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Vandana Shiva isn’t a writer to pull punches. By the twelfth page of ‘Stolen Harvest’ (2000), she announces a damning verdict on Western food production:
“Industrial agriculture has not produced more food. It has destroyed diverse sources of food, and it has stolen food from other species to bring larger quantities of specific commodities to the market using huge quantities of fossil fuels and water and toxic chemicals in the process.”
In Israel, 2 percent of the population works as farmers, mostly in hi-tech, irrigated, chemically treated and globally traded agriculture, worlds away from the 70 percent of the world’s people who farm for a living.
Shiva, an Indian physicist turned food activist, is certainly not the first writer to tackle the ethics of the sprawling, mechanized, global food economy. However, as a voice from the Third World, she paints an unusually intimate portrait of the traditional wisdom and customs that stand to be swept away by the forces of genetic engineering, trawler fishing and commoditization.
‘Stolen Harvest‘ focuses on three major changes in food production: The Green Revolution, which used industrial methods to get more human food out of crops on land; the Blue Revolution, which used aquaculture to raise fish catches fourfold in the last 40 years, and the White Revolution, the feedlot approach to dairy and meat farming which has raised milk and meat yields. To Shiva, each “revolution” has come at tremendous cost.
One result of the Green Revolution in India has been replacing locally grown mustard oil with imported soybean oil, or with soybean oil produced domestically but from seeds sold by agricultural giant Monsanto. Shiva explains what used to be the norm of mustard oil production before “Soy Imperialism:”
“Indigenous oilseeds, being high in oil content, are easy to process at small-scale, decentralized levels with eco-friendly and health-friendly technologies … The bulk of oilseed processing is done by over 1 million ghanis (expellers) and 20,000 small and tiny crushers that account for 68 percent of edible oils processed … Women in the bastis, or slums, usually buy small quantities of mustard oil extracted on their local ghani in front of their eyes…Yet these community-based systems of food and health safety were quickly dismantled in the name of food safety in 1998, when local processing of mustard oil was banned and free imports of soybean oil were installed in response to a mysterious contamination of Delhi’s edible-oil supply.”
She further mentions that Indian children don’t eat soy oil, and that the soybean, which has a lower oil content than mustard seed, is poorly suited to the national needs.
The next area Shiva turns to is the ocean, where on the Indian coast large shrimp trawlers have arrived to supply the appetites of Western elites who fancy prawns. As they scrape the ocean floor with dragnets, the ships annually kill off as many as 150,000 turtles living on the seabed. They also pull up loads of fish not suitable for sale, which are dumped back into the sea either dead or dying as “bycatch” that can be as much as a third of the weight of the total sellable catch.
Where shrimp are not caught wild, they are bred in saline aquaculture pools that leach into the underground aquifers locals rely on for drinking water, and the coastal farms destroy acres and acres of mangrove trees that usually safeguard the seaside villages from heavy winds.
“The environmental destruction caused by intensive shrimp farming is one of the major factors for its spread in Third World countries, even though the main consumers of shrimp live in affluent countries. In country after country where commercial shrimp fishing has been tried, it has proven unsustainable. For this reason, this industry is known as a ‘rape and run’ industry.”
Shiva is not against all aquaculture or fishing. However, she points out the vast difference between the modern, industrial approach and the traditional methods of fish farming, in which fishermen used hand-crafted nets and woven mats, or combined a rice paddy with prawn cultivation. Whereas the traditional methods have lasted for 500 years, industrial fish catching for export has made life unlivable for many of India’s coastal villages.
Finally, Shiva looks at the livestock industry in India, which has moved toward industrially raised and slaughtered cows for export. She first grounds the readers in the significance of the traditional Indian cow, which eats crop waste and pastures on uncultivated land:
“Indigenous cattle do not compete with humans for food; rather, they provide organic fertilizer for fields and thus enhance food productivity. Within the sacredness of the cow lie this ecological rationale and conservation imperative. The cow is a source of cow-dung energy, nutrition, and leather, and its contribution is linked to the work of women in feeding and milking cows, collecting cow dung, and nurturing sick cows to health.”
