I want to thank all of you for the work that you do. That's the only reason that I'm here. You are the heroes of the future. And I felt that it was worth it putting a little more CO2 in the atmosphere, coming here to tell you that about the work that the organic movement is doing. When I say organic I mean organic in the original term, that which is related, that which is based on connections. I think it is, and that's why I spend all my time practicing it, developing policies around it, fighting the false paradigms that kill its possibility. I think it is the most revolutionary activity of our times and you are the ultimate revolutionaries, you and organic farmers everywhere. So I hope that there will be a bigger fiftieth anniversary and then in one hundred years I hope we don't have any toxic agriculture.
In the wonderful skit that was just performed by the staff, one of the issues that came through was the elections not talking about agriculture. Well the Indian elections didn't talk agriculture either. The Indian elections were fought on a slogan that was created by an advertising company. The Indian elections are being affected by the US style, where the media and ad companies are supposed to relate candidates to the people. And the slogan that an American ad company thought would be very appropriate for India just now was 'India Shining'. And if you picked up during the months of January, February, March or April, every newspaper and magazine had a cover story on 'India Shining'.
But of course all of India wasn't shining. We have our share of information technology millionaires and billionaires. We have our share of millionaires who have become millionaires by doing nothing. This is the most amazing period in human history -- where the richest people are the ones who don't lift a limb. And then of course they pay huge amounts to gyms to lift a limb. Ghandi had a wonderful saying about this. He said any earning that does not involve physical labor is a sin. For those who work earning their livelihood in India, which is 75 percent of India, wasn't shining. It wasn't shining because the package of India shining was the package of globalization, the package of even deeper industrialization of agriculture, the idea that all the worlds agriculture should modeled on US style agriculture -- where farmers become so insignificant in the population that they don't count in the census anymore. We had a state -- well actually the state is still there, just the chief minister isn't. We had a state -- the state of Andhra Pradesh and its capitol Hyderabad -- where the chief minister wrote in his vision of 2020 that he thought the name should be Cyberabad. That's where the Microsoft Bill Gates was at, they even have a Bill Gates university. And Mr. Nider, the chief minister of the state, thought that all the farmers of the state were surplus farmers and he shaped policies to treat them as surplus farmers and repeatedly said he wanted to see, by the year 2020, 2 percent people on the land.
Well, policies in a country where 75 percent of people are on the land basically mean farmers are going to be pushed deep into debt, deep into misery. In the last 5 years we have lost 25,000 farmers because of -- the word they use is 'suicide'. We decided recently we're not going to talk about these as farmer suicides, we'll talk about these as genocide by an industrial agriculture system. It's those farmers, farmers like that, who were the quiet, silent pain in India, who voted. And they voted the India shining slogan out of power. We have a new government and of course the corporations that gain from industrial agriculture from globalization, the corporations that wrote the rules from the World Trade Organization, try to keep finding ways to keep putting forth their old agenda.
The farmers got into debt because of two factors. You know the factors. I don't need to tell you the details: the rising cost of production in an industrial system, and the falling prices in a globalized system. The combination of high costs of production and low prices is what leads to farm closure, indebtedness, unpayable debt and ultimately results in devastation in the shape of genocide against farmers. The new policies that I'm having to deal with now in our movement basically say we're going to do a lot for farmers and our new policies are supposed to be farmer centered. But just as corporations have to reinvent their agendas, we in the organic movement have to constantly reinvent our own agendas and responses. The corporate agenda was oh, farmers are deeper in debt, give them more loans. One trillion rupees (one dollar equals about 45 rupees) of new loans were pushed. It's like pouring more water on a person who is drowning! And I have to write to our Prime Minister in exactly that language.
There are only 2 interventions that you need to make reduce the cost of production: 1) by promoting sustainable agriculture and organic farming and 2) by regulating prices so that farmers can make a living. That's the only job that governments have. Not creating subsidies that go via farmers back to agri-business. The issue is not more loans; the issue is not higher subsidies. I don't know how many of you have been keeping track of this pretend new round that was launched in Geneva [she is referring to the WTO here] on the 31st of last month, but this was the attempt to pick up what they could not complete in Doha because of the collapse of the negotiations in Cancun. And the most significant event of Cancun was the Korean farmer who said WTO kills farmers and in a way his death was meant to illustrate that. The recent so-called framework negotiations have not moved anything by an inch. They keep talking about a new round because I believe the framework text that was agreed to on the 31st was nothing but a face saving text to keep the WTO in place. Because no one has agreed, the third world countries haven't agreed to high levels of dumping by forced lowering of tariffs and removal of import restrictions. And of course the more powerful players, Europe and the United States, have not agreed to lower subsidies. They can't. They can't because industrial agriculture can not be done without subsidies.
