This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org,
The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman.
A shocking new report finds at least a third
of the Himalayan ice cap will melt by the
end of the century due to climate change,
even if the world’s most ambitious environmental
reforms are implemented.
The report released Monday by The Hindu Kush
Himalaya Assessment is the culmination of
half a decade’s work by over 200 scientists,
with an additional 125 experts peer reviewing
their work.
It warns rising temperatures in the Himalayas
could lead to mass population displacements,
as well as catastrophic food and water insecurity.
The glaciers are a vital water source for
the 250 million people who live in the Hindu
Kush Himalaya range, which spans from Afghanistan
to Burma.
The region is home to the most ice in the
world, after Antarctica and the Arctic.
And over a billion-and-a-half people depend
on the rivers that flow from the Himalayan
peaks.
We turn now to the world-renowned environmental
leader and ecologist, who was born in Doon
Valley in the Himalayan foothills, Dr. Vandana
Shiva.
She’s an Indian scholar and physicist, as
well as a food sovereignty and seed freedom
advocate.
Dr. Shiva is also an alternative globalization
author who’s written more than 20 books.
Her latest, Oneness vs. the 1% and Who Really
Feeds the World?
She founded Navdanya, “nine seeds,” a
movement promoting diversity and use of native
seeds.
In 1993, Dr. Shiva was recipient of the Alternative
Nobel Peace Prize, the Right Livelihood Award.
Vandana Shiva, welcome back to Democracy Now!
VANDANA SHIVA: My joy to be with you again,
Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with
us.
The title of this book, Oneness vs. the 1%,
explain.
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, oneness is the recognition
that, A, we are part of one planet, and we
are one humanity.
And unless we live with that consciousness
and shape every moment of our production and
consumption with that consciousness, we are
going to destroy ourselves, which we are.
The melting of the glaciers is one of the
very severe indicators.
The 1 percent, of course, is the symbol of
the concentration of wealth under the rules
of the neoliberal economies, that are basically,
on the one hand, turning every natural resource
into a war zone.
Even the Venezuelan issue is really a war
over oil.
But war over seeds, that’s my life’s work,
to keep seeds free, because they literally
are a war over control of seeds, by a poison
cartel of three—Monsanto and Bayer, Syngenta
and ChemChina, Dow and DuPont—all of them
with their roots in Hitler’s Germany and
finding chemicals to kill people.
No wonder they’re still killing people.
No wonder they’re killing our butterflies
and our bees and our pollinators.
And every indicator is showing we are not
just in a severe climate catastrophe; we are
in the sixth mass extinction.
And both the species extinction and the climate
catastrophe are two sides of the same coin.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s start with Monsanto.
Last month, India’s Supreme Court ruled
that Monsanto’s patent for Bt cotton seeds
is valid.
You’ve questioned if a seed is an invention
and can be patented.
Talk about what Bt cotton is and why this
matters.
VANDANA SHIVA: Amy, I was in the Supreme Court.
I’m an intervener in that case.
And Monsanto does not have a patent on Bt
cotton.
And the Supreme Court did not give it a patent
on Bt cotton.
The only way it could have done it is by striking
down India’s law, Article 3(J) of our patent
law.
And I had a role with our Parliament: to shape
the amendments after the WTO trips forced
us to amend our laws.
3(J) says plants, animals and seeds are not
human inventions, therefore they’re not
patentable, because a patent is only granted
for that which is invented.
So, what is the Bt cotton?
There are only two kinds of GMO seeds that
account for most genetically engineered crops
around the world.
One is a family of crops called Bt crops,
like Bt cotton—
AMY GOODMAN: What does “Bt” stand for?
VANDANA SHIVA: Bacillus thuringiensis, a soil
organism which produces an endotoxin, which
becomes a poison only in the gut of the caterpillar
family.
But in the plant, it’s a readymade toxin,
with a very broad spectrum of harm.
