took one year off, and did my book, which is in your hands, the first book. But I never came back to
journalism or what you call active journalism. From one to another, I realized the realities are much
different and much in contrast in what you are doing. Hunger in India is at a level today that it very
shameful. We have this hunger existing at a time when we have a mounting food surplus. We have an
unmanageable food surplus, which is a record in history, and we also have a record number of hungry
with us today.

This paradox forced me to get into this issue of hunger. There are two ways of looking at it. One, of
course, is the grassroots effort that one can do to bring people out of hunger. The other, to my
understanding, is that hunger is the result of policies, national and international. The basic idea, or the
basic focus, today, is to keep one half of the world hungry, because you can only exploit the hungry
stomach. You cannot exploit a full stomach, somebody who is very happy and fed. That is the world’s
effort. And that is very shocking and demeaning, shameful.

That is the focus of my work.

Corporate Double Standard

In Motion Magazine: One of the things you mentioned

in one of your essays is the double standard that the
corporate world has in the way it treats the West and
the way it treats the developing world. Could you talk
about that, perhaps in light of the Coke/Pepsi scandal,
and also the questions of grain to India and GMOs?

Devinder Sharma: If you look at the double standards

they are apparent, very clear and very loud.
A Pepsi banner over the streets of New Delhi at the
time of the contamination controversy. Photo by Nic
Paget-Clarke.
In the recent cola controversy in India, the companies are saying that, “Your groundwater is polluted
so therefore you can’t blame us that the cola is also contaminated.” This argument has gone on for
some time on the television and in print media.

In one of the shows, though, I came out and said, “This is not the issue. If you look at the groundwater
in Europe and America, it is much more contaminated than in India. How come in those countries they
sell colas which are without any pesticides? They are following double standards.

The Union Carbide Bhopal disaster

If you look back, if you remember the Union Carbide accident that happened in India, the tragedy of
Bhopal, the Bhopal plant had lax safety standards, but the same plant in America, they had very tight
safety standards there. The double standard was apparent after the Bhopal disaster struck.

Looking at the cola controversy, we are being told that, “Your pesticide and fertilizer consumption is so
high in India that obviously the ground water gets contaminated” But let’s look at America and let’s
look at Europe.

In India, the average pesticide consumption per hectare is 450 grams per hectare. If you look at
Holland, the per hectare pesticide usage or consumption is 11,000 grams per hectare. In Japan it is
12,000 grams. In the U.S. it is 3,000 grams. And 99.9% of the pesticides go into the environment,
whether they leech into the water or they go into the air. Only 0.01% hits at the target – everyone
knows that. (This is a study done by David Pimentel of Cornell University. ) And they use 700 different
kinds of pesticides. In India, we use 160 different kinds of pesticides.

But now we have reached a stage that we are being told that, “Your water is contaminated”. And
fertilizer, the fertilizer intake in Holland is 495 kg per hectare. In India it is 99 kg per hectare. In
America it is 110 kg per hectare. If you look at Japan it is about 350 per hectare. If you look at the
European Union as a block then the pesticide usage is 500 grams per hectare. I’m not trying to say
that our water is not polluted, I’m not trying to defend that, but the double standard is very clear. In
those countries they follow strict health and safety norms, whereas in India they know you can get
away with murder -- as in the classic example of Union Carbide.

Cattle feed

If you look at the grains, we are being told that whatever we export from our country is not of good
quality so, therefore, “You need to have quality norms.” “You can go up to .0001 parts per million for
looking at toxin level in grains.” And so on. It’s interesting. And, yes, we all agree that quality is
important, but let’s look at double standards here. What is going from India meets the quality of the
Western countries, but what comes from the Western countries to India has to be cattle feed. So we
are given to understand that, “You are very comfortable with cattle feed so why this problem?”

Now, when I say cattle feed I will give you one example. In 1996, the last time we imported wheat, we
imported one million tons from Australia. That wheat, when it came to India, it was cattle feed quality.
What they exported to us was rubbish. It came with forty-two weed plants, seven of them new to India.
And they didn’t even clean it on the high seas when India said, “You should clean this grain.”

Look at America. At the time that Dan Glickman was the Agriculture Secretary he came to India. He
went around and met India’s Agriculture Minister and he asked him, “Why did you reject American
wheat?” because when we selected Australian wheat, which in any case was cattle feed, it was after
we rejected the American wheat. He was told that the wheat from America doesn’t conform to the
quality standards. The wheat from America actually had a downy mildew, a disease. The incidence of
downy mildew was more than .001 parts per million. And you know what he said? He said, “Where in
the world can you find wheat of that quality?” I’m glad our Agricultural Minister stood up and said, “Sir,
this is what you had asked the Codex Alimentarius to follow.” (editor: a Rome-based organization, “The
Codex Alimentarius Commission was created in 1963 by FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization] and
WHO [World Health Organization] to develop food standards”). And subsequently, it is also being
reported, the Secretary finally told our Agriculture Minister that, “If you could import all the cattle feed
that we exported at the time of PL480 (U.S. food aid in the ’50s and ’60s) when India was importing
wheat from America, what is the problem now?”

Soybeans. Now they are trying to export soybeans to

us, and those soybeans come with several viral
diseases and five pests. America is forcing India to
accept this saying that, “These pests are not harmful
for you.” If we were to export the same soybean back
to America, they would reject it. So the double
standards are very clearly apparent.

Emission standards, recycling plastics,

vaccine for cows A rally in New Delhi against the WTO, just prior to the
September 2003 Cancun ministerial meeting. Photo by
Nic Paget-Clarke.
And it is not only foodstuffs. If you look at the entire
WTO paradigm, the genetic engineering paradigm, the
technology, what is being developed, today … it is the opposite of technology, which is being dumped
on to us.

Let us take the example of automobiles. The automobiles that are being manufactured in India
conform to Euro 1, Euro 2 emission standards. In Europe they follow Euro 4. Because that (Euro 1,
Euro 2) technology has become obsolete they must find a market for it. So they dump it on to
countries like us.

Look at America, since a few years back they have had a wonderful way of recycling the plastic bottles
in which Pepsi is sold in America, or in India, for that matter. You can’t recycle that in America because
of the strict human safety norms. So what they are doing is shipping the plastic bottles to Madras in
India, recycling in Madras and taking it back and selling it for the colas in America. As if the humans
here don’t matter.

One can go on and on with these kinds of examples where the West has demonstrated that it doesn’t
give a damn.

And the worst now is we are always taken as the children of a lesser god, for all these years, but the
worst is now apparent and happening. One of the institutes in New Zealand has clearly said that they
are going to develop a genetically-modified vaccine for treating tuberculosis in cows, which is good
news of course. But they are saying the same vaccine would be applicable for human beings in the
Third World countries. What the rich countries need is a different vaccine, is a better vaccine. Which
means they are treating animals and human beings in this part of the world as the same.

What more do we need as an example for double standards?

The Great Trade Robbery

In Motion Magazine: How is globalization accelerating the process of marginalization of farmers in

the Third World?

Devinder Sharma: I’m sure, Nic, you have seen a movie called The Great Train Robbery, way back.
To me, this is a new edition of the same movie. It can be called The Great Trade Robbery. This is a
wonderful way of exploiting the Third World countries.

I remember once I had the privilege of sitting with Nelson Mandela. He was chairing one of my talks
and he said, “They follow a triple-M approach.” He said, “First, they sent the missionaries. It didn’t
work. Then they sent the military. It didn’t work. Now they are sending money – it will work.”
Basically, if you look at the world today, the West has got so used to being a parasite on the Third
World that they cannot imagine they do not do this harm to us. Under one pretext or the other, they are
going to exploit us. They are going to suck the blood of this part of the world -- in the name of trade, in
the name of growth, in the name of development, in the name of millennium goals, and so on, and so
forth.

I’m not being cynical, but let me explain. India is a country, which is one sixth of humanity, and I think
can be taken as a symbol or representative of the developing world in many ways. India is a country,
which has about 1,000 million plus people today. Out of it, 320 million people still go to bed hungry
every night. That’s a shameful paradox.

But let’s look at the globalization process as far as

agriculture is concerned. We have in India 557 million
farmers, today. At the time of independence, fifty-five
years back, the number of farmers in India was 200
million. It has grown to 557 million today. The average
land-holding size at that time, fifty-five years back, was
four hectares for a family. Today, it has come down to
1.4 hectares. This is an average for the rest of the
developing world, also. And, if you compare this with
America, just to compare the two biggest democracies,
fifty-five years back in America their population in Small farm in western Tamil Nadu, India. Photo by Nic
agriculture was about ten percent of whatever the Paget-Clarke.
population at that time was. The average landholding
size in America at that time was fifty hectares. Today,
the average landholding size in America is 200 hectares. The number of farmers in America today is
900,000, less than one percent of your population. There are more people in American jails than on
American farms. There are 2.1 million people in American jails today and there are 900,000 people on
American farms. You can see the contrast between India and America.

Now having said that, the reality is that American agriculture is of course in the hands of the industry,
but the American economy is so dependent upon agriculture and is so weighed down by the artificial
subsidy support that American agriculture has been providing to its agriculture that there is no market
for your produce, the economy collapses under the artificial weight of subsidies that America has
created all these years. They have to find a market for it.

The second block is the European Union. They, too, are overburdened with food stocks, especially
after the Common Agriculture Policy came in. They, too, face the same problem that America faces.
So they join hands. What can you do both of you? Both of the blocks could not dump food into the sea
now because international treaties do not allow you to do that. You can’t burn it because again the
international treaties do not allow you to do that. So you have to find a market. What better way than to
force open the developing countries to ensure that this kind of produce goes into them?

Market access, domestic support, and domestic subsidies

When the WTO came into effect, first the GATT then the WTO, they laid it down very clearly, based on
three pillars - market access, domestic support, and domestic subsidies. These are the three pillars of
the WTO Agriculture Agreement. But, at that time, the developing countries didn’t even understand
what all it meant. So they accepted, signed, and so on. The West, though, was very clear and very
sure about what it was doing. They came out with all these parameters, which actually supported or
protected their agriculture at the cost of the developing countries’ farmers. Everything was put into
place and we were supposed to sign -- take it or leave it. And we were also given this promise that if
you don’t enter into the WTO it is very difficult to trade bilaterally, and so and so forth. Our political
leadership accepted that dogma.

