Who Really Feeds the World? by Vandana Shiva

Author:Vandana Shiva [Shiva, Vandana]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: TEC003110 Technology & Engineering / Agriculture / Enology & Viticulture
ISBN: 978-1-62317-063-9
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2016-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

plants and animals in whole or any part thereof other than micro-organisms but including seeds, varieties and species and essentially biological processes for production or propagation of plants and animals.

In other words, the ruling showed that life and its biological processes (re)produce themselves and cannot be deemed as manufactured or assembled by an external force.

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Today, in addition to patents, new seed laws are being enforced across the world so that corporations can make farmers’ seeds and local diverse varieties illegal. These are laws of uniformity, enforced either through UPOV—the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, which allows intellectual property rights on plants in seventy-one member countries—or through seed acts that require seed registration.

In 2004 an attempt was made to introduce a seed law in India, which would have required the compulsory registration of farmers’ varieties. In response, we started a Seed Satyagraha, and the law has not yet been passed. Satyagraha means “force of truth” and was a word used by Gandhi to encourage noncooperation with unjust laws. In Gandhi’s words, “As long as the superstition exists that unjust law must be obeyed, so long will slavery exist.”

But there are many examples of how seed acts and intellectual property rights prevent farmers across the world from engaging in their own seed production. Take Josef Albrecht, an organic farmer in Germany, who was not satisfied with commercially available seed. He developed his own ecological varieties of wheat, and ten other organic farmers from neighboring villages took his wheat seeds. For saving, sharing, and planting his own seeds, the government fined Albrecht because he had traded in uncertified seed.

In Scotland, there are a large number of potato farmers. They could, until the early 1990s, freely sell seeds to other potato growers, merchants, or farmers. In the 1990s, holders of plant breeders’ rights started to issue notices to potato growers through the British Society of Plant Breeders, and made the selling of seed potato to other farmers illegal. In February 1995, the society decided to proceed with a high-profile court case against an Aberdeenshire farmer. The farmer was forced to pay £30,000 as compensation to cover royalties lost by the seed industry as a result of direct farmer-to-farmer exchange. Currently, laws in the United Kingdom and the European Union prevent seed exchange of any type.12

Seed laws for compulsory registration that are being pushed everywhere are based on the illegitimate restriction of people’s freedom in order to enhance corporate freedom and establish seed monopolies. Corporations are also manipulating governments across the world to introduce pseudosafety and pseudohygiene laws that make safe food illegal and declare hazardous food as safe. The Prevention of Food Adulteration Act of India was replaced by a Food Safety and Standards Act, which is now criminalizing street vendors, small neighborhood eating stalls, and farmers, while deregulating the biotechnology and industrial food industries. I have called it the “Food Fascism Act.” In the United States, the Food Safety Modernization Act is doing the same thing. Organic farmer

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