And it’s supposed to be a pesticide-producing
plant.
In fact, in the United States, it was approved
as a pesticide.
As a pesticide-producing plant, every cell
of the plant is releasing a toxin at very
high levels.
It’s supposed to control the bollworm pest.
The bollworm has become resistant, which is
in the nature of evolution.
Life evolves to overcome threats.
And the Bt does not—Bt cotton seed does
not have a patent, for the simple reason our
laws don’t allow it.
Monsanto was illegally collecting royalties
via Indian seed companies, because they couldn’t
do what they did in this country, which is
sign licensing agreements directly with the
farmers.
In India, they signed the licensing agreements
with the companies—with a lie that they
had a patent.
They signed on the U.S. patent, but India
is a sovereign country, and patent laws are
sovereign laws.
When they wanted to extract more royalties
and the price of seed jumped 80,000 percent,
this is the main reason why the suicide belt
of India, where now 310,000 Indian farmers
have committed suicide, it overlaps largely
with the cotton belt.
And 99 percent of the cotton seed is controlled
by Monsanto.
We have an anti-trust case in the Indian Competition
Commission saying 99 percent seed is a prima
facie monopoly.
Eighty thousand percent jump in seed, and
it doesn’t work to control the pests.
Farmers got into debt.
That’s the driver for farmer suicide.
When the Indian companies said, “We can’t
keep paying.
Our farmers are dying.
We can’t extract more royalties,” Monsanto
sued them, using patent law, infringement.
That’s when I was involved.
I was called to intervene in the High Court,
and then I intervened in the Supreme Court.
The attempt of Monsanto was to knock down
India’s law.
They failed.
Its control over media, that’s why it’s
so important to have Democracy Now!, Amy,
because the media is so totally in the hands
of the poison cartel.
They lied about what happened in the Supreme
Court that day.
AMY GOODMAN: What happened?
VANDANA SHIVA: They lost.
No, the Supreme Court said, “You go back
to trial.
It’s between two of you.
It’s not an issue of us knocking down the
law.”
They wanted to declare the genetically engineered
Bt as a chemical for which they wanted a product
patent, which means wherever it would have
existed, no matter where, it would have been
their property.
And the existence of Bt in the seed would
have been an infringement of their patent.
They totally lost with their agenda.
And the only way Monsanto has functioned anywhere
in the world, whether it be Brazil or Argentina
or their attempt in India, is illegally.
They are not just trying to shape law when
they don’t get their way.
They changed the WTO system by saying, “We
are the patient, diagnostician and physician,
all in one.
We have to prevent farmers from saving seeds.”
That’s what shaped my life.
That’s why for 31 years I’ve been saving
seeds and started Navdanya.
And I want to give to you, Amy, our love for
the seed, because when the suicides in the
cotton belt started—’til then I was saving
crop seeds, food crop seeds—I went down
and said, “I’m going to start a cotton
seed bank.”
Took a long time.
We retrieved native cottons.
We multiplied it.
Farmers grow organic cotton.
In the villages where the farmers are growing
organic cotton, Bt cotton has come down 60
percent.
And then we work with the Gandhi Ashram.
It’s 150 years of Gandhi’s birth anniversary,
and nonviolence was his dedication.
This is a nonviolent scarf, handspun, handwoven,
handprinted, with indigo, which was also at
one time—
AMY GOODMAN: Indigo.
VANDANA SHIVA: Indigo.
AMY GOODMAN: The dye.
VANDANA SHIVA: Dye.
You know, we used to have slave conditions
for growing indigo, and Gandhi led the first
satyagraha, the noncooperation, said, “We
would rather die than grow indigo.”
And that’s what triggered so much of the
freedom movement.
That’s with love to you for democracy, for
all life on Earth.
That’s democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: And this is being made by?
VANDANA SHIVA: By women.
AMY GOODMAN: In?
VANDANA SHIVA: In central India.
The central India is called Vidarbha.
