Musings: Shivanized

While reading an article about anti-GMO activist Vandana Shiva in the current issue of The New Yorker, I suddenly understood what had happened to little Kauai: We were Shivanized.

The “take no prisoners, no co-existence, us against them” mindset; the disinformation campaign; the strategy of attacking and ostracizing critics; the characterization of the seed companies as “pure evil;” the messianic call to “expel them from your islands,” starting with Kauai; the war terminology, and most especially, the fear-mongering — it all began with Shiva at her Jan. 17, 2013 Kauai talk sponsored by Hawaii SEED.

As acclaimed reporter Michael Specter makes clear in The New Yorkers, that's Shiva's schtick. As part of her ongoing “pilgrimage,” Shiva unceasingly trots the globe saying stuff that ranges from not quite true to outright false, viciously attacking anyone who disagrees, simplifying the complex issue of food and agricultural production down to a single simple solution: If we just return to organic farming, eliminate any seed created in a laboratory, ban all fertilizers, everything will be OK.

Except, as Specter points out, it won't.

Specter is no apologist for modern agriculture. He is well aware of the damage that can be caused by an over-reliance on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and water-sucking crops. He is cognizant of the dangers posed by pollen drift and insect-resistance, though he says both concerns can be addressed. He also recognizes that some 10 billion people will need to be fed by the end of the century:

Feeding the expanding population without further harming the Earth presents one of the greatest challenges of our time, perhaps of all time. For most of the past ten thousand years, feeding more people simply meant farming more land. That option no longer exists; nearly every arable patch of ground has been cultivated, and irrigation for agriculture already consumes seventy per cent of the Earth’s freshwater.

He addresses Shiva's claim that “If you look at the graph of the growth of G.M.O.s, the growth of application of glyphosate and autism, it’s literally a one-to-one correspondence. And you could make that graph for kidney failure, you could make that graph for diabetes, you could make that graph even for Alzheimer’s.”

And then debunks it:

Shiva had committed a common, but dangerous, fallacy: confusing a correlation with causation. (It turns out, for example, that the growth in sales of organic produce in the past decade matches the rise of autism, almost exactly. For that matter, so does the rise in sales of high-definition televisions, as well as the number of Americans who commute to work every day by bicycle.)

Specter goes on to point out how “Shiva’s absolutism about G.M.O.s can lead her in strange directions,” including condemning the Indian government for permitting the shipment of GMO grain and soy to feed the millions of starving homeless following a 1991 cyclone that killed 10,000 people.

He also questions her credentials:

Most of her book jackets include the following biographical note: “Before becoming an activist, Vandana Shiva was one of India’s leading physicists.” When I asked if she had ever worked as a physicist, she suggested that I search for the answer on Google. I found nothing, and she doesn’t list any such position in her biography.

And while Specter agrees that there has been an increase in the use of herbicides, he disagrees with Shiva's assertion that genetically-modified crops are the culprit:

But farmers face the problem whether or not they plant genetically modified crops. Scores of weed species have become resistant to the herbicide atrazine, for example, even though no crops have been modified to tolerate it. In fact, glyphosate has become the most popular herbicide in the world, largely because it’s not nearly so toxic as those which it generally replaces. The E.P.A. has labelled water unsafe to drink if it contains three parts per billion of atrazine; the comparable limit for glyphosate is seven hundred parts per billion. By this measure, glyphosate is two hundred and thirty times less toxic than atrazine.

Specter discusses how “Shiva’s speeches are filled with terrifying anecdotes that play to that fear” of eating GMO foods, even though “humans have consumed trillions of servings of foods that contain genetically engineered ingredients, and have draped themselves in thousands of tons of clothing made from genetically engineered cotton, yet there has not been a single documented case of any person becoming ill as a result.”

Specter also addresses Shiva's claim that “294,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves because they cannot afford to plant Bt cotton.” He writes:

Shiva contends that modified seeds were created almost exclusively to serve large industrial farms, and there is some truth to that. But Bt cotton has been planted by millions of people in the developing world, many of whom maintain lots not much larger than the back yard of a house in the American suburbs. In India, more than seven million farmers, occupying twenty-six million acres, have adopted the technology. That’s nearly ninety per cent of all Indian cotton fields. At first, the new seeds were extremely expensive. Counterfeiters flooded the market with fakes and sold them, as well as fake glyphosate, at reduced prices. The crops failed, and many people suffered. Shiva said last year that Bt-cotton-seed costs had risen by eight thousand per cent in India since 2002.