How can you do the agriculture that puts in ten times more resources, energy, finances, than what the system gets out? By definition industrial agriculture is a negative economy. Whether you look at it in financial terms, energy terms, or resource terms. And a negative economy can only be kept afloat by some form of a subsidy structure and a public support structure. Of course the corporations that created and invented subsidies now aren't happy with the fact that some of the subsidies keep some of the farmers on the land. So they want to shift to decouple income support, and to decouple income support in my view is the ultimate insult to sovereign producers. Because decoupled income support basically means we are going to treat you as unemployed. Not as having the best livelihood that this planet can offer any human being, but we will treat you, initially -- remember we have such a term in this country as 'deficiency payments' -- as if the farmers were somehow deficient and the government was somehow making up for the deficiency. And then Cargill concocted this language of decoupled income support which, if I had to really define it, I would call it the mechanism for lowering farm prices even more recklessly. Because decoupling basically says the cost of production will never be reflected in the prices of production.
I think there are three major myths of our time that we have to deal with on a daily basis as members of the organic movement and practitioners of organic farming. The biggest and worst myth is the one that started me on this path. It's the myth that I addressed in this book called The Violence of the Green Revolution. Not because I was looking for it, I was looking for a very simple explanation to a very puzzling phenomenon. The puzzling phenomenon to me was that in 1984 India, with the Green Revolution which has been celebrated, written about, and still gets written about, was a land at war. We lost 30,000 people -- which is like six 9/11's -- in the violence of terrorism and extremism in the 80's in the land of the green revolution, including one of our ex-Prime Ministers Indira Ghandi.
The Nobel Prize for Peace was given in 1972 to Norman Borlaug for the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution was supposed to be the recipe for peace. And here was the land where it had been implanted as the most successful project now reduced to a land at war. It had become a bloody revolution. I was very troubled. I was very troubled by the fact that something that was supposed to have generated peace and prosperity was actually generating discontent, anger, violence, and literally a civil war within our country. So I started to go to Punjab and every third or fourth trip of mine I had to cancel because a bomb had blown up a bridge or the train I was supposed to go on couldn't travel because the train ahead of ours had just been blown off the tracks. The kind of stories you hear about terrorism every where else were daily stories. And yet for 2 years I did keep going back to figure out what was happening. And that's what kept me on the track of industrial agriculture, just to explain the phenomenon of terrorism in the land of affluent Punjab: highest per capita income in India, highest rich land, highest credit and loans from the bank, highest anything that goes in the typical measure of prosperity. And yet this is the land of war.
This is the kind of statement that would come out of gatherings of farmers who happened to be Sikhs because this is the land of Sikhs. The Sikhs are the religious community that wears the turban and follow the Guru Nanak's teachings. And they have an annual gathering just like you have an annual gathering for NOFA; they have an all-Sikh convention every year. Let me just read out a few lines about what was driving them to the violence of that time. The hard earned income of the people or the natural resources of any nation or region are falsely plundered when the goods produced by them are paid at arbitrarily determined prices while the goods bought by them are sold at high prices. And in order to carry this process of economic exploitation to its logical conclusion the human rights of a people or nation are crushed. Then these are indices of slavery of that nation or region of people. Today the Sikhs are shackled by the chains of slavery. They did not seek that bondage into chemicals, into debt, into buying tractors, into prices being fixed by Delhi into cultivation patterns being fixed by Washington. They did not see that as liberation even though the paradigm of industrial agriculture repeatedly sells industrial farming as liberation because they define liberation as breaking our connection to the earth. They don't have to renew soil fertility with the compost party [referring to the skit.] No mulch, mulch, mulch, instead: urea, urea, urea, npk, npk, npk.
