Navdanya International

Navdanya International

URL: https://navdanyainternational.org

Updated: 1 year 3 months ago

Dr Vandana Shiva at #ORFC23

Fri, 12/30/2022 - 02:50

5 January 2023 – 11am GMT

In the Name of the Farmer: Vandana Shiva recalls a lifetime of campaigning for small-scale farmers

For over four decades, Vandana Shiva, has vociferously advocated for farmers’ rights, indigenous knowledge, diversity, localisation, and real democracy. She has been at the forefront of seed-saving, food sovereignty, and connecting the dots between the destruction of nature and indiscriminate corporate greed. In her keynote talk, Dr. Shiva will reflect on a life of activism, recounted in her new memoir, Terra Viva. She shares memories of her childhood in post-partition India, and reflects on how she was called to activism by the powerful Chipko movement– whose women were ‘the real custodians of biodiversity-related knowledge.’ She discusses how she later worked alongside some of the world’s most celebrated activists and environmentalists fighting for a more habitable planet and healthier democracies. With the challenges revealed by the COVID crisis, the privatisation of biotechnology, and the commodification of our biological and natural resources, Dr Shiva illuminates a path forward and continues to inspire new generations of activists along the way.

Speaker: Vandana Shiva
Chair: Jyoti Fernandes

Source

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6 January 2023 – 9am GMT

GM’s False Promises: Could the UK be next?

Three legendary activists for farmers’ rights tackle the false hope and real threats of genetic modification, sharing what they have learned and how those lessons can be used in the ongoing fight. The first wave of genetically modified (GMO) crops made false promises to reduce pesticide use and create higher yields and profits for farmers – from cotton farmers in Asia to maize growers in North America. There is very little evidence that this happened and instead the reality is one of increased herbicide use, ecological damage, static or reduced yields, greater farmer insecurity, greater corporate control and industrialisation. North America led the way with false promises but farmers in many countries have paid the price. While opposition within the EU has protected the UK to some extent, Brexit and high tech zeal for gene editing technology are now changing the dynamic for the new wave of modification. The narrative that gene editing (GE) is not GMO and is somehow “akin to nature” is gaining ground even amongst farmers who call themselves “regenerative” and “sustainable”. Pro GE legislation is being pushed in the UK and across the EU on the back of yet more false promises and hype.

Speakers:
Jim Goodman
Gerald Miles
Vandana Shiva
Liz O’Neill

Chair:
Ele Rose

Source

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Categories: A3. Agroecology

Is the Kunming-Montreal Global biodiversity framework enough to protect biodiversity?

Thu, 12/22/2022 - 08:44

During December 7- 19, 190 country representatives, members of civil society and delegates met for the UN Biodiversity Conference or COP15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

The meeting was set to deliberate the new global biodiversity framework, establishing the biodiversity goals for the next decade. After two weeks of slow deliberation, the COP15 members signed the new “Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework” agreement. The agreement included four goals and 23 key targets for biodiversity action aligning with the 2030 agenda.

As laid out in a recent article by Navdanya International, The Convention on Biological Diversity Must Resist the Commodification of Life, this CBD was crucial for providing protection against the increased attempts by multinationals to greenwash new biotechnologies, implement the further financialization of nature, and dilute biodiversity governance to allow for the greater privatization of life.

And although the new agreement has been hailed by many as the “Paris Agreement for biodiversity”, Dr. Vandana Shiva, President of Navdanya International, points out the dilution of the CBD’s role in biodiversity conservation, especially in the face of increasing corporate influence: “Thirty years after the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was signed into being, the conclusions of the COP 15 signal a dilution, delay, and weakening of the obligations made. The CBD was a commitment to conserve biodiversity everywhere, and this framework falls into the corporate trap of 30×30.”

Here she references Targets 1, 2 and 3 which set the goal to protect thirty percent of land, and ocean areas for biodiversity conservation, and restoration. These goals were already under much controversy before the COP15, as fears of further land grabbing under the guise of biodiversity conservation on one hand. And on the other, the goal of thirty percent not being enough in the face of mass biodiversity decline. The worry is that with little to no corporate accountability layed out in the document, the 30×30 target is easily diluted. Especially considering the failure to reach any of the Aichi targets set for 2020, which only set out to protect ten percent.

Concerns have also been raised at the agreement’s failure to mention the greatest vector for biodiversity loss, industrial agriculture. The most the issue is mentioned is in Target 7, which references pesticide reduction as necessary for curbing pollution. But this brief mention fails to address the other multidimensional effects agribusiness has had in the destruction of biodiversity, including the effects of GMOs on the erosion of biodiversity, monocultures, and genetic erosion of species. The framework also does not make any mention of regulation of new gene edited gmos, gene drives and other genetic manipulation techniques that could have detrimental consequences on biodiversity. To this, Dr. Shiva remarks, “The CBD and the Cartagena Protocol were supposed to regulate GMOs for Biosafety, but instead, in these thirty years, GMOs have decimated biodiversity. Not addressing this impact, which was part of the original mandate, is a failing. This failing is particularly worrying given that everywhere GMOs are being deregulated. The CBD has a role in arresting this deregulation, which it has not taken.”

Agreements on increased funding by global north countries were also made, with emphasis on removing public subsidies, and increasing public programs, but also in line was the call for private finance schemes to be used. “Even though Biodiversity offsets and financialisation are not directly mentioned, the doors have been opened by this agreement,” states Dr. Shiva. Meaning, instead of corporate accountability, the new framework opens the doors to corporate greenwashed solutions, such as “Nature-Based Solutions”, “sustainable intensification”, biodiversity credits, green bonds, and other “innovative schemes”, which risk a greater financialization of nature.

Lastly, the issue of Digital Sequence Information (DSI), violating the Nagoya protocol by allowing actors to bypass benefits sharing and access frameworks, was only marginally addressed. Establishing in Target 13 only a vague goal for the strengthening of benefits sharing without addressing the issue of patentability of DSI and its links to new biotechnologies. Dr Shiva remarked on this issue, “The acknowledgement of indigenous knowledge and rights, in the framework is welcome. However, the failure to take into account the continuing biopiracy and violation of the Nagoya Protocol, especially through Digital Sequencing Information, is still a major concern.”

Thumbnail photo credits: Navdanya

Categories: A3. Agroecology

Foreword from Dr Vandana Shiva to the Global Witness Report “A Decade of Defiance: Ten years of reporting land and environmental activism worldwide”

Thu, 12/15/2022 - 06:11

I could tell you that, around the world, three people are killed every week while trying to protect their land, their environment, from extractive forces. I could tell you that this has been going on for decades, with the numbers killed in recent years hitting over 200 each year. And I could tell you, as this report does, that a further 200 defenders were murdered in the last year alone. But these numbers are not made real until you hear some of the names of those who died.

Marcelo Chaves Ferreira. Sidinei Floriano Da Silva. José Santos López. Each of them a person loved by their family, their community. Jair Adán Roldán Morales. Efrén España. Eric Kibanja Bashekere. Each of them considered expendable for the sake of profit. Regilson Choc Cac. Ursa Bhima. Angel Rivas. Each killed defending not only their own treasured places, but the health of the planet which we all share.

It’s important to picture these victims as the real people they are. It’s easier for me. I have been surrounded by land and environmental defenders all my life, and indeed I am one of them. It started for me in the Garhwal Himalaya in India, where my father was a forest conservator and my mother a farmer. Industrial logging was destroying the ecosystem in which we as humans were intertwined. We knew, intimately, that the value of the Himalayan forest was not to be found in the price of its timber, but in the way its extraordinary, abundant diversity sustains all forms of life – not least our own. And so we put ourselves in the way of the commercial deforesters.

By doing so, we weren’t just putting ourselves in danger. We were confronting a whole viewpoint – a way of seeing nature as something not to be cherished and protected, but to be conquered and subdued. This is a viewpoint with its roots in the Western industrial revolutions of the 19th century, or even further back in the scientific theory of the Western so-called ‘Enlightenment’. It matters that this viewpoint originated in the West. As this report shows, nearly all of the murdered environmental and land defenders are from the Global South, and yet it is not the Global South that reaps the supposed economic ‘rewards’ of all this violence.

Climate activists hold up signs next to portraits of slain Philippine environmental defenders as they take part in climate justice protests on November 06, 2021 in Quezon city, Philippines. Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

The final, saddest truth is that this viewpoint has brought us to the brink of collapse. We are not just in a climate emergency. We are in the foothills of the sixth mass extinction, and these defenders are some of the few people standing in the way. They don’t just deserve protection for basic moral reasons. The future of our species, and our planet, depends on it.

That’s why it’s so important to support the call, made in this report by Global Witness, for real protections to be afforded those on the frontline of this ecological and humanitarian catastrophe. These are the people who understand, at the most fundamental level, how the fate of humanity is entwined in the fate of the natural places they are defending. It’s why they are prepared to risk everything to defend these places. And it’s why they, more than anyone, deserve protection.

That means national and supranational governments committing to report and investigate these murders, and ultimately to serve justice on the culprits. It means governments ensuring protections for defenders, including reporting and investigating their murders as a means to access justice. It means companies ensuring their operations do not cause harm. And of course it means all of us continuing to shine a light on these stories, not just to remember those who have fallen but to continue their urgent work by telling the world exactly why they are dead.

In 2021, 200 people were killed protecting their homes and their rights. I urge you to read all their names. To honour the dead with your attention. To get angry on their behalf, and then to act.

Featuring first-person testimony from defenders on four different continents, the report shows that:

Between 2012 and 2021, 1733 defenders have been killed trying to protect their land and resources: that’s an average of one defender killed approximately every two days over ten years.

Over half of the attacks over the 10-year period have taken place in just three countries – Brazil, Colombia, and the Philippines.

In 2021, 200 land and environmental defenders lost their lives – nearly four people a week. These lethal attacks continue to take place in the context of a wider range of threats against defenders who are being targeted by government, business and other non-state actors with violence, intimidation, smear campaigns and criminalisation. This is happening across every region of the world and in almost every sector.

Mexico was the country with the highest recorded number of killings in 2021 (54), followed by Colombia (33) and Brazil (26).

Over three-quarters of the attacks recorded in 2021 took place in Latin America. In Brazil, Peru and Venezuela, 78% of attacks took place in the Amazon.

The research has also highlighted that Indigenous communities in particular face a disproportionate level of attacks – nearly 40% – even though they make up only 5% of the world’s population.

Categories: A3. Agroecology

The Convention on Biological Diversity must resist the commodification of all life

Tue, 12/13/2022 - 07:02

From December 7- 19, the 15th COP of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will be taking place in Montreal, Canada, the first COP to take place since 2018, after being delayed due to the pandemic. This upcoming CBD COP is set to debate the next global framework establishing the goals and targets to be set for the next decade, to address the continued unprecedented loss of biodiversity. After the failure to reach any of the Aichi targets set at the CBD COP10 at Nagoya, Japan, this next framework will prove crucial in setting the tone for biodiversity governance through 2030, and onto 2050.

Two of the key topics being discussed at the COP15 are the issues around financing for biodiversity conservation, the issues of digital sequence information (DSI) and the governance of new biotechnologies.

Globally the COP15 comes at a pivotal moment when biotech and agribusiness are making a desperate attempt to greenwash new biotechnologies and financial schemes, lobby for deregulation and push new and untested technologies out to market faster. All while claiming these new biotechnologies, like CRISPR-Cas9 used for gene editing, gene drives, digital sequencing, and synthetic biology, and schemes like biodiversity credits and green finance, should be considered sustainable solutions to today’s crisis.

So far, the CBD has been the only international body addressing the governance of these new issues, evaluating their potential impact on biodiversity, as well as their multidimensional implications. This makes the current CBD COP all the more important for our ecological future.

But as described in Navdanya International’s Gates to a Global Empire report, starting back in 2016 there was already growing concern over the influence of the business sector over the agendas of these issues. As noted by Adelita San Vicente Tello and Aidé Jiménez-Martínez, delegates from the Mexican Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) to the CBD, language was already beginning to shift toward a more mercantile view of nature, and framing biodiversity for its commercial potential. Since then, the want for greater commercialization of biodiversity has only grown, and is now taking center stage at the current meeting.

(Source: https://mx.boell.org/es/2016/12/21/cuatro-pasos-adelante-y-uno-hacia-atras-en-la-regulacion-global-de-la-biologia-sintetica)

A Short History of the CBD and the Nagoya Protocol

In 1992 the UN Earth Summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil took place to address the growing concerns of species extinction, biodiversity erosion, and climate change. Out of the Earth’s summit the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was established, as well as the UN framework Convention on Climate Change. Two key principles were also established at the Rio meeting: the precautionary principle, and the polluter pays principles. According to Navdanya International President, Dr. Vandana Shiva, “Rio was based on values of ecological sustainability, social justice and economic equity – across countries and within countries. It was shaped by ecological movements, ecological science and sovereign governments.”

