Dr Shiva speaks to 101 East Al Jazeera on the world food crisis. For those of you who are not familiar with her work, it is worth hearing the words of this physicist, economist, environmentalist, political activist and so much more. The show also features voices from the Asian Development bank, who of course wish to continue dishing out advise that will serve the economies of the rich.
Haven't we seen that Free Trade Agreements and globalization don't work, from nations such as Indonesia, Mexico, Argentina and The Philippines? The WTO, IMF, and World Bank plans to empower developing nations are clearly failing (and I wonder why, perhaps because they are not built to work?). This programme shows how the world food crisis has affected the world's poor most heavily, with a focus on Cambodia. Having travelled throughout Cambodia in 2006/7, I wonder how the families that make up impoverished communities are surviving now, this clearly indicates their struggles.
This is what happens when you subsidise Western farmers and push their products on to economically disadvantaged nations, this is what they call trade liberalization?
Dr Shiva works against the fallacy of Free Trade agreements that see an eradication of protectionism and trade barriers, that subsequently lead to developing nations opening up their markets to exploitation and a continuation of third world debt.
Is it little wonder that India and China said no to the Doha agreement? Just after Peru has joined the likes of Bolivia and Venezuela in saying 'no' after decades of privatization.
I love how Dr Shiva just says it how it is.
World food prices and Dr. Vandana Shiva
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2 comments:
Yeah, okay. But wasn't there some sort of debate surrounding Shiva's essentializing the role of women or something within certain sectors of food production?
I can see Dr. Shiva getting new life in this moment when the whole Green Revolution myth surrounding food production (referring to the Green Revolution in genomics) is proven untrue. Does that mean we will return to a notion of women in the developing world as Earth Mother in her name? Or is it that the Earth Mother as economist will be re-couped?
I wouldn't say that Shiva implies that all women should act within 'earth mother' roles, instead is giving a socio-cultural interpretation of agriculture.
the Indian ecofeminist Vandana Shiva (1988, p38) makes this link explicit in her writing when she argues that 'women in India are an intimate part of nature, both in imagination and in practice. At one level, nature is symbolized as the embodiment of the feminine principle, and at another, she is nurtured by the feminine to produce life and provide sustenance.' Shiva considers that women are closer to nature because nature (prakriti) is seen as feminine in the Hindu tradition. Hindu philosophical traditions consider that there are two principles in the universe: purusha, which is male/non-material/'self ' or 'soul'/static, and prakriti, which is female/nature/dynamic.6 For Shiva, the 'death of the feminine principle' is equated with 'mal-development', the introduction of Western modes of development into the 'Third World', particularly intensive agriculture. Many ecofeminists, thus, re-evaluate what they see as a myth of patriarchal progress and instead envisage a return to small-scale, agricultural communities that worship the Earth Goddess, and in which women's natural inclination to work with nature rather than against it is permitted to flourish. Even where the antipathy towards modern progress is less extreme there is still a tendency to see non-Western religious traditions as 'free of the nature–culture dualism which is believed to underpin the oppression of both women and nature in Western history and thought, and the absence of which is thought to engender positive and sustainable relations between peoples and their environments in many non-Western societies' (Jackson, 2001, p23; see also Merchant, 1982; Plumwood, 1986;Warren, 1987).
Shiva has done a lot in supporting women, especially in india after the immense increase in the suicide rates amongst indian farmers (due to a monopolisation of agriculture by large corporations, n how they were forced into using non renewable seeds).
Shiva has done a great deal of work to empower farmers/impoverished people in asia (the seed revolution, slow food campaign etc)
but i think most often her work goes unaccounted for in the mainstream, perhaps because her stanchly anti globalisation views...
In addition, i think shiva acts as an excellent icon in the development of women. Comming from a south asian heritage, she is the only woman of her generation i have seen that has made such an impact in global terms.
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