And if you see the ads that is exactly what they are saying. You see ads for Roundup telling women: "you break free of weeding your land". You see the ads for synthetic fertilizers. In the early days they were all about how cow dung stinks. And how urea is white and how cow dung is black. You even have racism in fertilizer! Can you imagine? In talking about fertilizer, I don't know how many of you are aware that Monsanto gave me a cow dung award at the Johannesburg summit. They of course gate crashed into the press conference we were having to announce that the entire ten years after the Rio conference was becoming a fraud. The person came with this huge lump of cow dung. I said: "Oh, an organic farmer has brought me cow dung". Then I saw the person who was carrying it and I said: "Oh my god, you are the Monsanto representative". And he says: "Yes, we are giving you this". They didn't call it cow dung, they called it bull shit. It's the same thing. The soil doesn't make a difference between the bull or the cow. In India we worship both. By the time they are in the soil, they are the future fertility. We worship them as Lakshmi the goddess. Cow dung is worshipped, its Lakshmi. We have a special day of worship of cow dung around the time that we have our festival of lights Gopaldhan Puja. Go is guy, cow, cow 101. You need to add this little bit into your cow 101 for next year. Gopal is the dung of the cow. Dhan is the wealth in the dung of the cow. Gopaldhan. Because Monsanto wasn't giving me the cow dung award because they don't, they haven't been through your 101 courses. And they were basically saying that by promoting organic and critiquing genetic engineering I was actually going to push the world to starvation.
Monsanto might have illusions about how single companies end up addressing the food issue. I don't. I know the food issue is addressed by millions of our fellow beings, millions of microorganisms, amazing cooperation between plants and millions of people who work the land as partners with all the other species. And the biggest argument that has to be dealt with is this absolute lie. And that's why it's been my work over the last, now it's literally two decades because 1984 was the year I started to work on the Green Revolution. 1984 was the year we had the Bhopal disaster, when 3000 people were killed in one night because of the leak of gas from a Union Carbide pesticide plant. It is a plant that made carbides. 30,000 people have died since then. If you just take two aspects, 3000 people dead in Punjab and 30,000 dead in Bhopal. These deaths were because of weapons of mass destruction being used in agriculture. I don't mean it metaphorically and I don't mean it because your government uses those words all the time. These were meant to be weapons of war and when the wars were over the companies that made them wanted to find an alternative and agriculture became that alternative. It was their version of swords into plowshares except they were doing it with toxics, which don't change their nature.
Again and again and again we've been told that the reason that the toxics were the first Green Revolution, and now the genetically engineered seeds are the second Green Revolution, as it is repeatedly referred to, unnecessarily, is because without them we can't feed the world. That's the biggest lie of industrial farming because industrial farming is the most inefficient producer of food in the world. It's a system that uses far more resources than it produces, in terms of food. I notice you've been seeing the film on factory farming of salmon. I did studies on industrial shrimp farming. You feed the industrial shrimp fifteen times more fish than the shrimp produces in terms of protein. In industrial agriculture you use 300 units of input to produce a hundred units of output. Then there is an ecological system that you all work on, or is the traditional system of countries like India and China. You use five units to produce the same hundred units. It's an inefficiency that wastes resources 67 times more.
And no matter which way you look and which system you look at, monocultures with external inputs always have lower productivity. But they manage to present it as higher productivity by playing the trick of what I have called the monoculture of the mind. They reduce diversity to a monoculture and look at a single commodity -- put everything under soybean and GM corn and say we got more. Of course you get more GM corn and soy if you only plant GM corn and soy. It doesn't mean you grew more food than the system that grew the beans and had the cows and had the fruit trees and had the sheep and had the goats. There are FAO studies and I have the reports. I'm going to read the reports. They're going to be on Joni's table. I'll leave them for the NOFA secretariat so those of you who want to get more copies can get them. But the FAO studies show that small farm agriculture can produce up to three thousand times more than large-scale farms. Because farming is not like making automobiles. It's not like setting up a General Motors plant where the economy of scale reduces the costs. No. In agriculture, economies of scale increase the costs. And that is why you need the erasures of costs in terms of decoupling, in terms of subsidies, in terms of all the new gimmicks that are created to put public money not in supporting healthy agriculture but put public money to keep a totally unviable unhealthy non-sustainable system going.