And yet, seeing the cow as a milk machine or a meat factory apart from the bigger agricultural picture, as Western cattle raisers do, moves away from the Indian culture of the sacred cow, and generates the industrialized “mad cow.” Remarking on the Indian Al-Kabeer slaughterhouse, which kills 184,200 buffalo a year, Shiva writes that those same animals could have provided for the fuel needs of 900,000 average Indian families of five.
“Al-Kabeer has provided just 300 jobs,” Shiva writes. “In contrast, small-scale slaughtering for local consumption creates livelihoods and allows all parts of an animal to be used. …In large-scale industrial slaughterhouses, all these byproducts are treated as waste and become a source of pollution.”
Some of Shiva’s revelations were new to me, such as the far-reaching consequences of mass-producing shrimp. I also was shocked at how in world trade negotiations, India’s request to limit environmental damage through new regulation banning export of raw animal hides and fur was struck down as illegally limiting free movement of goods.
Finally, it was particularly sobering to read about the future of Indian wheat processing, which at press time was comprised of 3.5 million family run wheat shops providing 40 million tons of wheat flour a year. According to Shiva, less than 1 percent of flour consumed in India comes in packaged brands, because Indians prefer local and fresh ingredients. However, American-based food giants Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland seek to capitalize the industry through mechanization and branded packaging, which Shiva says will eliminate the livelihoods of at least 100 million Indians in the wheat industry.
A weak point in Shiva’s book is that despite her firm belief in traditional food raising techniques, she does not relate to the high birthrate in many of the poorer countries whose agriculture she seeks to defend. I do not know if a country such as India, or Egypt, or Israel for that matter, could feed its populace which has grown thanks to artificially abundant food, as well as medical advances that have reduced infant mortality and extended life expectancy. Whatever Shiva may make of the world’s outsize human population, she does not deal with the consequent increased demands on the resources of food.
Yet the book is a valuable look at how Western corporate agribusiness, which strips away animal and crop diversity by growing monocultures of soy, wheat, shrimp and cows, is also reducing the human diversity of the world by making traditional food raising costly or impossible. As consumers of rice, non-labeled genetically engineered soybean oil, and frozen shrimp, in Israel we certainly enjoy the fruits of industrialization in India and around the world. Stolen Harvest shows that this has come at great cost.
Thanks to Green Prophet writer Daniella for this review.
http://www.greenprophet.com/2008/12/stolen-harvest-vandana-shiva/
Vandana Shiva's Stolen Harvest:The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply
reviewed by Dalia Sapon-Shevin
Vandana Shiva's Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, 2000. 146 pp. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, $12.60 (paper).
In Stolen Harvest, Vandana Shiva personalizes an already intimate topic—the food which becomes our very selves. Shiva's first book on genetic engineering, Biopiracy, used a more academic style of critical analysis of the biotechnology industry. A renowned thinker in the areas of opposition to globalization, defense of traditional culture, eco-feminism, and genetic engineering, she confronts and details a multitude of food-related issues with her trademark passion and down-to-earth style.
Stolen Harvest as a whole reads best as a collection of poignant yet separate case studies. Although the stories are powerful and well-researched, the work lacks cohesion. For those who have looked into the issues surrounding biotechnology, agricultural policy and global food supply extensively, this book may best serve as a refresher course. Those new to the subject, however, will find the book a well- told and galvanizing wake up call. While Biopiracy was more theoretical, in this work Shiva takes us right into the homes and fields of the poor people of India.
The picture that Shiva paints is a bleak one. As corporate agribusiness becomes more and more centralized, it becomes sharply apparent that genetic engineering is the technology of absolute control. Not only does the industry refuse to label genetically engineered produce in the United Sates, it punishes severely those who label their products as GE free.
Centralized control of agribusiness has always spelled trouble for American farmers. Genetic engineering is only the most recent incarnation of corporate control over agriculture. With the rise of biotechnology, we are seeing the virtual return of tenant farming at its most basic, most insidious level. In America in the 1930's, an ecological disaster was propagated by profit-driven agricultural practices. Landowners forced the farmers to grow soil-depleting cotton year after year, despite farmers' warnings that to stop crop rotation would be devastating to the soil. The "dust bowl," traditionally touted as a "natural" disaster, was in fact heavily impacted by the practices of the landowners.
