People's Science

“Oneness vs. The 1% - Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom” by Vandana Shiva, 2018

Vandana Shiva is a world-class agrarian scientist from India, which is on the front-lines of the agriculture wars between corporate agriculture and agroecology. This book has chapters on inequality, finance capital and finance capital's control of agribusiness conglomerates that are attempting to control the world's food supply. However its key impact is detailing the failures and dangers of seed patents, GMO frankenfoods, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, superbugs, superweeds, bio-piracy, gene editing, oil inputs, high ag prices and oligopoly control of our food supply.  30% of the world's food supply is under their direct control according to her.  She contends this is primarily brought to us by the new Rockefeller robber-baron – The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).

Shiva points out the vast control Berkshire Hathaway and Gates have in ownership of various companies. Along with Vanguard Funds - which had $3T in assets in 2016 - many are in the agro sector. As of 2018 70% of the world's bio-tech/ag-chem was controlled by 6 conglomerates – BASF, Bayer, Dupont, DOW, Monsanto and Syngenta – which will soon be down to 3 corporations after mergers. Two Chinese companies are also involved – ChemChina and SinoChem. She notes that the very first corporation was the East India Company in 1600, so this process of corporatization is nothing new. This 'Toxic Cartel' tries to ride on the back of Borlaug's “Green Revolution,” which Shiva contends was successful due to improved irrigation, weather and more land put under cultivation, not bio-technology.

IG Farben's Zyklon-B, used in the gas chambers of the Holocaust, was first developed in the U.S. as a pesticide. The same corporate lineage later created Agent Orange, used as a deadly defoliant in Vietnam, and Monsanto's Round-Up, a cancer-causing pesticide common in the U.S. Shiva claims 3 million Indian farmers, especially in cotton-growing Maharashtra, have committed suicide due to high ag input prices, bankruptcy and toxic damage to their bodies. The Cartel acts in opposition to many treaties, laws and conventions protecting bio-diversity but its political and economic power give them an 'in' in India. Cornell University and Iowa State are two schools where Gates develops various innocent-sounding projects to take-over indigenous seeds and plants like rice, bananas, cotton, beans and chickpeas. Others like Harvard participate in his geoengineering schemes.

People's Science vs. Profit Science

Of particular interest is the scientific rationale against GMOs – plant gene engineering promoted by the billionaires. According to Shiva GMOs are a political and economic project, not a beneficial one. She advocates epigenics, a practice which accounts for the whole living organism and its interaction with the environment, not manipulating one isolated 'dead' gene, as Richard Lewontin puts it, preferred by bio-tech firms. Shiva calls the corporate practice 'genetic reductionism' and promotes a people's science based on thousands of years of peasant farming knowledge. Epigenics has proved to outperform GMOs according to her. She cites the failures in India of GMO Bt cotton, Golden Rice, Bt brinjal rice and GMO bananas. Shiva contends that industrial agriculture has world-wide damaged or destroyed 75% of water systems; 75% of soil quality; a 93% bio-diversity loss; a 40% contribution to climate change and endangered pollinators. Gate's organizations are also engaged in bio-piracy, stealing peasant knowledge and plant development in order to patent and privatize them.

The bad sequel to GMOs is plant or animal gene editing via 'CRISPR,' which also has multiple problems. It is inexact and 'off target,' leading to many unintended mutations. It's basic theory is that one gene produces one known outcome – 1=1. However that is not how genes work as their functions are more complex, mediated by the age of the organism, its environment, the presence of other genes and even chance. CRISPR is almost quite literally a Frankenstein project, a product of 'crude' science. Gates is heavily involved in CRISPR firms. A bigger threat are 'gene drives' – i.e. attempts to wipe out a certain weed through a gene-edited killer. In this case its a 'pigweed' in the southern U.S. called amaranth. However amaranth is cultivated as a highly nutritious plant in India, China, Latin America and Mexico...containing massive amounts of iron, protein, complex carbohydrates, calcium and a key amino acid. Releasing this deadly anti-pigweed 'gene drive' into nature would eventually travel across the world and ruin food crops.

Along with Gates, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and other billionaires are behind efforts to introduce high tech data, surveillance and 'advice' into farming, with Monsanto in a tech deal with Meta and John Deere. Climate and soil data companies have been absorbed, as well as crop insurance firms. How useful this is remains to be seen, but their involvement does not bode well. Shiva repeatedly mentions the quality of empty, processed and toxic junk food put out by corporations but never goes into this issue in any depth. She does prefer “fresh, local and artisanal food, without chemical additives and industrial processing.”

Solutions to Gatesism

Shiva contends that Gates is...or was ... the most powerful person in history given his economic and political power through Microsoft, his Foundation and investments. The BMGF has manipulative and profitable projects in education, agriculture, geo-engineering, finance, computerization and health. Some of Gates' organizations were behind the 2016 de-monetarization disaster in India for digital cash, which is being followed by a compulsory digital tax software roll-out in India – a country still overwhelmingly based on cash and paper. His foundation has investments in oil, mining, pharmaceuticals, biotech, coal, consumer products and firms like Caterpillar and McDonalds. His approach is as a technocratic authoritarian with a friendly veneer.

In the end Shiva embraces Gandhi's 3 principles: self-organization; self-reliance and localism; and civil disobedience as solutions. As examples she cites various struggles in India: In 1991 farmers organized to keep seeds in farmers hands; in 1993 farmers protested GATT/WTO. In Kerala there were protests against Coca-Cola stealing water, while other struggles occurred against water privatization in Delhi and industrial aquaculture in 3 Indian states. In 1998 they defeated a rule against indigenous cold-pressed edible oils which had been instituted to help the dumping of GMO soya oil in India. Imported palm oil leads to deforestation of rain forests while imported soya oil is processed at high temperatures using a toxic solvent. Shiva says a High Court in Uttarakhand has ruled that Himalayan nature – rivers, streams, jungles, the air, forest, glaciers, grasslands and springs – are legal entities with rights, similar to what happened in New Zealand.

The book is saturated with a large amount of 'oneness' jargon, similar to the mystical position of Gaia. Her term for Marxist alienation is separation, which she thunders against. Shiva uses inaccurate stats like 'the 1% versus the 99%' without acknowledging that even in India 9% are making out like bandits in their support of the 1%. She repeatedly uses the term 'mechanical mind' to designate non-diverse, isolated thinking. This is a deep ecology term – something her book hints is her fallback position. Even agroecology uses simple and sometimes complex machines or tools, as machines are extensions of human labor. She denounces industrialism and denounces capitalist agriculture, but without calling it capitalism. Capitalism is not in her repertoire as a name, she prefers euphemisms - colonialism, the term 'industrial' or Big Money.

This book is an excellent look at agricultural science, while being somewhat repetitive as to financialization, inequality and the reality of the 1% or the .1% or the .01%. If you are doing research on Gates, it would be informative in that area.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Celebrate Indian Women,” “The Vanishing Face of Gaia” (Lovelock); “Arundhati Roy,” “India,” “agro-ecology” or “agroecology,” “Monsanto,” “Bill Gates.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 4, 2023