I talk very often about the fact that industrial agriculture has been an intensification of capital and an intensification of chemicals. It was not about producing more food; it was about using more chemicals. That was what it was designed for, it was all it has achieved. There is an amazing system that is spreading around the world in paddy [rice] cultivation. And it started from farmers of Madagascar. I don't know how many of you have heard of the system of rice intensification. But we've just had a gathering at our farm in Dehra Dun, a gathering just like this. We had invited representatives from different states in India, organic farmers, and said we can host about a hundred of you. That's how much floor space we have. Three hundred turned out and they had to just squeeze tighter. You know their beds were literally neck to neck. They slept in the cowsheds, they slept everywhere. They slept above the water-harvesting tank. They slept in the dining hall. But, everywhere, organic farmers are on their own. No institution is spreading the system. From Madagascar it has spread across India. And the yields in Madagascar have jumped from two tons per acre to thirteen tons per acre without the use of chemicals, shifting to compost, and reducing water and irrigation by 60 percent.
One of our colleagues from South India grows sugar cane and he was giving his results and showing how just by being an extremely sensitive observer of how the plants are growing he has tripled the yields on sugar cane farms by getting rid of all inputs and getting rid of irrigation.
And the issue really is that plants are a bit like children. You don't get better children by pumping them with more money. I remember when the Columbine disaster happened -- you know, the shooting at the Columbine school. I was making a trip to this country. It was quite a few years ago and one of the senators that has something to do with the India caucus was sitting next to me on the flight and we started to talk. I said: "Don't you worry about these shoot outs in your schools?" and he said: "Yes, I'm extremely worried about it because we as a culture have obviously learned how to make a lot of money and to spend a lot of money, but I think we are forgetting how to bring up children, how to prepare the next generation for life.
And that's why I'm so thrilled in NOFA at all of the lovely sounds of babies in this hall. It just says that these babies, and these children and these teenagers, are going to be the real -- I guess probably the only -- wholesome human beings around. You can run workshops on how to be a human being. All of you, this amazing future generation that's absorbing all of this. Plants in the same way don't respond to chemicals. What plants respond to is the right amount of sunlight, the right amount of nutrients in a balanced way and just the right amount of moisture
That irrigation of the green revolution has led to all of the dams, all the water logging, all the salinity, all of the canals, all the depletion of ground water. It was all to feed the chemicals. Water as a carrier of chemicals, not a provider of water. Plants don't need that much. My calculations have shown that the Green Revolution uses ten times more water to produce the same amount of food that good healthy ecological agriculture uses. It was a water wasting revolution and the entire crisis across the world is because of those aspects of industrial farming. And the Green Revolution is nothing but industrial agriculture sent to the third world with all of the World Bank aid, all the US aid, all the Rockefeller aid. It was just given the name the Green Revolution so that it could avoid the Red Revolution that was spreading.
We need an agriculture that recognizes that agriculture produces health, agriculture doesn't produce commodities. And in a way, therefore, a farm has to be recognized as a conserver of resources, as a health provider, as a community holder, as a culture conserver -- all of those functions. Looking at farmers in that way would not allow what is going on worldwide-- in this country or the countries of the south, the countries like my country where artificially prices are being reduced to make farming unviable. The most viable activity, the activity that is necessary for humanity today and in the future is the oldest activity human beings have engaged in. It is suddenly in this period being made unviable
Industrialized, globalized agriculture is really premised on the assumption that there will be no farmers. If you look at the writings, if you look at the images of precision agriculture from the satellite computers working the irrigation systems, the sprays, robotic farming, they have it all worked out. Except so far they have not been able to give us health through that system. They've given us tremendous hazards, but not health. And they've sold the hazards by a second lie. That lie is that industrial farming produces cheap food and organic farming produces expensive food. Organic farming can not be afforded. It's not that organic farming leads to costly food, it's just that the price of industrial commodities are a lie.
I think it was during the skit that someone talked about earning enough so that the farmer can live. I think any system -- no matter what your producing -- needs to cover the cost of production and it needs to cover the well being of the producers in the context of the society in which they are producing. US farmers live in US society; you have a very different cost of living. Indian farmers have a different cost of living. That has been the problem. The problem really has been the fact that, using all kinds of subsidies, farmers here are uprooted from the land and then that same system tells you don't have to produce food anymore, and tells us we don't have to produce food anymore.
