Should the one-percenters control agriculture?

In 2014, when the Indian writer and activist Vandana Shiva was speaking in Halifax, I had the opportunity to sit down with her for a fairly extensive interview – mostly on topics related to genetically modified (GM) crops, which was a key theme of her address. When it was clearly time to wrap up the conversation, I blurted out a rather lame closing question, asking where she saw her work going in the next five years. In reply, Shiva recalled her studies at the University of Western Ontario, where she completed a PhD in philosophy in 1979, focusing on quantum theory.

“Uncertainty is at the heart of quantum theory. Potential is at the heart of quantum theory,” she said. “The potential of our work is that the world will shift much more to local, organic systems. That’s the potential. There’s also the other side – the corporate potential to unleash war against the planet, try every trick under the sun to prevent seed saving, to prevent organic farms, to prevent local distribution. That’s also unfolding at the same time, and I’m deeply aware of it. I will do my bit to protect life in all its diversity on the earth, to make sure I’m available to the service of communities who are trying to create better food systems, and I don’t think we should be at all surprised if these initiatives become the initiatives that shape the world in the future.”

Yes, this is a person who has some high ideals and aspirations. Since then, Shiva has published Who Really Feeds the World? The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology (2016), and Oneness vs. the 1% – Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom (2018) – the latter co-authored with Kartikey Shiva. I was curious about this newer book, which delves further into economics, and eventually a review copy landed on my desk.

In the West, much of the debate about GM crops has been consumer-oriented, focusing on questions about the healthfulness of food and the absence of product labelling that would give us the choice. But Shiva has always focused more on the production end – the ecological effects of industrial monoculture cropping, and the financial and cultural effects for farmers – especially in India. With this new book, she goes further in linking the powers of agribusiness and the growing concentration of global wealth.

Of course, complaining about the rich is nothing new – but Shiva is talking about a trend that has become more dramatic in the 21st century. “In 2010, 388 billionaires controlled as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity,” she says. “This number came down to 177 in 2011; to 159 in 2012; 92 in 2013; 80 in 2014; and 62 in 2016; it shrivelled to a mere eight in 2017.”

She traces this increasing economic inequality partly to the 2008 global economic crash, which presented the rich with an opportunity to further consolidate their ownership of assets across the world. “Stock prices had bottomed out, and the wealthiest billionaires bought out the economy at bottom-dollar prices,” she says.

The book includes lots of figures and references on this, and there’s even a table ranking the world’s top 100 billionaires, indicating their net worth and the source of their wealth – which could be fun for family trivia night. (Only one Canadian, David Thompson, makes the list, ranking fairly high at 25 – though he may have slipped a couple notches since this book was published.)

Once this uneven distribution is established, it continues to become more pronounced – because under today’s market system, returns on capital will always exceed wage increases. Much of the wealth is held and generated in the financial sector, based on speculation rather than production. The very wealthy, Shiva points out, largely avoid exposure to the productive economy, preferring to collect profits from rents, royalties, and acquisitions.

She says the concentration of wealth results in undue political influence, leading to further deregulation of the financial sector, while steering the direction of central banks to benefit one-percenters. And it’s not just individuals, but also private investment funds such as the Vanguard Group, which hold large shares in the major corporations. (A quick online check reveals that Vanguard’s AUM – assets under management – surpassed $6.2 trillion last year.)

Shiva traces large agri-business players back to the war economy – notably, chemical companies like Bayer and BASF that became part of the German conglomerate known as IG Farben, which went on to become a key partner of the Third Reich – as revealed in the Nuremberg trials, when a number of its directors were convicted. Nonetheless, some of these companies lived on to become part of today’s consolidated pesticide and biotechnology industry, comprising just a handful of firms – engaging in mergers and cross-licensing agreements that result in reduced liability (and virtually no real competition).

Shiva describes this as “convergence” – and she says it happens not just in the form of corporate mergers and consolidation by investment funds, but also “the merger of biotechnology and information technology.” She cites Monsanto’s acquisition of major climate data and soil data companies. The business model is based on using weather monitoring and modelling to sell precision agriculture equipment, software, and insurance – potentially integrated with “smart” technology embedded in farm equipment. Shiva says the end result is that farmers will become complicit in and dependent upon a satellite-enabled surveillance system that monitors all of their agronomical decisions and practices.

OVERSIMPLIFICATION

A certain amount of space in this book is devoted to the author’s fundamental criticisms of GM crops. She believes the enterprise will always fail, or bring unforeseen consequences, because it is based on an oversimplification of how genes function in an organism – in relation to each other, in relation to specific traits, and in relation to the environment. Also, she says it discounts local knowledge – the kind residing among farmers who are intimately acquainted with their land, and also the kind residing in seeds that have been bred on that land over many generations.

One of her main concerns is the appropriation and privatization of genetics from traditional crop varieties, through patents. “This genetic colonialism is nothing but an enclosure of the genetic commons,” she says. “Farmers’ rights to the seeds they have evolved over millennia will be open to biopiracy through the genome databases, just as maps were used to claim and steal territory in an earlier colonialism.”

What is new, in this book, is Shiva’s focus on the role of rich people who seek to impose these agricultural models on the developing world, in the name of philanthropy. She is particularly critical of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, describing the group’s work as a version of colonialism underpinned by a technological faith that resembles fundamentalism. “Bill Gates is the Pope of his religion of the worship and imposition of genetic engineering and digital tools,” she says, noting that criticism of this movement is dismissed as “anti-science” heresy.

Because Shiva sees all things as being connected, her description of these problems can sound conspiratorial, and her vision of a better world may sound a bit utopian – as in her conception of the human family embracing “oneness.” But she is, after all, a holistic thinker who aspires to “transcend the mechanical mind.” She does not present her arguments in a purely linear fashion, but instead circles around, reiterating key concepts in a style that sometimes resembles an impassioned sermon. This book is meant to be inspirational and persuasive – which is a perfectly legitimate literary project, though it is not everyone’s cup of tea.

Along the way, many interesting topics are addressed briefly – including loss of biodiversity; the emerging field of epigenetics; the complexity of the human gut biome; the saga of Golden Rice (and alternative means of obtaining sufficient dietary vitamin A); crazy geo-engineering schemes for climate modification; and the writings of Mahatma Gandhi, which are a touchstone for Shiva. Fortunately, the book includes extensive references at the end of each chapter. For the sake of further investigation, it would not be hard to find additional resources.

I do not need to be persuaded that the vast concentration of wealth in the world today is very bad for democracy, and corrosive to our collective humanity – and I think that a great many people across the political spectrum would agree. As for Gates – if he were part of the public sector (at least, in Canada), we would recognize that he is ineligible for the work he is undertaking because he is up to his eyeballs in conflict of interest.

Of course, Shiva has her critics too. (In our polarized world, the one thing these people have in common is the fact that they both receive death threats.) I am not here to claim she is infallible, but I see value in her idea of “democratic pluralism.” It involves the development of local economies and communities that organize to assert their right to play a larger role in decision making. “If globalization is the corporate-driven agenda for control, localization is the countervailing citizens’ agenda for protecting the environment and ensuring people’s survival and livelihood,” she says. This may have resonance for rural dwellers everywhere. DL