In fact, the prices of modified seeds, which are regulated by the government, have fallen steadily. While they remain higher than those of conventional seeds, in most cases the modified seeds provide greater benefits. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute, Bt farmers spend at least fifteen per cent more on crops, but their pesticide costs are fifty per cent lower. Since the seed was introduced, yields have increased by more than a hundred and fifty per cent.

Shiva also says that Monsanto’s patents prevent poor people from saving seeds. That is not the case in India. The Farmers’ Rights Act of 2001 guarantees every person the right to “save, use, sow, resow, exchange, share, or sell” his seeds. Most farmers, though, even those with tiny fields, choose to buy newly bred seeds each year, whether genetically engineered or not, because they insure better yields and bigger profits.

Specter traveled to India to meet with farmers and found :

The first thing that the cotton farmers I visited wanted to discuss, though, was their improved health and that of their families. Before Bt genes were inserted into cotton, they would typically spray their crops with powerful chemicals dozens of times each season. Now they spray once a month.

Everyone had a story to tell about insecticide poisoning. “Before Bt cotton came in, we used the other seeds,” Rameshwar Mamdev told me when I stopped by his six-acre farm, not far from the main dirt road that leads to the village. He plants corn in addition to cotton. “My wife would spray,” he said. “She would get sick. We would all get sick.” According to a recent study by the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology, there has been a sevenfold reduction in the use of pesticide since the introduction of Bt cotton; the number of cases of pesticide poisoning has fallen by nearly ninety per cent. Similar reductions have occurred in China. The growers, particularly women, by reducing their exposure to insecticide, not only have lowered their risk of serious illness but also are able to spend more time with their children.

The World Health Organization has estimated that a hundred and seventy thousand Indians commit suicide each year—nearly five hundred a day. Although many Indian farmers kill themselves, their suicide rate has not risen in a decade, according to a study by Ian Plewis, of the University of Manchester. In fact, the suicide rate among Indian farmers is lower than for other Indians and is comparable to that among French farmers.

Most farmers I met in Maharashtra seemed to know at least one person who had killed himself, however, and they all agreed on the reasons: there is almost no affordable credit, no social security, and no meaningful crop-insurance program.

Specter also dismisses Shiva's claim that Monsanto “control[s] the entire scientific literature of the world.” Nature, Science, and Scientific American, three widely admired publications, “have just become extensions of their propaganda. There is no independent science left in the world.”

Monsanto is certainly rich, but it is simply not that powerful. Exxon Mobil is worth seven times as much as Monsanto, yet it has never been able to alter the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is the principal cause of climate change. Tobacco companies spend more money lobbying in Washington each year than Monsanto does, but it’s hard to find scientists who endorse smoking.

Perhaps most revealing — especially in terms of how Kauai has been Shivanized — is this quote by Britith environmentalist Mark Lynas, previously a staunch biotech opponent who reversed his stance after studying all scientific literature:

“When you call somebody a fraud, that suggests the person knows she is lying,” Mark Lynas told me on the phone recently. “I don’t think Vandana Shiva necessarily knows that. But she is blinded by her ideology and her political beliefs. That is why she is so effective and so dangerous. She is very canny about how she uses her power. But on a fundamental level she is a demagogue who opposes the universal values of the Enlightenment.”

And on Kauai, she helped to create hundreds of little demagogues who are similarly blinded by ideology, and thus similarly dangerous.

Spector notes:

The gulf between the truth about G.M.O.s and what people say about them keeps growing wider.

And I recalled a dreadful article recently published about the Kauai GMO fight by some guy whose relatives belong Kauai Rising. It was so full of shibai that when I saw it on the Truthout.org site, I thought yes, he left the truth out.

A woman who has worked as an agricultural advisor in Hawaii for 25 years sent me an email with a link to the Truthout article, despairing over its falsehoods and asking, “How is this going to change?”

I wasn't able to give her much encouragement. It's hard to turn the tide once misinformation gets entrenched, and people who question it are bullied. But slowly, ordinary people and journalists like Michael Specter are beginning to speak up, and that gives me hope.

Specter ends his article — and I urge you to read it in his entirety — with this:

Genetically modified crops will not solve the problem of the hundreds of millions of people who go to bed hungry every night. It would be far better if the world’s foods contained an adequate supply of vitamins. It would also help the people of many poverty-stricken countries if their governments were less corrupt. Working roads would do more to reduce nutritional deficits than any G.M.O. possibly could, and so would a more equitable distribution of the Earth’s dwindling supply of freshwater. No single crop or approach to farming can possibly feed the world. To prevent billions of people from living in hunger, we will need to use every one of them.

Or to quote Frank Zappa: A mind is like a parachute. It only works when it's open.

And finally, a sincere mahalo to those who have contributed to Kauai Eclectic. Your support and acknowledgement means a lot!