GM-free Australia Alliance & Sydney Food Fairness Alliance Present
Dr Vandana Shiva: ecologist, scientist, philosopher, feminist
“PLANET ON A PLATE : EATING AND FARMING FOR OUR FUTURE”
introduction by farmer, author and educator, Joel Salatin
Teachers Federation Conference Centre, 37 Reservoir Street, Surrey Hills, Sydney
Friday February 20th 2015, 6 for 7pm until 9pm
As recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize and the Right Livelihood Award, Dr Vandana Shiva’s message is hope for the future. But we must change our profligate and unjust ways now.
At the start of the UN’s International Year of the Soil 2015, her recipe is for eating and farming within the Earth’s capacity to sustain all of the human family. This means respecting and nurturing the natural and agricultural seed diversity that is the fount of all life.
Dr Shiva explains that the globalised food industries based on agrichemicals, seed patents and genetically manipulated (GM) crops are unsustainable. The Earth cannot bear the hidden ecological, economic and social costs of high input industrial farm monocultures any longer. They depend on constant inputs of diminishing oil, phosphate, land and water resources.
The author of “Soil not Oil” says answers to the climate change crisis lie in the soil. In her 2015 New Year message*, Dr Shiva says: “The joy of growing food, the joy of eating food – that’s what the future is all about. And we know the corporations that have produced chemicals and GMOs cannot deliver on that promise.”
Only a transition to ecological farming systems and regenerative agriculture can secure food supplies for the future. Numerous studies show that low input multi-cropping, in harmony with natural processes, can feed us all well and in perpetuity. For instance, the UN’s IAASTD report is a plan for food and farm security, to end malnutrition and starvation among one billion poor people, including many in Australia.
Everyone has a right to affordable, adequate, appropriate and safe food. We must end the system in which food commodities are traded in global markets to where they are most profitable, not where they are most needed. Speculation drives prices up, denying access to food, eroding social equality and undermining democracy. Wasting 30% of all food produced world-wide to serve markets, not people, is unacceptable, Protecting the Earth and its biodiversity to reduce the many impacts of global climate change is also essential.
Dr Shiva is critical of the mis-allocation of scarce research resources to produce useless GM products. She heads a global campaign against GM bananas that Queensland University of Technology researchers created with Gates Foundation funding, for use in India and Africa. Proposed human feeding trials of the bananas have stalled. QUT’s GM bananas cut and pasted genes from bananas already high in Vitamin A, grown around the Pacific for centuries. Thus, patented commercial GM varieties pirate indigenous people’s property.
This month, Spinifex Press publishes essays “Seed Sovereignty, Food Security: Women in the Vanguard”, edited by Dr Shiva. Women activists, scientists and scholars propose new scientific and economic means to reclaim seed sovereignty and food security. They are inspired by many successful people’s movements for the fair and sustainable use of forests, land, water and seed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX5jsq74fAo&feature=youtu.be
Adam Breasley, Catriona MacMillan