Now eight years later, we find that the negative impacts have been so large and so huge it has begun
to show. If you look at the world, today, the American farmers, or let’s us say the OECD countries, (the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), the richest trading bloc, which is 24
countries, annually provides subsidies to agriculture to the tune of U.S. $360 billion, which means one
billion dollars a day. In India, we provide subsidies to our 557 million farmers and the total subsidy is
one billion dollars a year.

In the OECD the subsidies are direct. And can you imagine who are the beneficiaries of these
subsidies? Ted Turner receives subsidies for agriculture in America. David Rockefeller receives
subsidies for agriculture in America. These are the people who get subsidies. They don’t farm. Just
because they own land they get subsidies.

If you look at India, all the subsidies that we provide are

indirect -- by way of cheaper fertilizer, cheaper
electricity, cheaper seed, cheaper water. There are no
direct subsidies in India. But the World Bank and the
IMF (International Monetary Fund) have asked us to
remove subsidies because they are too distorting. The
poor should not get subsidies, whereas the rich should
get subsidies.

What happens with these subsidies?

Now what happens with these subsidies? They

Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment
contribute to corporate control of prices. joins a protest at Monsanto corporate headquarters,
St. Louis, Missouri. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
It should be noted, though, that a major percentage of
farmers in the U.S. get no subsidy at all because 70%
of U.S. subsidies go to 10% of the recipients who are
the largest farmers and corporations. In addition, U.S. family farmers usually sell their products below
their cost of production while corporations sell their meats in the store and their grain for higher prices
through processing and export.

Faced with this situation, U.S. family farmers maximize production in order to survive and the excess
production is then many times dumped around the world where it isn’t needed thanks to bad trade
policy from the WTO.

No matter the falling global prices, the corporations continue to benefit. The corporations take their
agricultural subsidies and trade incentives while they argue against subsidies in the Third World, then,
with their increasing level of control, they pump into agriculture such new problems as genetically-
modified seeds.

How cows and farmers survive

Look at the inequalities. We are being told that there is a clash of civilizations but the biggest clash of
civilizations that I see is when we compare the situation in which the farmer in this part of the world, in
the South, exists and the cows in the North. Every cow in America, Europe, Australia, Canada, all
OECD countries, needs a shower, needs a fan, needs a tube light, needs centrally-heated conditions.
You will agree all these are luxuries to farmers in this part of the world.

And whenever the cow goes to milk -- milking is done of course by machines, we all know -- I have
seen that every cow wears a strap around its neck. The strap has a chip, computer chip so the
moment the cow goes for the feeding bin when it is getting milked that chip matches with a chip on the
wall and it tells what exactly is the weight of the cow, what exactly are the protein requirements at that
time of the cow, and only that quantity comes out. In a way, the cow is the most food secure animal on
this earth today.

We all know, at least in India, that 320 million people go to bed hungry every night, and 50% percent of
the farming population elsewhere in the world goes to bed hungry every night. A farming family in
India, or in developing countries, survives on less than 1.4 hectares. But if you are rearing one cow
you need an average of 10 hectares of land for the feed and everything that you feed that cow. This
means for each cow you require about 10 hectares of land. On that 10 hectares five farming families
can survive. And the inequalities don’t end there.

The first time I wrote about this was in an article in The Ecologist a few years back, and I am glad
everyone is talking about this, but I did an analysis of the cow and of the human being, of a farmer in a
developing country, and I worked it out that every cow gets a subsidy of two dollars a day whereas fifty
percent of our farming population and the developing world lives on less than one dollar a day. Such is
the quantum of subsidies that you give for cows that you can put every cow into business class and
take it on a round-the-world trip. That’s the kind of subsidies you provide.

Yet we are being told, “You open up (your markets) and you get tremendous opportunity to export and
you’ll gain, and so forth.” Unfortunately, developing countries didn’t realize what this meant then, but
I’m sure now that the shoe is pinching, people are beginning to realize and that is what is now getting
reflected in the WTO.

WTO Negotiations

In Motion Magazine: Why are there seemingly permanent negotiations at the WTO? Ever since GATT
and the WTO started it has all been about the negotiations. Can you explain that?

Devinder Sharma: What happened at the WTO was they laid out a phase-out program where you
have to take stock of certain things after a few years. There is a review of the WTO Agriculture
Agreement -- it is going on at the moment. There is a review of the WTO TRIPS (Trade-Related
Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement also going on. But at the same time, the world
realized that they haven’t had enough. They needed to exploit the Third World more. They have to
bring in new issues. So what are the new issues? The new issues cropped up at Singapore sometime
back and they are called the Singapore Issues: transparency in government procurements, trade
facilitation, investments, and competition policy. These new issues have to be taken on board now.

The new round of negotiations at Cancun will be negotiating these four Singapore Issues. We are
transgressing from the issue of agriculture, patents and so on, into the investment issues and where
they want to move in the services sector, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Now
you want education to be privatized. Now you want water to be privatized. Now you want health
services to be privatized. All these things -- because the economic interest of the corporations in the
West is so dominant now that they are finding all kinds of areas where they can exert influence and
exploit the developing countries.

Privatizing every sphere of activity

In Motion Magazine: From reading some of the more recent essays that you have written,
globalization has had various definitions over the years, even over the centuries. But it seems the
current definition is liberalization -- privatizing the planet?

Devinder Sharma: It is in fact happening. If you look at the recent phenomenon of privatization, which
actually the European Union, America, Japan, and countries like Australia or Switzerland are a party
to, it is because of the dominance of the multinational corporations coming up or the private
companies coming up and occupying almost every sphere of activity.

So much so the politics. There was a time, if you remember, when Abraham Lincoln gave his famous
quote to all of us saying that democracy is of the people, by the people, and for the people. If you look
at today, I’m sure Abraham Lincoln is turning in his grave because democracy has changed, because
democracy’s definition has changed. Democracy is of the industry, by the industry, for the industry.
Whether it is (U.S. President) George Bush, whether it is (U.K. Prime Minister) Tony Blair, whether is
(Indian Prime Minister) Atal Bihari Vajpayee, all that they have been doing is to represent industry. If
you look at WTO, or NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), the entire focus has been to
promote the interests of industry, multinational corporations and so on.
President Bill Clinton has gone on record, when he was the president, saying that Monsanto is the
company which will take us into the 21st century. So we know what is happening. We know the Iraq
war, why it happened -- the oil corporations wanted more oil. That kind of thing is happening and
there’s always justification. The kind of education that is being forced onto us in India is privatized and
then goes into corporate hands. Specifically, it is all a game for control. It is a game for control and
monopoly.

Earlier, when we were faced with the colonialization era, it was the governments which were in
controlling, but today control is in the hands of corporates and they are trying to extract as much as
possible.

There was a time, and I’m sure you remember, when the sun would never set on the British Empire.
When you talk of globalization today, I think one
indicator is the sun never sets on the multinational
corporations. That gives an indication of how
globalized the corporations are, of the phenomenon
which is the using of democratic institutions, so called
democratic institutions, like WTO, or the financial
institutions, to force the banks of multinational
corporations or the private corporations onto us. It is an
issue of control and dominance. A few people are
controlling the entire global wealth and that control
comes through corporations.

The British legacy in India

Gateway of India, in Mumbai, erected by British
colonial authorities to "Commemorate the landing in
In Motion Magazine: What is the legacy of the British India of their Imperial Majesties King George VI and
in India, if there’s a way of summarizing it? Queen Mary". Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.

Devinder Sharma: Nobody wants to talk about it now.

Maybe it is politically incorrect. But what the British did
to India is very apparent. There was a time, if you remember, when Columbus sailed to look for India
and landed in America, 500 years back. Then came Vasco da Gama who landed in India, eventually,
from Europe and the world became exposed to India. That was a time when India was called, if you
look at Indian literature, we were called a golden bird. That’s why all these fellows were looking for
India. Not searching for America or anybody else.

Then, the British stepped in to India and when they left India was a poverty-stricken country. That is
the legacy of Britain.

If you look at Europe, Europe survives today because of their colonial past. Nobody wants to talk
about it now because nobody wants to rake up those memories, but if you look at India and if you look
at Indian history, you’ll find ample examples of how they looted India.

In fact the viceroys, the people who were appointed viceroys, would advance based on how much they
looted. There was an era in Indian history when you find that the one who gave the best or highest
booty to the emperor became the viceroy.

Divide and rule (the British and the WTO)

They followed the divide and rule policy. One of the British legacies is the divide and rule policy, which
they did remarkably well in India. They took almost all of India as their colony because of the divide
and rule policy, which is now being followed exactly by the WTO.

If you look at global politics now they are actually following divide and rule. Why are developing
countries not there as a block, it is because now the divide and rule policy says you should be having
issue-based coalitions. What is an issue-based coalition? It is that on agriculture I don’t agree with
Malaysia but on investment use I would agree with Malaysia. So India and Malaysia would go together
on the issues of investment but not go together on agriculture. So we are divided, you know.

The West has been very clearly using the same kind of legacy of divide and rule in commercial terms
or economic terms, and doing it very effectively. Developing countries stand isolated, or let’s say
separate and not as a bloc ,as the E.U. (European Union) would be, or for that matter as the U.S. and
E.U. together. Developing countries do not bloc because we have been put against the same formula
of divide and rule and we haven’t learned our lesson.

Another part of the legacy is in India, the British, whatever they left us with, unfortunately, the same
system prevails in India. We follow the same systems, political, bureaucratic, constitutional, all the
same systems the British left us with. The British left us with more problems but we continue with
them. We haven’t tried to set our house in order the way Mahatma Gandhi would have liked the house
to be. But that is the way people want it, or whatever you can say.