“The push to digitalise every aspect of life through Digital Sequence Information (DSI) and patents based on digital genome mapping undermines the Convention on Biological Diversity and the FAO Seed Treaty” @drvandanashiva https://t.co/Lh5KAgKarJ #COP15 pic.twitter.com/6nxgVLQKAA

— Navdanya International (@NavdanyaInt) December 14, 2022

It was with these values in place that the UN CBD’s main objectives were established: “The conservation of biological diversity; the sustainable use of its components; and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from genetic resources”, including the protection of agrobiodiversity, and the creation of frameworks for the protection of biodiversity. As technologies have developed, this mandate now also includes governance over biotechnologies, as defined by the CBD as, “any technological application that uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives thereof, to make or modify products or processes for specific use”.

Regulations around access and benefits sharing of biodiversity was set in place by the Nagoya Protocol, which set up a legal framework for access to biodiversity and the equitable sharing of benefits coming from the use of genetic resources. The protocol also established that states have the right over their biodiversity, and authority to determine access to genetic resources rests with national governments and is therefore subject to national legislation. This protocol was set up in order to protect states’ biodiversity heritage, along with the traditional knowledge attached to it, to make sure the countries whose genetic resources were used received adequate compensation or benefit sharing from the use of their genetic resources. As well as legal frameworks for taking out genetic samples and resources out of countries. All to combat bioprospecting and biopiracy from biodiversity-rich countries. But now with the evolution of digitalization tools, and new biotechnologies, the Nagoya protocol is under direct threat.

(Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Second_Earth_Summit_was_held_in_Rio_de_Janeiro.jpg under CC BY 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

The Legacy of the the TRIPS/ GATT agreements

Shortly after the creation of the CBD, the Uruguay Round of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade rules (GATT) and the Global Intellectual Property and Patent Laws in the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreements were ratified, formally institutionalizing a new free trade regime of food and agriculture. As part of the TRIPS/ GATT agreement, clause 27.3(b) started a new era of seed and biodiversity imperialism, effectively creating a loophole allowing for the provisional patenting of living organisms and their genetic material. The clause states, “Parties may exclude from patentability plants and animals other than micro-organisms, and essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals other than non-biological and micro- biological processes. However, parties shall provide for the protection of plant varieties either by patents or by an effective sui generis system or by any combination thereof.”

Although there have been divergent opinions on the interpretation of this clause, the effect of this agreement has led to corporations being able to patent seed, and biodiversity, as has been the case with GMOs, or the plants that provide the genetic material for the creation of GMOs. Today this precedent is leading to the ability for these same corporations to now patent digitalized genetic material, while essentially circumventing the frameworks established by the Nagoya protocol.

What is Digital Sequenced Information (DSI)

Digital Sequence information (DSI) is a biotechnology which can effectively scan a variety of genetic information of an organism’s genome, allowing for plants’ genetic material to be uploaded onto a digital database. Since the liberation of digital sequencing technologies in 2010, billions of genetic sequences, from nucleotides from DNA, sequences of RNA, amino acids, chemical compounds derived from genetic information (metabolites) and even epigenetic or information derived from environmental/ ecological interactions, as well as any other resulting information, have been sequenced and collected in various public and private databases. The largest repositories being public databases.

DSI has become a way to mass preserve and conserve genetic diversity, but since the take off of genetic biotechnologies, DSI has now become a valuable raw material for biotech companies. With synthetic biology technology, private companies and research institutions can now download the digitalized genetic information, and synthetically recreate the sequences in a lab, while effectively bypassing existing regulation on biodiversity access. Through CRISPR-CAS9 and other gene editing technologies, those synthetically recreated genetic materials can then be used to genetically alter living organisms. While there are many uses for DSI, such as for industrial chemical production, medical research, pharmaceutical development, the applications surrounding food, agriculture and gene drives are of the greatest concern.

(Image Source https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CRISPR_Cas9_(41124064215).jpg)

The next generation of GMOs are now being pushed with little regulation in many parts of the world. These “New Breeding Techniques” (NBTs), “New Genomic Techniques” (NGTs), or as the EU commission calls them, “plants produced by certain new genomic techniques” go beyond a new generation of GMO seeds, but are now extending to animals in agriculture, and other living organisms. For example, a new GMO potato was created by The International Potato Center through a DSI of an Argentinian and Peruvian potato variety with a sequence available from the public database GenBank. Experiments then took place in East Africa, without any financial compensation to Argentina or Peru. Highly risky gene drive organisms, such as gene drive mosquitoes, or mosquitoes that have been genetically modified with an extinction gene, have now been released all over the world, with little to no understanding of their potential ecological effects. All under the excuse of the eradication of malaria. Civil society organizations have been urging the CBD to consider the dangerous consequences this extinction technology could have and place a global moratorium on such extinction technologies.

As has been researched extensively by Navdanya International, these new biotechnologies are also being used for the creation of dangerous ultra processed artificial foods, using gene edited microorganisms for the ‘fermentation’ of chemical compounds. Impossible Burger, for example, uses a “heme” molecule from soy leghemoglobin, a colorant produced in genetically engineered yeast to make their burgers appear to ‘bleed’. According to the Center for Food Safety, the FDA didn’t conduct adequate long-term testing before approving the color additive in 2019, and after a short-term rat trial several potential adverse effects were detected.

Through mergers and acquisitions, cross-licensing between multinationals, as well as unregulated access to public DSI databases, private companies are able to amass huge private databases of genetic material, essentially leading to digitalized biopiracy. For example, Bill Gates funded Gingko Bioworks has now become one of the largest synthetic biology firms in the US. Thanks to the TRIPPS/ GATT clause and other patenting precedents, Ginkgo Bioworks is able to download publicly available DSI, tweak it and patent the resulting material to be used for the creation of synthetic food ingredients through its subsidiary Motif Foodworks, or for agricultural application through its partnership with Bayer. Novel methods of digital sequencing, database storage mechanism, search mechanisms and synthetic biology techniques can also be patented and kept as trade secrets by companies such as these. This effectively bypasses and blocks the principles of the Nagoya protocol, leading directly to digital biopiracy.

Concerns over these technologies are rooted in the long history of monopolization, privatization and biopiracy done by multinationals and western companies which have generated billions in profits. All with devastating consequences for the environment, from over exploitation, the creation and expansion of GMOs, the degradation of biodiversity, a lack of compensation, and the patenting out of farmers from their own seed and biodiversity. The risk of these technologies, if not properly regulated, is the further privatization of life.

While these issues were first raised in the December 2016 COP at Cancun, in 2018 the CBD noted the divergent views on this issue which resulted in the Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group Report. The expert group report has since issued a variety of recommendations to be taken up at the current COP15 on how to address the use of DSI technology, including updated frameworks for adequate compensation for nations, and indigenous groups, adequate tracking and traceability of country of origin, and that the benefits should contribute to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. As explained by Josè Esquinas-Alcazar, former Secretary of the FAO Intergovernmental Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture and Chairman of the FAO Ethics Committee for Food and Agriculture, these new technologies are also being taken up by the negotiations of The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, where access and benefits sharing for food and agriculture, thanks to DSI, is having to be renegotiated.

But considering the intensification of the corporate lobby in recent COPs, as well as interest in the United States marked by the recent Presidential Executive Order pledging support for advancing the bioeconomy, there is a large chance the issue could be forestalled once again.

The Financialization of Nature

As a growing response to the mass extinction of species, the financial sector has been making calls for the false solution of financializing nature and biodiversity through a number of market mechanisms. Organizations such as, Finance for Europe (AFME) and EY have proposed for the upcoming CBD COP recommendations around the creation of biodiversity credits, and Nature Asset companies (NACs) to provide finance to global south countries to conserve biodiversity.

This arises from the CBD’s call for the need of increased finance for developing countries from wealthier countries to help support the conservation and protection of biodiversity. Specifically, as part of the draft global framework to be presented at this COP, a USD $200 billion increase in financial flows for biodiversity conservation.

The finance sector is now trying to step in arguing that since, currently, 87 percent of funding for biodiversity comes from public finance, philanthropy and development institutions, and it is still not enough to cover all restoration and protection needs, private funding can come in to lessen the global biodiversity finance gap. Since they recognize that all industry and financial markets are intrinsically dependent on nature, they propose attaching measurable valuation schemes such as “nature-based solutions”, blue finance or ocean carbon/ biodiversity credits, and regenerative agriculture credits, to help protect what they deem as natural assets. This also includes the financialization of biodiversity, ecosystem services, and anything deemed “natural capital”. All under the guise of ‘protecting’ it. But if these sound familiar, it’s because many of these finance schemes are similar to those proposed for climate change finance, which have already been called out as greenwashed buzzwords being used to maintain the status quo.

The roll out of these schemes has already started, as in 2021 the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) unveiled a new asset class based on natural capital, called Natural Asset Companies (NAC). NACs work by identifying a natural asset and valuing it, such as a piece of endangered rainforest, an endangered animal or an entire ecosystem. Based on this, an NAC is then created, with the structure of the company or the company owners manages the NAC and lists it on the stock exchange. The NAC then generates financial capital through stock market exchange, and its value (aka the value of the ‘natural capital’) is determined by the index price. The NAC will then, in theory, conserve, maintain and grow the natural assets.

(Source: IEG and Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature Advances with Launch of New Asset Class)

Ways of valuing ‘natural capital’, as proposed to the CBD COP, also include biodiversity credits, or a financial scheme which finances biodiversity actions through the creation, sale and exchange of biodiversity ‘units’.

But even the NYSE and others admit that the main appeal of these new financialization schemes is the virtually unlimited potential for profit generation. As stated by Intrinsic Exchange, the company that helped NYSE launch its new asset class, can be potentially valued at USD$4000 trillion dollar “nature’s economy”. They also state that NAC can increase investor profits, “as the natural asset prospers, providing a steady or increasing flow of ecosystem services, the company’s equity should appreciate accordingly providing investment returns. Shareholders and investors in the company through secondary offers, can take profit by selling shares. These sales can be gauged to reflect the increase in capital value of the stock, roughly in-line with its profitability, creating cashflow based on the health of the company and its assets.”

(Source: Intrinsic Exchange: https://www.intrinsicexchange.com/en/solution)

There are many alarming aspects to the financial sector’s attempts to commodify whole ecosystems. These schemes essentially allow the historically plundering financial sector to determine what in nature has value, and what ecological communities and ecosystems are not assets deemed of protecting. The financialization of nature will only lead to the further commodification of the last remaining commons of the world, folding into the market economy the last remaining part of the natural world that had remained outside human purview.

NACs and anyone who creates, values and holds “biodiversity credits”, can now hold the exclusive rights to ecosystems, ecosystem services, land, and other beings, and ecological processes. The total commodification of nature, and ecosystems is extremely worrying, as nature is not a mere mechanism for profit, but is intrinsic in its own right to exist and thrive. It is not for financial robber barons to determine what in life has value. These schemes will also directly lead to land grabbing, as has already occurred through carbon credit systems, as 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity is in indigenous territories.

Click to view slideshow.

As history has shown us, corporate appropriation of the commons and of nature has never resulted in the greater protection of nature. The reason for today’s crisis is due to the extractivist, profit-driven, and mechanistic mentality of the corporate sector. There is zero evidence to suggest that all of a sudden, the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation, Blackrock, the World Economic Forum, and others corporate interests will ever have the public, the planets or nature’s best interest in mind. Who’s to say that a sector that has been in charge of destroying biodiversity and nature will all of a sudden be able to come in and save it?

The double angle attempts at commodifying life, both through the digitalization of genetic information, and the financialization of biodiversity and ecosystems, really just represent the latest attempts of corporate interest to commodify life. While at the same time, fully vertically integrating every aspect of their product chains from the very ecosystem functions that make their products possible, to extend ultimate control over every level of life. What is at risk here is the final encroaching on the complete privatization and commodification of life. We must resist.

