Vandana Shiva is still mad

by Alicia Kennedy

Published: 10/02/24, Last updated: 10/02/24

To Vandana Shiva, the Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate and ecofeminist, diversity is the rule of life. Overlooking the significance of biodiverse interdependence in the natural world has come with a high cost, and industrial agriculture has, in her perspective, committed a grave and heinous act of hubris by believing man-made interventions could somehow dampen the earth’s appetite for heterogeneity. “We degrade the planet, push species to extinction, make the planet unliveable because of climate chaos, and call this ‘progress,’” she writes in her latest publication, her 35th, “The Nature of Nature: The Metabolic Disorder of Climate Change.” This book looks specifically at how corporate power has ruptured the human relationship to land and food, and thus to human health — a relationship that must be repaired in order to stop climate change.

She describes this succinctly in chapter two, in which she criticizes a mechanistic view of ecology, one in which human inputs can create bigger “yields” that are worth any detrimental environmental impacts. Instead, she calls for an agroecological approach in which crops that help each other grow and add nutrients to the soil are planted together. “When we grow food in accordance with ecological laws, we regenerate the earth, her soil and biodiversity, her climate system,” Shiva writes, reflecting her long-held ecofeminist belief in earth-as-woman.

This might sound like what many big food companies are currently trendily touting as their “regenerative” practices, but Shiva insists this is merely greenwashing by these corporations of their same old practices. She calls them out by name early on in the book, writing, “Agribusiness, represented by ADM, Bayer, Cargill, Danone, Nestlé, Olam Agri, Syngenta and Google, which have systematically destroyed biodiversity in the soil and the environment, launched an initiative to mislead people into thinking that it will contribute to what it calls ‘regenerative agriculture.’”

In this book, as in previous ones, Shiva’s complex academic and activist background shapes her understanding and presentation of her ideas. While her undergraduate degree from Punjab University, from which she graduated in 1972, was in physics and she counts Albert Einstein as her major inspiration, she has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Western Ontario, where she also focused on physics. She became interested in working specifically on subjects of seed and food sovereignty in the 1980s, following a gas leak from a pesticide manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India. Through books and speaking, she has been influential ever since in advocating against genetically modified seeds and for small farmers, in India and abroad.

“When we grow food in accordance with ecological laws, we regenerate the earth, her soil and biodiversity, her climate system.”

Vandana Shiva

Her ideas have garnered her accolades and a large following, but Shiva is a controversial figure in some circles. A 2014 New Yorker piece written by Michael Specter criticized Shiva for being so dogmatically anti-GMO that she advocated for aid agencies not to send food to starving populations and, if they did, for the Indian government not to accept them. The 2021 documentary “The Seeds of Vandana Shiva,” documented the moment in her life when the New Yorker piece came out, interspersed with footage of Specter on a stage espousing the no-brainer brilliance of GMOs, revealing his own biases. The aid agencies still sent the food and the government accepted it, so one must ask, what is the real power of rhetoric? What is so materially dangerous about this woman, whose latest book has been released by Chelsea Green, a small independent publisher based in Vermont? According to a recently-exposed U.S.-government funded private social network that profiles, with personal information, those public figures who are against pesticides, such as Shiva and authors Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman, quite dangerous. 

Shiva has also come under attack for reportedly being paid well for her speaking appearances (I’m not sure this counts as a crime under capitalism) — but criticizing power and the Western belief in the endless upward progress of technology as a woman of color will never earn friends in high places.

One of the key ideas of “The Nature of Nature” is that Indigenous peoples, whose relationship with the earth works through “co-creation and co-production,” are the ones who have gotten things right. While Indigenous communities around the world control only 20 percent of land, she cites the statistic that they maintain 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity. Industrial agriculture claims to “feed the world,” but Shiva runs down the litany of what India, for one, has lost by focusing solely on the high yield of commodity crops:

“In India, we evolved 200,000 rice varieties, 1,500 mango and banana varieties and 4,500 varieties of brinjal. We bred our crops for diversity and nutrition, taste, quality and climate resilience. Today, we are growing a handful of chemically grown commodities which are nutritionally empty and laden with toxics; 93 percent of our crop diversity has been pushed to extinction through industrial agriculture. We are facing a severe crisis of malnutrition—India is 99th on the hunger index.”

The international, in Shiva’s view, is no longer intergovernmental but corporate — governments answer to the profits of a few corporations, rather than to the people, and this has not served us well in terms of the food supply and health of the land or humans. This has been a condition long in the making, and indeed, she’s been speaking out against genetically modified seeds on the basis of this corporate control, ownership, and pesticide dependence for decades. She includes her 1996 address at the Leipzig Conference on Plant Genetic Resources, presented with Maria Mies, in full, calling it “as relevant today as it was then” for its demand that global food security is too significant to leave in the hands of a few transnational companies whose only motivation is profit, despite overtures about “feeding the world.”

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While there is a lot of scientific and economic critique in the book, Shiva always brings the conversation back to food: to pulses (beans, chickpeas, lentils, etc.) as the true pulse of the world and culinary heritage in agroecological systems where they’re grown in a complementary way with vegetables and grains; to the ways in which women of society were once responsible for food processing that has now been outsourced to factories; and to the ways in which seasonality is stripped from food to the detriment and sidelining of local farmers working within their regional ecosystems. Highly processed foods, Shiva writes, also lead to diet-related diseases that she calls “foodstyle” diseases rather than “lifestyle” ones, blaming the food supply from which most people are disconnected for increases in cancer, diabetes and other ailments, including non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

She engages with some newer issues as well, taking aim at “fake food” and ecomodernists who believe that future foods like lab-made meat could solve the current woes of our food system, noting that, “Replacing one resource intensive and energy intensive industrial food system with another within the old paradigm is not the transformation of the food system that the people and the earth are seeking.” This might be the most compelling chapter in the book for its freshness and clarity, bridging the philosophy of her anti-corporate arguments into the conversations happening now around plant-based meats and cell-derived proteins.

Shiva has a polemical style that can be a turn-off for those who prefer their nonfiction with a heavy dose of journalistic objectivity (for those readers I’d recommend Dan Saladino’s “Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them” for a similar philosophy). But sticking with a Shiva text can still be rewarding. “The Nature of Nature” is citation- and quote-heavy, demonstrating a commitment to being in conversation with contemporary discussion around our most pressing issues, like climate change, even while this topic is old hat for her. “The transition for climate action is a transition from oil-based thinking and living to soil-based thinking and living,” she writes, in the final chapter. There’s no question that she’s provocative — what remains to be seen is whether that can provoke necessary real change in the global food system.

Top image credits (from left to right):

  • Hand placing seeds by piyayaset/ Adobe Stock
  • Packets of seeds by yanadjan/ Adobe Stock
  • Photo of Vandana Shiva by Kartikey Shiva

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