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Why Monsanto Is Fighting Tooth and Nail Against California's Prop 37. A new poll conducted by the University of Southern California and the LA Times has found that Proposition 37, the GMO labeling initiative has slipped a whopping 17 points since the last poll in September. The proposition continues to lead but only by 2 percentage points with less than a week before the election. Thirteen percent of likely voters are still undecided on whether to require mandatory labeling of genetically modified organisms in foods. The dramatic shift in opinion is likely due to the barrage of dollars spent by vested corporate interests to defeat Prop 37.

Chief among them are Monsanto corporation, the leading commercial force behind the creation, promotion, and widespread use of pesticides and genetically modified seeds in farming, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association which represents the world's largest processed food producers and distributors such as Coca Cola, Pepsi Co, and Nestle.

GMOs, Seed Wars and Knowledge Wars. A sign notifies shoppers that Whole Foods endorses Proposition 37, which mandates labeling of genetically modified organisms, at a store in Oakland, September 12, 2012. (Photo: Noah Berger / The New York Times) The only reason crops have been genetically engineered is to take patents on seeds, and collect royalties. If during colonialism the concept of Terra Nullius, empty land, allowed the takeover of land and territories by the colonizer, a new concept of Bio Nullius, empty life, is being used to claim “intellectual property rights” on seeds, biodiversity and life forms. But life is not empty. A report, published in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe, shows that genetically engineered crops have led to a 404 million pound increase in overall pesticide use from the time they were introduced in 1996 through 2011.

The data on increased chemical use shows that the claim that Bt toxin crops will reduce pesticide use and herbicide resistant crops will reduce herbicide use, is false. Vandana Shiva on Prop 37, GMOs, Food Sovereignty, and More. Listen to this segment Listen to the entire program A new poll conducted by the University of Southern California and the LA Times has found that Proposition 37, the GMO labeling initiative has slipped a whopping 17 points since the last poll in September. The proposition continues to lead but only by 2 percentage points with less than a week before the election.

Thirteen percent of likely voters are still undecided on whether to require mandatory labeling of genetically modified organisms in foods. The dramatic shift in opinion is likely due to the barrage of dollars spent by vested corporate interests to defeat Prop 37. Chief among them are Monsanto corporation, the leading commercial force behind the creation, promotion, and widespread use of pesticides and genetically modified seeds in farming, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association which represents the world’s largest processed food producers and distributors such as Coca Cola, Pepsi Co, and Nestle.

Rough Transcript Excerpts. Giant Walmart vs. the Small Farmer. India is a land of small farmers. According to the United Nations, the smaller the farm, the higher the productivity. Left party activists are herded into a bus as they are detained by police, during an anti Wal-mart protest in New Delhi. (AP) Small farms grow biodiversity. They are falsely described as unproductive because productivity in agriculture has been manipulated to exclude diversity and exclude costs of high chemical and capital inputs in chemical industrial agriculture. When biodiversity is taken into account, small farms produce more food and higher incomes. In the heated debate on FDI in retail, those promoting it repeatedly claim that the entry of corporations like Walmart will benefit the Indian farmer.

Any trader who mediates in the distribution of goods between producers and consumers is a middleman. Our mandis are governed by cooperatives, which include farmers. Given the size of Walmart, it creates a monopsony through its buying power. . © 2012 The Asian Age Dr. Myths About Industrial Agriculture. "The food revolution is the biggest revolution of our times, and the industry is panicking," says Vandana Shiva [AFP] Reports trying to create doubts about organic agriculture are suddenly flooding the media. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, people are fed up of the corporate assault of toxics and GMOs. Secondly, people are turning to organic agriculture and organic food as a way to end the toxic war against the earth and our bodies.

At a time when industry has set its eyes on the super profits to be harvested from seed monopolies through patented seeds and seeds engineered with toxic genes and genes for making crops resistant to herbicides, people are seeking food freedom through organic, non-industrial food. The food revolution is the biggest revolution of our times, and the industry is panicking. We are what we eat. One example of an industrial agriculture myth is found in "The Great Organic Myths" by Rob Johnston, published in the August 8 issue of The Tribune.

