February 25, 2011

Vandana Shiva on climate change and agriculture

In this important article summarizing much of her recent work, Dr. Shiva explains why biodiversity -- not genetic engineering -- can provide solutions to dangerous climate change as well as food shortages and record world hunger.

Climate Change and Agriculture
Biodiverse Ecological Farming is the Answer, not Genetic Engineering

"Industrial globalized agriculture is heavily implicated in climate change. It contributes to the three major greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the use of fossil fuels, nitrogen oxide (N₂O) from the use of chemical fertilizers and methane (CH₄) from factory farming. ...

"Industrial agriculture is also more vulnerable to climate change which is intensifying droughts and floods. Monocultures lead to more frequent crop failure when rainfall does not come in time, or is too much or too little. Chemically fertilized soils have no capacity to withstand a drought. And cyclones and hurricanes make a food system dependent on long distance transport highly vulnerable to disruption.



Genetic engineering is embedded in an industrial model of agriculture based on fossil fuels. It is falsely being offered as a magic bullet for dealing with climate change." ...

"Navdanya’s recent report titled, “Biopiracy of Climate Resilient Crops: Gene Giants are Stealing farmers’ innovation of drought resistant, flood resistant and salt resistant varieties,” shows that farmers have bred corps that are resistant to climate extremes. And it is these traits which are the result of millennia of farmers’ breeding which are now being patented and pirated by the genetic engineering industry. Using farmers’ varieties as “genetic material,” the biotechnology industry is playing genetic roulette to gamble on which gene complexes are responsible for which trait. This is not done through genetic engineering; it is done through software programs like athlete. As the report states, “Athlete uses vast amounts of available genomic data (mostly public) to rapidly reach a reliable limited list of candidate key genes with high relevance to a target trait of choice. Allegorically, the Athlete platform could be viewed as a ‘machine’ that is able to choose 50–100 lottery tickets from amongst hundreds of thousands of tickets, with the high likelihood that the winning ticket will be included among them.”

"Breeding is being replaced by gambling, innovation is giving way to biopiracy, and science is being substituted by propaganda. This cannot be the basis of food security in times of climate vulnerability."...

Read full article at Common Dreams.org or at Climate Story Tellers, "A gathering place for stories on all things global warming"

For more information on our site see: Women from Planet Diversity