Sustainable Farming

Vandana Shiva spoke to a crowd of 500 in Classroom Unit 2 as part of the ESLP lecture series. She talked about local family farmers in India as part of the movement against corporate globalization. Her story fused two struggles which are usually seen as separate: sustainability and global justice. “You can’t have justice without ecology and you can’t have good ecological sustainability without justice.”

World Bank style neoliberal capitalism function under the principle that development involves getting people off the farm and into the capitalist workforce. It uses loans and debts to force countries to privatize land under the pretense of development. It is a new face to the old colonial project, which used military force to move people off family lands to labor to create wealth for the colonizers.

The myth capitalists use is that two hundred years ago European governments forced peasants off the land and consequently, those countries got rich. They use the story of Europe as the model for development for all countries. Shiva calls this ‘historical amnesia.’ “You didn’t get rich because you uprooted your peasants, you just got rich because you just went out and grabbed every country in the world.” Western wealth was built on and continues to be fed by the exploitation of labor and resources from the rest of the world.

Today, IMF programs blackmail countries into privatizing farmland and forcing local farmers to grow one crop. These programs are based on a second myth that industrial agriculture is necessary to produce enough food for everyone. Shiva gave statistics that showed how smaller farms were able to produce more. Small farmers are able to use every inch of the land productively by diversifying crops and returning nutrients to the land through crop rotation.

The Monsanto Corporation is the largest agricultural company in the world; it sells genetically modified seeds to small farmers. These seeds are supposed to produce higher yield crops and more wealth for farmers. But it doesn’t usually work out that way; when they start using GM crops, farmers are pulled into an intense cycle of dependency on the corporation. Each year they have to buy more and more expensive herbicide from Monsanto to maintain crop growth. More and more farmers are unable to keep up. Since the corporation came, 30,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide because of this debt. Monsanto keeps coming up with tricky ways to make more profits and control the world’s food supply. It has been selling seeds genetically modified to be sterile and produce only one generation of crops, to force farmers to buy new seeds every year. When these ‘terminator’ seeds cross-pollinate they make other plants infertile. The huge amounts of herbicide required for GM crops are poisonous to humans and local ecosystems.

Capitalism works by forcing people into dependence on capitalist markets. Developing sustainable community farming systems is crucial to achieving independence from the state and corporations. “Farming is not a past that can disappear, farming is humanity’s future.” Shiva and activists around the world are organizing to take back the land by supporting independent, organic farmers.

Education for Sustainable Living Program Lecture Series
Meets Mondays at 7pm in Classroom Unit 002

5/15 Winona la Duke and Paul Stamets
5/22 Evon Peter (Native Movement)
6/5 Adam Wolpert (Artist & Teacher)