The Bengal Famine

But going back to your question of the British legacy, I just have to give you one example. In 1943, the
year when the world was shocked by the Bengal famine, the Bengal famine killed about three million
people. It was a time when India was under British dominance and there was enough food, but food
was diverted by the British to the armies which were fighting the Second World War. People died in
Bengal, but not because of the loss of production, because there was the loss of production in 1941,
that was a bad year, and there was no famine. 1943 was a better year but there was a famine in 1943.
And the interesting part is the then-viceroy of India gave a report to the Emperor, (and we all know of
Amartya Sen’s Theory of Entitlement which talks about the Bengal Famine), but what is not known is
that letter actually said that concerning the three million people who died, those are the people who in
any case would have died. They were of the lowest strata of life -- urchins and so on. Laborers, poor,
beggars, they should have in any case died. So, we should not have any regret.

Look at the way they have treated us. And when I say us I mean the Third World and the First World.
Ireland was also under British governance. Ireland had the infamous Irish Potato Famine in the
nineteenth century. Tony Blair went and apologized for the Irish Potato Famine. Yet, he has come to
India a number of times, and so has the Queen, and they have never apologized for the 28 famines
that occurred during the British rule in India. And 28 were man-made famines. That is the way they
have treated us.

But I think we have to blame ourselves, also.

Famine amidst food surplus

In Motion Magazine: You wrote an article about the famines in Kalahandi and Koraput. What sort of
system allows for massive crop production, even export, while the people living around the food are
dying? How is that structured?

Devinder Sharma: This is the greatest tragedy I would say in this century. The stark reality of India.
You talk about Kalahandi but let me first give you a little picture of the India scenario.

We today have 50 million tons of food surplus, wheat and rice stocked in the open. You can go around
the country and see it stocked in the open. I think at least 50 percent of it has already turned into cattle
feed. It cannot be consumed by human beings. And there are 320 million people who go to bed hungry
every night in India. One third of the world’s 800,000 people who go to bed hungry every night are in
India.

But it is not that only India’s political masters or Indian elite is unconcerned or criminally apathetic to
the realities of hunger. The international community is equally to blame. They are talking about
removing half the world’s hunger by the year 2015 and they are talking about the 800 million people
who go to bed hungry, so we should be moving at least, – but all they have done is to say that we will
remove half the world’s hunger by 2015. If they were really honest, the international community, they
could have focused on a country like India, because we have food, we have hungry, why should we
wait to the year 2015? There’s no explanation for this. I’m sure you will agree.

And not only India. Until recently Pakistan was overflowing with food grains. Bangladesh has been
overflowing with food grains. If you put the population of these three countries together, roughly 42-
43% of the world’s hungry are in these three countries. If the world was serious, they could have used
international political will to force these developing countries, these three countries, to feed the hungry.
But it never happened. Economics doesn’t want to talk about the hungry. Economics is like the pigeon.
Pigeons keep their eyes closed when the cat comes, feeling that the world is now safe. Economists do
the same. They feel that if you don’t talk about the hungry, you know, they don’t have to worry about
the hungry.

The Kalahandi Syndrome

But, to your question, if you look at realities -- Kalahandi is a stark reality. Kalahandi is as well known
as Mumbai or Chennai. People haven’t been to Kalahandi but they all know Kalahandi because
whenever there is a report of hunger and starvation, Kalahandi will always figure. (It is in western
Orissa in India.)

When I did my book In the Famine Trap, working in Kalahandi, I came out with this conclusion or
terminology, which is now popularly used of “Kalahandi Syndrome”. I was shocked myself to see that
Kalahandi was not a food-deficit area. It was not an infertile area. It was as good or as bad as the rest
of the country. Rainfall was as normal as the rest of the country. It was always green, as you could
expect. In fact, when the Bengal famine happened in 1943, the first shipload of rice went from
Kalahandi. But today the tragedy is that Kalahandi people die of hunger and starvation. For the last
five years, Kalahandi has produced on average surplus of 50,000 tons of rice, year after year. And
those people who produce cannot buy that rice. The problem is that there is food, but people do not
have the purchasing power to buy that food. That is why we have 50 million tons rotting in the country.
People can’t buy it.

Multinational companies and WTO, they are using this promise, “Look, these people can’t afford that
food. When we bring the subsidized food it becomes cheaper.” But this is untrue. Untrue because the
price at which that food is being made available in this country, no multinational company can provide
food at that level. They will not survive. Economically they will all collapse.

Importing Unemployment

Rice is available at 4 rupees/kg. Wheat is also available at 5 rupees/kg, or 4 rupees/kg. For the poor,
this would mean it would come down to less than 10 cents, 10 American cents/kg. Please tell me
where in America can you find wheat or rice at less than 10 cents a kg.

At those kinds of low prices, people can’t even buy that food. Basically they have lost their capacity.
And that is because of the globalization process. Why? Because when the cheaper food comes into
the country, actually it means we are importing unemployment. When the people give up agriculture,
what do they do? Not that this wasn’t happening earlier, but the process has been accelerated by
globalization coming into India from 1991 onwards. We are becoming a victim of globalization.

And this is a phenomenon not only confined to India. This Kalahandi Syndrome extends all over the
world. The world today has more food than the hungry need. The tragedy is that they can’t buy it. If
you look at the world supply of food today, if you were to distribute whatever is available today, we,
according to the norms laid out by the WHO, by the minimum calorie requirement, we would have food
left for 800 million people, a surplus left for 800 million people -- after feeding everybody. But why we
have 800 million people hungry today is because they can’t buy that food.

These are the inequalities and to us globalization will further accentuate that crisis because it is not
only not providing the poor food, it is taking away their jobs. How do you expect them to buy their food,
even if it is cheaper?
This kind of Catch 22 situation has never been explained by the economists, has never been asked
and understood by the economists. And because the poor and hungry have no voice, nobody is talking
about them. That’s the biggest tragedy. To me, this is the greatest challenge for us in the country and
that is why a few of us have got together to set up a small center we are calling the World Hunger
Institute. We think we are technically qualified to call it the World Hunger Institute because we have
the largest number of hungry in the world with us and we want to launch a direct assault on feeding
the hungry. Not as charity but as something that can build up their capacity to be food secure for the
years to come.

Interview with Devinder Sharma

The politics of food and agriculture

Part 2
From secured-cash crops to village republics

New Delhi, India

Devinder Sharma is an award-winning journalist, writer, and researcher

on food and trade policy. He is the author of "GATT and India -- Politics
of Agriculture" (1994) and "In the Famine Trap" (1997). He chairs the
New Delhi-based Forum for Biotechnology & Food Security.This
interview was conducted August 25, 2003 by Nic Paget-Clarke for In
Motion Magazine in New Delhi, India.

• Water conservation Devinder Sharma. Photo by Nic

Paget-Clarke.
• Agriculture technology

• Micro-credit
• Traditional farming practices
• Cyclic Mode of Development
• SEWA
• A real democratic movement
• Village republics
• “Engineer bureaucrat and contractor friendly”
• Leading the world into two clear halves
• From staple foods to cash crops
• The diversification mantra
• He who controls food controls the world
• Genetically-modified crops
• Control through research
• Profit-securing crops
• Privatization of research
• Value-added exports
• Tea from Luxembourg
• Part of our culture, part of their business
• One man took up the courage …

• Also see Part 1 – From British Colonialism to WTO Rules and Privatization

Water conservation
In Motion Magazine: You have written about some possible
techniques or strategies for change: traditional farming practices,
tuning agriculture technology to the needs of people, micro-credit,
and water conservation. Can you talk about them?

Devinder Sharma: There is no denying that these four sectors are

very important. But if you look at it the way we are being told to, we
should not follow our own traditionally applicable and time-tested
technologies and methodologies, which are suitable to the country’s
needs and to the environment.
A villager collecting water from a well
Let’s look at water. We have in India a watershed program which in western Tamil Nadu. Photo by Nic
talks about conserving water. In India, the rainwater comes in a Paget-Clarke.
hundred hours, in the three months of the monsoon season, that is
where we get 90% of our rainfall. In America, it’s intermittent
throughout the year. For us, it is very important to conserve that rainwater, so we are saying that we
should follow water harvesting technologies. But the tragedy is the water harvesting methodologies we
follow in India are actually borrowed from America.

The Tennessee Valley Authority in America has a water harvesting structure, which is called “ridge to
valley”. That model was adopted by India. Since 1982, we have been propagating this water-
harvesting model, supported by the World Bank and IMF and it has spread throughout the country. But
the tragedy is that model is alien technology for India. It can never work for an Indian environment
because it is not suitable for India. It was suitable for American conditions. And look at the irony, today
the American Texas A&M University is using the water harvesting model of Chennai (south-eastern
India) in their own research farms whereas we are using the American technology.

So, unfortunately, we have no faith in our technologies. When I was taught agriculture, all that I was
taught was that, “Your agriculture is substandard. Your agriculture is backward. Your agriculture is
dependent on monsoon. The only way for you to grow is to follow the American or developed model of
agriculture.” So, the mindset has been tuned to that. For us, all that we did in Indian agriculture was
backward. But these (developed) technologies have caused lots of problems as we all know, now.

Agriculture technology

Number two is the system of agriculture technology. We are being told that the world needs to produce
for a world population that will go up to 1.4 billion by year 2015. Therefore, the world needs to produce
more and therefore you need genetic engineering. This is going on all over the world. But the reality is
in a country like India, we are asking our farmers not to produce more because they have no place to
keep it.

In India, there is a new phenomenon, which has begun called “produce and perish”. Farmers produce
and because there are no buyers they perish. They commit suicide. And we are being told we have to
produce more. There is something wrong somewhere. Both things don’t go side by side. So,
agriculture technology, again it has to come from the Western companies, the Western NGOs.

Micro-credit

Self-help groups, the women groups are something which came up from Grameen Bank, and so on,
and we have taken that thing (micro-credit) and multiplied it without even realizing whether it was good
or bad. I see no reason why the poor should get a loan, a credit from the bank at 24%, which the
Grameen Bank provides. I see no reason why the corporate houses in India should get a credit at 6%
rate of interest. The more they are poor, the higher the rate of interest.

