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Suffolk Closeup: The fight against Franken-food

KARL GROSSMAN
KARL GROSSMAN

Vandana Shiva, a giant in the environmental field, came to the East End last month.

Ms. Shiva came to speak about her battle against the drive by the chemical industry, led by Monsanto, to radically limit what has been a diversity in seeds, to mix the genes of different species to create genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and to otherwise “industrialize agriculture” at a huge cost to life and the earth.

“I couldn’t believe Vandana agreed to come,” said Kathleen Marder, in introducing Ms. Shiva on October 18, terming her “the world-renowned environmental leader.”

Two hundred people filled the Silas Marder Gallery at Marder’s Nursery in Bridgehampton to listen to Ms. Shiva. “She has a wonderful way of describing the overwhelming role of chemicals,” said Eve Kaplan, who with her husband runs the organic farm, “Garden of Eve,” in Riverhead. “But with a lot of joy and love and hope for the future and that it’s possible for humans to come together and turn things in a positive direction.”

Scott Chaskey, long-time director of the highly successful organic Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett, a project begun by the Peconic Land Trust in 1990, said: “I’ve been reading her books since her first one came out. Her message gets stronger and stronger and her ability to organize people and to provide answers to the difficult situation we are in —just extraordinary!”

Mr. Chaskey has not only been a student of Ms. Shiva’s work but has pursued it himself as a farmer, a leader of organic farmers in the United States, and in his own books including “Seedtime: On the History, Husbandry, Politics and Promise of Seeds,” published last year.

Ms. Shiva, who has a doctorate in physics, is from Delhi, India. “Staying Alive” was the title of her first book, published in 1988. A year earlier in India she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology. This led to the creation in 1991 of Navdanya, an Indian movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seed, the promotion of organic farming and fair trade.

Soon, she had become an international leader in these areas. In 2004 she started, in collaboration with Britain’s Schumacher College, Bija Vidyapeeth, an international college committed to education on the subject of sustainable living.

Books by Ms. Shiva have kept pouring out. Recent ones include “Earth Democracy,” “Justice Sustainability and Peace” and also “Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Change.”

Ms. Shiva said she was delighted to be on the East End. “Your region still has farms that look like farms,” she commented. And this in contrast to “industrial farms” that are “creating deserts” and doing “violence against the earth.”

She spoke of the “amazing web of life” and how “diversity” and “resilience” are an integral part of that. But there’s been a massive move since World War II, led by chemical companies, particularly those that make pesticides derived from the “nerve gasses” they developed during that war, to bring “uniformity” to agriculture, dominate it and produce colossal profits for themselves. They have worked to control what is grown and “displace diversity in what we eat” while also striving to “marry chemicals and seeds.”

She provided a list of a dramatically reduced variety of seed types now in use — beets, from 288 to 17, cucumbers, 295 to 16, tomatoes, from 488 to 25.

With “genetic engineering” — the mixing of the genes of one species with another, even if one is a plant and the other an animal or insect — they have created genetically modified organisms, GMOs.

The U.S. has become an enormous victim of this “dark path.”
Nations around the world have banned the growing of genetically modified crops, including most of Europe, but here in the U.S., an already large percentage of crops, particularly soybeans and corn, are GMOs. Monsanto has become the corporate king of GMO seed and has successfully persuaded the U.S. government to let it expand wildly in GMO-based agriculture.

It’s been busy patenting its genetically-modified seed, hooking farmers on its use and coupling that campaign with use of its pesticides. “Is life an invention? Is it patentable?” asked Ms. Shiva.

Monsanto and the rest of the chemical industry have been manipulating federal and other governments here to overturn local bans on GMO agriculture and suppress disclosure on food products that they are genetically modified.

At the same time, she said, the chemical industry has been endeavoring to suppress U.S. media reporting on any of this.