The Global Food System Casino. Food is our nourishment. It is the source of life. Growing food, processing, transforming and distributing it involves 70 per cent of humanity. Eating food involves all of us. Yet, it is not the culture or human rights that are shaping today’s dominant food economy. Rather speculation and profits are designing food production and distribution. Putting food on the global financial casino is a design for hunger. After the US subprime crisis and the Wall Street crash, investors rushed to commodity markets, especially oil and agricultural commodities. A 2008 advertisement of Deutsche Bank stated, “Do you enjoy rising prices? When speculation drives up prices, the rich investors get richer and the poor starve. The world commodity trading has no relationship to food, to its diversity, to its growers or eaters, to the seasons, to sowing or harvesting. Gambling on the price of wheat for profits took food away from 250 million people.

Vandana Shiva at Hawaii State Capitol GMO Labeling Rally (video) On the opening day of the 2013 Hawaii State Legislature, Dr. Shiva, the renowned anti-GMO activist from India visited Hawaii. Dr. Shiva addressed the GMO labeling rally, which was the end point of a march which started three miles away at the University of Hawaii. The march drew hundreds of demonstrators from Oahu and the neighboring islands. Her rousing speech refers to Monsanto and Big Pesticide, basically five big corporations trying to take over the food supply of the world and attempting to patent life itself. She points out that there are thousands of species of each type of crop in the seed banks, which Monsanto wants to destroy, for sheer greed and profit. Dr. Vandana Shiva: Our Violent Economy is Hurting Women by Vandana Shiva.

On December 29th, the brave and courageous survivor of a fatal Delhi gang rape breathed her last. This blog is a tribute to her and other victims of violence against women. Violence against women is as old as patriarchy. Traditional patriarchy has structured our worldviews and mindsets, our social and cultural worlds, on the basis of domination over women and the denial of their full humanity and right to equality. But it has intensified and become more pervasive in the recent past. It has taken on more brutal forms, like the murder of the Delhi gang rape victim and the recent suicide of a 17-year-old rape victim in Chandigarh. In India, rape cases and cases of violence against women have increased over the years. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) reported 10,068 rape cases in 1990, which increased to 16496 in 2000. We need to see how the structures of traditional patriarchy merge with the emerging structures of capitalist patriarchy to intensify violence against women.

Seed savers: Vandana Shiva and female farmers stand up to Monsanto. Vandana Shiva Explores Earth-centred Politics in Making Peace With the Earth | Jacana. Wars in the 21st century are wars against the earth: against natural resources like water, soil, forests, minerals, seeds. The global corporate economy based on the idea of limitless growth has become a war economy and the means it uses are instruments of war. Trade wars. Water wars. Food wars. In a compelling and rigorously documented exposition, Shiva demolishes the myths propagated by corporate globalisation in its pursuit of profit and power by demonstrating its flawed assumptions and devastating fallouts. Corporate control violates all ethical and ecological limits. Making Peace with the Earth outlines how a paradigm shift to earth-centred politics and economics is our only chance of survival; and how collective resistance to corporate exploitation can open the way to a new environmentalism of interdependence and earth democracy.

About the author Vandana Shiva is an Indian philosopher, environmental activist, author and eco feminist. Book details Did you like this article? Vandana Shiva: 'Seeds must be in the hands of farmers' | Global development. Ploughing a field and sowing seeds in Ethiopia, 2007. Photograph: Andrew McConnell/Alamy Vandana Shiva shows no sign of fatigue despite an overnight flight from Delhi and an hour's audience with Prince Charles before arriving at the Guardian, where she launches into her views on agriculture, food, biodiversity and "seed freedom".

The Indian founder of Navdanya, which campaigns for biodiversity and against corporate control of food and seeds, says Africa is the battleground for two very different approaches to agriculture. One is the agroecological approach, based on the use of traditional seeds, diverse crops, trees and livestock, with smallholder farmers and the right to food at the core. The other is an industrial system based on monoculture, the use of fertilisers and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), where companies such as Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, BASF and Dow are dominant. However, Shiva considers Agra to be making an assault on Africa's seed sovereignty. Vandana Shiva on Int’l Women’s Day: "Capitalist Patriarchy Has Aggravated Violence Against Women" This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: We continue our conversation on this International Women’s Day with world-renowned feminist, activist, thinker from India, Dr.

Vandana Shiva. India witnessed nationwide protests earlier this year following the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi in December. The rape brought attention to other instances of sexual violence in India, where one woman is raped every 20 minutes, according to the national crime registry there. The conviction rates in the rape cases in India have decreased from 46 percent in 1971 to 26 percent in 2012. To talk more about the significance of International Women’s Day, we go to Los Angeles to speak with Vandana Shiva, where she’s on tour right now. Vandana, welcome to Democracy Now! Today, the protests that are taking place are a result of a number of things. VANDANA SHIVA: I think this case is not just about Bowman, the Indiana farmer.