© Navdanya International 2022

Further Reading

New GMOs: civil society organisations along with organic and agroecological producers reject the European Commission’s opinion in favour of alternative regulations (May 2021)

The Gmo Revival (April 2021)

Webinar ‘GMOs are a failed Technology. The future is GMO-Free’ – Highlights (March 2021)

Truths and lies about new and old GMOs – Testing the industry narrative (February 2021)

Digital Biopiracy to Undermine International Treaties that Protect Biodiversity and Prevent Biopiracy (“Gates to a Global Empire” Report), Navdanya International, October 2020

Beyond Green Gold: Megadiverse Countries as Providers of Genetic Resources and Digital Sequence Information – Aidé Jiménez-Martínez And Adelita San Vicente Tello (“Gates to a Global Empire” Report), Navdanya International, October 2020

A Treaty to Protect our Agricultural Biodiversity – Josè Esquinas-Alcazar (“Gates to a Global Empire” Report), Navdanya International, October 2020

Owning Seeds Through Patents and New Gene Editing GMO Technologies – Vandana Shiva (“Gates to a Global Empire” Report), Navdanya International, October 2020

Global Resistance to Genetic Extinction Technology – Navdanya (“Gates to a Global Empire” Report), Navdanya International, October 2020

Biodiversity, Gmos, & Gene Drives of the Militarised Mind – Vandana Shiva (“Gates to a Global Empire” Report), Navdanya International, October 2020

The Law of the Seed – Navdanya International, 2013

Seed Freedom – A Global Citizens’ Report – Navdanya International, 2012

Campaign

New GMOs must not be deregulated

Categories: A3. Agroecology

Civil society organisations around the globe demand a moratorium on genetically engineered gene drives at UN Biodiversity Conference

Thu, 12/01/2022 - 09:19

Civil society organisations around the globe demand a moratorium on genetically engineered gene drives at UN Biodiversity Conference

–
Berlin, 1 December 2022 – Ahead of the UN Biodiversity Conference COP 15 and its Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety in Montreal over 140 civil society organisations from Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia and the Americas have issued a joint manifesto exposing alarming risks of environmental releases of genetically engineered gene drive organisms which could lead to irreversible ecological consequences and drive entire species into extinction.

Gene drives use new genetic engineering techniques such as CRISPR-Cas to forcibly spread new genetic information within the genome of populations and entire species of organisms in nature, including traits that can cause their extinction. The signatories of the manifesto are urging national governments at COP15 to resolve critical legal, environmental, biosafety and governance issues as well as fundamental ethical and cultural questions before considering any environmental release of gene drive organisms.

The call for a global moratorium is consistent with demands at previous occasions including at COP13 in Cancun and COP14 in Sharm El-Sheikh. „This controversy will not go away“, said Barbara Pilz, who coordinates the international Stop Gene Drives campaign. „We will continue to fight for a global moratorium on this pretentious concept of reprogramming and extincting entire species in nature.“

The manifesto highlights the need for thorough and genuine risk assessment and uncovers the lack of participatory decision-making processes on this topic to date. It proposes the inclusion of multi-disciplinary expertise and respect for diverse knowledge systems in any processes of technology assessment involving gene drives. This should include indigenous peoples and local communities whose territories are among those being proposed for the first releases of gene drive organisms.

Recalling the goals of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, Pilz added:

„We urge decision makers at COP15 to approach the issue of gene drives with utmost caution. Once released, they cannot be controlled, reversed or recalled and will respect no borders. This technology adds immense risks to the conservation of biological diversity and is at odds with the concept of nature protection. Let us not create another destructive legacy to future generations. ”

Representatives of the Stop Gene Drives campaign and of other signatories of the manifesto will attend the events of the Convention on Biological Diversity in person in Montreal this December and can be reached for comment. They will join other strong civil society voices striving for inclusive and participatory processes of precautionary technology assessment and equitable decision making on the subject of synthetic biology and gene drives.

The full text of the manifesto is available here and it is still open for signature.

Source

Categories: A3. Agroecology

Joint Statement: NGOs AND Trade Unions demand the end of EU’s export of banned pesticides and other hazardous chemicals

Thu, 12/01/2022 - 08:10

Exports of banned hazardous chemicals: time to put an end to double standards

1. Hazardous chemicals, banned at a domestic level in order to protect human health and the environment, are currently produced and exported by EU countriesto third countries where regulations are generally weaker.

2. An in-depth investigation(link is external) has shown that, in 2018 alone, more than 81,000 tonnes of pesticides containing 41 different hazardous chemicals banned on EU fields, have been exported from European factories for use in agriculture in other countries.

3. Such agrochemicals include Syngenta’s paraquat, the world’s deadliest weedkiller, and acetochlor, manufactured by Bayer, which was banned in the EU over concernsrelated to contamination of drinking water and its potential to damage chromosomes. The EU also exports vast amounts of banned, bee-killing neonicotinoid insecticides.

4. Low- and middle-income countrieslike Morocco, South Africa, India, Mexico, Malaysia or Brazil were the intended destinations for the bulk ofshipments. In such countries, dangerous pesticides banned in the EU cannot be safely used and have devastating impacts on both human health and the environment, resulting in widespread infringement of human rights.

5. About 385 million cases of acute pesticide poisonings occur each year, mainly in low- and middle-income countries, where a large proportion of the population continues to be involved in agriculture orlives in areas where pesticides are used, and where farmers often handle them unprotected.

6. The main export destinations for these banned pesticides are countries that are the biggest exporters of agri-food products to the EU. Like a boomerang, banned pesticides find their way back to European consumers via imported food, thus ending up on the dinner plates of EU citizens.

7. The EU also exports dangerous, banned industrial chemicals; in 2020, this included 21 industrial chemicals banned orseverely restricted in the EU in order to protect human health or the environment. For instance in 2020 the EU exported 539 tonnes of nonylphenol ethoxylates, an endocrine disruptor that is banned in the EU. The EU also exports cancer-causing car cadmium batteriesthat are prohibited in itsjurisdiction.

8. Overall,some 667,000 tonnes of hazardous chemicals banned orseverely restricted in the EU were exported in 2020, according to the European Chemical Agency (ECHA).

9. “The practice of wealthy States exporting their banned toxic chemicals to poorer nations lacking the capacity to control the risks is deplorable and must end”, according to a statement endorsed by 35 United Nations Human Rights Council experts in July 2020. The experts warned that the “health and environmental impacts” are externalized “on the most vulnerable”, especially “communities of African descent and other people of colour”.

10. As shown in a recent legal analysis, by allowing the export of banned pesticides to African countries members of the Bamako Convention or partiesto the Central American Regional Agreement on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Waste, the EU violates its international obligations under the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, and customary law, as well as its international human rights obligations.

The European Commission must live up to its commitment to “lead by example”

11. On 14 October 2020, in its Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability, the European Commission committed that the EU will “lead by example, and, in line with international commitments, ensure that hazardous chemicals banned in the European Union are not produced for export, including by amending relevant legislation if and as needed.”

12. The commitment of the European Commission to prohibit the export of hazardous chemicals banned in the EU was welcomed by dozens of civil society organizations in an open letter. In addition, almost 70 MEPs wrote to the President of the Commission, welcoming its promise to end this practice, while stressing that “concrete actions are urgently needed”.

13. On 9 December 2020, the Commission confirmed that it is “currently considering the various options for implementing this objective, including a revision of the legislation” to prevent the export of hazardous chemicals, including pesticides, that have been banned in the EU.

14. In March 2021, the Council of the European Union stated that it “expressly welcomes” the initiative of the Chemical Strategy to address “the production for export of harmful chemicals not allowed in the European Union”. The Commission is now expected to produce a legislative proposal by 2023.

15. In the meantime, Member States are taking the lead. France has already prohibited the export of pesticides which are banned in the EU for reasons of health or environmental protection. Germany is also moving towards the adoption of a legal prohibition on the export of banned pesticides. Other countries are considering the adoption of similar measures.

16. We call, with utmost urgency, on the European Commission to uphold its commitment and table, without further delay, a legislative proposal to prohibit the export of all pesticides and other hazardous chemicals banned at EU level, to put an end to double standards, and to ensure a level-playing field for the industry and harmonization between national legislations.

17. The EU must play a global leadership role on this issue. An EU-wide export ban will be an important step towards implementing the commitment, stated in the Chemicals Strategy, that the EU will show “international leadership” by “setting the example for a global sound management of chemicals” and “play a leading role to champion and promote high standards in the world”.

18. A ban will also inspire non-EU countries to follow, and to also prohibit the export of dangerous pesticides and other hazardous chemicals that are banned in their own jurisdictions, in order to protect human health, occupational health and safety, and the environment.

19. An EU-wide export ban will promote a global transition away from the use of those dangerous chemicals and a move towards more sustainable practices and safer alternatives, sending a strong signal to governments and companies that such hazardous pesticides and chemicals should not be used anywhere in the world. This will help trigger the highly needed investments and funding for the development and implementation of alternative practices like Integrated Pest Management, Integrated Weed Management, agroforestry and agroecology.

Ensuring an effective export ban by amending the EU PIC Regulation

20. The EU should prohibit the export of banned chemicals by amending the PIC Regulation (EU Regulation No 649/2012 concerning the export and import of hazardous chemicals).

21. The PIC Regulation governs the trade of hazardous chemicals that are banned or severely restricted in the EU, places obligations on companies that wish to export these chemicals to non-EU countries or import them into the EU.

22. The objectives of the PIC Regulation are to “promote shared responsibility and cooperative efforts in the international movement of hazardous chemicals to protect human health and the environment from potential harm” and “contribute to the environmentally sound use of hazardous chemicals”.

23. The PIC Regulation has a list of chemicals that have been banned or severely restricted in the EU in order to protect human health and/or the environment. It also contains a mechanism to annually update this list with newly banned or severely restricted chemicals. PIC already includes an export ban that applies to a small list of hazardous chemicals (listed in its Annex V).

24. The PIC Regulation is therefore the most adequate piece of legislation for implementing an EU-wide export ban.

25. While within the EU, the PIC Regulation implements the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, which mainly concerns the facilitation of information exchange so that importing countries are informed about the export of certain hazardous chemicals and their characteristics, its Article 15 makes it clear that “nothing in this Convention shall be interpreted as restricting the right of the Parties to take action that is more stringently protective of human health and the environment than that called for in this Convention”.

The export ban should apply to all banned chemicals

32. There are currently 260 hazardous chemicals listed in Annex I of the EU PIC regulation, of which 59 are industrial chemicals, three are severely hazardous formulations and 207 are pesticides. Some of the chemicals are groups of chemicals that include dozens of different compounds. The list is updated every year with newly banned chemicals.

33. Of those, 32 industrial chemicals, three severely hazardous formulations and 193 pesticides are listed in the EU PIC regulation because they have been banned in order to protect human health or the environment. All banned industrial chemicals subject to PIC are either banned for consumer use or banned for professional use, or for both use categories. Similarly, all banned pesticides listed in PIC are either banned as plant protection products or banned for use as biocides (such as disinfectants or parasiticides) , or in both use categories.

34. The export ban should apply to all chemicals that have been listed in PIC as having been banned in order to protect human health or the environment, when the intended use in the importing country is one that is prohibited in the EU. The Commission should put in place strong control measures to ensure compliance.

35. All pesticides banned as plant protection products should be prohibited from being exported for use as plant protection products. Similarly, the export of pesticides banned as biocides should be prohibited if their use in the destination country is as biocides. Similarly, the export of industrial chemicals banned for professional use in the EU should be prohibited for professional use elsewhere. Export of industrial chemicals for consumer use outside the EU should be disallowed if they are banned for consumer use within the EU.

36. The export ban should apply regardless of whether the chemicals are exported as pure substances, or in mixtures or articles.

37. A further 19 pesticides and 36 industrial chemicals are listed in Annex I of the EU PIC Regulation as having been “severely restricted” to protect human health or the environment. This typically means that the use of the chemicals is allowed only under certain strict conditions.

38. The export of those chemicals should only be allowed for uses that are approved in the EU, with strict provisions in place to ensure compliance in importing countries.

The export ban should apply to all countries

39. Among the destinations for EU exports of banned chemicals are OECD countries such as the United States, Japan and Australia. An EU export ban should apply to all countries, including OECD members.

40. Dangerous chemicals have the same impact on people’s health and the environment, regardless of where they are used.

41. For example, paraquat, which was banned in the EU because of concerns related to farmers’ exposure and possible links between paraquat and Parkinson’s disease, has created similar health problems in the US, which is the main export destination for the EU’s paraquat exports. Hundreds of US agricultural workers have developed Parkinson’s disease as a result of occupational exposure to paraquat and have sued its manufacturer, Syngenta.

42. An export ban that would allow the export of banned chemicals to other OECD countries would also inevitably create loopholes as nothing would prevent these countries re-exporting those chemicals to low- or middle-income countries.

43. The European Commission’s commitment to ban the export of banned chemicals makes no distinction between export destinations. Also, neither the Rotterdam Convention nor the EU PIC Regulation make any distinction between OECD and non-OECD countries in terms of the trade restrictions that apply to the export of hazardous chemicals.

