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TechnoratiActivist's Message at USF: End Needless Waste of Food
JOLIET -- Vandana Shiva is giving new meaning to the old metaphor, "You reap what you sow."
Shiva, a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, urged more than 225 people to consider the food and ecological crisis as one in the same during her speech at the University of St. Francis.
"We have mastered the art of wasting the planet," she said. "Land and water are being misused, polluted and disintegrated by nonsustainable agriculture. We need to reclaim the ethics of the gift of food."
Examining a crisis
Shiva, a leader in the International Forum on Globalization (IFG) along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin, has spent more than 20 years examining agriculture and the environment and advocating on behalf farmers and the hungry around the world.
Less than 50 percent of crops harvested around the world are for human consumption, Shiva said. Of that food, 50 percent is wasted, which results in just over 12 percent of all the food produced on the planet actually being consumed.
"Couldn't we make sure that no one was hungry if that food wasn't wasted?" she asked.
Saving, sharing seeds
Shiva, who won of the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award) in 1993, is the founder and director of Navdanya, India's network of seed keepers and organic producers.
Shiva said she has dedicated her life to saving and sharing seeds and nonviolent farming.
"For every seed sold or planted anywhere, there's a royalty collected," she said. "If a farmer saves seeds or shares seeds, he's a thief. I think it's our duty to pass them on and share them with a neighbor who needs seeds."
When farming became a big business, the average local farmer was pushed out of the market by costs or even forced off his land by his government, Shiva said.
"Farmers should be producers, but they're forced to be consumers," she said. "The input is more than the output, and it cannot be sustained."
Shiva opposes genetically modifying food, as well, and said pesticides and herbicides do nothing more than attack the food itself.
"Pesticides don't just kill the pests they're supposed to kill," she said, remarking how the names of common pesticides alone sound violent.
"We don't have to destroy the planet pretending we're doing what's best."
Small-scale farms
Shiva said the shift back to small-scale farming and bio-diverse farms is occurring.
"Across the world, bio-diverse farms based on ecological systems produce more," she said. "The small-scale farm is better because crops are grown with care."
Shiva said she believes that food should be viewed as life.
"The giver of food is the giver of life," she said.
Before becoming an activist, Shiva was one of India's leading physicists.
She has authored or edited more than 10 books and her most recent, "Soil Not Oil," examines international issues with food security, peak oil and climate change.
Shiva signed copies of her book following her speech.
12 Comments so far
Show AllHalf of half is 25%, though maybe the reporter missed one of Vandana Shiva's steps in the logic. Whether it's 12% or 25% of food that directly nourishes a person, that is indeed a lot of waste.
It is very sad that one of humanity's staple foods, fish, is at risk worldwide of collapse. Fish is now a luxury but once it provided affordable protein, DHA and EPA (omega-3s crucial for brain function) and vitamin D (every cell has D receptors).
Much as I wish humans could be vegans, it doesn't appear to work. We could get DHA and EPA from algae, but who would bother? Meanwhile, only 5% of ALA, the omega-3 found in flax, hemp, and canola oil, converts in the body into DHA and EPA. Vitamin D2 (a vegan source) is a poor substitute for D3 (from animal sources).
True, our intestinal flora can make B12, another nutrient most people get from animal sources. It's also true that humans can make D from sunlight -- IF the UVB rays reach us (but people living above LA and Atlanta can only make D in their skin between 11 am and 1 pm, and we make zero D between October and March, and skin with more melanin makes much less D).
But humans can't be healthy without DHA/EPA and that comes from animal sources (fish or grass-fed beef, pork, and mutton). Weston Price was right, we don't need a lot of meat, but a very moderate amount is necessary for health.
If vegans got blood tests for DHA and EPA and vitamin D, the results would show them to be deficient. I wish that wasn't so. And certainly, the habit of eating a lot of animal muscle (while ignoring organ meats) is a giant waste of resources.
Vandana Shiva certainly knows what she's talking about and is right, and it's welcome to see that she and Ralph Nader (I don't know of Jeremy Rifkin yet, though the name rings a bell) are leaders of the International Forum on Globalization. Globalization is definitely a very serious problem that needs to be justly resolved. It's only about empire-building and this, from what I've gathered anyway, is always or nearly always destructive, malignantly parasitic, hegemonic, counter-competitive, which is also counter-alternative(s) and we need alternatives, etcetera.
She's definitely right, what she's opposing is another kind of war on humanity, and all wars on humanity need to be stopped.
When considering that poor farmers of India have committed suicide to the order of (I've read a number of times) 100,000 over the past decade or so and due to having been either suckered into becoming slaves of Monsanto, f.e., or the government of India required the country's farmers to use only seeds from Monsanto, and we don't see war on humanity in this, then we're damn morons; because this clearly and obviously is another war on humanity.
When considering the statistics that she provides on how LITTLE of the food that's grown is actually consumed by people, illustrating enormous waste, then:
a) People who claim that this planet cannot support the present human population and the expected 9bn population by 2050, or whatever the year referred to is, hardly have a leg to stand on for such claims; and,
b) We again should see a war on humanity.
I, recently enough, read that South Africa actually produces plenty of food, but most of it is exported and the South African population starves due to the exportation of the food produced there. This is another war on humanity. Are any South African representatives, including Archbishop (if it's the correct title) Desmond Tutu, speaking out about this real crime? I haven't heard or read of any speaking out on this topic.
There should be a video of her speech and I'll do a search to try to find it. Doing a search of Youtube for videos with her, only using her name for searching, turns up many links, however the article doesn't say when the speech occurred and adding "St. Francis" as an additional search term still produces plenty of links with none in the first page having any text specifying "St. Francis". So I won't do any more to try to find a video for the speech she gave at this university. There are plenty with her at Youtube though and genuinedigest's Youtube channel has a playlist for a 6-clip video with her speaking.
http://www.youtube.com/user/genuinedigest
The video's entitled, for Youtube pages anyway, "Vandana Shiva - The future of food and seed" (parts or clips 1-6).