Show Full Transcript › Monsanto and the Seeds of Suicide. Vijaya, 22, and her husband Avalu, 28, cultivated cotton Bt on their 5 acres of land. Due to unbearable debts and recent bad harvests, Avalu committed suicide by swallowing pesticide in 2005. Vijaya remains alone with her two daughters, Venalla, 5, and Navyer, 2. In order to provide for her family, she works in the fields where she earns 100 rupees a day in paddy fields (rice) or 25 rupees in cotton fields. She owes the bank 1 lackh rupees. She wants to keep her land for her daughters’ dowries. In the countryside, a widow with two children cannot remarry because the men refuse to support the children from a previous marriage.

(Photo: Viviane Dalles*) “Monsanto is an agricultural company. “Producing more, Conserving more, Improving farmers lives.” These are the promises Monsanto India’s website makes, alongside pictures of smiling, prosperous farmers from the state of Maharashtra. Control over seed is the first link in the food chain because seed is the source of life. . © 2013 Asian Age. Vandan Shiva: Monsanto and the Seeds of Suicide. Source: The Asian Age “Monsanto is an agricultural company. We apply innovation and technology to help farmers around the world produce more while conserving more.” “Producing more, Conserving more, Improving farmers lives.”

These are the promises Monsanto India’s website makes, alongside pictures of smiling, prosperous farmers from the state of Maharashtra. Control over seed is the first link in the food chain because seed is the source of life. Monsanto’s concentrated control over the seed sector in India as well as across the world is very worrying.

Through patents on seed, Monsanto has become the “Life Lord” of our planet, collecting rents for life’s renewal from farmers, the original breeders. Patents on seed are illegitimate because putting a toxic gene into a plant cell is not “creating” or “inventing” a plant. In 1995, Monsanto introduced its Bt technology in India through a joint-venture with the Indian company Mahyco. But it had changed Indian agriculture already. Dr. Environment activist Vandana Shiva receives UVic honorary degree and talks future of food - Local. You don’t get named an environmental hero by Time magazine or one of the five most powerful communicators in Asia by newsmagazine Asiaweek without picking up a few honorary degrees along the way.

“I have a few, yeah,” Vandana Shiva said in an interview Tuesday, without being able to say how many. “I’d have to count them.” Shiva, whose home-base is Dehradun — the northern Indian city nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas — is in Victoria to receive an honorary doctor of laws at the University of Victoria. The environmental activist will also give a lecture Wednesday night on the future of food — a topic she considers intimately connected with politics. “The future of food will be decided by how democracy evolves,” she said. That evolution is not necessarily moving in the right direction. The most recent step in an alarming trend, she said, was the quiet passage of a rider dubbed the “Monsanto protection act” by critics this month. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Asmart@timescolonist.com. Vandana Shiva: Maharashtra's water is going to sugar and grape barons. Srijana Mitra Das Apr 3, 2013, 12.00AM IST The ongoing drought in Maharashtra is being described as the state's worst in many decades, causing agricultural distress and forcing villagers to move to urban areas looking for work.

Vandana Shiva , environmental activist and an authority on biodiversity, spoke with Srijana Mitra Das about factors driving this drought, its impact — and how it can be contained: What is the scale of Maharashtra's drought and who's been worst hit? Large parts of Maharashtra lie in the rain-shadow of the Western Ghats. It is therefore a drought-prone area geographically. But drought vulnerability can be reduced or increased according to how we use land and water.

Today, some of the worst affected districts are Solapur, Pune, Ahmednagar, Sangli, Satara, Osmanabad, Beed, Latur, Nashik, Jalna, Parbhani and Aurangabad — these are also districts where sugarcane cultivation is concentrated. Is such intensive cash-cropping a cause? Campaign against GM bananas. GMO Patents Turn Farmers Saving Seeds Into "Thieves" ~ Vandana Shiva.

Deutsche Welle: Vandana Shiva at the Global Media Forum | Press Releases | DW.DE | 10.05.2013. Vandana Shiva: Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Forest. Corporate Push for GMO Food Puts Independent Science in Jeopardy. Eco-Feminist Dr. Vandana Shiva: Farmers Who Use GMOs Are Like Rapists. Food Poisoning on a Global Scale.