There was a debate in parliament, two days back, and in that debate one of our ex-Prime Ministers
was very emotionally talking about the farmers getting credit at 14%, whereas the rich or middle class
is getting the credit at 6 to 8 %. I told him subsequently that you are worried about 14%, which the
farmers are getting, which of course is bad, but look at the tribals in the Kalahandi belt. Nobody can
imagine that those poor who are hungry, who die of starvation and hunger, when they go to the
money-lenders to take credit, the rate of interest is 460%. I’m sure even if Monsanto was to pay a rate
of interest of 460% the company would collapse. And we expect those poor to come out of the poverty
trap?

All our focus is to ensure that the rich get the credit much cheaper, and then we believe in the trickle-
down effect. It is the poor who are being taxed, who
are being exploited in all these games. If you are able
to pass on that benefit to the poor, I’m sure the poor
can do miracles. But that is not happening

Traditional farming practices

The last issue you mentioned was traditional farming

practices – which they think is a bad idea. “It is not
sustainable. It will not feed the country.” We have been
given to understand that, “Your food production will
collapse if you go in for traditional farming practices.”
Please tell me where in the world, and I’m talking of
the rich world, do we have a technology which suits a Farming in western Tamil Nadu. Photo by Nic Paget-
Clarke.
farmer in 1.47 hectares? And still we are being told
that technology which is applicable for 200 hectares is
good for 1.47 hectares. That dichotomy I can’t understand.

There are traditional farming systems in India that nobody wants to take on because they think that
they are backward. Essentially, the word is they are backward and they are substandard. But if you
look at it, 70% of India is still following traditional farming practices. They are the ones who are farming
in inhospitable areas. Only 30 percent of India is what is called assured-irrigation. That is the Green
Revolution belt. So 70% of India is still following traditional farming practices. Their focus should be to
improve those traditional farming practices rather than to displace those farmers or those systems by
the modern technology, the so-called high-tech technology.

Let me give another comparison here, America is considered to be a place which has very
sophisticated technology. 2002 was a year when America faced the worst drought since the 1930s.
2002 was also a year when India faced the worst drought since the nineteenth century. Both the
countries faced a severe drought. It is time to compare these countries. If you look at America, 26 of
your 50 states suffered from drought. In India, 13 of the 30 states suffered from drought. In America,
the agriculture production fell down by 30%. In India it fell down by 18%.

I remember going to America and finding that there were farmers praying in churches in rural areas,
praying for the rain gods to smile. There were farmers who sold off their ranches. Farmers who sold off
their cattle. There was a terrible shortfall of fodder. President Bush diverted $150 million of milk to feed
the cattle. The so-called precision farming in America collapsed. We talk of precision farming in
America, you apply fertilizer and pesticides where it is needed, your rainfall is intermittent throughout
the year so there should be no problem of water. You have sprinklers, drip irrigation and so forth. But
look at what happened. North Carolina was fighting with South Carolina over water. In a number of
states, irrigation of kitchen gardens and washing cars was banned. It didn’t happen in India. Which
means that technology is not the one which we should adopt in India. Despite the cost and
sophistication, it didn’t work in America. With one drought it failed.

So why do we adopt the same system here? We are sitting right now in Delhi, if you go to the India
Agriculture Research Institute they are going to launch a research project for precision farming. They
are going to spend three crore rupees, which means 30 million rupees to do a research project on
precision farming because the Americans are doing it. Is that that the requirement for India?

Cyclic Mode of Development

In Motion Magazine: Are there examples of local organizing where people are getting involved in
trying to bring about changes in India using these techniques?

Devinder Sharma: Not only in India. If you look around the developing countries, there are many,
many such examples which of course the scientists don’t want to accept. In a place in Bihar, now it
has also gone into a state called Jharkand, there is a group of villages, 50-odd villages which have
been part of what is called a “Chakriya Vikas Pranali” which means Cyclic Mode of Development. It
was started by an amazing person from the same area. It has gone into what is called a “three is to
three to three to one system” of sharing the produce and the income from that piece of land. This is
with the landless – the work on the land in that area.

What I want to say is, in those areas, they look like an oasis in the
entire hunger belt of Jharkand, near Bihar. These 50 villages are the
areas which look prosperous compared to that area. In an area
where rupees-ten is a big income for a day, these are the villages
where they have village’s funds of about 100,000 rupees each, that
would be only ten percent of what they have earned. And they have
done it completely by their own traditional ways.

SEWA

And they are not the only villages. If you go around the country, you
are going to visit SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association,
Ahmedabad, Gujarat), SEWA is another classic example of how the
people have done it by pooling their own capacity as well as their
capabilities to ensure that they build up the capabilities of the people
to grow using agriculture as a means. They have done it remarkably
well.
Self-Employed Women’s Association,
Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Photo by Nic
You go around in various parts of the country and you will find these Paget-Clarke.
kinds of examples. But they are spread all over the country. Nobody
wants to bring them together and draw a lesson from them. That is a
tragedy because multinational companies come, they have their PR
(public relations) units behind them, and they keep on bombarding us with this information that, “You
have no other escape but to use this kind of technology.” And, “We will do wonders for economic
growth” and so on. We are lured by that.

But go to see these examples, There are thousands and thousands of examples. Jules Pretty, in one
of his publications, has documented many of them. Jules Pretty is a professor at one of the
universities in UK. He has written on sustainable farming practices -- where the people have done it.

A real democratic movement

In Motion Magazine: Do you think there is a beginning of a real democratic movement that is coming
out of these kinds of organizing efforts, and in contradiction to globalization?

Devinder Sharma: Yes, and what the government says is something different. You will see the
numbers are multiplying. The interesting part is when we started looking at all these things we first
thought that they are happening but they will disappear because of the onslaught of the technology-
based companies and so on. But, surprisingly, it hasn’t happened. These numbers are multiplying.
More and more people are going back to these traditional systems and that’s a great ray of hope for
the kind of things we are talking about – sustainable farming, sustainable agriculture, a sustainable
future.

Just to give an example, Punjab is the food bowl of India. Punjab is an area which is ecologically
diverse today. 60 percent of the country’s food surplus comes from Punjab, the northwest part of India.
But that’s the area where we have reached a second generation bottle-neck as far as environmental
damage done -- the water table going down drastically, soil becoming in a pathetically bad situation.
The soil is hungry. The ecology has gone bad. The capacity to produce of the soil has gone down
drastically, and so on.

But now the farmers are reverting back. Many farmers in that state are reverting back to traditional
farming practices. They realize that all these experiments they did in the Green Revolution period have
done damage. People are trying to go back.

It may be a small experiment but I always believe as Neil Armstrong said, when he stepped on the
moon, “A small step for man, a giant leap for
mankind.” As Hillary Clinton also said once, “It takes a
village,” then another village, then another village -
the multiplier effect- and a revolution is born. I am
very hopeful about that.

Village republics

In Motion Magazine: So, there’s actual political,

democratic involvement of the individuals within these
villages?
Banner in western Tamil Nadu. Photo by Nic Paget-
Clarke.
Devinder Sharma: In the villages? Yes, but not at the
national scene.

In Motion Magazine: It’s growing?

Devinder Sharma: Slowly.

In Motion Magazine: From active involvement by people?

Devinder Sharma: I will give you one example. India has about 600,000 villages. And we know the
condition of the villages. But, can you believe, roughly 1,500-plus of India’s villages have actually put
signboards outside their village saying, “If you are a government employee, or a company official,
please don’t walk in.”

And it hasn’t happened as a movement. It has happened sporadically. They are all spread over the
country, these 1,500 villages. These are the villages, which have become complete, what I call, as
village republics. They are self-sufficient. They don’t need anybody’s support.

And 1500, my God, is not a small number. If that 1,500 multiplies to 3,000 in the years to come, just
see what will happen to this country. We don’t need external support. What all those villages are
saying is, “Please don’t come up with these external supports to use. We have had enough.”

“Engineer bureaucrat and contractor friendly”

In Motion Magazine: In the implementation of some of these efforts for sustainable development, you
have talked about them disparagingly as “engineer bureaucrat and contractor friendly”. What is a
better way of developing sustainable agriculture?

Devinder Sharma: It has to be based on the local needs, the local environment, the local capacity of
the farmers, and local technology. And that is what has been amply demonstrated.

Just to give an example, if you look at WTO negotiations, every time Frank Fischler, the European
Union Agriculture Commissioner, talks about the kinds of things that he is doing under WTO, “The
developing country farmer will gain.” But the tragedy has been that when, two years back, Frank
Fischler came to India that was the first time he had ever visited a developing country. He has always
been talking about the benefits to developing countries, yet even when he came to India he did not
meet farmers. He doesn’t even know what the farmers of India look like. Sitting there in Brussels, or in
Geneva, or in Washington we tend to believe, “This is wonderful. What we are doing will help the
farmers.”

I think that is the greatest tragedy, because we are basically uneducated and if we go to these farmers
we can learn from them. They carry with them hundreds or thousands of years of experience. I think
the world should go backwards and learn from them rather than think that they are backward and poor
so they need to be taught.

That was the biggest tragedy of the Green Revolution model. The Green Revolution Model talked
about “lab to land”, it didn’t talk of “land to land”, and that is why you find all these problems coming up
all over the world wherever Green Revolution is followed.

When I was a student of the Green Revolution model, I was taught the land grant model of education,
and it tended to believe, “We need to disseminate this information to the farmers.” It takes farmers as
a bloc of unread illiterates who don’t know about all these things. “They have to be educated.”
Whereas, these people have tremendous wisdom with them. That was what the Green Revolution
should have got back. But they didn’t and look where the world is heading.

In a country like ours, which is a land of contrasts -- India is truly a subcontinent, as we all know -- you
can find all kinds of experiments, which could have been done. You could have answers to all kind of
things that you are looking all over the world for. There are sustainable answers with people and we
never went back to them. We never want to learn from them. It is shameful if a man with a PhD goes
and sits with a farmer and learns something.

Leading the world into two clear halves

In Motion Magazine: How would you compare the state of liberalization at the time you wrote the
book, in 1992, and now?