Climate change emissions from meat production are far higher than currently estimated, according to a controversial new study that will fuel the debate on whether people should eat fewer animal products to help the environment.
In a paper published by a respected US thinktank, the Worldwatch Institute, two World Bank environmental advisers claim that instead of 18 per cent of global emissions being caused by meat, the true figure is 51 per cent.
Ride the cow and eat the SUV?
Vandana Shiva is asuperstar. She can organize farmers, she talks and writes nothing but real true visionary ideas about what is happening now and what should be happening. In her country small farmers fed everyone for 10,000 years. The small farmers of the world could feed everyone because their kind of agriculture is so much healthier and efficient than agri business.too bad big agra has so much power
BIO diverse is key. Working within the enviroment one is given is key.
The best and most sustainable farms are the ones that follow these principles.
For economic reasons which have NOTHING to do with sutainability or for that matter a TRUE preservation of WEALTH, the system demands that Monoculture be used to raise our food.
This the economics of scale and "false efficiencies" wherein it easier to grow, store and transport ONE type of food over the many.
Thus we get CORN CORN CORN. The growing of food has adopted the methodology of the factory Assembly line that Henry Ford introduced.
if you grow CORN CORN CORN..you use the same mechanisms and equipment, fertilizers, herbicedes and machineries many times over thus making CORN CORN CORN easier and cheaper to produce.
We then get TOO much corn and try to find ways to UTILIZE what we do not need.
We then decide to feed it to cows and everything falls apart.
The fundamental problem with the Corporations providing the food supply is they always seek EFFICIENCIES. these are not efficiencies designed to provide us with healthy foods, they are intended to maximize profits.
We should not be growing foods based upon what is most PROFITABLE.
I am very happy that there are seed keepers in India. Companies like Monsanto have tried to forbid saving viable seeds in order to keep a monopoly and sell their seeds every year. That is on the moral level of privatizing water and should be resisted. If you have some legacy plants, please save and distribute the seeds.
But the math in the article is a little careless. "Less than 50 percent of crops harvested around the world are for human consumption, Shiva said. Of that food, 50 percent is wasted, which results in just over 12 percent of all the food produced on the planet actually being consumed". It should be 25% not 12%, based on the information given.
Joe
We always fed our dogs table scraps. They were all very healthy. But none of my friends will give their dogs any table scraps. Not even those juicy t-bones with lots of meat on them. Upsets their stomachs they say. The vet tells them not to and to buy instead the dry dog food he sells. What a racket. What a waste.
Having lived in third world countries where they don't waste food, I've seen free roaming chickens in every back yard, eating table scraps and insects (and providing eggs and meat). Some larger yards even had a hog or two to eat their scraps. If there was an open field, a milk cow would be there. Crops were planted in front yards. In America, all this is verboten. But if things keep deteriorating, maybe some good will come of it and home food production will come back.
The pet food industry is behind the unqualified blanket advice to avoid feeding animals from our table. Not wanting to take the time to clarify what would be good and what wouldn't, veterinarians play it safe and forbid table scraps. Sometimes it is ridiculous. No milk or cream for cats? No knucklebones for dogs? Nutritional advice for humans and animals suffers from industrial mind pollution.
Joe
Good point, Joe.
Conventional veterinarians, like physicians are trained to administer drugs and perform surgery. They are not trained in nutrition unless they are holistic alternative trained.
I would steer clear of the milk and cream for cats, due to growth hormones, antibiotics and pasteurization which can cause bloating and upset the same as in people.
I do feed my cats some of what we eat, though. They like thick greek yogurt (probiotics), wild salmon, mostly skin (omega-3 fatty acids), sauteed organic zuchinni, carrot, apple, raw chicken drumettes and raw bison (whole foods). I also give them wet can EVO duck.
I agree veterinarians play it safe recommending bags of dry food thereby supporting the pet food industry. If we ate cereal every day, all day, would we be healthy?
Dry food is full of mostly inflammatory-causing carbohydrates (corn, wheat) and typically miscellaneous unidentifiable scraps from dead animals contributing to health issues including cancer and arthritis and early death.
Using all food and not wasting can help our cats and dogs stay healthy, too.
"Nutritional advice for humans and animals suffers from industrial mind pollution."
Well put, Joe.
Jeevee
"DON'T WASTE FOOD!!!"
Concerning dams, another disadvantage is that in tropical regions dams attract a fly that causes "RIVER BLINDNESS" IN CHILDREN.
Land IS life. Food is Life.
Food security and the right not to be expulsed from one's subsistence land are two of the most important issues that accompany environmental impact studies for the massive industrialization being undertaken by construction of scores of massive hydroelectric dams in SA and other parts of the world.
Think US financial bail-out scale investments, genocidal disregard for the public commons and social contract of public policy. Think exclusionary practices in virtually every dimension of participatory civil life in the places where these are been bulldozed through scientific opposition as well as economic analysis.
Massive social movements are finding solidarity between previously factionalized peoples and are learning to analyze and counter the 'divide and conquer' syndrome. Mother nature by virtue of existing is emerging as the research library and the experts are millions of people who have lived in harmony with the land.
Yet to attempt a conversation about this is like trying to build a cistern on a teflon mound.
Transnational industries still believe it possible to alter entire river/sea biomes, cause extinction that occurs in domino style colapse radiating outward in intensifying imbalances through entire agricultural and social structures.
As MLK said...How long? Not long... because no lie can last forever.
http://www.internationalrivers.org/en/node/287