Have you got 22 minutes to be inspired by a talk the likes of which you’ve never heard before? It contains sentences like this:
- If you take more than you need, then you are stealing.
- When you allow greed to be a virtue rather than a negative trait, it doesn’t just reward the bankers and CEOs, it changes the minds.
- Values that everything is an object, everything is a commodity, is what has transformed India into the capital of rape.
Spoken by Vandana Shiva at an international media conference in Germany attended by 570 journalists from 90 countries.
New Delhi based Indian nuclear physicist, philosopher, feminist, environmentalist, activist, author of 20 books, Shiva has been called “a one-woman movement for peace, sustainability and social justice”.
One of her main causes is to protect original seeds from being grabbed for exclusive patenting by the likes of the unbelievably powerful American Monsanto corporation.
She told the Global Media Forum run by Germany’s external broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, for 3 days earlier this month: “270,000 farmers’ lives have been taken with seed monopolies in cotton in India – 95% of the cotton is now owned and controlled by Monsanto – and they collect royalties, those royalties are paid by farmers through their very lives: 270,000 farm suicides concentrated largely in the cotton belt. So what we try and do is build alternatives.”
Other sentences I’ve cherry-picked from that talk:
- If we did an honest analysis of the real cost of industrial agriculture, the real cost of poisons in our food, the real cost of GMO’s, the real cost of monopolies on seed through patents, we wouldn’t be able to afford the system that’s destroying the planet, wiping out farmers – and farming is still the most significant livelihood on the planet and in my view the most significant livelihood for the future.
- Why are the shirts we buy so cheap? Because the farmers who grew the cotton were killed through debt; this was taken then to Bangladesh and China; and then the women get burnt in fires, and then you get cheap clothing, just like you get cheap food.
- Bad food is costing the world 4.3 trillion dollars through obesity. It’s not food. We need a new labelling: food and non-food. So much of what is being eaten is not worthy of being eaten.
- By encouraging farmers to use their native seeds they were actually producing more food.
- Human rights are a derivative of the earth, and I think that change is happening so fast, it’s so wide, which is why out of the blue an occupy movement can be created, of the one percent versus the 99 percent. And of course a surveillance system is being built to try and make sure that the 99 percent doesn’t have its way. But a one percent rule has never lasted. It must be 100% participation, not just of every human being, but every species on this planet, that’s the earth democracy we need to create.”
Another keynote speaker (scroll down) at that conference on the future of growth – economic values and the media, was 85-year-old American linguist, philosopher and critic of US government policies, Noam Chomsky, who is widely regarded as the intellectual father of the Occupy Movement.
On the current conflict in Gezi Park in Istanbul he commented that "the protesters are trying to save the last part of the commons in Istanbul from the wrecking ball of commercial destruction”. His theme was “A roadmap to a just world – people reanimating democracy".
You can hear and/or download Shiva's talk at http://soundcloud.com/dwgmf/ws55-closing-ceremony-mittwoch. I’ve also attached it here. I’ve seldom come across anything that made so much sense on so many of the issues people who visit our site care about.
The annual Global Media Forum is an event our shallow scandal-grubby duopolistic media would do well to send journalists to to immerse them in the issues that really matter in the real world.
