Total Madness: General Selected Writings by Various Authors.
THE SEED AND THE SPINNING-WHEEL
For html document: http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/shiva209.htm
Voice From The South
by Vandana Shiva
Life and craft are inseparable, Panjim, India. Photograph: Roderick Johnson/Images Of India
Reflections on technology, politics and the culture of crafts.
from Resurgence issue 209
INDIA'S INDEPENDENCE movement did not have a gun as its instrument or symbol. Our symbol and instrument for freedom was a craft technology - the charkha (spinning-wheel). The policies to promote hand spinning and hand weaving of cloth (khadi) and boycotting mill-made cloth were at the heart of our struggle for freedom. The crisis of unemployment and fall in incomes faced by the Indian weavers today was also a crisis generated a century and a half ago by the mechanization of the textile industry in Britain itself. When the British introduced their textile mills in India there was a devastating impact on the local handloom weavers.
Gandhi's critique of the industrialization of India on the Western model was based on his perception of the poverty, dispossession and destruction of livelihoods which resulted from it. "Why must India become industrial in the Western sense?", Gandhi asked. "What is good for one nation situated in one condition is not necessarily good for another differently situated. One man's food is often another man's poison. … Mechanization is good when hands are too few for the work intended to be accomplished. It is an evil where there are more hands than required for the work, as is the case in India."
It was to regenerate livelihoods in India that Gandhi thought of the spinning-wheel as a symbol of liberation and a tool for development. Power-driven mills were the model of development in that period of early industrialization.
However, the hunger of mills for raw material and markets was the reason for a new poverty, created by the destruction of livelihoods either by diverting land and biomass from local subsistence to the factory, or by displacing local production through the market.
Gandhi said that "anything that millions can do together becomes charged with unique power." The spinning-wheel became a symbol of such power. "The wheel as such is lifeless, but when I invest it with symbolism, it becomes a living thing for me."
India got her freedom through the symbol of the spinning-wheel. Gandhi recognized that technology is a political and social construct. It must adapt to people and diverse social, economic and environmental contexts if it is to serve human development. People cannot be and should not be forced or coerced to adapt to technology as an end.
If technology is a means, then its productivity and efficiency have to be measured by other ends - ends such as promotion of freedom and democracy, generation and protection of livelihoods and conservation of the natural environment. When these human and ecological concerns are the primary ones for society then society organizes itself to generate and promote technologies that are decentralized, make use of human hands and need fewer natural resources and little capital. Craft technologies allow the poorest of people to produce freely, have a livelihood and a meaning in life, and experience democracy in their everyday lives. Democratic decentralization, and protection of livelihoods and the environment give rise to craft technologies.
When ordinary people build and use a technology without heavy capital investment, the technology is small-scale; it uses local skills and local resources. Craft products made by hand are by their very nature embodiments and reflections of beauty because they are made as expressions of human creativity. Since cultures are diverse, these crafts as expressions of culture are diverse. In India, every region has its distinctive sari design. Across the world, as long as foods are based on craft and home-based production and processing, food cultures are diverse. As soon as food is industrialized, crops are reduced from hundreds to just a few, like rice, wheat, corn and soya. Food and drink are reduced to McDonald's and Coca-Cola.
Craft technology uses resources efficiently. There is multi-functionality built into crafts. Rice grain feeds humans, and rice straw is used to feed cattle, weave mats and baskets and shelter homes. Coconut kernels give oil, the husk makes coir for rope, mats and mattresses, the trunk builds homes and irrigation channels, the leaves make roofs, mats and fans. Any technology which creates jobs and conserves resources has social and ecological sustainability built into it. It therefore lasts. The lasting quality of craft technologies is a reflection of this sustainability.
CRAFT TECHNOLOGIES have been destroyed and displaced by industrial technologies, not because they were non-sustainable or inefficient, but because they serve society, not capital. They are not efficient as a means of exploitation and capital accumulation. While the rise of industrial technologies has been driven by the needs of capital, rather than the needs of nature and people, the relationship between capital and technology has been systematically hidden by a new mythology which treats technology as an end in itself.
In the dominant paradigm, technology is seen as being above society both in its structure and its evolution, in its technological fixes, and in its technological determinism. It is seen as a source of solutions to problems that lie in society, and is rarely perceived as a source of new social problems. Its course is viewed as being self-determined and evolving linearly. In periods of rapid technological transformation, it is assumed that society and people must adjust to that change, instead of technological change adjusting to the social values of equity, sustainability and participation.