It is the place where Gandhi moved to create
his final ashram, to create a totally democratic
society.
And for him, democracy began with economic
democracy.
You’ve got to produce what you need.
That’s why he pulled at the spinning wheel.
And for me, the seed is today’s spinning
wheel.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Bayer.
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, Bayer, everyone thinks
they began starting with aspirin.
They began, for Hitler’s Germany, making
Zyklon B, the gas that was used to kill millions
in the concentration camps.
They were part of IG Farben.
IG Farben was the cartel that was tried at
Nuremberg.
One of Bayer’s inventions is heroin.
AMY GOODMAN: Heroin.
VANDANA SHIVA: Heroin.
And it was called “heroin” because it
made you feel like a hero.
I think one future program you could do, Amy,
is how the devastation of our societies, how
the destruction of the economy of Mexico has
created the drug trade; how the devastation
of rural America, as well as the unemployment
in the industrial belt, has created the opioid
crisis; how Punjab, the land of the Green
Revolution, 75 percent youth are now drug
addicts.
So, Bayer bought out Monsanto.
Bayer bought—so, Monsanto today is Bayer.
And it’s a German company.
But these are global companies.
They have no home.
They have no loyalty.
They are accountable to no citizens.
All of them work through tax havens.
You know, if you know—I think it’s—which
is the place in America that’s a tax haven,
where all of the companies are registered?
Delaware.
Delaware.
All of—including Monsanto.
So, Monsanto was bought out by Bayer for the
simple reason that they wanted to erase the
name of Monsanto, which has become such a
dirty name.
But when I did this book, Oneness vs. the
1%, I wanted to really figure out, you know,
what are the stocks, what are the ownerships.
That’s when I realized that the majority
stocks in all the corporations that rule our
world are owned by the investment funds, which
is where the billionaires stock their money.
The biggest, BlackRock, the second biggest,
Vanguard, they were nothing 'til the 2008
Wall Street disaster.
Last year, BlackRock was $6 trillion—$6
trillion.
They lost 30 percent with one case, of Monsanto's
Roundup Ready causing cancer.
It’s a Californian case of Dewayne Johnson.
And the jurors ruled that—
AMY GOODMAN: Roundup Ready is the pesticide.
VANDANA SHIVA: Roundup is the herbicide that
kills everything, but it has been known by
the World Health Organization to be a carcinogen.
Monsanto attacked the World Health Organization,
like they attacked me, like they attack anybody
who speaks the truth and tells good science.
But a Californian jury has ruled.
And the day the ruling came, Bayer lost 35
percent.
So, when people feel, “Oh, these guys are
too powerful,” I say, “They’re just
three.
We are 300 million species.
We are 7 billion people.
We are more.”
And secondly, they are a bubble, that has
exploded with fictions of financial multiplication,
with rent collections.
Basically, Monsanto and Bayer are nothing
but rent collectors.
They are the lifelords of today, like feudalism
had the landlords.
They do no work.
They do nothing.
They don’t breed seed.
They make poison, and then collect rents.
I think we need a better world in terms of
how we grow our food.
AMY GOODMAN: So, chapter two of your book,
“The Money Machine of the 1%,” there you’re
talking about these hedge funds, these large
corporations.
VANDANA SHIVA: I’m talking about the large
corporations, but I’m also talking about
the mechanisms of the neoliberal economy,
which puts in place ways to make the money
machine keep growing, at the cost of life
of the people and the planet.
So, it’s not an accident that we are in
an ecological catastrophe, where IPCC, the
climate body, as well as the biodiversity
convention panel are saying that we have 10
years to change.
The money machine—I name it the “money
machine” to talk about the new ways in which
money is being created and accumulated.
Intellectual property rights and patents is
central.
It’s a rent-collecting system.
Not paying taxes is a second.
Look at Amazon, wanting to come to New York.
It destroyed India’s systems.
It’s destroyed India’s taxation systems
for its own facility.