Additional measures should be adopted to support a global transition

44. A prohibition on the export of banned chemicals is an important first step, but it must be complemented by other measures. The EU must assess the needs of farmers and agricultural workers in low-and-middle income countries, and put in place just transition measures to support them in their transition away from hazardous chemicals, and towards safer and sustainable alternatives, especially Integrated Pest Management, Integrated Weed Management, agroforestry and agroecology. These farmers must be supported in their transition towards sustainable food production systems, to ensure they are not subject to a higher risk of crop losses and are not forced to buy those hazardous chemicals from somewhere else.

45. European manufacturers that make huge profits from the sale of hazardous, banned chemicals in low-and-middle income countries also produce a vast amount of those products outside Europe, the sales of which will remain unaffected by an EU export ban. Likewise, manufacturers could evade the export ban by moving production to other sites, outside the EU. We therefore call on the Commission to implement without delay its commitment in the Chemical Strategy to “promote due diligence for the production and use of chemicals within the upcoming initiative on sustainable corporate governance” and clarify that agrochemical companies headquartered in the EU are prohibited from producing or selling dangerous chemicals that are banned in the EU anywhere in the world.

46. We also call on the European Commission to implement the EU commitment to “use all its diplomacy, trade policy and development support instruments” to promote the “phasing out” of the use of pesticides no longer approved in the EU and “to promote low-risk substances and alternatives to pesticides globally”. This could be achieved by establishing, in cooperation with FAO, WHO, UNEP and ILO, a new UN mechanism to promote a global phase-out of highly hazardous pesticides in agriculture by 2030.

47. The Commission should also engage in dialogue and cooperation with partner countries, including in the framework of Trade and Sustainable Development Chapters and Sustainable Food Systems Chapters in trade agreements, and leverage the Global Europe instrument to work on national roadmaps and specific programmes and partnerships that will support partner countries to their transition towards sustainable food systems and the achievement of sustainable development.

48. Ensuring a global transition also implies ending the import of agricultural and agri-food products that have been treated with pesticides banned in the EU, as well as other products made with chemicals banned in the EU. It is a question of putting an end to the export of the most unsustainable impacts of our EU consumption and prioritising the health of agricultural workers, the population, and the environment in producing countries.

Attachment Joint-Statement-december-2022.pdf

Categories: A3. Agroecology

GMO-Free Europe Event 2022

Mon, 11/28/2022 - 08:33

The GMO-Free Europe event took place on 17 November 2022 at the European Parliament, co-organised by Save Our Seeds and IFOAM Organics Europe and hosted by the Green Group / EFA in the European Parliament.

We discussed the European Commission’s initiative to change the legislation on the approval, risk assessment and labelling of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) in food and agriculture.

For more information on the event, and for the speakers’ presentations, please check the dedicated page.

Source

Categories: A3. Agroecology

1 Million EU citizens tell EU Commission: end the war against nature

Mon, 11/28/2022 - 08:16

Vice-President Jourová and Commissioner Kyriakides receive Bees ECI demands

On Friday 25 November, representatives of the European Citizens Initiative Save Bees and Farmers delivered a clear message to Vice-President Jourová and Commissioner Kyriakides: we want an end to the war against nature. To restore biodiversity and protect citizens’ health, the use of synthetic pesticides has to be strongly reduced by 2030 and completely phased out by 2035. The EU should support farmers to achieve these goals. This comes at an important moment where the legislative proposal from the the European Commission is under heavy attack by the agro-industry and some EU member states in the EU Council.

Helmut Burtscher-Schaden, a representative of this ECI’s Citizens Committee said: “Fifteen years ago the Commission proposed legislation to reduce the risk and the dependence on pesticides, to protect ecologically sensitive areas, and to substitute more hazardous pesticides with less hazardous ones. Member States and the Parliament agreed to these objectives in 2009 when they adopted the Sustainable Use of Pesticides Directive and Regulation 1107/2009, but Member States subsequently failed to follow the laws they had agreed on. From this background we see it as a fatal signal in terms of democratic policy if some Member States are now trying to torpedo the SUR, trying to delay it or – as is already being speculated in newspapers – try to kill the file.”

The citizens demand a say in this discussion on our health and our environment. Martin Dermine, main representative: “This debate can no longer be dominated by the chemical industry and its allies who lobby in favor of industrial farming. There can be no agriculture and food security without healthy soils, clean water and biodiversity. Industrial chemical agriculture is on a dead-end road.”

Constantin Dobrescu, Romanian beekeeper Romapis, member of the citizens committee: “Every year, thousands of Romanian beekeepers face serious losses of bees in circumstances that are clearly linked to the use of pesticides. The situation is getting worse every year and is linked to the increasingly industrial agriculture practiced in my country.”

Annemarie Gluderer (individual member of the citizens committee): “Our organic farm is surrounded by land that is sprayed a lot because of intensive apple production. Pesticides drifted onto our property, our organic herbs were contaminated with them and could no longer be sold as organic goods. We had to take a lot of protective measures to prevent ourselves from being poisoned. And we, the aggrieved, are accused, threatened with closure, hated and excluded. For us, there is only one solution: a pesticide ban here and now! I ask for it! For our organic farm, as a mother and grandmother for a future for our grandchildren.”

Dr. Polyxeni Nicolopoulo, member of the citizens committee from Greece, environmental pathologist, university of Athens stressed the importance for our health: “We see many cancers and infertility at younger ages, related to pesticide exposure interfering with our hormone system. In utero exposure to pesticides can lead to male infertility and cancer in early age. Bees are sentinels for human health.”

Martin Dermine, main representative of the ECI concludes: “We are over 1 million EU citizens on our way to a toxic free world. We advocate for the restoration of nature, healthy food, healthy soil and clean water, flowers in the fields and biodiversity everywhere in our environment.”

Here you can find the official image of the meeting and here are the representatives of the ECI in front of the Commission building at the Schuman Roundabout in Brussels.

We want a phase-out of synthetic #pesticides to end the war against nature. Representatives of Save Bees and Farmers #ECI delivered 1 Million signatures and a clear message to EU Vice-President @VeraJourova and Commissioner @SKyriakidesEU. https://t.co/cVf97gJZvn pic.twitter.com/aTMXVg0T64

— PAN Europe (@EuropePAN) November 28, 2022

The formal Save Bees and Farmers initiative demands are:

A phase-out of the use of synthetic pesticides: By 2030 the use of synthetic pesticides shall be gradually reduced by 80% in EU agriculture. By 2035, agriculture in the entire Union shall be working without synthetic pesticides.
Measures to recover biodiversity: Habitats shall be restored and agricultural areas shall become a vector of biodiversity recovery.
Support for farmers: Farmers must be supported in the necessary transition towards agroecology. Small, diverse and sustainable farms shall be favoured, organic farming expanded, and research into pesticide-free and GMO-free agriculture will be supported.

The citizens’ initiative is officially validated and the European Commission will have to come with a formal answer. In January an official hearing in the European Parliament will follow.

The delegation visiting the EU Commission:

Dr Polyxeni Nicolopoulo (Greece, medical doctor, individual member of the citizens committee), Annemarie Gluderer (South Tyrol, Italy, organic farmer, individual member of the citizens committee), Constantin Dobrescu (Romania, beekeeper, Romapis and BeeLife), Dr Helmut Burtscher (Austria, scientist, Global2000), Johann Lutke-Schwienhorst (Germany, Aurelia Stiftung), Corinna Hoelzel (Germany, BUND), Veronika Feicht (Germany, Umweltinstitut München), Karl Baer (Germany, former main representative of the citizens committee, now member of the Bundestag), Madeleine Coste (Slow Food EU), Clara Bourgin (France, Friends of the Earth Europe), Luís Morago (Spain, Avaaz), Natalija Svrtan (Croatia, PAN Europe), Tjerk Dalhuisen (Netherlands, PAN Europe) and Dr Martin Dermine (Belgium, PAN Europe).

Background:

The European Citizens Initiative was organised by organisations from all countries in the EU. Signatures with the formally required personal data were collected in all member states. Ten countries reached the minimum threshold set by the EU and the total number of valid signatures makes it an official request on the agenda of the European Commission and Parliament.

Signature collection: in green are the countries where most signatures were collected and that passed the minimum threshold. Out of the total amount of 1,18 million signatures 89% was valid (registration address and date of birth or ID number correct). This results in 1,05 million valid signatures and 11 threshold countries (in dark green).

The official results can be found on the website of the European Commission.

www.savebeesandfarmers.eu

Categories: A3. Agroecology

Sign the petition to say #IChooseGMOfree

Fri, 11/18/2022 - 01:15

A broad coalition of environment and progressive farmers organisations, launches a petition urging the EU to keep GM food strictly regulated and labelled.

Big chemical and seed corporations want to push new genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on the market, forcing genetically modified food onto our fields and plates without us knowing about it.

These companies have been lobbying the European Commission for years to exclude new GMOs from the European GMO regulation, making unsubstantiated claims on the supposed benefits for sustainability, pesticide reduction and climate. But as they also hold patents on the seeds engineered with these techniques, their true motivation remains to increase their profits.

Excluding new GMOs from the current GMO regulation would prevent farmers, food producers, retailers, and citizens from opting for GM-free choices. We have the right to decide what we eat and grow in our fields!

Sign the petition to urge European decision makers to take a strong stand against any attempts to exclude new GMOs from the existing EU GMO legislation and to uphold mandatory safety checks, transparency and labelling for all GMOs to guarantee the safety of our food, as well as to protect nature, the environment and our freedom of choice.

Sign the petition to say #IChooseGMOfree.

Learn more

The Gmo Revival

Webinar ‘GMOs are a failed Technology. The future is GMO-Free’ – Highlights

Truths and lies about new and old GMOs – Testing the industry narrative

The lobby behind Italy’s opening to GMOs

Categories: A3. Agroecology

GMO Mustard: An unnecessary, toxic, and failed technology

Wed, 11/09/2022 - 23:56

By Dr. Vandana Shiva

Mustard is the colour of our spring — basant. It is the flavour, and aroma, of our foods. It is a warm massage for a baby, and the glow of our oil-lamps on Diwali. Mustard has been central to the cultural and food identity of the diverse cultures that make up India. Mustard was the colour of freedom during our freedom movement. India’s mustard cultures and seed freedom are being threatened by the Poison Cartel, and Bayer-Monsanto.

There is a desperate push for introducing GMO Mustard, which will be the first GM food crop introduced into India. The attempt was made in 2016 to 2017, but it failed. And now another attempt is being made. On the 3rd of October 2022, the Supreme Court told the government to maintain the status quo till a hearing on the introduction of GM mustard was completed.

The push for this GMO is anti-science and anti-democracy. GMO mustard approval is a handing over of our democratic institutions to the Poison Cartel.

Thanks to the case of Bt Cotton, we have already seen what GMO crops can do in terms of destruction. Farmers have been committing suicide because of debt due to the high cost of seeds. Since Bayer-Monsanto has been focused on extracting patent royalties, the price of seed has jumped 80,000%. They have extracted Rs 7000 crores as illegal royalties. Under Indian Patent law article 3j, Bayer-Monsanto does not have a patent on BT cotton seed, since the law does not allow patents on seeds, plants and animals. But they have been manipulating and attacking India’s courts to weaken article 3j, thus attacking our democratic and farmers rights. This article is the legal expression of the concept of Vasudhaiva Kutumkam, or the Earth as one family.

For the poison cartel, there are no plants and animals with their own integrity. Life is a corporate “invention”. For Bayer-Monsanto GMO means God Move Over, we will now pretend to be creators of life to collect royalties and Lagaan. Patents and royalty collection is the endgame; GMOs are the excuse.

When the Competition Commission of India started an inquiry because 95% of the seed is controlled by Monsanto, Monsanto dragged the Competition Commission to court. The Monsanto and Bayer merger intensified the threat of monopoly over seed, the first link in the food chain. And when corporations get as big as Bayer-Monsanto, manipulating the courts and the government becomes very easy. If the Seed Price Control order is dismantled, and if the 3j article is removed, the GM mustard will fully become a Bayer-Monsanto mustard.

Sarson Satyagraha in Rajasthan, 2015 – Photo credits: Navdanya

Risky Genetic Transformations

In other words, the basic patents on the GM Mustard technology, as well as agrichemical package, are all owned by Bayer, as the Glufosinate (commercially called “Basta”) to be used with the GM mustard is also a Bayer herbicide.

The gm crop is based on multiple genetic transformations, and introduction of genes from unrelated organisms. These include the barnase gene for male sterility, bar-star gene, bar gene for herbicide resistance to Glufosinate (Basta, Bayer’s herbicide analogous to Monsanto’s Glyphosate), TA29 for regulator, CaMV 35S, Cauliflower Mosaic Virus (as a viral promoter), AMV, Alfa-alfa Mosaic Virus (as a viral promoter), and Agrobacterium tumefaciens as Terminators.