Devinder Sharma: When I came out with my book on agriculture and WTO / GATT, it was dubbed as
an analysis which was extreme, not true for India, “India is going to gain” and so on and forth. In fact,
the Indian Finance Minister subsequently said, “That book has been written by somebody who never
read the GATT Agreement.” There were lots of comments about me.

In the subsequent title of this book, the next edition, it was called, “GATT/WTO Seeds of Despair”. I
was very clear that there’s going to be a negative thing for us. Interestingly, the government of India,
two years back, published a document which was released in Delhi in a forum to which it invited
farmer leaders, political leaders and the NGOs. The document says, it was evaluating the WTO
Agreement on Agriculture, that all the hopes and expectations from opening up under WTO have been
belied.

The government of India took seven or eight years to realize that this was negatively impacting us. I
think anyone who had a keen insight into the political economy, the way the world was moving, could
see where it was moving. I’m glad now the book is being dug out. Lots of people are taking it out and
trying to see what was said there. It is now coming out to be true. In fact, all that I have said is now
coming out to be true. It is nothing to be complimenting oneself, the only thing I am trying to say is if
you are dispassionately trying to analyze the realities, knowing the political situation going on, you can
see where the world is moving.

The liberalization process is leading the world into two clear halves, whether it is through WTO or
through the financial institutions of World Bank and IMF. It is now forcing the world to move on to a
stage where the staple foods will be produced by the OECD countries. The rest of the world will mainly
produce products or crops which will meet the luxury requirements of people in the Western countries.

From staple foods to cash crops

In Motion Magazine: Like what?

Devinder Sharma: Like producing cut flowers. Like
producing peas. Like producing tomatoes. Like
producing sunflower. Things like that which will meet
the luxury requirements of the West. Coffee. And the
staple foods will be produced by only America and
Europe.
Banana crop. Tamil Nadu. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.

Now, why is it happening? Why I am saying this is

based on analysis, based on an understanding. Today,
Europe exports about 18% of the world’s agriculture, the European Union. 17% is contributed by
America. Add on the Cairns Group (editor: group of 17 agricultural exporting countries, formed in
1986) as such, as a bloc, they will take another 20%. Which means about 50, 55% is in the hands of
these three blocs – which are essentially the OECD blocs.

But, interestingly, through the WTO we are asked to lift up trade barriers, reduce our tariffs, so that the
cheaper food can come into our countries. When cheaper food comes the entire focus is on destroying
your food self-sufficiency. Once you are not food self sufficient, once you become dependent then you
become dependent, for all times to come.

The diversification mantra

Look at the other way. The World Bank and IMF, they tell us in India that, “You produce enough wheat
and rice, and so on. You need to diversify.” Diversification of agriculture is the new mantra. Whether it
is India, whether it is China, whether it is Pakistan, whether it is Philippines or Africa – we should all
diversify. Why? Because we are producing too much of grains. Look at the clever intention of the
World Bank and IMF. If there is one place or one bloc that should diversify, it is America and Europe.
They go on producing soybean after soybean, corn after corn, wheat after wheat. They need to
diversify. Nobody tells America to diversify. Nobody tells European Union to diversify. Why is that only
we are being told to diversify? And since it comes with money, it comes with credit, facilities the World
Bank provides -- the countries are moving on it. They are following the diversification mantra.

Basically, we are moving from staple foods to cash crops. You will agree cash crops don’t feed you.
They can give you the money if you export, but they don’t feed you. In a country like ours where 1.47
hectares is the average landholding size, you need staple foods so that the poor man can at least feed
his family first. You cannot export them to America and then get the dollars. That is what is called the
Kalahandi Syndrome.

He who controls food controls the world

So what are we doing now? Very clearly, the world is full up of nuclear weapons. There’s a
tremendous outrage of wars being fought with precision bombs, so the biggest weapon that a country
can have is food. Food is the biggest weapon. As long as America and European Union and a few
other blocs control food I don’t think they will have any problem. The future of wars will not be fought
through the armed forces, to me the food is the biggest weapon. He who controls food controls the
world.

Genetically-modified crops

In Motion Magazine: Which leads to GMOs What is your opinion to GMOs.

Devinder Sharma: The same. This is part of the same paradigm. Genetically-modified (GM) crops
(editor: also read interview with Dr. Doreen Stabinksy) – one, of course, you are tinkering, whatever
you are doing, and the other part is you are controlling the food chain. That is what the GM companies
are going to do now. It is part of the same paradigm of World Bank, IMF, GM companies, and the WTO
-- if you look at the same liberalization process.
What will happen now is the new products that are coming up are also coming up with stronger
intellectual property rights. First of all, we don’t have the technology. The technology is in the hands of
the Western companies, so the new crop seeds that come from them would have to be bought by us.
We have no escape. And they have already ensured things like Terminator (editor: a genetically-
engineered seed which only produces for one generation) which is now no longer a concept, it is a
product. We will have terminator and seeds that you can program to insure that production goes up or
goes down.

Control through research

Then you have the control – control through research. One way is you force the countries to open up
so that you can remove the barriers -- the trade can push the food grains. But another aspect, which is
worrisome for the West is there are countries like India and China that still have a very powerful and
formative research infrastructure in the public sector. India has the second biggest research
infrastructure in the world after China. This is a system which can use its expertise to grow crops and
at least meet the food security requirement. So, the best way is to dismantle this system.

At an international level there is the CGIAR, the Consultative Group on International Agriculture
Research. They are under tremendous attack from the multinational corporations because they find
them to be the first obstacle. So they will go. We know that their days are numbered.

The next attack is going to be on ICR, the Indian Council for Agricultural Research, which has about
31 agricultural universities and about 81 national institutes. They have about 30,000 agricultural
scientists employed. But that system is being destabilized through intellectual property rights.

Let me give you one example. Rice is a crop which originates from India along with the Japanese
region. It is Indo-Japanese. That is why it is classified in two categories, indica and japonica. But now
the rice genome has been mapped. We don’t need the varieties that we’ve got in India. What we need
now is the genes. The genes are mapped, cloned, and intellectual property rights control exist – they
(patents) have been taken out by companies in the Western part of the world.

India was recently requiring one gene of rice to be incorporated into rice. We actually went to Japan to
buy their gene. We spent 30 lakh rupees which would mean three million rupees to buy one gene. It
didn’t work. Imagine if India was to start buying genes in a country where you can’t even pay the staff
salaries today. The research infrastructure goes redundant after a few years. We are fast moving to an
arena where the research will be stifled, so the private companies take over. We have the entire seed
industry moving into India because there is a huge market here.

As I said earlier, we have a 110 million landholdings,

557 million farmers, only 10 percent of our farmers
replace seed every year which means only ten percent
of the farmers buy seed every year. 90 percent still
save seed. So, through terminator and other seeds
these companies control, steer the market. The first
Terminator crop will be available on the market in the
year 2004.

Profit-securing crops

In Motion Magazine: I think you have changed your A large puppet, part of a protest against genetically-
opinion on GMOs over the years. You seemed more engineered crops at Monsanto's headquarters, St. Louis,
open to it in your first book? Missouri. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.

Devinder Sharma: Basically, I am a geneticist. I did

my genetics on plant breeding and I too was very fascinated by this science. Over the years lots of
people have asked me this question. Why have I changed my opinion about GMOs? I think as you go
along you see what is happening. You see the politics. You see the mischief. You see the
manipulations being enacted. You realize that this technology is not for the welfare of the farming
communities of the developing countries. Therefore, your stand also starts hardening knowing the
politics that is prevailing. It is not because of the technology. The technology per se is wonderful and I
still have great hopes on that, but the technology has gone into the wrong hands. What do you do with
that? The tragedy, as I have written in many of my articles, is that the public sector scientists should
stand up and say herbicide tolerant plants (editor: e.g. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybeans) is not
what we require, and they fail to say so.

You will have more and more such kinds of products coming into the country which are not required.
They doesn’t boost your productivity. They don’t increase your production. They only insure profit for
the company – they are basically profit-securing crops. It is not food security they are talking about it is
profit security. Scientists have helped the companies profit security – that is what my worry is.

Privatization of research

In Motion Magazine: Could you talk some more about the privatization of research, in the context of
the privatization of the world? Why is that significant?

Devinder Sharma: It is very significant. When we had the land grant university coming up in America,
India also adopted the land grant model from. The land grant universities in America. were essentially
public sector controlled.

I read a report, that said there are 535 plant breeders working on corn in America today. Of which only
30 are n the public sector. The rest are in the private sector. This gives you an idea.

When I was a student of agriculture, plant breeding, the Mecca of plant breeding was an institute in
England called the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge. The Plant Breeding Institute was an institute
which was a public sector institute. It was an institute which was getting £6 million from the U.K.
government as support, but returning £10 million a year to the government. It was not a loss-making
unit. But Margaret Thatcher sold off that institute to Unilever. Unilever sold it off to Monsanto. Today
that institute is gone. Imagine when these kinds of privatizations start taking place all over the world.

In India, these public sector institutes are at least covered by the democratic norms. At least the
government can tell, “Look, you should be working on wheat. This is a disease that has erupted. You
should be working on it.” But tomorrow, if it is privately controlled, who can tell that institute to work?

In a country like India, where the crops are so diverse, where the landholding size is so small, where
the insect and the pest attack is virulent because we are in a tropical world, we need to have public
sector controlled research which looks beyond profits. Unfortunately that is going away. We may be
the last bastion left. Essentially, all countries in my neighborhood are also giving up. It is privatization
of research and that research will not be on these kinds of crops we are talking about. They will be
more acting as a service center for the companies in the Western hemisphere. For instance, Monsanto
requires some experiments to be done in India, these will become the service centers to do that
research.

Value-added exports

In Motion Magazine: You were talking about how the WTO was encouraging diversification among
developing countries, is that similar to the British banning, in India, the local manufacture of cloth?

Devinder Sharma: You are very right. That is a legacy which still continues. It is very interesting.
Cotton was not a major crop of India before the British found that America cotton was not coming.
America stopped supplying cotton for the Manchester industry in Britain. So, they diverted attention to
India. Cotton erupted in India and it was shipped directly from here to Britain.