And now—
AMY GOODMAN: How?
How?
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, they got the government
to create one uniform tax and to all be paid
on digital, on computers.
A little corner store in a little town cannot
do it.
They get wiped out overnight.
And meantime, the reason Bezos became richer
than Bill Gates is because of India.
And he’s acknowledged it.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain that further.
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, by changing the taxation
systems.
AMY GOODMAN: How did he change it?
VANDANA SHIVA: By putting influence on the
government of India, because just like there’s
a federal structure in America, and your taxation
system in Massachusetts is different from
the taxation system of Oregon, Oregon is different
from the taxation system in New York, they
made it one uniform GST.
Before that, Bill Gates—and I have a story
in there, how Bill Gates and the other IT
industry worked to get cash banned.
They called it the “war on cash.”
Now, 90 percent of India’s economy is cash.
Overnight, everyone lost their lifetime savings.
Everyone was made poor.
Everyone was made vulnerable.
Demonetization is what it was called, and
the GST.
These are the two things that are being debated
in our national election lead-up right now.
Bezos is now working with our dear Bill Gates.
They want a 0 percent duty—0 percent duty—on
e-commerce.
Does it mean that when they ship things, they
don’t ship goods?
No, they ship goods, but with zero taxation.
The person on the ground in a real local economy
will be paying a tax.
As it is, they have become more expensive.
The real economy has been made artificially
more expensive because of the cheating by
the money machine.
AMY GOODMAN: How did Bill Gates come to exert
such power?
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, as is known and is in
the book, Bill Gates did not invent anything.
The BASIC program was made by some mathematics
professors in a college.
The Office operating system was by a software
engineer, and he bought it for $50,000.
He’s built an empire by creating patents
on software.
And the first WTO meeting in Singapore gave
him tax concessions, which is why all the
IT industry moved to India.
The fact that Silicon Valley became India
Silicon Valley is because they could save
$40 billion annually by paying lower wages
for the same work.
It was an outsourcing of software, all for
Bill Gates.
With his accumulation of money and making
any communication system illegal, like the
communication system through real currency
and forcing digital payments, he’s the one
who gains, because all the software for all
the digital economy, he collects rents and
royalties on that.
And then he started to put some of his money
into philanthropy.
And everyone thinks, “Wow!
He’s such a generous man.
He gives so much.”
But I’ve done an analysis in the book.
Every place he gives to is his former future
markets.
I’ll give you a simple example.
So, the first generation of GMOs, the Bt cotton,
the Roundup Ready soy and Roundup Ready corn,
have started to breed superpests and superweeds.
So now they’re trying to get new GMOs based
on gene editing and gene drives.
In gene editing, not only is Gates financing
the research, he has created a company for
the patents.
It’s called Editas.
So, he will collect rents when gene editing
is pushed through.
And worse, in the United States, half the
farmlands are overtaken by superweeds.
The most important one is Palmer amaranth.
Amaranth is a sacred crop for us.
We eat it.
Now, the U.S. Defense system DARPA and Bill
Gates have joined hands for a new technology
called gene drives to push species to extinction.
And they want to drive the amaranth to extinction.
And there’s a footnote in that report saying,
“Oh, yeah, there will be a food insecurity
impact on India.
They eat amaranth.”
No, there will be a food security impact on
the world.
There is an—this is an acceleration of the
race to extinction.
It is immoral.
It should be made illegal.
AMY GOODMAN: A recent report by Oxfam India
reveals billionaire fortunes in India increased
by 35 percent last year as the poorest remained
in debt.
Globally, Oxfam found that billionaires’
wealth increased by 12 percent in the past
year, with the 26 richest people owning the
same amount of money as the world’s poorest
half, the world’s poorest 50 percent.
Economic inequality hits women and girls the
hardest.
This is Oxfam Executive Director Winnie Byanyima
speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos
last month.
