Economic observers around the world have their eyes set on India, as the country of 1.2 billion people becomes one of the planet’s fastest growing economies.
Vendana Shiva, renowned environmental activist, is asking hard questions about what that ‘growth’ entails.
“It hides the fact that the growth is not really taking into account the costs – the land, the biodiversity, the water, the people,” she said last week to a packed house in Ondaatje Hall last week.
Dr. Shiva, who has 20 books and 500 academic papers to her name and was named one of the planet’s “environmental heroes” by Time magazine, was in Nova Scotia for several days of meetings with community groups across the province. Her talk at Dalhousie, titled “Water, Biodiversity, Agriculture and Justice,” was a wide-ranging discussion about the important value of maintaining biodiversity for quality food production and strong communities.
Local, living economies
“India has become the capital of hunger,” she said, noting that per-capita consumption has fallen over the past 10 years and is now comparable to what it was during the famine of 1942, when 2 million Indians died from hunger. Today, 42 per cent of Indian children have their growth stunted due to malnutrition.
“This is the ultimate injustice,” she said, “that we could waste their futures for a few percentages of growth.”
She spent a good portion of her talk criticizing practices that corporatize seed production in India, arguing that the seed is a fundamental right of local farmers and crucial to maintaining true biodiversity. She emphasized the importance of building living communities based on living soil.
“We have a choice...between continuing arrogance, ignorance and hubris that devastate the resources to which all people have rights. Our other option is building local living economies based on biodiversity.”
Dr. Shiva’s lecture was sponsored by the College of Sustainably, which has shared her lecture online. Click here to watch.