I think it makes economic sense to have set up a manufacturing plant in India rather than to ship it all
the way to England. But they didn’t want that profit to be shared with the Indians. Of course, we were a
colony at that time and no colonial master will do that, but even now it is not being done. If you look at
the way the way the WTO is doing things, it is just to ensure that the raw material comes from this part
of the world. It goes to that part of the world and then it is “value-added” -- the terminology now being
used is “value-added” -- and beautifully packed, and then it comes back to us with much more price,
and intellectual property rights, and so on, and so forth.

Tea from Luxembourg

Let me give you an example. There are three countries which would top the production chart for tea in
the world. That is India, Sri Lanka, and Kenya. They are the three countries which are the major
producers of tea. But I’m sure if I were to ask you a question, “Which are the major exporters of tea,
you will have an answer.”

In Motion Magazine: I would think it was India.

Devinder Sharma: That is what everybody would think. The biggest exporters of tea are Luxembourg,
Belgium and Britain. They don’t grow tea.

In Motion Magazine: So how do they get it there?

Devinder Sharma: That is what is very interesting. Because they value add then pack it their value
goes up. They become a big exporter of tea than us. We export the raw material. They pack it. They
value add it – you can find hundreds of kinds of tea now if you go to the tea shops anywhere in the
West, mango tea, lychee tea, all the flavors – they add those values and they ultimately market it.

If you look at oranges, we export orange skin to Holland and Holland makes something and exports it
to the rest of the world. They are the kind of valuations that are going on. Interestingly the second
biggest exporter of agriculture products in the world is Holland. And Holland is not even of the size of
Punjab.

That is the way the world is moving. To us that is a cause for worry because in our country we are not
worried about exports we are worried about our food security needs – feeding the poor. Everything is
now being looked at by way of how much you can export. It is agribusiness.

Part of our culture, part of their business

In India it is agriculture. If you go to Punjab, they say the only culture of Punjab is agriculture. That is
what we were actually using agriculture as. It is part of our culture. Whereas, for the West it is part of
their business, it is industry, for us, it is part of our livelihood, part of our life. That is the difference and
that is why I suppose there is a clash.

If you look at rice, for instance, rice doesn’t mean anything to an average American except for what he
gets in the market or what he eats. But in India rice has tremendous cultural, religious roles. I get
married and the rice is in every kind of ceremony that I
involve – rice is there. It is part of our culture,
upbringing. And now we are being asked to diverse
from that. Under modern systems – this is all
backwards.

One man took up the courage …

In Motion Magazine: Indians are in a very good

position to see how the free trade rules are similar to
the British rule?
Visiting the Gandhi Samadhi at the Mahatma Gandhi
Devinder Sharma: That’s right. It is basically divide Memorial Park, New Delhi. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
and rule. I think the British were very smart. But there
is a ray of hope here, again with the British system.
And I have always being saying that. The British empire was a very ruthless empire. As we said
earlier, the sun would never set on the British empire. But, one man took up the courage, and there
was no media like today, one man took up the courage and the empire crumbled.

In Motion Magazine: Can you talk a little about his philosophy (Mohandas K. Gandhi) and how that
applies today?

Devinder Sharma: I am very hopeful. Lots of people have asked me, the multinationals are a very big
force. I said they are not bigger than the British empire at that time. Not in terms of money, but
ruthlessness. What the British had at that time … people could disappear, nobody would ask a
question to the British government. But, today, if people disappear there are a whole lot of human
rights groups and civil society groups and the media and so on – it is very difficult. I don’t mean it
doesn’t happen but it is very difficult today. And there can be movements born after that.

But look at that one man and the empire crumbled. I am very hopeful today it will not be one man, it
can be ten men, but the multinational empire can also crumble. That is again a legacy, a lesson that
has to be learned. That is why I was very keen that you should see the Mahatma Samadhi (Mahatma
Gandhi Memorial Park). That is where you can get some inspiration.

Somebody who came from Britain, I had some time, I took him around to Mahatma Samadhi and he
sat down with me in that garden, on that lawn, and then he asked me this question: “Is it where you
get your inspiration?” I said, “I don’t know about that, but I know one thing, that whenever I come to
this place I know if this man could do it, a hundred of us can do it now.” All it needs is one plus one.
One plus one becomes eleven. And somebody said, one plus one plus one becomes one hundred and
eleven. That’s the way it multiplies. I am very hopeful.

Return to Part 1 – From British Colonialism to WTO Rules and Privatization

Also see:

• Assessing the Risks of Genetic Engineering

Super weeds, non-target impacts, horizontal gene transfer
Interview with plant geneticist Dr. Doreen Stabinsky
Auckland, Aotearoa / New Zealand
• Genetic Engineering index of articles

• Bill Gates' Rescue Package: Flogging a Dead Horse

by Devinder Sharma
New Delhi, India
• Extended series of interviews and articles from the United Nations World Summit on
Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, August 26 - September 4, 2002

Published in In Motion Magazine November 11, 2003

Interview with Vandana Shiva

The Role of Patents in the Rise of Globalization

“The recovery of economic democracy

is at the heart of recovery of democracy itself.”

New Delhi, India

Dr. Vandana Shiva is founder of both the Research
Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology, an
independent public industry research group, and
Navdanya a grassroots conservation movement in
India. This interview was conducted by Nic Paget-
Clarke on August 27, 2003 for In Motion Magazine in
New Delhi, India.

• A twist in the history of patents

Vandana Shiva at a press conference with other leaders of
• Control of the technology an anti-WTO march in New Delhi, August 27, 2003 . All
photos by Nic Paget-Clarke.
• The role of patents
• Globalization of U.S. patent laws
• Patents regulate life
• Medicine: from healing to profits
• Ecology and equity
• From theoretical physicist to advocate for
biodiversity
• Agriculture and violence
• Focus on biotechnology and patenting
• The influence of Gandhi
• The death of economic democracy
Marching with former Indian prime ministers.
• The recovery of economic democracy
• The flow of wealth from South to North
• From ownership of land to ownership of
biodiversity
• War is globalization by other means

A twist in the history of patents

In Motion Magazine: I think sometimes people’s

eyes glaze over when hearing about patents and
legal matters, but in your book “Protect or Plunder –
Understanding Intellectual Property Rights” you
describe some interesting history, about how
originally patents were used to spread technology
but now they have been turned into their opposite.
Could you outline how that twist happened?

A soldier of the Indian Army provides security for the former

Vandana Shiva: In the early days, the word patent prime minsiters marching in the anti-WTO rally in New Delhi.
was used for two things. In the case of getting hold
of territory, what were issued by kings and queens
were letters-patent, which were open letters. Anyone
could know that Columbus had been given a right by
Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand to conquer and
take over any territory on their behalf.

But the second meaning, defined around the same

time by the Venetian laws on patent, which were the
first patent laws, was that a master craftsman could
be brought (to a country), because technology at
that time was craft technology, and if a country could
not make glass they would give to the master On the march in New Delhi.
craftsman apprentices and say, “Train our people in
this art.” “Train our people to make glass.” “Train our
people to make steel.” “Train our people to make
textiles”, and we will give you an exclusive right (to make these products) for seven years while you
are training people.

The period of the patent was seven years because it took seven years to learn a craft. After that seven
years was over, the master craftsman went back to wherever he belonged and you had all the
apprentices available in the country to spread that technology as a free public good. This was the
pattern throughout the early use of patent law.

Then you get slow shifts with the rise of industrialism. As big industry became a major economic
interest, they started to use technology as an instrument of monopoly. Patents became the way to say,
“Only we will use this technology”.

The way they expanded this power was, on the one hand, extending the life of patents. It went from
seven years to fourteen. Now, under WTO (World Trade Organization), for the first time it is twenty
years -- extendible in a period where technologies are becoming so obsolete that if you have that kind
of monopoly for twenty years you are totally controlling the technology.

And the second thing is constantly increasing the domain over which patents will apply. For example,
in India’s patent law agriculture could not be touched. Agriculture was free of monopolies. And in
medicine you could not have a product monopoly. You could not monopolize a medicine but you could
monopolize a method of making a medicine. But, medicine has been brought into monopolies. Seed
has been brought into monopolies. Cells have brought into monopolies. Genes have been brought into
monopolies. Animals have been brought into monopolies.

Basically, the ’80s saw a twist in this and a lot of it had to do with the rise of the big industry and their
convergence into one set of giants, which are the health giants, the pharmaceutical giants, the gene
giants controlling all life.

Control of the technology

In Motion Magazine: You’ve also said that with the rise of other countries in the world, with their own
manufacturing systems, markets started to slip away but the developed countries still had control of
the technology?

Vandana Shiva: The thing was that when we were living in a world based on crafts, transferring
technology was the objective. But as the world got industrialized, as developing countries shed the
colonial burden, imperialistic patent law started to develop.

For example, again India, under a 1970 law, developed a very strong medical sector. And I think if
WTO had not come on the horizon, India would be providing cheap medicine to American citizens. It’s
capable of doing that. But the American citizens, and the African citizens, and the Brazilian citizens,
and in the future the India citizens are being told, “You will only buy from these monopolies.” It was a
way to de-industrialize Southern countries who had started to build capacity, technological capacity for
themselves.

The role of patents

In Motion Magazine: So patents have had a very specific role in the latest version of imperialism, in
this globalization phase?

Vandana Shiva: If you want to have one tool for imperialistic control, it’s patent law under the WTO
agreement. It’s in my view the worst of the WTO agreements. It is a totally coercive tool. It has only a
negative function: to prevent others from doing their own thing; to prevent people from having food; to
prevent people from having medicine; to prevent countries from having technological capacity. It is a
negative tool for creating underdevelopment.
It’s the privatization of knowledge. I have called it the enclosure, the ultimate enclosure. We had
enclosures of land. Now, we are seeing enclosures of biodiversity, life itself. In my book “Biopiracy”,
I’ve talked about how this is the last colony. It is the spaces within our minds -- for knowledge. The
spaces within life forms for reproduction. A seed cannot reproduce without permission of the patent
holder and the company. Knowledge cannot be transmitted without permission and license collection.
It’s rent collection from life. It’s rent collection from being human, and thinking, and knowing.

