Vandana Shiva: Food and Water for All

Vandana Shiva: Why We Face Both Food and Water Crises
By Maria Armoudian and Ankine Aghassian, AlterNet.
Policy-makers are finally grappling with the growing global food and water crises that are upon us. While they grope for answers, Vandana Shiva reminds them that it was their wild economic schemes that created these crises in the first place.
The globalized economic structure is simply incompatible with the basic physics of the planet and the principles of democratic governance, she says. And until we align the economic system with those of the ecological system, the problems will only get worse. While many of Shiva's books address some aspect of this fundamental problem, one title captures it most succinctly, Earth Democracy, Justice, Sustainability and Peace.
Shiva is a physicist, author, director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology and Ecology and the founder of Navdanya.
AlterNet: Much of your writing and speaking has focused on our economic structure's incompatibility with the ecological functioning of the earth. Talk about that incompatibility.
Vandana Shiva: One aspect of the inconsistency is between the principles of Gaia, the principles of soil, the ecology, renewability, how the atmosphere cleans itself and the laws of the global marketplace. The global marketplace is driven by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the illogic of so-called "free trade," which is totally not free. [The result of this incompatibility] is the current food crisis: The more agriculture is "liberalized," the greater the food scarcity, the higher the food prices and the more people will go hungry.
Never has there been this rate of escalation in food prices worldwide as we witness now with the global integration of the food economies under the coercive and bullying force of the WTO.
AlterNet: You have said, in the past, that these activities are done in the name of improving human welfare. But instead, poverty and dispossession have increased. Where do we see this the most?
VS: We see the worst dispossession in the countries of the South -- tragically -- those countries that could feed themselves. India, for example, was food self-sufficient. We were able to feed our people with a universal distribution system, affordable food for all, and agriculture policies that put food first. Small farmers could make a living.
But a decade and a half of globalization's perverse rules have led to 200,000 farmers committing suicide because they can't make a living anymore -- all their money goes to make profit for Monsanto or Cargill. Meanwhile, with the economy's so-called growth, people are starving. Per capita entitlement to food has dropped in a decade and half from 177 kg to 152 kg per year.
This contradicts the false propaganda being spread about the reason prices are rising. They say it is because Indians are getting richer and Indians are eating more. Well, some Indians are getting richer, but they're not eating more. There's a limit to how much you can eat. And the handful of billionaires buys a few more private jet planes and builds a few more private mansions. [But in reality], the average Indian is eating less. The average child has a bigger chance today of dying of hunger. The Cargill's of the world have a stranglehold of the world's economy; they're harvesting super-profits while people die of hunger.
AlterNet: You talk about India being worse off, but many economists -- including those on the political left -- say that places like China and India are, overall, actually improving. But you say that is not true.
VS: It's not true. India, under the perverse growth of globalization, has beaten out Africa in the number of hungry people. While we have 9.2 percent growth measured by GNP and GDP, 50 percent of our children have very severe malnutrition. Fifty percent of deaths for children under five are due to lack of food. That's about a million kids per year.
AlterNet: That is a considerable change that I don't think the world is seeing.
VS: That's because the media orchestrates every analysis and interpretation. They would like this crisis to look like a success of globalization, and they would like to offer more globalization as a solution. In fact, the World Bank has said there should be more liberalized trade. Before the WTO was formed, we had protests with 500,000 farmers on the streets of Bangalore in 1993 to say that this is a recipe for starvation, for destroying agriculture, self-reliance and food security. And the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs -- before the WTO was born -- had a press conference to say that globalization will make food affordable for all.
They forget that food ultimately is not produced in the speculation and commodity exchanges controlled by Cargill in Chicago. It is produced by hard working women and men working with the soil and sun. And if you destroy the capacity of the people to work the land and the capacity of soil to produce, you're going to have hunger. The tragedy is that the hunger of today and the rise of food [prices] is the result of globalization policies, and it is being implemented on a global scale. Unless we bring local food sovereignty and "food democracy" back into the picture, we will not have a solution to this.
WATER

AlterNet: We should also talk about water scarcity. There are major water wars occurring and considerable concern about the future of water. Do you think that water scarcity is being created largely by the phenomenon of privatization or is it resulting from climate change and other such phenomena?
VS: Water scarcity [is] being created by non-sustainable systems of production for both food and textile. Every industrial activity has huge water demands. Industrial agriculture requires ten times more water to produce the same amount of food than ecological farming does. And the "green revolution" was not so green because it created demand for large dams and mining of groundwater.
Industrial agriculture has depleted water resources. In addition, as water has become polluted and depleted, a handful of industry saw water as a way of making super-profits by privatizing it. They are privatizing it in two ways. The first is through buying up entire civic, municipal distribution. The big players in this are Bechtel, Suez and Vivendi.
And interestingly, wherever they go, they face protests. Bechtel was thrown out of Bolivia. Suez wanted to take Delhi's water supply, but we had a movement for water democracy and did not allow them to take over. But there's a second kind of privatization, which is more insidious -- and that is the plastic water bottle. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are leading in this privatization. But in India where Coca-Cola was stealing water, I worked with a small group of village women, and they shut their plant down. Across India, these giant corporations are taking between 1.5 to 2 million liters of water a day and leaving behind a water famine.
AlterNet: Given what is happening as a result of climate change, would we still face a water crisis without these practices?
VS: We would not be facing water problems if people have been allowed to have their economies, to practice sustainability and to live their lives. Every step in the water crisis is due to greed. As the water becomes increasingly scarce, the corporations who control the water become richer. It is the same with food. As food becomes scarce, the corporations controlling food become richer. That is the paradox of the global economy. Growth shows up in the profits of corporations while in the real world, the resources from which they make their profits, shrink.
AlterNet: You have also suggested that these same economic principles are incompatible with the sustenance of democratic governance.
VS: There are many levels at which a market economy called corporate globalization has to kill democracy in order to survive. Take the birth of World Trade Organization (WTO), an undemocratic institution. There are no negotiations on the rules it imposes. These rules are created undemocratically. Then, every time these rules are implemented, there are protests. Normally in democracy, if the will of people say change this policy, governments change. Unfortunately, governance today is run by corporations not the people. Every step of deepening the market economy is a depletion of democracy. Our very governments have been stolen from us, and we have to use democracy to counter these rules, this paradigm, and the absolute destruction [it causes].
Note: Vandana Shiva is one of the seminal thinkers and doers of our times. See more stories tagged with: seeds, monstanto, india, farming, water, food, vandana shiva