The original Food and Environmental safety assessment of the plant reveals that the barstar gene is to be found in the leaves, stem and roots of the GMO Mustard, and the Barnase gene is found in various vegetative tissues. The Bar gene is also found in the leaves, oil and oilseeds of the new plant. These are proteins that are not present in traditional mustard varieties.

However, the plant (as food) has not been assessed for safety, in its expression of the “layered” Bar “Trans Gene”, that has been implanted into the GMO mustard. What is tested, is surrogate proteins expressed in E Coli Bacteria. Isolated proteins expressed in bacteria are not equivalent to transgenes expressed in plants, which are much more complex organisms. Instead of testing for difference, a false assertion is dictated — that the two are equivalent.

The assessment also casually states, on page 63, “The data showed that the Barnase expression levels are below the detection level and yet the expression level is sufficient to create the male sterility trait”. As it is the expression of the trait that makes the difference in living systems, it is this trait that needs to be assessed in transgenic mustard as food.

Barnase is an enzyme that breaks down RNA indiscriminately and is known to be an extremely potent cell poison. Traces of barnase have been found to be toxic to rat’s kidneys and to human cell linings (Ilinskaya and Vamvaka, 1997; Prior et. Al., 1996).

The Barnase enzyme is also inhibited by the barstar protein. Both are produced by the soil bacterium Bacillus amyloliquefaciens. In the soil bacteria, these enzymes are bound, so barnase can do no harm. But when present in the plant, and when it is secreted from the cell, it is no longer bound and is thus harmful to other cells. It is exactly this harm that has not been scientifically assessed.

Additionally, there have been no official tests done on the safety of viral promoters.This is especially concerning as the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus, for example, is notoriously unstable (Ho, Ryan and Cummins, 1999). The CaMV 35S promoter taken from the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus is a DNA sequence used in commercial GMO crops for almost twenty years. It is also a classic example of how DNA can still reveal unexpected functions, even decades after discovery or use in a GM crop. The CaMV 35S DNA is described in every application for commercial use as a simple DNA “promoter” (as in, an “on” switch for gene expression). In 1999, however, the CaMV 35S “promoter” was found to encode a recombinational hotspot, meaning implanted genes were more likely to be unstable, resulting in likely horizontal gene transfer (Kohli et al., 1999). In 2011, it was found to produce massive quantities of small RNAs. These RNAs probably function as decoys to neutralize the plant immune system (Blevins et al., 2011). One year later still, regulators found these plants to contain an overlapping viral gene whose functions are still being elucidated (Podevin and du Jardin, 2012).

It is important to note that when first released in 2002, Pro-Agro’s (Bayer) application for the approval of commercial planting of GM mustard, based on the same transformations, was rejected by the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC).

Basant Panchami celebration at Navdanya Farm, 2017 – Photo credits: Navdanya

The risk of GM Mustard is not necessary

Besides the instability and clear risks of the genetic transformations, there are many other risks associated with GMO-Mustard. With its Herbicide Resistant Trait, the new GMO will displace native mustard varieties, just like GMO-Cotton displaced Desi-Cotton in India. Genetic contamination from GM mustard will also be irrevocable and irreversible. Furthermore, mustard is grown as a mixture, with chana and wheat. Agrichemical spraying will also destroy the biodiversity of associated crops.

The sterility trait is introduced to produce non-renewable seeds. Just as has previously been the case, farmers will have to re-buy seeds every year, leading them to be trapped in debt, and be driven to suicide like the farmers growing GMO Bt cotton. An unnecessary violence, as in India, there already exists a diversity of local varieties of mustard coupled with traditional farming practices which give more yield without chemicals. The push for this GMO is therefore anti-science, especially as the main justification given for the necessity to genetic engineer with herbicide resistant traits, to resist Bayer’s herbicide, is to increase yields and curve the dependency on edible oil imports. The GMO mustard has lower yields than non-GMO alternatives available in the country. The government itself has admitted in the Supreme Court that increased yields are not being claimed, yet in the media this is the false claim being spun.

HT hybrid mustard DMH 11 has failed the first criteria of a test risk protocol of a GM crop, of whether the GM Crop is required in the first place. The answer in “No” based on the admission of the Union of India itself in their ‘Reply’ Affidavit in the Supreme Court. They said: “No such claim has been made in any of the submitted documents that DMH 11 out-performs Non-GMO hybrids. The comparison has only been made between hybrid DMH 11, NC (national Check) Varuna and the appropriate ZC (zonal checks) — MSY of 2670 Kg/ha has been recorded over three years of BRL trials which is 28% and 37% more than the NC & ZC respectively” (At 88, pg.56).

India can produce enough oilseeds that are diverse, healthy, safe, and culturally appropriate. In the 1990’s India had become self-sufficient in edible oils as a consequence of the conscious commitment to grow more oilseeds. The policy was called the “Yellow Revolution”, and it worked. In 1993-94 India was producing 97% of her requirements.

Native Mustard Seeds – Photo credits: Navdanya

Import Manipulation

In 1998, the same year that Monsanto sneaked in its BT cotton, the multinational companies (MNC) in India manufactured a crisis to get indigenous oilseeds banned and dumped GMO soya oil on India by manipulating a drop on import duties. India had bound its import duties at 300% in the WTO. The United States lobby had soya oil import duties reduced to 45%. In the manipulated crisis of 1998, the duties were dropped to 0%. In addition, the soya bean was subsidized by $190/tonne by the US government, and Rs 15/kg by India. It is no wonder then that India was flooded with imports. It was not because of domestic scarcity, but because of manipulated prices, manipulated trade and manipulated policy .

At that time, the women of the slums of Delhi called me to say their children could not eat the food cooked in soya oil. They wanted the mustard oil back. So we organized the “Sarson Satyagraha” in 1998 and saved our mustard. But the imports kept increasing through dumping and manipulation of policy. Compared to 1.02 million tonnes edible oil imports in 1996-97, India’s imports doubled to 2.98 million tonnes in 1998-99, and then jumped to 5 million tonnes in 1999-2000.

Today we are importing more than 60% of our domestic requirements. And destroying our coconut, sesame, groundnut, safflower, niger, mustard, and linseed diversity. All for GMO soya which is destroying the Amazon, and palm oil which is destroying the Indonesian rainforests. This has directly caused Indian farmers to lose livelihoods, and health.

We can grow enough oilseeds to meet India’s needs. As the farmers organizations wrote in a letter to the Environment Minister, Anil Dave: “Oil seed production has taken a hit due to bad pricing/procurement support from the government, and inappropriate anti-farmer import policies adopted by the government. It is not because we are unable to produce enough or do not have the seeds or know how. If the pricing, procurement and import policies are made farmer friendly we assure you that we can produce all the mustard and other oil seeds the country needs.”

Today, the government of India is again being manipulated by the same interests that forced the edible oil imports on India, to now force GMO Mustard in the name of reducing import dependence.

The unscientific and corrupt approval for GMO Mustard is simultaneously an approval to 100 other crops that are undergoing trial. We stopped Bt Brinjal in 2010. There was a democratic consensus in India that we would not become victims of GMO foods. The 2020 decree by Mexico President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador aims to phase out GM corn and the herbicide glyphosate by 2024.

The decision about GMO Mustard is not merely a technological choice. It is about our Seed Freedom and Food Freedom. Since GMO technology has been pushed primary to own the seed through patents to collect royalties, since such patents cannot be granted without dismantling the public interest and national interest built into our structures, laws and policies, GMO mustard is a recipe for the colonization of India by the Poison Cartel Bayer- Monsanto. If GMO mustard is approved, India as a free, democratic, sovereign country dies. If GMO crops are approved, and article 3j of our patent laws is diluted, misinterpreted, and distorted, India as a civilization dies and becomes a colony in the toxic empire of the Poison Cartel.

This is why we are continuing the Sarson Satyagraha we started in 1998 – to keep India free, healthy and prosperous.

(Dr. Vandana Shiva was appointed by the UN to an expert group to create the Biosafety Framework to implement art 19.3 of the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD). This framework evolved into the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. Dr Shiva has also served on the National Expert Group which drafted India’s National Biodiversity Act, and the Plant Variety Protection and Farmers Rights Act.)

Bibliography:

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Ilinskaya ON, Vamvakas S. Nephrotoxic effects of bacterial ribonucleases in the isolated perfused rat kidney. Toxicology. 1997 Jun 6;120(1):55-63. doi: 10.1016/s0300-483x(97)03639-1. PMID: 9160109.

Kohli, A., Griffiths, S., Palacios, N., Twyman, R., Vain, P., Laurie, D.A. and Christou, P. (1999), Molecular characterization of transforming plasmid rearrangements in transgenic rice reveals a recombination hotspot in the CaMV 35S promoter and confirms the predominance of microhomology mediated recombination. The Plant Journal, 17: 591-601. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-313X.1999.00399.x

Mae-Wan Ho,, Angela Ryan, & Joe Cummins (1999) Cauliflower Mosaic Viral Promoter – A Recipe for Disaster?, Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease, 11:4, 194-197, DOI: 10.1080/08910609943562.

Podevin N, du Jardin P. Possible consequences of the overlap between the CaMV 35S promoter regions in plant transformation vectors used and the viral gene VI in transgenic plants. GM Crops Food. 2012 Oct-Dec;3(4):296-300. doi: 10.4161/gmcr.21406. Epub 2012 Aug 15. PMID: 22892689.

Prior TI, Kunwar S, Pastan I. Studies on the activity of barnase toxins in vitro and in vivo. Bioconjug Chem. 1996 Jan-Feb;7(1):23-9. doi: 10.1021/bc9500655. PMID: 8741987.

Categories: A3. Agroecology

Happy Birthday, Dr Vandana Shiva

Fri, 11/04/2022 - 16:47

The Navdanya International team wishes their indomitable President
Dr. Vandana Shiva, a very Happy 70th Birthday!
May her 70th year see the shift towards a people-centred caring world.

We Need Biodiversity-Based Agriculture to Solve the Climate Crisis

–
Dr Vandana Shiva

The Earth is living, and also creates life. Over 4 billion years the Earth has evolved a rich biodiversity — an abundance of different living organisms and ecosystems — that can meet all our needs and sustain life.

Through biodiversity and the living functions of the biosphere, the Earth regulates temperature and climate, and has created the conditions for our species to evolve. This is what NASA scientist James Lovelock found in working with Lynn Margulis, who was studying the processes by which living organisms produce and remove gases from the atmosphere. The Earth is a self-regulating living organism, and life on Earth creates conditions for life to be maintained and evolve.

The Gaia Hypothesis, born in the 1970s, was a scientific reawakening to the Living Earth. The Earth fossilized some living carbon, and transformed it into dead carbon, storing it underground. That is where we should have left it.

All the coal, petroleum and natural gas we are burning and extracting to run our contemporary oil-based economy was formed over 600 million years. We are burning up millions of years of nature’s work annually. This is why the carbon cycle is broken.

A few centuries of fossil fuel-based civilization have brought our very survival under threat by rupturing the Earth’s carbon cycle, disrupting key climate systems and self-regulatory capacity, and pushing diverse species to extinction at 1000 times the normal rate. The connection between biodiversity and climate change is intimate.

Extinction is a certainty if we continue a little longer on the fossil fuel path. A shift to a biodiversity-based civilization is now a survival imperative.

Take the example of food and agriculture systems. The Earth has roughly 300,000 edible plant species, but the contemporary global human community eats only 200 of them. And, according to the New Scientist, “half our plant-sourced protein and calories come from just three: maize, rice and wheat.” Meanwhile, only 10 percent of the soy that is grown is used as food for humans. The rest goes to produce biofuels and animal feed.

Our agriculture system is not primarily a food system, it is an industrial system, and it is not sustainable.

The Amazon rainforests are home to 10 percent of the Earth’s biodiversity. Now, the rich forests are being burned for the expansion of GMO soy crops.

The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on land and climate highlights how the climate problem begins with what we do on land.

We have been repeatedly told that monocultures of crops with intensive chemical inputs of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides are necessary for feeding the world.

While using 75 percent of the total land that is being used for agriculture, industrial agriculture based on fossil fuel-intensive, chemical-intensive monocultures produce only 30 percent of the food we eat, while small, biodiverse farms using 25 percent of the land provide 70 percent of the food. Industrial agriculture is responsible for 75 percent of the destruction of soil, water and biodiversity of the planet. At this rate, if the share of fossil fuel-based industrial agriculture and industrial food in our diet is increased to 40 percent, we will have a dead planet. There will be no life, no food, on a dead planet.

