1. Solutions to the Food and
Ecological Crisis Facing us
Today
TEDx - Dr Vandana Shiva
Presenter
Dr. Noor Nigar

2. Dr Vandana Shiva
• Indian scholar, environmental
activist, ecofeminist and anti-globalisation author.
• Based in Delhi, Shiva has written more than 20 books.
• She is often referred to as "Gandhi of grain" for her
activism associated with the anti-GMO movement.[
• Shiva is one of the leaders and board members of the
International Forum on Globalization & a figure of the
anti-globalisation movement.

3. Chipko Movement
• Deepest love for the forest brought about a change in a
non-violent way.
• Peasant women who had never been to school made
the biodiversity experts change the policies of this
country.
• The most important product of the forest of the
Himalaya is not timber but soil, water and pure air.
• She was a volunteer in this movement.

4. What she learned
from the Chipko
Movement?
•Nature is not out there;
we are part of nature.
•Protecting nature is not
a luxury.

5. Why is Environmentalism not a problem?
• The foundation of every economic activity is:
• The rivers
• The land
• The Forest
• The Biodiversity

6. Reality of Food in
India
• Approximately half to three-quarters people are
not getting enough food to eat.
• 2 lakh farmers have committed suicide in one
decade from 1997-2007.
• A million children are dying every year for lack of
food.
• Before the new economic policies, there wasn’t
drastic hunger in tribal areas.

7. What is unprecedented in our long history?
•Two hundred thousand farmers
have committed suicide in a
decade.

8. Synthetic fertilizer
• India gives 1.3 trillion Rupees as
subsidies for poisoning our soil,
for synthetic fertilizers.
• This money is more than the
defense budget of our country.

9. Problems are Interconnected
Climate change
Land
Children
malnutrition

10. What Capitalist Patriarch gave us?
Assumption that
nature is dead
when it is very
much alive.
You have to declare
nature dead to
establish man’s
empire over nature.

11. Why is the Cleaning of
the Ganga difficult?
• Despite spending millions government
is finding it difficult to clean it.
• We have broken the cycle- the cycle of a
nutrition that should go back to the
land is going as pollution to the rivers.
• Solution:
• Good Town Planning
• Good Sanitation

12. What is Monoculture of Mind?
It is a mechanistic
thought that makes
us blind to diversity.
It has destroyed
food systems- but
we think that we are
growing more food.

13. What has Monoculture of Mind done?
• It has succeeded in transforming India from the land of abundance and pulses
and all seeds and cereals and millets into a land where we’re importing daals
and now, we’re making fake dals (iDaals).

14. What is “iDaal”?
• It is not a daal.
• It is basically Soyabean reconstituted
and coloured yellow.

15. Faking Food
• We can fake the supermarket shelf
• We can fake the customer
• But, we cannot fake the body.

16. Millets
• Scarcity of food is caused because we use ten units of
inputs to produce one unit of food.
• A seed of millet gives thousand seeds-the reason they
are called millets.
• Millets are now forgotten foods.

17. Ways to prevent
multiplication of seed:
• Genetic engineering
• Terminator seed ( suicide
seeds)
• Patenting (it makes it illegal for
the farmers to save their own
seeds)

18. Reasons for Farmer
Suicides
•High-cost seeds
• high-cost chemicals
•Debt

19. How to change this genocidal and ecocidal
system?
• Recognizing that biodiversity is not a problem.
• The separations that have been made between those who grow the food and
those who eat the food if only that link could be closed miracle start to
happen.
• Citizen action.

20. The Paradox
• The more we eat by biodiversity, the more we grow it.
• if we don’t eat millets, who will grow it?
• If we don’t ask authentic Dal, it will not be grown in this
country.

21. Eating
• Eating is an ethical act.
• Eating is an ecological act
• Eating is an agricultural act.

22. Root cause of Huge
Food and Agrarian Crisis
• Forgetting about agriculture,
• forgetting about the field farmers
• forgetting about the seed
• forgetting about the soil

23. What should you
throw your weight
behind(support)?
Make the right choice
•Ecosystem
•Diversity
•Farmers

24. What is killing planet and people?
Greed
Super
profits
Ill health

25. Signing off:
•Eat Right
•Think holistically