If you look at the World Bank recipe for the third world they keep telling us you don't have to produce food anymore. No, now you should grow vegetables to export to the rich north. That's the market access language in the WTO. I always say: "No, we want our brothers and sisters who are growing vegetables in the north to find the markets in their countries". Our farmers should find our markets in our countries. There will always be certain things you can't grow. You can't grow coffee - import it. You can't grow pepper - you have to take it from us and that's fine. But those are always the tiny bits of spice of life, not staple foods.
The problem with industrialized globalized agriculture is that its focus is to take staple food production out of the control of producers. And that is why they keep pushing agriculture into vegetables, into floriculture -- forget the seed, forget the corn, forget the grain. Leave that to Cargill, ConAgra, and ADM. The ConAgras will continue to need the 400 billion dollars in subsidies that grow in Europe and the US and OECD countries because without it the system won't run for them. The system just can't run. Cargill therefore wrote the World Trade Organization rules.
The agriculture agreement is a fascinating agreement because it has nothing to do with agriculture at all. It has 3 clauses: one on market access, one on export competition, one on domestic support. Nothing about food production, nothing about land, nothing about soil, nothing about farmers except an exit clause: the green box that they talk about. If you look in the foot notes in the WTO agreement, the green box appendices actually say countries can subsidize their farmers for exiting from agriculture, not for staying on the land, but for getting off the land. They call it the exit clause. They call it producer retirement. Resource retirement basically put an end to farming. And that's exactly the change we want to see in our lifetimes. That farming will be what farmers do. Food will be what people working the land with love produce. Food will not be this anonymous bundle of toxins that reach our tables.
I'm sure you all read this lovely book Fast Food Nation. Did you read the part on the strawberry flavor? It is half a page of chemicals just to get the flavor of strawberry into ice cream that doesn't have the strawberries. What an effort! Can you imagine? Except the effort gets made because someone makes a lot of money in the flavor industry. And that is what we're really up against with the entire trading system. It is based on people making money both ways. I mean Cargill and the World Bank told us we couldn't save the wheat we harvested. I think this was around the year 2000, maybe a little earlier. They said when we harvest our wheat and store it we are wasting government money, we are increasing the budget deficit, we should sell it off. Of course if you sell off the wheat after harvest you have to bring it back. So Cargill bought the wheat at $60/ton and sold it internationally at $240/ton. And then three months later we were short of wheat and we were re-importing it and Cargill was selling it back to us at $240/ton. Just work it out. They made $180/ton over 2 million tons one way and $240/ton over 2 million tons the other way. India lost, the producer lost, the poor lost because the wheat became more expensive. Only Cargill gains.
Industrial agriculture with the WTO rules is no more about producing food. It is about producing profit. And everywhere in the world the actual production of food is going down. And sometimes I get up in the middle of the night and I think: "Oh my God, at this trend, if all of us working to stop this trend are not able to, not only where will good food come from but where will any food come from?" Because it's a system in which the trade is driving the system. But they're not producing. They're locking farmers into debt; they're getting farmers off the land. But they don't really have a system of production. They have a system of commerce, they have a system of commodification, but they don't really have a system of production.
And they have a system in which trade is becoming what my friend, the European parliamentarian Caroline Lucas, has called the great food swap. Every country is exporting the same thing and every country is importing the same thing. My friend Gene just gave me an apple when I arrived and it had a label from New Zealand. I know in India we are being dumped on by Washington apples that are subsidized hugely. Meanwhile our apple growers up in Himachal can't sell their apples. The Washington growers are probably also threatened by the New Zealand imports. It's not that the Washington grower will stay safe.
It's a system of mutually assured destruction. Let me just give you a few figures about this great food swap. In 1996 Britain exported a hundred and eleven million liters of milk and imported a hundred seventy-three million, and yet they talk about the milk oceans in Britain. It imported 49 million kilograms of butter and exported 47, and yet we talk about butter mountains. The mountains of butter are based on importing, not on production. Now this jugglery with imports and exports is leaving no one with any idea of how much food we have in the world today. The Food and Agriculture Organization until about 4 years ago used to give production data. It now only gives trade data. So you could actually be having less food and trading more and imaging that there is more food in the world then there is. So you have a lie coming from the trade side.