Industrial technologies are never compared with the craft technologies on the basis of their intrinsic qualities: on the basis of democracy, protecting livelihoods, conserving resources and protecting beauty, diversity and sustainability. They are compared on the industrial criteria of returns on capital and productivity of labour alone. Of course, getting rid of labour and using more energy and natural resources is by definition more productive. But in pursuit of such productivity both livelihoods and environment are destroyed. Industrial production is facilitated by governments making natural resources available for free or at highly subsidized prices for industry. Local and environmental costs are externalized. Such capital-intensive industrial technologies grow with large social and ecological subsidies. Besides being destructive of jobs and the environment, they destroy democracy, beauty and diversity.
These negative traits are not, however, at the centre of the dominant discourse on technology, which focusses only on 'newness' and 'obsolescence'. Every new technology is assumed to be better than and superior to all existing technologies - no matter what the risks or the social and ecological costs. On the blind faith of 'new is better', government policies and public investment are dedicated, democratic debate is crushed and alternatives are destroyed. Technology is transferred from being a means for meeting human needs into being a religion. The ground for technological change shifts from people's democratic choices to coercion by government and industry. Technological determinism creates technological dictatorship.
The 'Human Development Report 2001' on 'Making New Technologies work for Human Development' (published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is actually a report on selling new technologies like genetic engineering. Farmers in the Third World and consumers in the North have rejected genetically engineered crops and foods. The report is aimed at creating an atmosphere of 'trust in technology'. But to achieve this, the report reinforces most of the technology myths.
It reinforces the myth that the Third World is a 'technology follower', and that the West is the source of all technology. It ignores the facts that modern organic agriculture was introduced to the West from Indian peasants by Sir Albert Howard; that one in three us citizens uses Indian or Chinese medicine today; and that the West is engaged in the blatant biopiracy of indigenous knowledge as in the case of neem, turmeric, basmati, tamarind, etc. The report has totally blocked out the existence and spread of technologies and innovations of the South.
Worse, it even justifies the richness of the North and the poverty of the South, which have been created by political and economic processes, as based on an "ecological divide" between ecologically rich temperate and ecologically poor tropical regions, even though, in terms of biodiversity, biological richness, and biological productivity, the tropical rainforests and tropical farming systems are much richer than the monoculture forests and farms in the temperate zones. Processes that create and aggravate political and economic inequality are thus being turned into facts of nature.
The interesting questions which should have been raised and answered are: why, in spite of being ecologically rich, has the South become economically poor? Why, in spite of being the source of agrodiversity and medicinal plant diversity, are the agricultural and health systems of Third World countries in crisis? Why are hunger and disease growing? The relationships between technology and trade would then have thrown up interesting new perspectives for human development.
A central tenet of technological determinism is: "Technology shapes society and technological change is always positive and progressive." The UNDP report repeats the assumption that "New technologies improve on the ones they replace." Large dams were supposed to improve on indigenous water harvesting structures, but in fact they have displaced millions of people and destroyed millions of acres of fertile land. Chemical pesticides were supposed to have been an improvement on natural pesticides, but in reality they have led to increase in pests through build-up of resistance. Plastics were supposed to be an improvement on cloth bags, but today getting rid of plastic bags is a big campaign everywhere. New is not always better. The old need not always disappear.
In fact, ecological concern is bringing back technologies which were considered obsolete. Climate change and sustainable energy concerns have made the bicycle a better technology than the car. Health concerns have made natural foods a preferred alternative to industrially processed food, concern for quality has made 'slow food' preferable to fast food, and sustainability has made organic farming superior to chemical agriculture. The debate about technology today is about ecology, ethics, culture, livelihoods and justice. It is about cultural diversity and cross-cultural fertilization of innovation. It is no longer about the West as the only source of technology, and North to South as the only direction of technology flows. It is about bringing ecology and culture to the heart of technology. It is about re-evaluating illusions about the efficiency of mega-scale technologies which externalize social and ecological costs. It is about recognizing the innovative capacity of peasants and craftspeople.
The debate is about the political and ecological content of technology. It is a debate about substance, not form. Technology needs an ethical and ecological core, not a mere face-lift. The 'Human Development Report 2001' misses the core of contemporary technology debates. It is triply outmoded: it promotes outmoded technology myths and technology paradigms, it ignores the social and cultural dimensions in the current technology debates and it is out-of-date on current technology trends.