Besides the carbon dioxide directly emitted from fossil fuel agriculture, nitrous oxide is emitted from nitrogen fertilizers based on fossil fuels, and methane is emitted from factory farms and food waste.

The manufacture of synthetic fertilizer is highly energy-intensive. One kilogram of nitrogen fertilizer requires the energy equivalent of 2 liters of diesel. Energy used during fertilizer manufacture was equivalent to 191 billion liters of diesel in 2000 and is projected to rise to 277 billion in 2030. This is a major contributor to climate change, yet largely ignored. One kilogram of phosphate fertilizer requires half a liter of diesel.

Nitrous oxide is 300 times more disruptive for the climate than carbon dioxide. Nitrogen fertilizers are destabilizing the climate, creating dead zones in the oceans and desertifying the soils. In the planetary context, the erosion of biodiversity and the transgression of the nitrogen boundary are serious, though often-overlooked, crises.

Thus, regenerating the planet through biodiversity-based ecological processes has become a survival imperative for the human species and all beings. Central to the transition is a shift from fossil fuels and dead carbon, to living processes based on growing and recycling living carbon renewed and grown as biodiversity.

Organic farming — working with nature — takes excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, where it doesn’t belong, and puts it back in the soil where it belongs, through photosynthesis. It also increases the water-holding capacity of soil, contributing to resilience in times of more frequent droughts, floods and other climate extremes. Organic farming has the potential of sequestering 52 gigatons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to the amount needed to be removed from the atmosphere to keep atmospheric carbon below 350 parts per million, and the average temperature increase of 2 degrees centigrade. We can bridge the emissions gap through ecological biodiversity-intensive agriculture, working with nature.

And the more biodiversity and biomass we grow, the more the plants sequester atmospheric carbon and nitrogen, and reduce both emissions and the stocks of pollutants in the air. Carbon is returned to the soil through plants.

The more we grow biodiversity and biomass on forests and farms, the more organic matter is available to return to the soil, thus reversing the trends toward desertification, which is already a major reason for the displacement and uprooting of people and the creation of refugees in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

Biodiversity-based agriculture is not just a climate solution, it is also a solution to hunger. Approximately 1 billion people are permanently hungry. Biodiversity-intensive, fossil-fuel-free, chemical-free systems produce more nutrition per acre and can feed more people using less land.

To repair the broken carbon cycle, we need to turn to seeds, to the soil and to the sun to increase the living carbon in the plants and in the soil. We need to remember that living carbon gives life, and dead fossil carbon is disrupting living processes. With our care and consciousness we can increase living carbon on the planet, and increase the well-being of all. On the other hand, the more we exploit and use dead carbon, and the more pollution we create, the less we have for the future. Dead carbon must be left underground. This is an ethical obligation and ecological imperative.

This is why the term “decarbonization,” which fails to make a distinction between living and dead carbon, is scientifically and ecologically inappropriate. If we decarbonized the economy, we would have no plants, which are living carbon. We would have no life on earth, which creates and is sustained by living carbon. A decarbonized planet would be a dead planet.

We need to recarbonize the world with biodiversity and living carbon. We need to leave dead carbon in the ground. We need to move from oil to soil. We need to urgently move from a fossil fuel-based system to a biodiversity-based ecological civilization. We can plant the seeds of hope, the seeds of the future.

Truthout, 22 September 2019 | Source

Categories: A3. Agroecology

What is Missing from the Climate Debate

Thu, 11/03/2022 - 08:13

Climate Change is Really Ecological Collapse

Time is critically running out for climate action. In a year when oil and gas companies will have hit historic record high profits, with the sector set to close out the year at $4 trillion, unprecedented flooding in Pakistan, Puerto Rico and Nigeria, the world is no closer to reducing climate emissions, or remedying ecological destruction.

Many have now even begun to question the point of the yearly COP meetings, as according to the UNEP, even if current climate pledges are met in full, we would still see global heat rise above the 2.5C threshold, leading us into further unprecedented climate chaos. The Postdam Institute is already reporting the rupturing of five critical planetary boundaries, and this year has seen an unprecedented rise in global emissions.

The planetary boundaries framework. Credit: J. Lokrantz/Azote based on Steffen et al. 2015. Licenced under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

The climate emergency we are facing is part of several interlocking crises involving our health, our soils, ecosystems, our society and the biodiversity on the planet. It is a symptom of the broader ecological crisis being perpetuated by an extractivist and profit-driven system. In other words, the current climate chaos currently being experienced all over the world, is a symptom of a larger ecological collapse. The Earth’s climate is composed and intricately interconnected with many overlapping planetary systems and cycles.

It is not just the disruption of carbon cycles, but the disruption and rupture of many of the Earth’s cycles such as, the nitrogen cycle, water cycle, carbon cycle, air flow cycles and cycles of biodiverse life. Individual ecosystems have been altered to such an extent that it is now causing massive deregulation of Earth’s cycles. All of these cycles are interconnected and ensure the maintenance of ecosystems and hence, climate health.

We cannot talk about climate change without addressing industrial food systems.

The way we produce, consume, distribute food has a huge impact on the health of the planet, and hence climate. Food systems tie into all of the mentioned planetary cycles. So we cannot talk about climate change, without talking about the food system, as they are one of the main ways humans interact and affect Earth’s cycles.

Industrial agriculture and globalization have been one of the main reasons the Earth’s cycles have ruptured. Due to land use change, agrochemical pollution, monocultures, genetic ecocide, plastic contamination, fossil fuel use, long-distance transportation it is now one of the largest causes of planetary destruction. It has caused ecocide and biodiversity loss, soil desertification, erosion, and contamination. It has caused mass water pollution all throughout the water cycle, greenhouse gas emissions and a rupture or imbalance of the nitrogen, water, methane and carbon cycle. All of which means the disruption of the climate systems.

Source: Food sovereignty: five steps to cool the planet and feed its people

Together, these ecologically destructive practices account for 44% to 57% of all greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), making the global food system one of the main culprits behind climate change and environmental degradation. For example, agribusiness’ continuous invasion into forests and other vital ecosystems, has made the industry responsible for 70% to 90% of global deforestation.

Today we are also witnessing the collapse of biodiversity, with the 6th mass extinction. According to a report by The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Chatham House and Compassion in World Farming, “Food system impacts on biodiversity loss”, the industrial global food system is the primary driver of global biodiversity loss, threatening 86% of species now at risk of extinction. Although there have been repeated calls for action on this devastating fact, nothing has been done because the practices that have caused this ecocide have yet to be addressed.

The same is true for the destruction of soils. Due to agrochemicals such as artificial fertilizers and agrotoxins, the life of the soil has been destroyed. Artificial fertilizers and pesticides are proven to kill the diverse microbiota of the soil, causing a lack of ability to naturally convert nitrogen, and carbon. Soil with no life, also has no water holding capacity and no fertility to support animal or plant life. Soils lack of water holding capacity and lack of carbon, or organic matter, is one of the reasons mass floods, droughts, and forest fires are becoming more extreme. If the interconnection of these issues is not also addressed, these crises will only continue to get worse.

The Dangers of Reductionist Narratives

In another year of climate in-action, we are actually seeing a rallying behind the false solutions that just maintain business-as-usual, or even work to consolidate industrial models. Corporations are now interested in using the necessary urgency for climate policy to their advantage with a series of false, greenwashed solutions. The solutions proposed in response to the imminent climate crisis, are costly, unproven, and often dangerous technological fixes that are geared towards replacing the very natural processes they have been destroying.

They constitute an imposition of technological innovations such as artificially grown lab food, gene editing, carbon capture, carbon credits and the financialization of nature. But the real agenda behind these false solutions is the final consolidation of the industrial food system through a totally, digitally controlled agricultural supply chain, lab-made foods, and the financialization of the last natural frontieres through biodiversity and ecosystem services financial credits. It is the final push for food without farmers, and farming without the Earth.

Synthetic Fake Foods

In order to erase the last remaining small farmers, corporate-sponsored narratives are now pushing for the reduction of complex ecological collapse into dualistic narratives around plant versus animal, instead of addressing the larger crisis of how current industrial practices are destroying Earth’s ecosystems. In these false dichotomies animals are now being blamed instead of industrial systems as a whole, for the food system’s impact on climate.

The integral, complex, and interconnected husbandry of animals in many traditional cultures around the world is now being lumped in with industrial animal production, effectively erasing the importance of these traditional food and cultivation cultures. In these false climate narratives, animals have also been reduced to mere products for protein, that can simply be replaced by more efficient technologies such as lab-engineered products.

This reduction effectively ignores the multidimensional and essential roles animals can fill in diverse agroecosystems. It thus completely ignores our relationship with nature and creates a rift separating humans from nature and food from life. While it is a fact that all industrial production systems, whether for plants or animals, are heavily responsible for ecological collapse, agroecological and small scale systems are not one in the same.

Proponents of fake food claim that it provides a real solution to climate change, and environmental degradation, due to it not needing intensive water and land resources, while also addressing concerns over animal greenhouse gas emissions and animal welfare in the admonished meat industry. However, the true purpose could not be further away from ending climate change or world hunger.

Instead these ultra-processed ‘plant-based’ foods that rely on dangerous technical innovations such as synthetic biology, CRISPR-Cas9 gene manipulation, and new GMOs. These techniques involve reconfiguring the genetic material of an organism to create something entirely new, and not found in nature. Some companies are also investing in cell-based meat, grown from real animal cells. The result is a whole range of lab-grown fake meats, eggs, cheese, and dairy products swarming the market to ultimately replace animal products and alter modern diets.

These technologies represent a new wave of the patenting logic that was first applied to seeds during the Green Revolution. By being able to now fully control the entire food supply chain, from the genetic manipulation of these fake foods, to their lab production, to the distribution chains already controlled by big agribusiness. The Earth and small farmers will no longer be needed, with the exception of the mass monocultures already controlled by agribusiness.

“Nature-based solutions”

Nature-based solutions are a broad concept increasingly used by corporations and world leaders to promote a range of carbon offsetting schemes for climate and biodiversity protection, that are firmly grounded in discredited market mechanisms and corporate greenwashing. It is a concept that seeks to instrumentalize nature, by using the transactional logics of market mechanisms, all while externalizing ecological destruction and perpetuating neocolonial dispossession of indigenous populations, peasants, and many other communities through carbon offset projects. All in order to continue business as usual, without fundamentally addressing the root causes of the climate crisis. If left unchecked, these tactics will continue to exacerbate the crises by bolstering inequality and corporate power. “Net-zero” and “carbon capture” are two solutions advocated by multinationals and billionaires that fall under this umbrella.

In order to push for these false solutions we have seen a reduction of whole ecological collapse to just the issue of carbon emissions. In both international and everyday discourse, carbon emissions are seen as the sole vector for climate change. This allows for the idea of ‘Net-Zero’ to seem like a viable solution.

In essence, the idea behind ‘Net-Zero’ is to balance out greenhouse gas emissions with removals of greenhouse gasses until we are left with zero. In order to reach zero, the amount of CO2 added cannot be more than the amount taken away from the atmosphere over the same period of time. This equation is problematic in its own right because it implies that companies can achieve net-zero by investing in carbon offsetting schemes.

However, net-zero will not lead to real reductions in carbon emissions for several reasons. First, net-zero focuses only on emissions flows and as such fails to consider the cumulative nature of carbon. Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years, unless it is stored elsewhere, meaning that past, present, and future emissions will have a cumulative impact on both global warming and ocean acidification. Second, net-zero is based on a lie because offsets do not actually reduce atmospheric concentrations of CO2. CO2 levels will thus continue to rise at an alarming pace if they are not effectively sequestered by the soils and oceans.

Click to view slideshow.

This means that in order to understand how to slow down, adapt and heal climate chaos, it is fundamental to understand how each of the planetary cycles is being ruptured and thrown off balance, and not just attempt to ‘solve’ carbon emissions. If we continue to reduce the climate narrative to simply an issue of reducing carbon emissions to ‘net zero’, without understanding and addressing the other aspects of greater ecological collapse, climate chaos will only continue.

In reality, ‘net-zero’ is nothing more than an elaborate corporate greenwashing scheme that grants polluting companies the right to expand their activities and continue polluting as usual, as long as they can claim to sequester carbon elsewhere. By offsetting their emissions through planting monoculture tree plantations, companies will thus continue to provoke land grabbing and displacement of communities, human rights violations, water scarcity, and further biodiversity loss.

