Bija Swaraj not Bt Raj : The Future is Organic, not GMOs

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Farmers, first of all, are breeders. They might not have the lab coats that have come to define modern plant breeding, but their wisdom, knowledge and contribution is unquestionable. To be able to continue breeding, using their own seed,  is their first right, their first freedom and their first duty.

This right has been recognised in India’s Plant Variety Protection and Farmers Rights Act

“39 (iv) a farmer shall be deemed to be entitled to save, use, sow, resow, exchange, share or sell his farm produce including seed of a variety protected under this Act in the same manner as he was entitled before the coming into force of this Act”

All seeds bred by the public sector or by private corporations are based on varieties bred by farmers.

For the last 2 decades, Monsanto has forcefully monopolised the cotton seed sector with its Bt Cotton seeds, through illegal, illegitimate and corrupt means. It controls 95% of the cotton seed supply and collects royalties in the form of technology fees even tough it does not have a valid patent – because Monsanto introduced Bt cotton into India illegally, before India changed its patent laws (following a WTO – TRIPS dispute), and when we did amend our patent act we introduced clause 3 (j) clearly defining that biological processes are not inventions.

Keep Reading on Dr. Vandana Shiva’s Website

Seed Satyagraha (Civil Disobedience to end Seed Slavery)

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Read more: Download Seed Satyagraha Booklet

“Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people” – Henry Kissinger

“Control seed and you control life, itself” – Dr. Vandana Shiva

Humanity has sustained itself through organic agriculture for the last 10,000 years, working with nature, using nature’s inherent urge to grow, adapt, create diversity; selecting good seeds for nutrition, taste and resilience. Food is Organic and despite corporate efforts, 70% of the food people eat worldwide still comes from small farms. Organic can feed the world if it was allowed to create the abundance it can deliver instead of being criminalised.

Since the second world war, fought over the control of resources, Oil Companies and Chemical Corporations that were beneficiaries of the World Wars – like Monsanto – have influenced geopolitical policy (masquerading as food policy) to create peace-time demand for and dependence on fossil fuels and toxic chemicals in the global food system. A system waging war on nature and human beings forcing countries to use war chemicals and technologies in the name of agricultural innovation. A system that creates heavily subsidised chemical food and commodities that are incapable of nourishing humanity or protecting the planet and its vital ecological processes. A system that, by design, wastes 50% of global food and creates global hunger leaving a billion people perpetually hungry and 2 billion people suffering from food related diseases. A system that contributes 40% of green house gas emissions and is largely responsible for the climate crisis we face.

Within the last century, healthy, natural, organic food has been made more difficult to produce because of the chemical pollution, at first, and genetic pollution, more recently. A handful of companies have spread these toxics across our planet diverting US$ 400 Billion of public money to subsidise their high cost chemical commodities to make them artificially “cheap”. The costs of this “cheap” food are astronomical in terms of the health of people, the ecological damage it causes and it’s exploitation of farmers. If the true costs of chemical food were taken into account it would be unaffordable. Instead of subsidising chemical food and creating epidemics of food related diseases, public money, used for nourishment and the protection of public health through organic food would save us billions in health care. Denying people their right to healthy, poison-free food by manipulating laws, policy, science and the use of public money to impose a non-sustainable, unhealthy food is food-dictatorship.

This food-dictatorship has now grown to threaten our seeds, the source of all food. Without the diversity of open-pollinated, freely available, freely exchanged open-source seed humanity will not have food – we will only have toxic commodities.

Keep Reading on Seed Freedom

World Food Day October 16: Campaign for Climate, Food and Farm Justice

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Call to Action – BECOME AN ENDORSING ORGANIZATION TODAY

The industrial food system is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. Industrial agriculture practices, like Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), large-scale monocultures, overuse and abuse of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, fossil fuel intensive transportation and storage, all generate significant amounts of Greenhouse Gases (GHGs), not to mention underpin an inequitable and unhealthy food system.

Conversely, small-scale regenerative organic farming not only emits less greenhouse gases than industrial agriculture, including significantly less nitrous oxide and methane as compared to industrial agriculture, but has the potential to counter climate change by successfully sequestering carbon dioxide. Importantly, according to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, small farmers hold the key to doubling food production while mitigating climate change and alleviating rural poverty. In fact, recent studies by the GRAIN demonstrate small farmers already feed the majority of the world with less than a quarter of all farmland. The Rodale Institute’s White Paper, “Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change,” states that small farmers and pastoralists could sequester more than 100% of current annual CO2 emissions with a switch to widely available, safe and inexpensive agroecological practices.

However, small-scale farmers and producers unfairly bear the brunt of climate impacts, threatening their communities and livelihoods. The Global South, although emitting only a fraction of all GHGs, disproportionately suffers the impacts of climate change, leading to environmental refugees, widespread hunger and economic injustice. For too long, only those who have been responsible for creating climate change have had a seat at the policy-making table; it is time to ensure those most affected and those most able to create solutions are heard.

While it is critical to continue to support efforts to develop a sensible and far-reaching strategy for renewable energy in both the government and marketplace, it is equally important to address one of the largest emitters of GHG and unjust sectors in the global economy, the industrial agriculture system. Addressing climate change on the farm and food system can not only tackle the challenging task of agriculture generated greenhouse gases, but produce more food with fewer fossil fuels, while building a just and sovereign food system.  Our communities, our economy, and our families demand immediate action.