For example, it talks of 100,000 Indian software professionals going to the us annually when, in fact, 50,000 jobless Indian professionals from the us information technology (it) sector are returning to India because of the collapse of it firms and the economic slow-down. It talks of "trust in technology" and adaptation to risks in the age of the Mad Cow and Foot-and-Mouth epidemics! It talks of reduction in under-nutrition in South Asia and the end of chronic famine at a time when starvation deaths and famines are making a comeback due to a decade of trade liberalization policies and unregulated introduction of capital-intensive technologies in agriculture. It talks of industrialization of the textile sector allowing employment and incomes to increase at a time when thousands of Indian weavers are being pushed to starvation and suicide because of unemployment caused by dismantling the policies that protected the handloom weavers.
Ignoring the entire experience of India's freedom struggle through the spinning-wheel (charkha), the UNDP report states in a section on 'Costs of Inertia Versus Costs of Change': "If the Luddites had succeeded in prohibiting the adoption of spinning jennies, Britain would have foregone the productivity growth that allowed employment and incomes to increase so dramatically."
With a totally one-sided view of the history of technology, the UNDP technology report refers only to Britain's experience of mechanization of textiles and describes the defence of alternatives as "inertia".
Had Gandhi not resurrected the spinning-wheel and handlooms, India would have been trapped in colonized inertia. We would have destroyed our rich and diverse textiles. We would have failed to protect the livelihoods and welfare of our weavers which are once again threatened by globalization.
WHILE THE TECHNOLOGY report is written from a Euro-centric bias, it claims, instead, to be correcting a European and us bias in the debate on technology and genetic engineering. Much of the false promise of genetic engineering upheld by the biotech industry and by the UNDP report is based on earlier myths about the Green Revolution. As the report states in the section on 'Food Production and Nutrition': "Technological Progress has played a similar role in accelerating food production. Starting in 1960 a green revolution of plant breeding, fertilizer use, better seeds and water control transformed land and labour productivity around the world. This had dynamic effects on human development. Increased food production and reduced food prices eliminated much of the under-nutrition and chronic famine in Asia, Latin America and the Arab States. Because the poorest families rely on agriculture for their livelihood and spend half their incomes on food, this also contributed to huge declines in income poverty."
Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Firstly, the Green Revolution focussed only on labour productivity, not resource productivity. Agriculture therefore shifted from labour-intensive ecological technologies to capital- and resource-intensive technologies. In terms of ecological efficiency and conservation of soil, water, biodiversity and energy, the Green Revolution led to a sixty-six-fold productivity decline. This led to a severe ecological crisis in agriculture threatening the future of food production and creating resource poverty even in resource-rich regions like the Punjab.
Secondly, repeated reference to doubling of cereal yields ignores the fact that this gain in yields of rice and wheat was at the cost of a four-fold decline in pulses, oilseeds, millets and greens. Malnutrition and deficiencies of protein, iron and vitamin A have been a direct result of these rice and wheat monocultures. Genetic engineering of 'golden rice' is now being offered as a new miracle in the same reductionist, one-dimensional paradigm of technology. While 100 g of greens give around 14,000 mg of vitamin A, golden rice will produce only 30 mg of vitamin A per 100 g of rice. This is the jugglery of figures through which ecologically, economically and socially inappropriate technologies have repeatedly been sold to the Third World as 'miracles'.
In terms of biomass per acre and nutrition per acre, both the Green Revolution and genetic engineering are inefficient and wasteful technologies and create nutritional poverty. It is not true that the Green Revolution "contributed to huge declines in income poverty". Both Green Revolution and genetic engineering technologies are creating income poverty as more and more of the scarce incomes of farmers are drained to buy costly seeds and chemicals. Instead of being called High Yielding Varieties (HYVS) the new seeds should, more appropriately, be called High Cost Varieties (HCVS) since they involve high capital costs and high resource costs. The shift from open pollinated to hybrid seeds has led to such an escalation of costs that farmers are getting into deep debt. In India new seed technologies have forced farmers into selling their own kidneys and even committing suicide. 20,000 farmers have committed suicide over three years in the Punjab and Andhra Pradesh.