The solutions exposed above are a product of a mechanistic worldview that sees nature as dead and inert matter that can be engineered and manipulated to fit our needs and bolster corporate greed. By placing technological innovations on a pedestal and branding them as the only possible option for solving the world’s many crises, the big corporations are setting their own agenda to further cement their control, while wasting precious time. In so doing, they are obscuring the real root causes of the crises we face and bringing us down a dangerous path of further unprecedented crisis. This reluctance to address systemic issues is by no means accidental, rather, it is a deliberate attempt by giant multinationals to maintain their control by perpetuating the same power structures that created our current crises, without taking responsibility for the large-scale pollution and environmental degradation they have caused.

The Answers are right in front of us

The ways to rebalance, regenerate and heal our ecosystems are already known to us. The ways to adapt are also in our hands, and in the support we give to our local food communities who aim to work alongside nature to restore its biodiversity and rejuvenate its natural cycles.

Climate resilience and adaptation can only be developed by local communities actively healing and working from the disruptions present in their local ecosystems. This means agroecological systems must also be developed by local communities to regenerate local ecosystems, and foster biodiversity.

Biodiversity of plants, animals, and microorganisms are key to providing the stability and balance necessary to create resilient agroecosystems in the face of climate change. The same food and agriculture systems that conserve and rejuvenate biodiversity also mitigate climate change and contribute to health and increased livelihoods through regenerative, living economies. Healthy agro-ecosystems come from and work with, healthy greater ecosystems, and vice-versa. Healthy agroecosystems also ensure the maintenance of a healthy greater ecosystem by working in tandem and regenerating Earth’s cycles on a micro scale.

Increasing genetic diversity, as well as crop diversification, is central to the agroecological approach to farming to reduce vulnerability to floods, droughts, and other unpredictable weather extremes. This is why seeds and the capacity to save, breed and preserve through planting must remain in the hands of small farmers. Only then can crop varieties adapt to our changing planet. These communities are at the forefront of climate and ecological chaos, and they are also the ones building resilience to it.

Climate policies hence, must address not just greenhouse gas emissions, but also the full scope of harmful practices perpetrated by the industrial agriculture system, and their false solutions. As well as actively support the regenerative and adaptive work being done by local food communities at the forefront of climate chaos. A transition to organic, regenerative farming should be the top priority, to move away from the industrial food system and embrace a different vision of a regenerative food system.

© Navdanya International

2022

Also read:

The Nitrogen Problem in Agriculture, Dr Vandana Shiva, 7 July 2022

The Corporate Push for Synthetic Foods: False solutions that endanger our health and damage the planet, Navdanya International, March 2022

The age of fake food: a conversation with Satish Kumar and Vandana Shiva, Navdanya International, 28 January 2022

Climate Change is Ecological Destruction: Greenwashing and false solutions at COP 26, Navdanya international, 9 November 2021

Plants, Planet & People – The Living Earth and Climate Change, Dr Vandana Shiva, Navdanya, October 2021

Webinar: Regeneration for Climate Resilience – Highlights, Navdanya International, 29 October 2021

“Carbon Capture”: Two World Views, Two Technology Paradigms, Two Economic Systems, Two Futures, Dr Vandana Shiva, Navdanya, October 2021

UNFSS – Where Multinationals Continue to Design our Food Systems and Control our Diets – Navdanya International, July 2021

Which Future for our Climate? Technofixes vs Biodiversity-based solutions, Navdanya International, 28 June 2021

Earth Democracy: Connecting the Rights of Mother Earth to People’s Rights and the Well-being of All, Navdanya, Mother Earth Day, 2021

Bill Gates & His Fake Solutions to Climate Change, Navdanya International, April 2021

An Agroecological Transformation to Tackle Climate Change, Navdanya International, 2 March 2020

We Need Biodiversity-Based Agriculture to Solve the Climate Crisis, Dr Vandana Shiva, 22 September 2019

Seeds of Hope, Seeds of Resilience – How Biodiversity and Agroecology offer Solutions to Climate Change by Growing Living Carbon, Navdanya, 2017

Manifesto TERRA VIVA. Our soil, Our Commons, Our Future , Navdanya International, May 2015

Manifesto on Climate Change and the Future of Food Security, International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture, 2008

Categories: A3. Agroecology

Biodiverse, circular and local food systems are the foundation of food sovereignty

Mon, 10/31/2022 - 05:55

By Dr Vandana Shiva, 27 October 2022

The web of life is a food web, and we are interconnected with natural systems and all living things. Thus, food sovereignty is primarily an ecological process of co-creation with other life forms. Food sovereignty begins with the right of all living things, of biodiversity and “living” seeds to thrive and evolve, with the right of soil and food not to be considered inert matter. Earth rights are the foundation of the right to food freedom and food sovereignty. There can be no food sovereignty without seed sovereignty, that is, the right to save and use traditional, resilient, native seeds. This activity necessarily involves caring for the land and soil. We cannot aspire to food sovereignty if we do not nurture soil organisms because ecosystem biodiversity supports biodiversity within our gut microbiome. The health of the planet and our health are one and the same.

Seed sovereignty means seeds in the hands of farmers. Seeds that can be stored, bred and exchanged freely. Open-pollinated seeds that are not patented, genetically modified, owned or controlled by agribusiness giants. Seed sovereignty is based on reclaiming seeds and biodiversity as commons and public goods. When the food web is broken by chemicals and poisons and the rules of “free trade” and globalization, biodiversity is wiped out, farmers go into debt, and people die from starvation or chronic non-communicable diseases related to environmental pollution and poor quality food. Food sovereignty includes the right to grow food free of chemicals and GMOs. Food sovereignty means poison-free food and agriculture.

In 1987 I was invited to a meeting on biotechnology from which it became clear how the opportunity to patent life forms for profit was the real purpose of pushing GMOs onto the market. It was then that I decided to start saving seeds through the movement that, since 1991, has been called Navdanya. Since then, more than 150 community seed banks have been established in India. Local seeds, adapted to local cultures, provide more nutrition and are more resilient to climate change. At the Navdanya Farm and Earth University, we have trained more than one million farmers who now practice organic agriculture based on biodiversity and without the use of synthetic chemicals.

The shift from globalization driven by multinational corporations to a progressive localization of our economies has become an ecological and social imperative, essential for food sovereignty. Supporting local economies implies that anything produced locally, by making use of local resources, should be protected, so as to protect both people’s lives and the environment. Food sovereignty therefore means biodiverse, circular and local food systems.

The globalized industrial food system has recently produced a new monster, the modern synthetic, fake, lab-made food industry, even claiming that fake food is the best solution for the health of the planet and people. It is important to consider that artificial food depends on industrial agriculture. For example, on soy monocultures with high chemical input of fertilizers and pesticides and, in some cases, on GMO soy. Food sovereignty means feeding ourselves real, genuine, biodiverse food and freeing ourselves from the false promises of artificial food.

Therefore, free trade rules written by corporations that promote hunger, disease and climate change must be corrected. Earth rights and human rights are the foundation of food freedom and food sovereignty. Around the world, small farmers are already implementing organic farming based on biodiversity, and real food free of chemicals. They are practicing agroecology, preserving and nurturing their soils and seeds. They are feeding their communities with healthy, nutritious food while regenerating the soil and the planet. True agriculture is practiced in harmony with the laws of nature and leads to the regeneration of the planet through the renewal of biodiversity, soils, and water. We need to support small farms that care for the earth, for all life, and produce biodiverse, healthy, fresh, environmentally friendly food for all.

Categories: A3. Agroecology

In Defense of Real Food – World Food Day 2022

Sat, 10/15/2022 - 23:21

Click to view slideshow.

Download pdf

Real food is how our bodies are interconnected to the web of life on Earth. We are so deeply interconnected that our microbiome forms a continuous, reciprocal macro-organism with the microbiome of the soils. The real food we eat provides information to our bodies about the season, environment, and the health of the surrounding ecosystems so that our body can respond accordingly. We are so connected that the debilitation of health of one aspect of our food web, goes on to have a direct effect on our health. But since the advent of industrialization, we have been systematically displaced from the deep, inherent relationships we hold with our food.

The deep seeded extent of corporate power’s infiltration into our daily bread extends all the way from the overuse of toxic substances, shadowy backroom lobbying, and a shapeshifting appropriation of resistance through greenwashing tactics. All to keep us in the dark over the destructive consequences of agribusiness-as-usual. So much so that now less and less people remember where food comes from, and what a healthy, integrated agro-ecosystem looks and feels like.

Such is the disconnect that nutritionally empty, artificial, chemically laced junk, masquerading as food, has become the norm. We have been fooled into thinking food is an object, a necessary but fundamentally non-distinct input into the machine of the body. Corporations would have us believe that food is just ‘functional’, i.e. all nutrients, whether synthetic, from plants, or from animal foods are all created equal in terms of nutrition. But this is simply not so. There are fundamental differences and complexities in bioavailability, nutritional synergies, nutrient density and diversity that are present in real foods. It is impossible for lab-made imposters to mimic the bioavailability and nutrition synergies present in natural foods. Especially as the extent of such complexity is not yet fully understood. As the most advanced branches of science evolve, such as epigenetics, microbiome research, ecology and others, it’s clear there is an infinite amount of information we still don’t know and therefore cannot manipulate artificially.

There is also overwhelming evidence of how such synthetic simulacrums cause detrimental health effects on their own. Just as the Earth, her ecosystems, and her soils have been treated as dead, empty matter that can be manipulated with chemicals, so has the body, under this vision, suffered the same fate.

Small farmers and local food communities have deliberately been destroyed in favor of corporate power, and the health of people, the planet and food systems has been purposefully disregarded. Today this has become evident in the explosion of noncommunicable, metabolic diseases, along with mental illnesses, on one side, and the growing number of people affected by malnutrition and hunger on the other. All caused by the depletion of the human microbiome, lack of basic macro and micronutrients, and food being contaminated with carcinogenic and endocrine disrupting chemicals from toxic pesticide residues, heavy metals, artificial growth hormones, and antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. These same diseases that are affecting humans are also affecting the Earth, in the forms of pollution, mass extinction, and ecological collapse causing climate change.

The call has been made that this system can no longer go on, and now we are finding agribusiness chanting along with what food movements have been saying for years. The corporate chimera has shifted its mask again, appearing to be an ally to the growing eco-conscious movements. Now the very ones who have perpetuated the Earth’s destruction and our amnesia, have shapeshifted once more to try and convince us they hold the solutions. But how can the same groups that have so heavily profited off the destruction of our health, small farmers, and the Earth, all of a sudden be so interested in changing the system they created? If in condemning the industrial atrocities of animal factory farming, for example, we are inadvertently making way for the same corporate actors to step in, are we really making any progress?

The imagination of corporate power can only conjure further iterations of itself- cold, anti-life, lab-made, synthetic and most importantly, profitable. Those that have caused mass-suffering (of peoples, ecosystems, animals and so on) are now saying no more animal suffering, no more nutrient deficiency, no more climate problems thanks to carbon trade offs, nature-based solutions, digital agriculture and lab-made foods. Technological innovation can solve all this by simply eliminating the problem. No more cattle to feed, no more chickens to house, no more dairy cows to pump because now a highly complex combination of never before seen ingredients can be put together with pesticide laden, industrially grown seeds to produce a sterilized, denatured facsimile of the real thing. Complex ecological breakdown is now simplified into catchy marketing slogans, reduced to simple solutions where corporate accountability is conveniently forgotten in favor of shameful individual responsibility.

The push for food without farmers, and farming without the Earth, represents the agenda of the next corporate takeover of food systems in the final elimination of real farming through digital agriculture, and elimination Real Food through lab-made synthetic foods. An agenda being pushed through corporate aligned, false climate-change policies to eliminate animal agriculture, vertically integrate supply chains and digitalization. The industrial, monocultural farm will now find its use in providing previously inedible, unpopular commodity crops as raw materials for lab-made foods. The parasite now sucks the last drops of its heavily infected host before it moves on to its new cell-cultured lab protein.

The already underway destruction of real food has already destroyed health, as profits cannot be made from a healthy planet, healthy people, or a well-functioning local food community. The fight now extends beyond just small farmer versus factory farming, its now real food versus man-made synthetic, fake foods; its nutrient-dense, regenerative foods grown with care, versus corporate digital dystopia.

So, are we going to look to those who regard land, food, and life as extractible, commodifiable, profitable objects to solve the problem which stems from the fundamental disconnection to the Earth and Life? Or do we look to the generational stewards, the indigenous people who speak for their lands, the independent scientist evolving the science of agroecology, and the careful small farmer? Who are the ones that can teach us how to care for the Earth?

The defense of real food is now more important than ever, as it also represents the defense of the small farmer, the defense of our relationship to the Earth, and to life itself.

Real food is nutrient dense, comes from living soil, living water, sunlight and the contribution of hundreds, if not thousands of interconnections with other living beings (including animals).

