vandana shiva. a great interview.

 A truly great and enlightening interview.  The  American Military Industrial Congress Complex  has well and truly  invaded  everything.  Down to the  very Seeds of Life

GM Seeds and the Militarization of Food (And Everything Else)

By Jon Letman, March 6, 2013

Originally published in Truthout

Foot soldiers in the battle against corporate globalization and the privatization of commons like land and water have long been aware of Indian physicist and philosopher Dr. Vandana Shiva. An ecofeminist pioneer, today she is best known as an outspoken opponent of the GMOs (genetically modified organisms) being developed by transnational biotechnology and chemical corporations like Monsanto and Dow.

Shiva disputes the notion that patenting genes and controlling the world's seeds, and thus much of its food supply, will better serve humanity. Biotech companies claim their genetically engineered (GE) crops are able to withstand threats from insects, disease, and man-made pesticides and herbicides while making a serious contribution to feeding an increasingly hungry world.

Such claims are straight-up fabrications—lies—according to Shiva. GMOs, she says, destroy the natural web of life, threaten biodiversity and the environment, and are a scourge for human health and society.

Jon Letman for Truthout: The Hawaiian Islands are one of the most heavily militarized places on the planet. They're also an epicenter for GMOs. Can you talk about the connection between military and GMO testing in these islands?

Dr. Vandana Shiva: War and agriculture came together when the chemicals that were produced for chemical warfare lost their markets in war, and the industry organized itself to sell those chemicals as agrochemicals. Then, when gene splicing was worked out as a technique in public systems, the corporations realized here was something that would work wonderfully for them. Not only would they get to sell more chemicals, but now, by genetically modifying seed, they could for the first time say, "We are creators and inventors of plants," and redefine seed as an invention covered by patents and therefore collect rents and royalty. If every farmer, every year has to buy seed—which is the main reason for pushing GMOS—it's huge profits.

The techniques themselves are militarized, come from war, including the fact that the only way you can move a gene that doesn't belong to an organism and you have to cross the species barrier—which can't be crossed by reproduction—you can only do it by using a gene gun, which is war at the genetic level, or infecting a plant with cancer, which is biological warfare. So the war mentality is at the heart of the technology.

And then the industry that grew powerful and rich through wars (Monsanto andDow Chemical both manufactured Agent Orange) is its final step of the militarized mindset, the militarized world coming together, is that imposing these toxins, the GMOs—an agriculture that nobody wants, food that nobody wants—can only go the next step by an absolute militarized society, where police states are created to police farmers.

Now, they can't make up what's the new empire, and they keep saying, "Oh, the center is shifting to Asia." And they keep talking about an Asia that is doing all the dirty work for the old empire. All the pollution, all the destruction of workers' rights, all the pollution of the rivers, the killing of our farmers. That's not Asia. Asia is diverse; it's pluralistic, and when you describe the Polynesian islands, it's a continuum from Asia. Christ, Buddha, Sikhism, every religion of the world started in Asia, but we butchered up Asia and said "it’s Middle East, Southeast, Far East, Indochina, South Asia . . ."

In this continuity from Asia to Polynesia to Hawaii is the other way of thinking about ourselves everywhere, including in Hawaii—that we are an interrelated part of a beautiful planet which organizes herself, and that is the Gaia theory.

I think these militarized borders and militarized takeovers, those who have practiced it for the last century think it's going to be the way of the next century. It's not going to be the way of the next century. The way of the next century has to be making peace with the earth.

JL: Hawaii is so biologically rich, and we have so many rare plants. How can preserving Hawaii's native plants—the native biodiversity—how can that help ensure a healthier, more diverse agricultural crop community?

VS: We were repeatedly told diversity is a luxury—industrial monoculture, chemically fed and now genetically modified—is the way we get our food. Nothing could be a bigger lie. When food becomes a commodity, it goes where profits can be made, and if there are more profits in biofuel, that's where it will go. If there are more profits in animal feed, that's where it will go. So we have to reclaim our sources of food and our sources of food are biodiversity. The work I've done over the last 25 years with protecting biodiversity shows that the more intensive the biodiversity, the more food you’ll have and the less you have to hurt the earth

JL: Around the world we see horrific violence by people against one another. Every week we seem to reach a new low. My question is simple: What is wrong with people today?

VS: I don’t think it's people who are the source of these cycles of violence. They're caught in them. It isn't that violence hasn't existed before our times—it has. But it was always localized. I think the violence in our times is global in scope—because the military and the economy are now globally organized, and they feed on each other, and the military has become the last economy.

Those wars in Iraq and Iran are not just wars; they are not just wars. They are about control over resources. They are about giving contracts. They are about opening up Iraq to the GMO seeds of Monsanto. There was an Iraqi Order 81 that [L. Paul] Bremer passed making it illegal for Iraqi farmers, who are the heart of the source of agriculture, the Mesopotamian Civilization: They could not use and save their own seeds. And in the big seed freedom report we have prepared—and anyone can download it from the Navdanya website—we have a contribution by a journalist who found out that Abu Ghraib, the jail from which all the scandals came, used to be the seed bank of Iraq, and Abu Ghraib the name came from one of their most precious wheat varieties. Now, a changing of a name that was a wheat variety, a place that held the biodiversity heritage of a civilization into a jail for torture, that mutation is what we must understand to understand the deepening violence.

I think we need to ask today why are people who live peacefully side by side, killing each other? Why did the Arab Spring become the Arab Nightmare? I think there are a number of causes. That first trigger of the Arab Spring was a young man who wasn’t able to sell vegetables. Now, if you push people to such a corner there are only two things they can do: either rebel to change it and say I will get justice; I will have work, whether I am a Shia or Sunni, and we will stand side by side and we will sell vegetables. I will have work whether I am a Hindu or Muslim, and we will work together, or the system that has hijacked a Democracy and turned representative Democracy into "of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations," must win its votes on basis of divide: "You know the real threat is the immigrant; the real threat are those Christians; the real threat are those Hindus," and you create a ground for insecurity and hatred of a volatile nature.

There is actually a huge economy in selling arms and dividing people, and it needs people fighting each other.

I remember Syria before the way it's gone. There was a year of drought, and I'm just saying if those farmers had been given the kind of seeds that could survive the drought, they'd have been doing farming. They were displaced; they were angry; they were protesting. Before you knew it, they became sectarian protests; before you knew it, different sides started to arm, and American arms are everywhere.

So I think it’s all of these convergences that are brutalizing, particularly the men, who are now just finding one place to find an identity: how to be the more vicious killer. We won't be able to reclaim our humanity through narrow identities. We can only reclaim it through a very broad universal human identity and even broader earth identity. That's why I talk of Earth Democracy.

The challenge is really reclaiming our humanity to be able to live in peace with each other.

http://www.fpif.org/articles/gm_seeds_and_the_militarization_of_food_-_and_everything_else