Genetic engineering and seed patents go hand in hand. Patents and technology fees will further escalate the drain on farmers' income. In the us, new technologies and new intellectual property rights on seed are already transforming agriculture into a police state, as illustrated by the Percy Schmeiser case in Canada and 400 other cases in the us.
That is why, in India, we have started Navdanya, a movement for saving farmers' seeds, sharing seeds freely and promoting low-cost organic farming which protects biodiversity and increases farmers' incomes three-fold and farm productivity many-fold compared with the industrial agricultural technologies. Diversity as a pattern of production, not merely of conservation, ensures pluralism and decentralization. It prevents the dichotomy of biological systems as 'primitive' and 'advanced'.
As Gandhi challenged the false concepts of obsolescence and productivity in the production of textiles by his search for the spinning-wheel, groups across the Third World are challenging the false concepts of obsolescence in agricultural production by searching for seeds used by farmers over centuries and making them the basis of a self-reliant and sustainable agriculture.
Biodiversity-based, resource-efficient nonviolent farming technologies, rather than capital-intensive, external-input-based violent industrial monocultures, are the best way forward for the poor and fragile ecosystems.
The UNDP technology report exposes its blind faith in genetic engineering by totally negating experiences with sustainable ecological agriculture. It states that "Biotechnology offers the only or best 'tool of choice' for marginal ecological zones." This rejection of technological diversity and alternatives is the most fundamental flaw of the report. It ends up promoting technological totalitarianism. It is more of a sermon than an analysis. It is more about technology as an end of human development than a means of human development. As a means, technologies will always be pluralistic, since they must adapt to diverse social, economic and ecological contexts. As an end, technology is a coercive monolith to which people and ecosystems are forced to adapt, no matter what the costs, no matter what the alternatives.
The UNDP seems to have forgotten that human development must put human beings at the centre of concern instead of picking the latest technological tools and fads that some humans have shaped for their political purposes and putting them at the centre of human enterprise. In the final analysis, all that the report has done is offer a desperate sales pitch for genetic engineering. That is how it is being used. It has failed to move the debate on technology forward. And it has failed miserably as a Human Development Report.
Vandana Shiva is co-author of An Ecological History of Food and Farming in India. This two-volume history is published by Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, New Delhi. For further information contact: vshiva@vsnl.com
from Resurgence issue 209Subscribe to Resurgence
Voice From The South
by Vandana Shiva
Life and craft are inseparable, Panjim, India. Photograph: Roderick Johnson/Images Of India
Reflections on technology, politics and the culture of crafts.
from Resurgence issue 209
INDIA'S INDEPENDENCE movement did not have a gun as its instrument or symbol. Our symbol and instrument for freedom was a craft technology - the charkha (spinning-wheel). The policies to promote hand spinning and hand weaving of cloth (khadi) and boycotting mill-made cloth were at the heart of our struggle for freedom. The crisis of unemployment and fall in incomes faced by the Indian weavers today was also a crisis generated a century and a half ago by the mechanization of the textile industry in Britain itself. When the British introduced their textile mills in India there was a devastating impact on the local handloom weavers.
Gandhi's critique of the industrialization of India on the Western model was based on his perception of the poverty, dispossession and destruction of livelihoods which resulted from it. "Why must India become industrial in the Western sense?", Gandhi asked. "What is good for one nation situated in one condition is not necessarily good for another differently situated. One man's food is often another man's poison. … Mechanization is good when hands are too few for the work intended to be accomplished. It is an evil where there are more hands than required for the work, as is the case in India."
It was to regenerate livelihoods in India that Gandhi thought of the spinning-wheel as a symbol of liberation and a tool for development. Power-driven mills were the model of development in that period of early industrialization.
However, the hunger of mills for raw material and markets was the reason for a new poverty, created by the destruction of livelihoods either by diverting land and biomass from local subsistence to the factory, or by displacing local production through the market.
Gandhi said that "anything that millions can do together becomes charged with unique power." The spinning-wheel became a symbol of such power. "The wheel as such is lifeless, but when I invest it with symbolism, it becomes a living thing for me."
India got her freedom through the symbol of the spinning-wheel. Gandhi recognized that technology is a political and social construct. It must adapt to people and diverse social, economic and environmental contexts if it is to serve human development. People cannot be and should not be forced or coerced to adapt to technology as an end.