With the rise of biotechnology, we are seeing the virtual return of tenant farming...
In the farm crisis of the 1980's, agribusinesses effectively maintained their monopoly over farmers by selling seed, fertilizer and pesticides at inflated prices which drove farmers deeper and deeper into debt. Thousands of farmers lost their land, and the control of the banks became near-absolute.
Change the year to 2000, replace the landowners or the banks with Monsanto and the tenant farmers with all the farmers of the world, and you have the makings of a disaster hitherto unknown to our planet. The scale of control only grows, as farmers become dispossessed of their land, their equipment, and finally, the genetic makeup of the actual life form itself.
Although Stolen Harvest is primarily about India, the parallels to America are easily apparent. She demonstrates that corporate methods of control follow predictable patterns, and these very attempts at homogenization compel us to make our resistance that much more strategic. We must learn to anticipate the moves of big business in order to successfully subvert them.
In the chapter entitled "Soy Imperialism," Shiva traces a fascinating and infuriating path through the replacement of the mustard seed with the soybean in Indian agriculture, and the subsequent destruction of local food culture. The contrast between the decentralized, ecologically low-impact and cheap processing of mustard oil and the costly, unhealthy and expensive (albeit government-subsidized) soybean oil is striking. Not only did the subversion of the traditional food culture degrade the lives of the people of the North Indian Belt, in 1998 it proved fatal. In Delhi, batches of oil were tainted with adulterants such as diesel, waste oil and industrial oil. Forty-one people died, and an estimated 2,300 were affected. Mustard-oil sales were widely banned, and shortly thereafter India announced that it would institute the free import of soybeans. The government then banned the sale of all unpackaged edible oils, effectively destroying a traditional method of autonomous food production and economic independence. The government control over oil became absolute.
According to the health minister of Delhi, the adulteration was not possible without a mass conspiracy. It was done is such a way that it could kill people quickly and conspicuously, and an immediate ban on mustard oil and free import of soybeans became inevitable. The Rajasthan Oil Industries Association claimed that a "conspiracy" was being hatched to undermine the mustard oil trade, and felt that the "invisible hands of the multinationals" were involved.
Once again, no cost proved too high in the pursuit of absolute control, especially not that of mere human life.
Shiva demonstrates in her well-researched yet highly personal narratives the tried and true corporate methods of disempowerment, rip-off and control. Industries move into economically depressed areas bearing false promises of creating more jobs. Without fail, those same corporations time and again heavily technologize and centralize their operations, further depressing the economy and devastating the natural environment.
The recurring theme of the book is a stern demonstration of the cycle of destruction set in motion when the inability or unwillingness to think holistically informs corporate practice. When we buy a hamburger at McDonald's, its price in no way reflects the true cost of its production. Shiva's powerful narratives allow us to hold a piece of food in our hands and, in a thought process we have never been taught to follow, lets us trace backwards the story of the land it was grown on, the cultural and economic toll on the ecosytem and people, the sacrifice endured so that it might be made, the full weight of environmental devastation present in its existence. The seed and the plant become so much more than the sum of their parts, they become symbols of all that we stand to lose, all of the life concentrated in its smallest, most basic structure.
Shiva offers little in the way of strategy for resistance, but the book ends on a hopeful note. The final chapter, "Reclaiming Food Democracy," gives brief sketches of worldwide resistance and constructive alliance building, detailing seed-saving and field burnings in India, crop-pulls in Ireland and England. Resistance to corporate control and support for sustainable, community-based farming are on the rise. Labeling, import bans and supermarket bans are being discussed and carried out all over Europe.
The Biodevastation 2000 conference marked a rapidly growing American consciousness towards these issues, and a multitude of creative, multi- level resistance tactics have sprouted. From giant puppets to billboard improvement, from lobbying for labeling to a greater push towards community supported agriculture (CSA), from crop pulls to guerrilla gardening, resistance is blooming everywhere.