WINNIE BYANYIMA: So, last year alone, we saw
billionaire wealth increase by $2.5 billion
every day, while the wealth of the bottom
half of humanity, 3.8 billion, was dropping
by $500 million a day.
… I’m here in Davos to call on governments
to wake up and take up their responsibility
and tax fairly, tax wealth and put money in
the public services that people need.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Oxfam’s executive
director.
Vandana Shiva?
VANDANA SHIVA: Yeah, Winnie’s a dear friend,
and I released the German version of their
report two years ago.
And they’re the ones who followed up the
Occupy movement’s 1 percent naming.
And they constantly release annually, at the
celebration of party of the 1 percent—right
now it’s a collapsing party—the Davos
meeting, where they show.
Now, can you imagine, every day, $2 billion
added to the wealth of the thieves, the stealers,
the casino players?
And not only are they accumulating more wealth,
they’re converting the real lives of people
into their wealth.
My work is on seeds, to prevent seeds from
becoming the wealth of these giants.
And Bill Gates has a very big role in pushing
GMOs in Africa, through the Alliance for the
Green Revolution in Africa, pushing patents
on seeds, against the laws, the sovereign
laws that countries like India have created.
But they are privatizing water.
He is part of geoengineering the extremely
false solution to the climate crisis, the
melting of glaciers.
And I remember in 2009 we did a study on the
third pole, on the Himalayan ecosystems, the
impact on climate change.
And all the pressure was put by the polluters
to say, “Deny that the glaciers are melting.
Deny.”
Our government flipped overnight to say, “They’re
not melting; actually, they’re increasing.”
So these new reports are extremely important.
And the Himalaya, Himalayan snows don’t
just support the people in the Himalaya; they
support half of humanity, because all the
rivers for the most densely populated part
of the world emerge from the Himalaya.
And the consequences of this are huge.
But the most important thing is, those women
in Ladakh, with whom I work, the Women’s
Alliance, they don’t use one drop of oil
or one ounce of gas.
They are totally in a renewable energy economy.
And they’re being punished.
That’s why climate justice is such an important
part of avoiding climate catastrophe.
AMY GOODMAN: So, how does it feel to come
to the United States?
Because what you’re saying, the denial of
the effects of climate change is very Trumpian.
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, sadly, in that case,
it was President Obama, because he flew into
Singapore to tell the governments, “Stop
pushing for legally binding emissions.”
He flew into Copenhagen after having received
the Nobel Peace Prize, and called the five
worst polluters—India, China included now—and
said, “Let’s get rid of the legally binding
convention.”
And that’s why Paris is merely an agreement.
It’s not the legally binding U.N. Framework
Convention with emissions that were legally
binding.
And it was in the middle of the negotiations
he announced, “We’ve come to an agreement.”
And that’s when Evo Morales, the president
of Bolivia, got up and said, “We were here
to fight for the rights of Mother Earth.
We weren’t here for the rights of polluters.
And all of us are negotiating inside the hall.
Five people get together and say, ’We’ve
come to an agreement to destroy the Earth.’”
That’s why he worked on the rights of Mother
Earth and called many of us to become the
drafting team for the draft declaration, Universal
Draft Declaration on the Rights of Mother
Earth, which is available for people.
And the work on the movement for the rights
of nature has grown out of that, out of the
failure of Copenhagen.
AMY GOODMAN: So you’re talking about 10
years ago, in 2009.
VANDANA SHIVA: Ten years ago, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: When President Obama flew into
Copenhagen at the U.N. climate summit.
VANDANA SHIVA: Which is the tragedy these
days, that the 1 percent money machine has
become so powerful that it actually controls
the political machine in a very big way.
And we know the elections of the U.S. was
Facebook handing over to Cambridge Analytica
the “technology” angle, and you got the
first artificial intelligence president based
on algorithms of hate—hate for women, hate
for blacks, hate for Muslims, hate for migrants.
Now, you can’t run democracy on the hate
machine.