If technology is a means, then its productivity and efficiency have to be measured by other ends - ends such as promotion of freedom and democracy, generation and protection of livelihoods and conservation of the natural environment. When these human and ecological concerns are the primary ones for society then society organizes itself to generate and promote technologies that are decentralized, make use of human hands and need fewer natural resources and little capital. Craft technologies allow the poorest of people to produce freely, have a livelihood and a meaning in life, and experience democracy in their everyday lives. Democratic decentralization, and protection of livelihoods and the environment give rise to craft technologies.
When ordinary people build and use a technology without heavy capital investment, the technology is small-scale; it uses local skills and local resources. Craft products made by hand are by their very nature embodiments and reflections of beauty because they are made as expressions of human creativity. Since cultures are diverse, these crafts as expressions of culture are diverse. In India, every region has its distinctive sari design. Across the world, as long as foods are based on craft and home-based production and processing, food cultures are diverse. As soon as food is industrialized, crops are reduced from hundreds to just a few, like rice, wheat, corn and soya. Food and drink are reduced to McDonald's and Coca-Cola.
Craft technology uses resources efficiently. There is multi-functionality built into crafts. Rice grain feeds humans, and rice straw is used to feed cattle, weave mats and baskets and shelter homes. Coconut kernels give oil, the husk makes coir for rope, mats and mattresses, the trunk builds homes and irrigation channels, the leaves make roofs, mats and fans. Any technology which creates jobs and conserves resources has social and ecological sustainability built into it. It therefore lasts. The lasting quality of craft technologies is a reflection of this sustainability.
CRAFT TECHNOLOGIES have been destroyed and displaced by industrial technologies, not because they were non-sustainable or inefficient, but because they serve society, not capital. They are not efficient as a means of exploitation and capital accumulation. While the rise of industrial technologies has been driven by the needs of capital, rather than the needs of nature and people, the relationship between capital and technology has been systematically hidden by a new mythology which treats technology as an end in itself.
In the dominant paradigm, technology is seen as being above society both in its structure and its evolution, in its technological fixes, and in its technological determinism. It is seen as a source of solutions to problems that lie in society, and is rarely perceived as a source of new social problems. Its course is viewed as being self-determined and evolving linearly. In periods of rapid technological transformation, it is assumed that society and people must adjust to that change, instead of technological change adjusting to the social values of equity, sustainability and participation.
Industrial technologies are never compared with the craft technologies on the basis of their intrinsic qualities: on the basis of democracy, protecting livelihoods, conserving resources and protecting beauty, diversity and sustainability. They are compared on the industrial criteria of returns on capital and productivity of labour alone. Of course, getting rid of labour and using more energy and natural resources is by definition more productive. But in pursuit of such productivity both livelihoods and environment are destroyed. Industrial production is facilitated by governments making natural resources available for free or at highly subsidized prices for industry. Local and environmental costs are externalized. Such capital-intensive industrial technologies grow with large social and ecological subsidies. Besides being destructive of jobs and the environment, they destroy democracy, beauty and diversity.
These negative traits are not, however, at the centre of the dominant discourse on technology, which focusses only on 'newness' and 'obsolescence'. Every new technology is assumed to be better than and superior to all existing technologies - no matter what the risks or the social and ecological costs. On the blind faith of 'new is better', government policies and public investment are dedicated, democratic debate is crushed and alternatives are destroyed. Technology is transferred from being a means for meeting human needs into being a religion. The ground for technological change shifts from people's democratic choices to coercion by government and industry. Technological determinism creates technological dictatorship.
The 'Human Development Report 2001' on 'Making New Technologies work for Human Development' (published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is actually a report on selling new technologies like genetic engineering. Farmers in the Third World and consumers in the North have rejected genetically engineered crops and foods. The report is aimed at creating an atmosphere of 'trust in technology'. But to achieve this, the report reinforces most of the technology myths.
It reinforces the myth that the Third World is a 'technology follower', and that the West is the source of all technology. It ignores the facts that modern organic agriculture was introduced to the West from Indian peasants by Sir Albert Howard; that one in three us citizens uses Indian or Chinese medicine today; and that the West is engaged in the blatant biopiracy of indigenous knowledge as in the case of neem, turmeric, basmati, tamarind, etc. The report has totally blocked out the existence and spread of technologies and innovations of the South.