Globalization of U.S. patent laws

In Motion Magazine: How has the WTO been a forum for the globalization of U.S. patent laws?

Vandana Shiva: The WTO has an agreement called Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights
agreement (TRIPs), which basically is nothing more than globalization of U.S.-style laws. And its
globalization of U.S.-style laws both in content and in process. In terms of content, in the late ’80s
when this law was drafted, the United States was the only country that granted patents on life forms.
This precedent was set in a 1980 decision on a genetically-engineered micro-organism, subsequent to
which was the rise of the biotech industry. The granting of life patents was seen as an imperative both
by the industry as well as the government. The U.S. government actually encouraged life patenting.
The decision-making was set by the courts, rather than by Congress, never with a public debate,
never with a public policy decision on the ethical implications, ecological implications, economic
implications of what life patents mean.

The second way in which this is a globalization of U.S. law is the fact that it was really U.S. companies
which got together, drafted the law, took it to the U.S. administration, then took it to the secretariat of
the at-that-time General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), which was the precursor of WTO,
and as Monsanto, which was one of the companies in the intellectual property coalition admitted in
drafting this law, “We achieved something unprecedented. We were the patient, the diagnostician, and
the physician all in one.

Patents regulate life

With the broadening of patents to life forms, patents do not just regulate technology they regulate life.
They regulate economy. They regulate basic needs. A patent is an exclusive right to make, produce,
distribute, or sell the patented product. So, if a patent is granted, for example, on seed it means a
farmer who grows a seed cannot save seed from the harvested crop because that is constituted as
making the seed and the exclusive right to the seed belongs to the company. It means seed-saving by
farmers is now defined as intellectual property theft. Many farmers in the United States have been
sued by the corporations for doing something normal in farming, which is saving their seed.

Exchanging seed with your neighbor, which is called brown-bagging -- it was not a commercial
exercise; it was a mutual give-and-take in society; a social act of exchange for non-profit activity -- has
also been defined as an infringement because now distributing is covered by a patent, even if it is not
commercial, because the companies interpret that by exchanging seed you are taking the market
away from them.

Medicine: from healing to profits

Also, patents can be given for medicine. For example, in the case of medicine, if there is no patent we
can treat people with AIDS with $200 expenditure per year. Indian companies can make it for that cost
because they can make them as generic drugs. They are not piracy drugs, which is the way the U.S.
pharmaceutical industry talks about them. They are generic in the sense that different processes have
been used. The same medicine, the same retroviral, costs $20,000 in the United States because of
patenting -- that is the only difference. Which means something which is being made for $200 is being
sold to consumers for not just ten times but a hundred times the price. As our prime minister said, the
big companies are trying to turn the matter of disease from healing into a matter of profits.

There was an attempt made, at the beginning of the TRIPs negotiations, to make it look like the lower-
cost production that could happen in the absence of monopolies was piracy. The industry managed to
define piracy as absence of monopolies. We want to define monopoly as monopoly and recognize that
things like seeds should be accessible to farmers, things like medicine should be accessible to those
who are dying of AIDS, and no regime in the world can put profits above people’s lives.

In Motion Magazine: Are the same corporations controlling food and health?

Vandana Shiva: It’s the same companies. The industry that used to be the chemical industry is also
the pharmaceutical industry, is also the seed industry, is also the biotech industry. There is no
separation -- and agro-chemical industry. It is all one.

Ecology and equity

In Motion Magazine:You made the statement in your book on patents that there’s always a
connection between ecology and equity. Can you talk about that?

Vandana Shiva: Ecology is about interactions in the natural world, sustainability of resources.
Whether you look at water, you look at biodiversity, you look at anything, conservation happens.
Environmental sustainability takes place when people have a stake and a share in the rewards of the
conserved resource. If people have the ability to drink water from a well, and look after that well, and
will suffer the consequences of contamination, they will not contaminate that well. People who pollute
a well or a river are the ones who don’t have to drink from it.

Similarly, when it comes to monopolies on intellectual property, conservation is what is sacrificed. It’s
the small peasants of the world who have conserved biodiversity. If they have to continue conserving
biodiversity, they need to have their rights defended. They need to be able to know that when they
plant basmati rice it will be their reward to harvest that basmati. They will not be treated as pieces of
RiceTec property. And they need to have a market for their produce.

Intellectual property destabilizes both, and in fact, starts to become an incentive for destruction of
biodiversity by pressures of the industry for monocultures, on the one hand, but also by not giving
people a chance to protect the resources from which they make a living because they are no more
their resources.

That is why ecology goes hand-in-hand with equity.

From theoretical physicist to advocate for biodiversity

In Motion Magazine: Could you go over how you started in the field of physics and then ended up
where you are today and how that relates to your organizing?

Vandana Shiva: I chose to be a physicist. I loved physics from an age when I didn’t even know what
the content was but I knew I wanted to figure out how nature works. Einstein was my hero. This is
what inspired me.

I lived through life training to be a physicist, initially training to be a nuclear physicist and then realizing
there’s a dark side to it. I left that to become a theoretical physicist. I worked in foundations of quantum
theory.

As is typical, I was doing my Ph.D. in Canada and everyone who goes from the South as a scientist
stays on and becomes a university professor and I could see, “That’s what I will become.” I wanted to
become that. But I said, “I’m not informed enough about how my society works. There is a question in
my mind. We have the third biggest scientific community in the world. We are among the poorest of
countries. Science and technology is supposed to create growth, remove poverty. Where is the gap?
Why is science and technology not removing poverty?” I wanted to answer that question to myself.

I said, “I will take off three years. Look at science policy issues. Be a little more educated, socially, and
then go back to physics.” That was my chosen life path. I was, in any way, involved in forest protection
in the Himalayas, my home, before I went for a Ph.D. I constantly volunteered with a movement of
women called Chipko .

But when I started to work on science and technology issues, I realized very quickly that they are
about resource control. They are not about efficiency. A big trawler in the sea is not more efficient than
a small boat. It controls more resources. And denies the small boat.

Green Revolution farming is not more efficient. It takes more water and leaves other areas deprived of
financial investment, water inputs, everything else. What you really see is technology acting as, what I
called in that period, a polarizer of resource access. Very quickly I started to realize that technology
issues, ecology issues, social inequality issues, were actually very intimately connected. I did a lot of
analysis/writing at that point and I was invited by the United Nations to carry these issues further.

Meantime, the Ministry of Environment, seeing some of my reports, commissioned me to look at

mining in my valley. I had just had my son, the 21-year-old boy who is walking around (in the office
where this interview took place), and I said “perfect”. I had lost my mother at that time, so I said “I will
go back, look at this mining, make a break in my science policy, also make a short break from my
return to physics. Do the study. He’ll be a little older. But I will also do more work on ecology and the
grassroots movement. Did the study. We stopped the mine.

Agriculture and violence

I started to do the United Nations work and a huge world unfolded. The Punjab crisis burst which
forced me to look at agriculture, ecology issues of agriculture, but also the rise of terrorism linked to
unequal development. I wrote my book called “The Violence of the Green Revolution”.

1984 was the year I started to look very, very closely at those issues because we’d had genocide in
Punjab. We’d lost our prime minister in that terrorism, which eventually killed 30,000 people. And it
was the year of Bhopal. As a result of that gas leak from a pesticide plant, 30,000 people more have
died.

So, I was just surrounded by these mega-violent epidemics all linked to agriculture and agriculture that
was supposed to be progressive. In 1984, I decided that something was wrong and I needed to go to
the roots of it. Why has agriculture gone so violent? Why are we so dependent on pesticides --
weapons of mass destruction? The real weapons of mass destruction because they did move from the
war industry into agriculture.

Focus on biotechnology and patenting

After three of four years of looking more closely at agriculture issues, I started to get called into
biotechnology seminars because it was the next step. In ’87, at one of these seminars, the industry
laid out its grand dream of controlling the world. They talked about needing genetic engineering so that
there’s a technology that they have that peasants can’t use so that they can have a monopoly through
technology. Patents. Because without it they cannot consolidate power.

That was said by Sandoz. Sandoz merged later with Ceiber-Geigy. Sandoz and Ceiber-Geigy became
Novartis. Novartis merged with AstroZeneca, which was anyway two independent companies, earlier.
All of them merged to become Syngenta. What they had said at that time was, “By the turn of the
century we will be five.” In ’87, I said, “I don’t want to live in a world where five giant companies control
our health and our food.”

I dropped everything else. I left my work on dams and forests and mines. I was doing very broad-scale
work on the environment movement then. Dropped everything else. Handed it over to the next
generation -- and they were brilliant activists in India -- and moved into a focus on two things:
biotechnology and patenting.
I tracked the whole TRIPs negotiations through and have followed the biotech industry from the day it
wanted to become a giant industry. I have tried to do my best to defend the freedom of people; create
seed banks so that farmers have free seed; nature has freedom of diversity; and these monopolies are
restrained.

Since 1987 to now, which is 16 years, I have had a single pointed attention to prevent imperialism over
life itself.

The influence of Gandhi

In Motion Magazine: When you are working with the various farmers’ organizations, various mass
organizations, specifically in India do people consciously learn from what Gandhi had to say? (See
photo of Gandhi's working room, the Harijan Ashram by the Sabarmati River, Ahmedabad, Gujarat,
India.)

Vandana Shiva: Definitely. People very, very much learn from what Gandhi had said. When I brought
the TRIPs issues for the first time to farmers’ organizations in India, in ’91 when the first draft of the
WTO texts were ready, it was called the Dunkel draft text, I started to tell people what this would imply.
It took no time: by ’92, ’93, we had giant farmer rallies. And the title (of the movement) was the Seed
Satyagraha -- the non-violent, non-cooperation with laws that create seed monopolies, inspired totally
by Gandhi walking to the Dandi Beach and picking the salt and saying, “You can’t monopolize this
which we need for life.”