Making a Killing from the Food Crisis

Making a killing from the food crisis

The Real News

Devlin Kuyek: "Right now Cargill is making approximately $471 000 an hour in profits"

Tuesday May 13th, 2008

While people around the world are suffering from hunger and protesting the rise in global food prices, major grain traders, such as Cargill, are reporting big profits. Making a Killing from Hunger, a report by international NGO, GRAIN, says that the global food crisis is more than a food shortage or a price blip, it's a structural meltdown, resulting from globalization and neoliberal policies.

Devlin Kuyek is a researcher on global agribusiness for GRAIN, an international NGO which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity. He is also the author of The Real Board of Directors: The construction of biotechnology policy in Canada, and Good Crop/Bad Crop: Seed Politics and the Future of Food in Canada .

Transcript:

VOICE OF ZAA NKWETA, PRESENTER: Global food prices continue to soar, causing hunger and rioting in many parts of the world. But according to a recent report by international NGO GRAIN, there is another side to the story. The report, "Making a Killing from Hunger," says big profits are being made by several food corporations and investors. Devlin Kuyek, a lead author of the report, finds that the problem is more than a food shortage or a price blip; he says the food system is experiencing a structural meltdown.

DEVLIN KUYEK, RESEARCHER, GRAIN: The food crisis is essentially a structural problem. It goes much deeper than this kind of perfect storm scenario that a lot of people have been painting. It has to do with three decades or more of structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization policies that have forced many countries to dramatically alter their food production and to shift to becoming, in many cases, import-dependent. So there's been this move to push production into places that they say is more efficient, and the advice given by agencies like the World Bank and the IMF has been to say, "Let others look after your food production. They can do it more efficiently. You focus on other things." There's the example of Haiti and how it used to be, three decades ago, self-sufficient in rice. It was told to open up its markets by the IMF and its donors. Cheap rice flooded in from the US. It undercut local production; a lot of that declined. So Haiti is put in a position where now it's dependent on imports from the US. And when you get this escalating market prices, of course, the country and large numbers of poor people who live there are extremely vulnerable. And we're in a situation today where the food crisis is really not even a problem with supply; it's more a problem of price, and people can no longer afford to buy it. You've got a shift also in production, the type of agricultural production. Governments have pursued policies to industrialize their agriculture, and this has made agriculture highly dependent on inputs, so whether it's seeds, chemical fertilizers, or machinery, and often dependent on petroleum for production as well. And in the midst of all this, in the global food system that's been created over the last few decades, we have some corporations that sit in the middle of it all and who really have taken a stronger and stronger position in managing the food system. They're the ones who are profiting immensely now from this food crisis. So even though we're in a situation where millions of people can no longer afford to fulfill their basic food needs, you have corporations making record profits, a company like Cargill, which is one of the world's biggest grain traders. There are only a small number of companies that control the trade in basic cereals, and Cargill's one of these companies. And its profits are higher than they've been in years. Right now, Cargill's making approximately $471,000 an hour in profits. Cargill's also one of the world's largest fertilizer companies. And so in a time like this where countries are desperate to increase their food production, Cargill and other fertilizer companies are taking advantage of this and boosting up the prices that they're charging for the fertilizer. I mean, in some cases they're doubling, almost tripling the prices that they were asking for last year, which were already high. Cargill's profits from fertilizer are also topping, you know, $2 billion from last year alone. And then, of course, you have companies like the seed companies, the Monsantos and Syngentas and Duponts, who have been taking an increasingly large share of the global seed market through policies of privatization, through the expansion of GM agriculture, genetically modified crops, and they too are raking in enormous profits. Monsanto's profits, I think, from last year are up about 44 percent. This is a situation we're seeing across the board. It's hard to imagine how you could look at the current scenario and say, well, we need more globalization, we need more trade liberalization. It makes much more sense in this kind of situation that countries get back to basics and start looking at how they're going to satisfy the food needs of their people and not be so dependent on exports and on the world market, not be dependent on a market where corporations can essentially make as much profits as they want, especially in crisis times, when the need is higher and the demand is higher, when people are more desperate. I think if anything we need a complete rethink of the model that we're in.