An influential scientist and passionate writer, Vandana Shiva has spent years fighting for the protection of biological diversity and against GMOs.
In the 1970s, Vandana Shiva, barely in her twenties, joined the Chipko non-violent women's movement, which had been founded to halt deforestation in the highlands of northern India. To protect the forests, women would form a circle and embrace the trees; Vandana Shiva thus became a "tree hugger", following the example of Amrita Devi, who three centuries earlier, in 1730, had embraced a tree to prevent the soldiers of the Raja of Jaipur from cutting down the forest that was home to the Bishnoi community.
Since then, Vandana Shiva's influence has grown ever greater, and she has become one of the world's most important activists — the "rock star of the anti-GMO movement", as American journalist Bill Moyers once described her. With her proud gaze, her maternal smile and the ever-present bindi on her forehead, Vandana Shiva has become the embodiment of the commitment to protecting agricultural biodiversity, which she considers intimately linked to cultural diversity — both threatened by multinationals and genetically modified organisms. "Growing and conserving biodiversity is not a luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative," the Indian activist has stated.
Vandana Shiva, who holds a master's degree in physics and a doctorate in philosophy of science, has over the years been awarded an extraordinary number of prizes and honours. In 1993 she received the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Prize; in 2003 Time magazine named her an "environmental hero", while Asia Week listed her as one of the five most powerful communicators in Asia.
In 1982 she founded the Research foundation for science, technology and ecology, and in 1987 she established the organisation Navdanya, a movement for the defence of food sovereignty, seeds, biodiversity and the rights of small farmers, which promotes organic agriculture and fair trade.
Shiva has written numerous essays, including "Monocultures of the Mind: Biodiversity, Biotechnology and Scientific Agriculture", "The Violence of the Green Revolution" and "Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge", and sits on the boards of many organisations, including the World future council, the International forum on globalisation and Slow food international. In 2004 she founded Bija Vidyapeeth, the Seed University, an international college where, among other things, seminars are held on organic farming techniques and natural pesticides.
Vandana Shiva's commitment is directed above all at the battle against GMOs and agri-food multinationals. "Biodiversity is the fabric of culture; there cannot be cultural diversity without biological diversity. We must defend the uniqueness of what we eat and of what we use to feed our children. In the same way, we must defend what we are from the global monoculture," she wrote in her essay "Monocultures of the Mind". Shiva began to oppose the genetic modification of seeds in the late 1980s, after attending a conference on biotechnology.
Since then she has travelled the world giving lectures on the ethical and ecological impacts of genetic engineering in agriculture. At the heart of her work is the idea that seeds must be free, and a rejection of corporate patents on seeds. Shiva believes that by engineering, patenting and modifying seeds, multinational corporations such as Monsanto are attempting to impose "food totalitarianism" on the world. "Indigenous seeds have been displaced by new hybrids that cannot be reproduced and must be purchased every year at high cost," she has written. "Hybrids are also highly vulnerable to pest attacks."
The Indian activist fears that GMO cultivation damages ecosystems and biodiversity, and that GMO vegetables are harmful to health; she also argues that the very idea of genetically modifying a living organism goes against natural laws. "They want to patent life, and life is not an invention," she has stated.
Like Gandhi, Shiva calls into question many of the goals of contemporary civilisation. She is particularly critical of the negative impact of globalisation, which the Mahatma too considered lethal to the survival of small local communities. "Globalisation has created a new slavery, a new holocaust, a new apartheid," Shiva has written. "It is a war against nature, against women, against children, against the poor. It is a war of monolithic cultures against diversity, of the large against the small, of war technologies against nature."
She believes that the development model adopted by Western countries is not sustainable and that, on the contrary, it creates debt and poverty, disrupting the balance of nature's vital cycles. In this way, cultures and traditions are gradually dismantled in the name of competitiveness and profit. "What we are doing to the poor in the name of globalisation is cruel and unforgivable," Shiva has stated. "This is particularly evident in India, where we are witnessing disasters unfolding in full caused by globalisation."
For Vandana Shiva, Western industrial civilisation — male-dominated and patriarchal — made the mistake of excluding women from nature, creating a form of development "devoid of the feminine, conservationist and ecological principle". For this reason, she considers it essential to place women and ecology at the centre of the debate on modern development.
Indian women, who for Shiva are custodians of an original knowledge — derived from centuries of familiarity with the land — and who sustained the economy in rural areas, have been particularly affected by the exploitation of natural resources, which has become violence against nature and against women.
Vandana Shiva plays an important role in the global ecofeminist movement. In 1988 she published the book "Staying alive: women, ecology and survival", which helped to redefine perceptions of third-world women, and she launched a global movement called Diverse women for diversity, in defence of biological and cultural diversity.