I do not think that industrial products are equal to organic products, and in the global market they should not be treated as that. We have in fact started to talk about artisanal food, just like you have artisanal craft; you have lovely woolen weaving. You pay more for it. You happily pay more for it. You have hand crafted shoes. You have embroidery done by hand and not by machines. Everytime something is hand crafted everyone knows more went into it of love, not more of resources but of care, more attention, more beauty, more of quality.
And that shift from the obesity paradigm of mass and weight and extension to the quality paradigm is really the revolution we are making. We are shifting agriculture from the obsession with quantity: quantity traded, quantities produced of single commodities, to quality of life of the people who grow the food. The quality of life of those who eat it and the quality of the products themselves.
In any case, if the full cost of production were honestly taken into account, it's a very costly system that neither the planet nor the richest society can afford. Can you imagine if the entire cost of production was reflected in the prices? No industrial farm could sell anything. If the chemicals that go in to it were reflected not just in the price that had to go in them but the environmental cost and the health cost they carry. The water that is embodied in industrial farming, and even more importantly the whole issue of food miles: the miles that are traveled to take food, or the CO2 that is emitted.
Edward Goldsmith, who is the founder of the Ecologist, the most important and the earliest environmental journal that we have, has taken on climate change as a very important issue. He was sharing with me these figures that he has worked on. Industrial farms generate .04 tons per hectare of carbon emissions compared to non-industrial agriculture which only emits .007. Roughly 7 times more carbon dioxide emissions in the production. And then you add the food miles in transport!
The Danish environmental ministry had done a calculation that for every kilogram of food traded globally there is 10 kilograms of carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere, which goes to destabilize the climate and bring rain at wrong times, bring drought, bring hurricanes, snowstorms. All the weather instability that is proving not just a threat to agriculture, but a threat to life itself.
I believe finally that the very big challenge we have is the challenge that industrial agriculture can not live its next phase without privatizing and owning the very gifts of this planet. That includes biodiversity and it includes water. I started the organization that I work through now on organic farming, called Navdanya, as a movement to save seeds in 1987 when I first came to know of the GATT agreement. In time it became the WTO, but the GATT agreement basically had a treaty called a Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights agreement treaty. And it was trade related because it wasn't trade related! India had said this is not about trade. US lawyers, the Washington lawyers, put TR before IP and now it's trade related by definition. So you have to include it in the World Trade Organization.
Well there is a part of this treaty, Article 27 3B, which actually forces countries to have private monopolies on seed and biodiversity and patent material. That's the day I went back home and said this is one thing I do not accept and I will work in my country and world wide to not accept it: the idea that life is an invention and therefore can be treated as property and therefore royalties can be collected from farmers, including royalties collected after contamination by genetically engineered seed.
I know you had workshops on these cases that Monsanto has initiated against farmers. We started to organize back in 1990, 1991, 1992. Half a million farmers coming on to the streets to say just one thing. When the British tried to monopolize salt, Ghandi said: "Salt is a gift of nature. We need it for our survival; we will not obey your salt laws. We will make our own salt, we will continue to make our own salt." Exactly in the same way seed is a gift of nature. It has been evolved by ten thousand years of the brilliance of farmers' innovation. We will not treat it as your property. We will continue to save it, share it, exchange it freely as the common collective heritage of the farming communities.
This pledge, this commitment that we take, every farmer that works with us, any consumer who buys organic food through us, has to make this commitment. They can't become members of Navdanya unless they pledge to not respect the patenting of life. And to boycott consumption of products that are linked to it. For us it is doubly important. For us it is particularly important because so many of the crops we have evolved are now being patented.
Besides the fact that patenting of life is unethical in and of itself, its doubly unethical when the resources that have been involved by communities of the south are then patented as monopolies and inventions of companies like RiceTech in Texas. They claim to have invented the basmati that is famous from my valley. And the patent on basmati basically said they had invented the plant, its height, the grain, the size of the grain, the elongation properties of the grain, the aroma -- because it's an aromatic rice -- the aroma in the rice and even methods of cooking.