BECOME AN ENDORSING ORGANIZATION TODAY

A National Food Policy for the 21st Century

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Authors: Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, Ricardo Salvador, Olivier De Schutter

“Thanks to the productivity of our farmers, the United States has led the world in agriculture for generations. But it’s time to recognize that the challenges facing our food system have shifted; we need to do more than produce an abundance of cheap calories. Too many of our children are struggling with obesity and type 2 diabetes, while many adults struggle with chronic preventable diseases linked to diet, costing us more than $500 billion a year. We must commit not just to feeding but to nourishing our citizens, especially our children. We can do this by honoring our great tradition of small family farms, and by building a food system that works with nature while continuing to be productive and profitable. To that end, I’m announcing the creation of a task force reporting directly to me and charged with developing the nation’s first National Food Policy. This policy will be organized around the paramount objective of promoting health — that of our citizens and of the environment — at each link in the food chain, from the farm to the supermarket, to our schools, home tables, and even restaurants. With the development of this policy, we will demonstrate that the American food system can continue to be a model the rest of the world can follow.”

— America’s next president
A scenario for the State of the Union address, January 28, 2017

The Opportunity

The current and future well-being of the nation can be significantly improved by creating a National Food Policy (NFP). Such a policy, if properly conceived and implemented, will result in a healthier population, a reduction in hunger, mitigation of (and adaptation to) climate change, decreases in energy consumption, improved environmental conservation, rural and inner city economic development, a reduction in socioeconomic inequality, a safer and more secure food system, and savings to the federal budget, especially in spending on health care.

How could a single innovation such as the NFP possibly deliver on such a broad spectrum of our major contemporary challenges? Because these various issues are currently addressed through piecemeal and often contradictory approaches, whereas they are interlocking problems that can best be addressed through a unified and coordinated policy focused on their common denominator: the food system.

KEEP READING ON THE MEDIUM

Info Graphic: Family Farmers: Feeding the World, Caring for the Earth

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Family farming includes all family-based agricultural activities, and it is linked to several areas of rural development. Family farming is a means of organizing agricultural, forestry, fisheries, pastoral and aquaculture production which is managed and operated by a family and predominantly reliant on family labour, including both women’s and men’s.

Both in developing and developed countries, family farming is the predominant form of agriculture in the food production sector.

At national level, there are a number of factors that are key for a successful development of family farming, such as: agro-ecological conditions and territorial characteristics; policy environment; access to markets; access to land and natural resources; access to technology and extension services; access to finance; demographic, economic and socio-cultural conditions; availability of specialized education among others.



Family farming has an important socio-economic, environmental and cultural role.

Download the Info Graphic from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

FAO-Infographic-IYFF14-FamilyFarms-en

World Hunger: Ten Myths

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Authors: Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins

In troubled times, all of us seek ways to make sense of the world. We grasp for organizing beliefs to help us interpret the endlessly confusing rush of world events. Unfortunately, however, the two of us have come to see that the way people think about hunger is the greatest obstacle to ending it. So in this Backgrounder we encapsulate 40 years of learning and in-depth new research to reframe ten such ways of thinking explored in our latest book World Hunger: 10 Myths. We call them “myths” because they often lead us down blind alleys or simply aren’t true.

Myth one: too little food, too many people

Our response: Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world’s food supply. Even though the global population more than doubled between 1961 and 2013, the world produces around 50 percent more food for each of us today—of which we now waste about a third. Even after diverting roughly half of the world’s grain and most soy protein to animal feed and non-food uses, the world still produces enough to provide every human being with nearly 2,900 calories a day. Clearly, our global calorie supply is ample.

Even though the global population more than doubled between 1961 and 2013, the world produces around 50 percent more food for each of us today—of which we now waste about a third.

Increasingly, however, calories and nutrition are diverging as the quality of food in most parts of the world is degrading. Using a calorie-deficiency standard, the UN estimates that today roughly one in nine people is hungry—about 800 million; but adding measures of nutrient deficiencies as well, we estimate that a quarter of the world’s people suffer from nutritional deprivation.

Food scarcity is not the problem, but the scarcity of real democracy protecting people’s access to nutritious food is a huge problem. So, fighting hunger means tackling concentrated political and economic power in order to create new equitable rules. Otherwise hunger will continue no matter how much food we grow.

Keep Reading on Food First

Women and Biodiversity Feed the World, Not Corporations and GMOs

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The two great ecological challenges of our times are biodiversity erosion and climate change. And both are interconnected, in their causes and their solutions.

Industrial agiculture is the biggest contributor to biodiversity erosion as well as to climate change. According to the United Nations, 93% of all plant variety has disappeared over the last 80 years.

Monocultures based on chemical inputs do not merely destroy plant biodiversity, they have destroyed soil biodiversity, which leads to the emergence of pathogens, new diseases, and more chemical use.

Our study of soils in the Bt cotton regions of Vidharba showed a dramatic decline in beneficial soil organisms. In many regions with intensive use of pesticides and GMOs, bees and butterflies are disappearing. There are no pollinators on Bt cotton plants, whereas the population of pollinators in Navdanya’s biodiversity conservation farm in Doon Valley is six times more than in the neighbouring forest. The UNEP has calculated the contribution of pollinators to be $200 billion annually. Industrial agriculture also kills aquatic and marine life by creating dead zones due to fertilizer run off. Pesticides are also killing or damaging aquatic life.

Keep Reading on Common Dreams