Worse, it even justifies the richness of the North and the poverty of the South, which have been created by political and economic processes, as based on an "ecological divide" between ecologically rich temperate and ecologically poor tropical regions, even though, in terms of biodiversity, biological richness, and biological productivity, the tropical rainforests and tropical farming systems are much richer than the monoculture forests and farms in the temperate zones. Processes that create and aggravate political and economic inequality are thus being turned into facts of nature.
The interesting questions which should have been raised and answered are: why, in spite of being ecologically rich, has the South become economically poor? Why, in spite of being the source of agrodiversity and medicinal plant diversity, are the agricultural and health systems of Third World countries in crisis? Why are hunger and disease growing? The relationships between technology and trade would then have thrown up interesting new perspectives for human development.
A central tenet of technological determinism is: "Technology shapes society and technological change is always positive and progressive." The UNDP report repeats the assumption that "New technologies improve on the ones they replace." Large dams were supposed to improve on indigenous water harvesting structures, but in fact they have displaced millions of people and destroyed millions of acres of fertile land. Chemical pesticides were supposed to have been an improvement on natural pesticides, but in reality they have led to increase in pests through build-up of resistance. Plastics were supposed to be an improvement on cloth bags, but today getting rid of plastic bags is a big campaign everywhere. New is not always better. The old need not always disappear.
In fact, ecological concern is bringing back technologies which were considered obsolete. Climate change and sustainable energy concerns have made the bicycle a better technology than the car. Health concerns have made natural foods a preferred alternative to industrially processed food, concern for quality has made 'slow food' preferable to fast food, and sustainability has made organic farming superior to chemical agriculture. The debate about technology today is about ecology, ethics, culture, livelihoods and justice. It is about cultural diversity and cross-cultural fertilization of innovation. It is no longer about the West as the only source of technology, and North to South as the only direction of technology flows. It is about bringing ecology and culture to the heart of technology. It is about re-evaluating illusions about the efficiency of mega-scale technologies which externalize social and ecological costs. It is about recognizing the innovative capacity of peasants and craftspeople.
The debate is about the political and ecological content of technology. It is a debate about substance, not form. Technology needs an ethical and ecological core, not a mere face-lift. The 'Human Development Report 2001' misses the core of contemporary technology debates. It is triply outmoded: it promotes outmoded technology myths and technology paradigms, it ignores the social and cultural dimensions in the current technology debates and it is out-of-date on current technology trends.
For example, it talks of 100,000 Indian software professionals going to the us annually when, in fact, 50,000 jobless Indian professionals from the us information technology (it) sector are returning to India because of the collapse of it firms and the economic slow-down. It talks of "trust in technology" and adaptation to risks in the age of the Mad Cow and Foot-and-Mouth epidemics! It talks of reduction in under-nutrition in South Asia and the end of chronic famine at a time when starvation deaths and famines are making a comeback due to a decade of trade liberalization policies and unregulated introduction of capital-intensive technologies in agriculture. It talks of industrialization of the textile sector allowing employment and incomes to increase at a time when thousands of Indian weavers are being pushed to starvation and suicide because of unemployment caused by dismantling the policies that protected the handloom weavers.
Ignoring the entire experience of India's freedom struggle through the spinning-wheel (charkha), the UNDP report states in a section on 'Costs of Inertia Versus Costs of Change': "If the Luddites had succeeded in prohibiting the adoption of spinning jennies, Britain would have foregone the productivity growth that allowed employment and incomes to increase so dramatically."
With a totally one-sided view of the history of technology, the UNDP technology report refers only to Britain's experience of mechanization of textiles and describes the defence of alternatives as "inertia".
Had Gandhi not resurrected the spinning-wheel and handlooms, India would have been trapped in colonized inertia. We would have destroyed our rich and diverse textiles. We would have failed to protect the livelihoods and welfare of our weavers which are once again threatened by globalization.
WHILE THE TECHNOLOGY report is written from a Euro-centric bias, it claims, instead, to be correcting a European and us bias in the debate on technology and genetic engineering. Much of the false promise of genetic engineering upheld by the biotech industry and by the UNDP report is based on earlier myths about the Green Revolution. As the report states in the section on 'Food Production and Nutrition': "Technological Progress has played a similar role in accelerating food production. Starting in 1960 a green revolution of plant breeding, fertilizer use, better seeds and water control transformed land and labour productivity around the world. This had dynamic effects on human development. Increased food production and reduced food prices eliminated much of the under-nutrition and chronic famine in Asia, Latin America and the Arab States. Because the poorest families rely on agriculture for their livelihood and spend half their incomes on food, this also contributed to huge declines in income poverty."
Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Firstly, the Green Revolution focussed only on labour productivity, not resource productivity. Agriculture therefore shifted from labour-intensive ecological technologies to capital- and resource-intensive technologies. In terms of ecological efficiency and conservation of soil, water, biodiversity and energy, the Green Revolution led to a sixty-six-fold productivity decline. This led to a severe ecological crisis in agriculture threatening the future of food production and creating resource poverty even in resource-rich regions like the Punjab.
Secondly, repeated reference to doubling of cereal yields ignores the fact that this gain in yields of rice and wheat was at the cost of a four-fold decline in pulses, oilseeds, millets and greens. Malnutrition and deficiencies of protein, iron and vitamin A have been a direct result of these rice and wheat monocultures. Genetic engineering of 'golden rice' is now being offered as a new miracle in the same reductionist, one-dimensional paradigm of technology. While 100 g of greens give around 14,000 mg of vitamin A, golden rice will produce only 30 mg of vitamin A per 100 g of rice. This is the jugglery of figures through which ecologically, economically and socially inappropriate technologies have repeatedly been sold to the Third World as 'miracles'.
In terms of biomass per acre and nutrition per acre, both the Green Revolution and genetic engineering are inefficient and wasteful technologies and create nutritional poverty. It is not true that the Green Revolution "contributed to huge declines in income poverty". Both Green Revolution and genetic engineering technologies are creating income poverty as more and more of the scarce incomes of farmers are drained to buy costly seeds and chemicals. Instead of being called High Yielding Varieties (HYVS) the new seeds should, more appropriately, be called High Cost Varieties (HCVS) since they involve high capital costs and high resource costs. The shift from open pollinated to hybrid seeds has led to such an escalation of costs that farmers are getting into deep debt. In India new seed technologies have forced farmers into selling their own kidneys and even committing suicide. 20,000 farmers have committed suicide over three years in the Punjab and Andhra Pradesh.
Genetic engineering and seed patents go hand in hand. Patents and technology fees will further escalate the drain on farmers' income. In the us, new technologies and new intellectual property rights on seed are already transforming agriculture into a police state, as illustrated by the Percy Schmeiser case in Canada and 400 other cases in the us.
That is why, in India, we have started Navdanya, a movement for saving farmers' seeds, sharing seeds freely and promoting low-cost organic farming which protects biodiversity and increases farmers' incomes three-fold and farm productivity many-fold compared with the industrial agricultural technologies. Diversity as a pattern of production, not merely of conservation, ensures pluralism and decentralization. It prevents the dichotomy of biological systems as 'primitive' and 'advanced'.
As Gandhi challenged the false concepts of obsolescence and productivity in the production of textiles by his search for the spinning-wheel, groups across the Third World are challenging the false concepts of obsolescence in agricultural production by searching for seeds used by farmers over centuries and making them the basis of a self-reliant and sustainable agriculture.
Biodiversity-based, resource-efficient nonviolent farming technologies, rather than capital-intensive, external-input-based violent industrial monocultures, are the best way forward for the poor and fragile ecosystems.
The UNDP technology report exposes its blind faith in genetic engineering by totally negating experiences with sustainable ecological agriculture. It states that "Biotechnology offers the only or best 'tool of choice' for marginal ecological zones." This rejection of technological diversity and alternatives is the most fundamental flaw of the report. It ends up promoting technological totalitarianism. It is more of a sermon than an analysis. It is more about technology as an end of human development than a means of human development. As a means, technologies will always be pluralistic, since they must adapt to diverse social, economic and ecological contexts. As an end, technology is a coercive monolith to which people and ecosystems are forced to adapt, no matter what the costs, no matter what the alternatives.
The UNDP seems to have forgotten that human development must put human beings at the centre of concern instead of picking the latest technological tools and fads that some humans have shaped for their political purposes and putting them at the centre of human enterprise. In the final analysis, all that the report has done is offer a desperate sales pitch for genetic engineering. That is how it is being used. It has failed to move the debate on technology forward. And it has failed miserably as a Human Development Report.
Vandana Shiva is co-author of An Ecological History of Food and Farming in India. This two-volume history is published by Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, New Delhi. For further information contact: vshiva@vsnl.com
from Resurgence issue 209Subscribe to Resurgence
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