Rice is something you learn how to cook when you are a 6 year-old kid. Especially in our kind of culture. It is easier than chapattis, you know chapattis. Chapattis are tougher; you graduate to chapattis later. Rice comes first. While we're talking about chapattis, our friend Monsanto patented an ancient Indian wheat variety. It's European patent is 0445929. There are three US patents that I am working with the Center for Food Safety to challenge. We have challenged the European one. The fascinating issue is Monsanto has got out of genetic engineering wheat, it has got out of the European wheat market, but it has not abandoned the wheat patent. And when I filed the case in the Indian Supreme Court, the last line in the plea was: "We don't want to see a day when we say the prayer 'give us this day our daily bread' as a prayer to Monsanto."
Because the patent is not just for the wheat, it is for all products from the wheat. Its for chapattis, its for roti. ConAgra by the way has a patent on atta. It has a patent on atta flour. Now flour is atta in India. So in effect it is like flour flour. It's a bit like when you go into Starbucks they say chai tea. But chai is tea. It's like tea tea. So ConAgra has this flour flour patent and the invention is, believe me, they invented the fact that if you put wheat through any equipment, cracked wheat will come out the other end and then if you put cracked wheat back into that equipment, flour will come out the other end. And they got a patent last year from the United States patent office!
We challenged neem -- WR Grace had that patent. Neem is a wonderful ecological pest control product from the neem tree. We spent 6 or 7 years challenging these patents. But we do it because, each time we do it there is an example set that biopiracy is happening. And everytime we do it there is a defensiveness in the system. It takes a lot out of us, but we are not willing to give up
And I'm sure you're not willing. Because the wonderful thing about fighting dishonest power, which has unleashed a war against the planet and farmers and producers of the world, and to do that through organic farming by creative, constructive action is you don't have to stop. It's such fun anyway. Every day is meaningful. You get up in the morning not terrorized about how you're going to face that office today because the farm invites you.
But even more importantly I do believe the organic movement is holding the germplasm of freedom in its hands. For a few years now, both with movements as well as with governments, I keep saying the way to take our next step is to build more and more freedom zones. Zones in which we do not admit toxic poisons into our food systems. Zones in which we do not allow genetically modified seed to come in. Zones in which we do not allow patenting of life, in which we see it as a human abuse and an abuse against species. Zones in which we do not allow privatization of our water resources.
These freedom zones are really building and spreading. I have a report. For those of you who want it or need it, please contact Julie. It's basically a report on GMO-free zones and how fast they are spreading around the world. It basically says on genetic engineering that citizens are voting for GMO freedom. But when we had this gathering of organic farmers in India, we called it Vasundhara. Vasundhara is the earth as a goddess, but the earth as a supporter of life. That's what the word means, a supporter of life. One of the pledges we took -- and the declaration of this real freedom should be up on our website, the Navdanya website or my website vshiva.net -- we called it the declaration of real freedom through the real Green Revolution.
These freedom zones are really building and spreading. I have a report. For those of you who want it or need it, please contact Julie. It's basically a report on GMO-free zones and how fast they are spreading around the world. It basically says on genetic engineering that citizens are voting for GMO freedom. But when we had this gathering of organic farmers in India, we called it Vasundhara. Vasundhara is the earth as a goddess, but the earth as a supporter of life. That's what the word means, a supporter of life. One of the pledges we took -- and the declaration of this real freedom should be up on our website, the Navdanya website or my website vshiva.net -- we called it the declaration of real freedom through the real Green Revolution.
It is those truly global values of love for the earth, love for all beings, love for each other, love for work, that is shaping the future. We got together, many of us got together in a commission that I chair. It's called the Commission on the Future of Food. I brought some copies of the manifesto that we wrote, Wendell Berry was part of it, the entire team at IFOAM was part of it, Greenpeace was part of it, someone -- I don't know how well he is known here, Carlo Patrine the founder of slow food -- was part of it.
Together we wrote… I'm not going to read out the principles in this manifesto but we actually drew up a manifesto on the future of farming. Not to say that this is what people should do, but to basically declare this is what we are doing. We are changing agriculture, we are changing its practice, we're changing its paradigm and we're not going to rest until we change the policies that make it marginal. Our dream is to make organic the only way farming is done because it is the only true way farming should be done.
Thank you.
This page was last modified on January 14, 2008 at 6:43:07 AM.