On the non-cooperation side we were very inspired by Gandhi. But also on the constructive side, the
other side of our work with farmers and farm groups is the creative side of saving seeds, doing
agriculture without corporate dependence -- without chemicals, without their seed. All this is talked
about in the language that Gandhi left us as a legacy.

We work with three key concepts. (One) Swadeshi -- which means the capacity to do your own thing --
produce your own food, produce your own goods.

(Two) Swaraj -- to govern yourself. And we fight on three fronts -- water, food, and seed. JalSwaraj --
JalSwaraj is water independence -- water freedom and water sovereignty. Anna Swaraj is food
freedom, food sovereignty. And Bija Swaraj is seed freedom and seed sovereignty.

(In regard to these fronts) Swa means self -- that which rises from the self and is very, very much a
deep notion of freedom. I believe that these concepts, which are deep, deep, deep in Indian
civilization, Gandhi resurrected them to fight for freedom. They are very important for today’s world
because so far what we’ve had is centralized state rule, giving way now to centralized corporate
control, and we need a third alternate. That third alternate is, in part, citizens being able to tell their
states, “This is what your function is. This is what your obligations are,” and being able to have their
states act on corporations to say, “This is something you cannot do.”

The third component is Satyagraha, non-cooperation, basically saying, “We will do our thing and any
law that tries to say that us being free is illegal we will have to not cooperate with it. We will defend our
freedoms to have access to water, access to seed, access to food, access to medicine.”

The death of economic democracy

In Motion Magazine: Last time we spoke, you were talking about how to make democracy more
viable and you were saying that it comes down to individual participation at an economic level. How
would that function?

Vandana Shiva: Well, actually any real, true democracy is one in which people can determine the
conditions of their living -- their food, their health, their jobs, their livelihoods. These are defined as
economic issues. They used to be covered by democratic governance of the representative kind to the
extent that before globalization, if you voted someone to power you could put demands on that
representative to say, “We need a school in this community, and if you promise you get us a school we
are with you.” By and large, it was possible for politicians to come back and deliver their promise
because it was within the national sovereign space.

But globalization has meant the erosion of national sovereign space. For example, under the
agreement on agriculture nobody can guarantee a price to a farmer. Governments cannot go to
farmers and say, “We will make sure you get a living price for your farm commodities.” They cannot go
to a community and say, “We will defend your jobs and prevent them from being undermined and
companies running off to some cheap overseas site.” They cannot offer guarantees on education, they
cannot offer healthcare -- the typical things democracy was made of.

What we’ve seen is a split of democracy. It’s been emptied out of its economic content, been left with a
representative shell of electoral theatrics -- literally.

Economic decisions have moved out of the hands of citizens and even of the hands of countries and
moved into organizations controlled by corporations like the WTO, and the World Bank, the IMF
(International Monetary Fund), and the corporations themselves. What we have is economic
dictatorship combined with representative democracy. But representative democracy under economic
dictatorship is not able to counter that dictatorship and act as an economic democratic force. (Rather
it) moves and leans increasingly into winning votes by polarizing society and dividing society along
lines of race, gender, religion, ethnicity. That is why over the ’90s, as globalization has deepened its
reach in our communities and countries, fundamentalism, communalism, religious hatred have seen a
rise. Because religious fundamentalism, I believe, is a child of the death of economic democracy.

In Motion Magazine: Because?

Vandana Shiva: Because people without economic rights are left insecure. There is joblessness.
They can’t understand the processes leading to it. Ordinary farmers can’t really understand why prices
are going down.

If you can say, “The prices are going down because some other farmer in some other state is doing
something to you;” or, “Your water is disappearing because some other state is doing something;” or,
“Your jobs are going because the Moslems are breeding too much;” or in Europe, “The immigrants are
coming too fast; or in the United States, “The Mexicans are crossing the border;” it takes no time
before the economic insecurity left as a result of globalization mutates into a ready-made ground for
political interests to say, “Your job has been taken away by so and so.” “Your security has been robbed
by so and so.” That’s the rhetoric that has filled the space as economic insecurity has grown.

The recovery of economic democracy

In Motion Magazine: How can a farmer, for example, economically become involved?

Vandana Shiva: I think the recovery of economic democracy is at the heart of recovery of democracy
itself. And it doesn’t stop at that. It goes further into the creation of peace.

In a way, we really have three combined challenges, just now. We’ve got the threat of war and
violence. We’ve got the threat of economic insecurity, loss of jobs, loss of livelihoods, loss of incomes
for farmers. And thirdly, we’ve got this whole situation that our leaders are not representing our will --
the collapse of democracy.
Ordinary farmers have to get involved, can get
involved, by engaging in a recovery of economic
democracy as an everyday practice meaning, as we
do here, with seed Swaraj, with Anna Swaraj, saving
seeds, growing your own seed, not going to
Monsanto in every season and having your seed
collapse. Making chipatis in Old Delhi.

I was just told, yesterday, that 41 billion rupees of

losses have been faced by farmers in one state who
were sold Monsanto corn. We did a calculation that
farmers of Bt cotton, the genetically-engineered
cotton, lost a billion rupees in one season.

If farmers are saving the seed, growing their crop,

they are making reclamation of their economic
space. They are giving up chemicals and the
pesticides that have contaminated all sources of
water in this country, including the soft drinks now.
They are not just saving money. They are saving
their lives and they are saving public health.
Making saris.

By reaching out to consumers and setting up

alternate marketing systems, as we do with the Dilli
Haat where we have our direct marketing stall, we in
Navdanya, my organization, which is the main outlet
for organic growers in this country, we bring the
produce directly from farmers, and it’s literally their
marketing platform.

The flow of wealth from South to North

In Motion Magazine: The contradiction between

knowledge, as a collective process, and patents
Sacks of peppers in Old Delhi.
being the opposite of that … do you think that is
related to the fact that wealth has been flowing from
one half of the world to the other?

Vandana Shiva: North-South inequality is very

clearly a result of imperialistic structures being put in
place that suck wealth out of the South, put it in the
North. That’s exactly why the North looks rich and
the South looks poor. Not because human beings in
the South don’t know how to create wealth.
Everyone knows how to make things, create things.
Every one is creative. But when the results of your
creativity, productivity are not yours to hold and the
results of your labor and creativity are transferred Spices for sale in Old Delhi.
somewhere else the one who takes it becomes rich
and the one who’s left without it is the one who
stays poor.

During colonial rule, this extraction was done

through ownership over land. The British came to
India to a country, which was richer than England at
that time, and every record tells you that. They used
to exchange pepper with bags of gold. A sack of
pepper used to be equal to a sack of gold. Then
they came in as traders, established themselves as

Busy market area in Old Delhi.

rulers. First as the East India Company, which was thrown out in the 1857 Rebellion and War of
Independence, then, as the crown which took over the role of the Company and continued to rule.

The regions that were the richest, such as Bengal, became the poorest. In 1942, two million people
died of famine in the land where there was no shortage of wheat. Amartya Sen got a Nobel prize for
saying something so basic, that people did not die because there was not enough food. They died
because they had been robbed of their entitlement. That was the basis of his Nobel prize. That is also
the basis of noticing inequality.

We (Navdanya) have two books on the history of food and farming and we have tracked in them what
the wealth of Indian peasants was being used for. Schools were being built in England. Mental
asylums were being run by the transfer of peasant wealth into England. That’s why the colonizing
empire constantly grew. That’s what land ownership did at that time, which the British institutionalized
in this country. Before that we had land use. We had use-of-it right. Not private property in land.

The British turned the revenue collectors into landowners and created what they called the permanent
settlement and Zamidari system through which wealth would flow to them. The revenue collectors
were left as landowners. The original cultivators were left as the dispossessed peasants.

From ownership of land to ownership of biodiversity

What ownership over land, a very distorted ownership of a land, did to indigenous communities at that
time of colonialism, ownership over biodiversity, seeds, genes, medicine is doing in today’s world. The
biodiversity is in what is called the poorer part of the world. We are biodiversity rich but every year,
annually, $60 billion worth of wealth-transfer is taking place because the control over the products is in
the hands of the North. Monopolies of patents are in their hands. Monopolies on trade are in their
hands.

Coffee -- trade jumped from $40 billion to $70 billion over the last few years so there was literally a
doubling of trade. One would have imagined a doubling of trade would have left a doubling of incomes
in the hands of those who grew the coffee. The incomes of the coffee producers dropped from $9
billion to $5 billion and some of the most dispossessed people of the world today are the coffee
growers, as also every other commodity grower.

These are amazing mechanisms -- the trade arrangements, trade treaties, intellectual property rights
patent treaties. They are doing, once again, in a deeper way what colonialism did and the projections
are that 70% of American wealth will be through rent collection, through patents, because the U.S
government is not designing America as a society where people are involved in making things. It has
dismantled manufacture. It has gone off to China. Pick up anything in a supermarket -- it is made in
China. But America would still like to collect returns and that is through intellectual property. So, while
people’s jobs are disappearing, the corporate wealth is increasing and then, of course, all the details of
the rest of it carry on.

There are all these mechanisms of taking wealth from those who work, those who create, to those who
control through extremely coercive instruments of power.

War is globalization by other means

In Motion Magazine: Which is now further enforced by invading other people’s countries?

Vandana Shiva: I have said that war is another name for globalization because if you really look at
Iraq it wasn’t liberated. American soldiers didn’t come out winning. More of them have died since the
so-called war got over. But one thing did happen and that was that corporate America got to enter Iraq
and use American tax money in the process. Bechtel got a big contract. Halliburton got a big contract.
That is where the whole so-called reconstruction went. This is exactly what globalization does – (for
example) put the water of the world in the hands of Bechtel, Suez (Lyonnaise des Eaux), Vivendi
(Environment). Globalization is war by other means and war is globalization by other means.
In Motion Magazine: It depends on the policy of the leaders of the U.S. at the time?

Vandana Shiva: At this point it so happens America is the empire. But one thing we learned with the
British Empire is that empires rise and empires sink.

Published in In Motion Magazine March 28, 2004