Real food comes from the care of a small farmer’s hands.

Real food works in tandem to the inherent interconnections of both plants and animals as essential elements of a healthy and balanced agroecosystem. It is made by caring for multidimensional health necessary to produce nutrient rich foods for generations to come.

Real food accepts, honors and humbly respects the cycles of life and death inherent in the Earth’s cycles.

Real food connects us all to the flow of life.

Real food gives us a chance to rejuvenate the earth, our food economies, food sovereignty and food cultures.

CALL TO ACTION – “Our Bread, Our Freedom” 2022

Categories: A3. Agroecology

Our Bread, Our Freedom – From the squares of Campania and Italy for a “world of justice and peace“

Wed, 10/12/2022 - 00:06

OCTOBER 15, 2022

From the squares of Campania and Italy for a “world of justice and peace“, with Dr Vandana Shiva in a live broadcast from India coordinated by Infinitimondi in collaboration with Navdanya International.

Categories: A3. Agroecology

People’s Food Summit

Tue, 10/11/2022 - 05:25

Regeneration International, in conjunction with steering committee partners such as the Organic Consumers Association, The Global Alliance for Organic Districts, IFOAM Asia, Navdanya, the International Network of Eco Regions, Savory Hub Africa, Via Organica, The League of Organic Municipalities and Cities and BERAS International will be hosting the People’s Food Summit on World Food Day, October 16, this year.

Categories: A3. Agroecology

Fête de l’agriculture paysanne

Mon, 10/10/2022 - 06:04

Paysannes d’ici et d’ailleurs.

Marché paysan, exposition, animations enfants avec la participation de Vandana Shiva.

Categories: A3. Agroecology

A bridge between health and environmental sustainability the SALUS proposal brought to the European Parliament

Thu, 10/06/2022 - 05:38

By Alexia Cassinari – Salus, 4 October 2022 | Source

The international conference “ Promoting health and sustainability: the natural way out of the permanent state of emergency ” was held on 28 and 29 September at the European Parliament in Brussels. Thanks to MEPs Rosa D’Amato and Manuela Ripa and the Greens / Efa group it was possible to bring the theme of health promotion linked to environmental sustainability to an institutional place.

Life expectancy in Europe has grown in recent decades but the quality of life has not. The data and studies presented during the two days of the conference outlined how it is actually possible to achieve healthier longevity thanks to a paradigm shift that focuses on a concrete strategy for promoting healthy lifestyles that unite health and the environment.

The response of European governments to the spread of Covid has highlighted a system vacuum: the emergency approach that has been put in place has not been accompanied by any significant intervention on health promotion that would have helped the population to strengthen the natural response. immune to infection . “The motto we have thought to define this paradigm shift is ‘compone et collaborate’ (unite and collaborate)” said the naturopath Milena Simeoni, creator of the SALUS initiative in 2019. Director of the LUMEN School of Naturopathy , Simeoni presented, among other things, the MINERVA project (MIgraine and Nathuropathy: Empowerment with nutRition, attententiVness and yogA). MNERVA represents an example of the paradigm shift that can concretely be implemented; the project, in fact, aims to promote, at a European level, independent and non-profit research on the efficacy of holistic naturopathy in the prevention and treatment of migraines. Another important piece of this paradigm shift is the Citizens’ Initiative (ICE) # Time4SustenaibleHealth. “The SALUS European Network” explained Simeoni “wants to collect more than one million signatures of European citizens to ask the European Commission to recognize and support the central role of the health and sustainability promoter (HSP), to activate local trials, to coordinate Member States to increase investment in health promotion up to 5% of health and social budgets.

To show the feasibility and concreteness of the proposals put forward by SALUS, the intervention of Dr. Pekka Jousilahti, epidemiologist and researcher who works as a research professor at the Finnish Institute for Health and Wellness (THL) , abbreviated as THL , was enlightening. , in Helsinki presented the positive results of a public campaign to promote healthy lifestyles conducted on a stable basis in the North Karelia Region from the 1980s to today.

Among the interventions, several international speakers, including the famous Indian activist Vandana Shiva who recalled how the industrial agricultural model, characterized by monoculture, biodiversity reduction and widespread use of chemicals and, in parallel, a wrong diet strongly influence the incidence of chronic degenerative diseases and contribute to reducing the quality of life with advancing age. On the same wavelength, the intervention of prof. Mìguel Angel Martinez Gonzalez, Spanish doctor, epidemiologist, professor and researcher in nutritionwhich for twenty-five years has been engaged in research involving more than 22,000 participants and which demonstrates the importance of the traditional Mediterranean diet, both to ensure greater health and to ensure environmental sustainability.

Among the concrete paradigm shift proposals that emerged during the conference, there was also talk of the gradual transition from a health system that pays for the disease to one that pays for the healthy longevity generated. “This ambitious goal is possible” said Dr. Alberto Donzelli, president of the Alineare Sanità e Salute Foundation,specialist in hygiene and preventive medicine. “We need to make health profitable and create a bridge between education and health and health promotion. A proposal that goes in this direction, which emerged within the SALUS initiative, is to involve non-health professionals in the health system, such as experts in traditional and complementary medicines, who can collaborate with doctors in supporting citizens to achieve a change of lifestyle “.

Among the practices related to the holistic world, we talked about meditation and its positive effects on the quality of life, as explained by Davide Pirovano, teacher of effective communication and meditation at the LUMEN network. “With mindfulness it is possible to reduce systemic pressure, perceived stress and anger,” he said. “This is why meditation can also be a fundamental tool for that change we want to see in the world”.

As part of the SALUS initiative, legislative proposals were also born: Dr. Alberto Zolezzi, an Italian parliamentarian, worked for example on the legislation on the recognition of sustainable intentional communities, “people who come together around a purpose, a project and a common set of values that contribute to the good of the territory. The environment and ecology always return as fundamental ingredients for the change of paradigm, ”he explained.

Numerous and innovative the philosophical and scientific contents of the event that will soon see new European appointments to continue building the bridge between sustainability and health. Those who subscribe to the newsletter on the website www.salusnetwork.eu are sent the conference proceedings.

Categories: A3. Agroecology

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9 January 2022
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Categories: A3. Agroecology

Rewilding Food, Rewilding Our Mind & Rewilding the Earth

Tue, 09/20/2022 - 05:06

By Dr Vandana Shiva – Pressenza, 19 September 2022 | Source

Regenerating Biodiversity in our farms, forests, and our Gut Microbiome for Zero Hunger and Good – Health for All

Mother Earth is self-organised. Mother Earth has created and sustained Diversity.

Colonialism transformed Mother Earth, Vasundhara, Pachmama, Terra Madre, into Terra Nullius, the empty earth. Our living, bountiful earth, rich in Biodiversity and Cultural Diversity was reduced to an empty earth. People of the colonised lands were denied their humanity to justify the appropriation of the their lands, their homes, their resources. The Biodiversity of the earth disappeared in the minds of men who reduced the earth to private property to be owned, and raw material to be extracted.

The colonial Monoculture of the Mind separated people from the land, forests from farms, seed from food, food from biodiversity, health and nutrition in order to maximise profits through extractivism. People of colonised cultures and the biodiversity of plants and animals were objectified, enslaved and transformed into the property to be owned.

The colonial industrial paradigm could not tolerate diversity and self organisation and redefined “wild” as place or region uninhabited and uncultivated by humans.

This is clearly a flawed definition. The places and ecosystems recognised as “wild” today are where indigenous people protect nature, the land and biodiversity.

On 22% of land left with the original custodians and guardians, indigenous people protect 80% of biodiversity.

Wild is not the absence of humans, but the loving, compassionate presence of caring communities.

Wild is the opposite of the colonised, enclosed, controlled and exploited, manipulated monocultures and the uniformity.

Wild is where humans are partners of nature, enhancing biodiversity and cultural diversity through co-creativity, respecting the integrity and ecological space of all beings

Wild is self-organised and self-regulated. Wild is living as part of nature, not living in the illusion that we are separate from nature and are her masters and owners. Wild is living in nature’s ways,

Wild societies and cultures respect the integrity of all beings, the sovereignty of all cultures and peoples, and enhance the well-being of all through cooperation, sovereignty, mutuality, and symbiosis. Since the web of life is a food web Rewilding food is the first and most significant step in rewilding the earth, respecting her rights, rejuvenating her biodiversity, her self-organised freedom, her rights.

To regenerate biodiversity and provide more food for more species and more people so no one is hungry, no one is malnourished, no one is sick with chronic diseases, we need to Rewild our minds, our food and food systems.

As Albert Howard observes about Indian and Chinese agriculture in the Agriculture testament,

“In the agriculture of Asia we find ourselves confronted with a system of peasant farming which in essentials soon became stabilised. What is happening today in the small fields of India and China took place many centuries ago. There is here no need to study historical records or pay a visit to the remains of the megalithic farming of the Andes.The agriculture practices of the Orient have passed the supreme test – they are almost as permanent as those of the rival forest, of the prairie or of the ocean.”

Farming like the Forest Is Rewilding

Colonial forestry separated forests from farms and reduced forests to monoculture timber mines, without people, without food. Sacred forests disappeared. Community forests disappeared. Biodiversity and its ecological functions disappeared.

If revenues and profits could not be extracted from land it was declared wasteland by the British even though the forests were rich on biodiversity, local communities were sustained by food from the forests and the waters, and the forests performed vital ecological functions life protection from cyclones. The Sundarbans mangrove forests of India were listed as wastelands in British records.

Farms that had more trees than forests were transformed into Green Revolution monocultures of commodities to maximise profits.

Plants were manipulated to first adapt to external inputs of chemical fertilizers and then genetically engineered to become pesticide factories (Bt toxin GMOs), or resistant to herbicide (Roundup Resistant GMOS). Both applications have failed. Instead of controlling pests, Bt crops have created superpests. Instead of controlling weeds, Roundup-resistant crops have created superweeds.

All sustainable food systems, whether they be the forests, grasslands or farms, have animals integrated in them.

Rewilding food includes undoing the historic injustice to indigenous people and tribals. It includes bringing people and food back into the forests, and trees and animals back on farms.

Rewilding includes rediscovering and regenerating forest foods and wild edibles and creating Food Forests.

Rewilding includes rediscovering and regenerating forest foods and wild edibles and creating Food Forest. This also means not destroying the forest.

It includes taking animals out of factories and putting them back on the land, letting them be free-range, and integrating them back in farming systems, nourishing the plants that feed them.

Rewilding also means regenerating biodiversity on our farms and forests, and rewilding our gut microbiome, our bodies, and our minds.

Nine Principles to follow to Rewild Food, Rewild the Earth and Feed the World

We are part of the web of life, not outside the web. We are members of the Earth Family, other species are our relatives We are not masters and of the Earth, we are not owners of biodiversity. EcoApartheid, the illusion humans being separate from the earth, is at the root of violence against the earth, her biodiversity, her diverse cultures. Returning to our membership in the earth family in our minds and life is the first step of Rewilding. It is a step towards making peace with the earth and creating non violent ecological civilisations.
The web of life is a food web. Food is the currency that flows through the nutrition cycle, nourishing all life. The nutrition cycle is an ecological cycle that weaves the web of life. As an ancient Upanishad states Everything is food, everything is something else’s food”.
Humans are part of the food web, as custodians of biodiversity, as cocreators with other species, as eaters, as growers. Food makes us members of the earth family, nourished by soil micro-organisms, by insects, by plants and animals
Every ecosystem is a home of diverse species. Every ecosystems provides diverse foods to diverse species. Forests, farms and grasslands are interconnected ecologically through the nutrition and water cycle, and cannot be divided and separated.
Self organisation and self regulation is the principle of life and of Rewilding ,from the smallest molecule and cell, to microbes, plants, animals, ecosystems, and Mother Earth herself.
Biodiversity is the organising principle of all living systems and of Rewilding. Biodiversity weaves the web life through interconnections of mutuality and symbiosis. biodiversity produces more food and increases resilience.
The Planet’s Health and our Health is one Health. The Biodiversity in the soil microbiome, the biodiversity of the plants we eat, and the biodiversity in our gut microbiome is one interconnected health.
Rewilding food is rewilding the Earth. The more biodiversity we grow, the more we create conditions for the earth to grow more biodiversity, thus arresting biodiversity loss and species extinction.
The Earth’s Climate system has been created by the living earth through photosynthesis. Climate change is a result of the Earth’s Climate Balance and her self regulation being disrupted through the junk energy from fossil fuels. Rewilding our food and the Earth is a Climate Solution.

The original article can be found here

Thumbnail image by Pixabay

Categories: A3. Agroecology

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