And you can’t run democracy by the hate
machine being fueled through the divide-and-rule
policy of the 1 percent to destroy our oneness,
our solidarity, our recognition that we are
one humanity and can be strong when we fight
for the rights of the planet and for our basic
rights to food and water and livelihoods and
justice and democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: You are famous for describing
corporate control, challenging corporate control,
but then also coming up with alternative systems,
what you call food democracy.
Explain.
VANDANA SHIVA: Yeah.
So, we’ve just done a book on biodiversity,
agroecology and regenerative organic agriculture,
which is 31 years of our practice and research,
because I can’t see thinking separate from
action.
We find we can feed two times India’s population—two
times India’s population—by conserving
biodiversity, providing more nutrition per
acre, the more biodiverse the system, and
organic systems produce more nutrition.
Farmers earn 10 times more by not spending
precious money on chemicals and big machines.
And the Monsantos and the Bayers of the world
are imagining an agriculture without farmers,
farming without farmers, farming with drones,
farming with spyware in the tractors, farming
with robots, farming with artificial intelligence.
They’re talking about digital agriculture
where you don’t need people.
But that means no one to care for the land,
because agriculture means care for the land.
We need the Green New Deal, which is such
an amazing discussion in this country.
And the Green New Deal has to be to put more
people on the land, just like during the Dust
Bowl in the Depression.
Hands healed the Dust Bowl.
We need hands to heal the planet.
We have solutions to climate change, because
it’s only through taking the excess carbon
and the excess nitrogen out of the air, can
we heal the broken nitrogen cycle and the
carbon cycle.
Ecological farming, biodiverse-intensive farming
does that.
And we only need to add 2 percent, and 10
years we can solve the climate crisis.
With 0.5 percent organic matter, we can get
rid of the drought.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain exactly what you mean,
to the nonfarmer audience.
VANDANA SHIVA: So, the basic problem of climate
change is that the planetary boundaries have
been ruptured.
There’s a limit of cycling of carbon, of
nitrogen and other minerals and elements.
By taking fossil fuels out from underground
and burning them at a very high speed, 600
million years of nature’s work—20 million
years being burned every year—we are putting
too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,
which is why we have climate change.
We use some of this fossil fuel to then make
nitrogen fertilizers, which emits a nitrous
oxide, which is 300 times more deadly for
the climate.
You get rid of chemicals, you get rid of fossil
fuels, and you start doing organic, all that
excess carbon can be pulled back by the plants
and put back in the soil, which is why I wrote
the book Soil Not Oil.
When you put nitrogen-fixing plants, the pulses—you
know, everyone’s now talking of plant-based
diets, proteins from plants.
We did it in India forever with our lovely
dal, our pulses.
They fix nitrogen nonviolently.
You don’t have to blast fossil fuels at
high temperature to fix atmospheric nitrogen.
The plants have the intelligence to do it,
peacefully, and give us good protein, the
same way, while fixing the broken nitrogen
cycle, which if you look at the planetary
boundaries graph, the nitrogen cycle is and
the biodiversity system is the most abused.
And in every one of these problems, whether
it’s hunger or the chronic disease epidemic
or climate change or species—you know, the
pollinators on our farm are six times more
than the pollinators on the forest.
And now, every year, we offer a 1-month course
on the practice of biodiversity, agroecology
and organic food systems.
Everywhere, the world is being healed, with
a lot of solidarity, a lot of oneness, between
ourselves and the web of life, and a reclaiming
of that, our intelligence.
Intelligence will never be artificial.
Real intelligence is what makes us live.
Life is intelligence.
Intelligence is democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar,
environmental activist, food sovereignty and
seed freedom advocate, and alternative globalization
leader and author.
She’s written more than 20 books—her latest,
Oneness vs. the 1% and Who Really Feeds the
World?
This is Democracy Now!
I’m Amy Goodman.
Thanks for joining us.
