#142

Feminist and Ecological Politics

FiLiA in conversation with Eco-Feminist legends Vandana Shiva, Farida Akhter, and Susan Hawthorne

Sunniva: Welcome to this podcast everyone, and welcome to this panel. Salonika and I will be the host of today's discussion. Salonika studies and teaches psychology in Nepal and I'm studying and working in the environment in the development sector in Morocco. 

On the occasion of Mother Earth Day we are hosting this panel focusing on feminist and ecological politics. We'll just introduce our guests now. So the first woman of today's panel is Farida Akhter a women's movement activist, a writer, and a leading exponent of biodiversity based ecological agriculture. Farida is the co-founding organiser of a biodiversity-based farmer’s movement in Bangladesh. So I'm so glad to have you here. 

Our second guest of today is Dr Vandana Shiva. She's a physicist, ecologist, feminist activist and the founder of a movement for biodiversity conservation and farmers rights. She is also the founder and director of the Research Foundation for Science Technology and Natural Resources.

And a final speaker is Dr Susan Hawthorne. She's a writer, a poet, a political commentator, and a publisher. She has been involved in the women's liberation movement since 1973. Susan has notably worked in Aboriginal education and taught English to Arabic speaking women. She also co-founded Spinifex Press in 1991.

Susan was also a speaker at our annual FiLiA conference in 2019. Lisa-Marie, would you like to introduce FiLiA. 

Lisa-Marie: Welcome everybody just a couple of minutes on FiLiA. FiLiA is a women-led volunteer organisation. We're a charity. We are explicitly feminist and we exist to do three things. The first of those is to build systems and solidarity and that's locally, nationally, and internationally. This panel, to be honest, absolutely exemplifies that. 

We've got speakers from Australia, Bangladesh, India. We've got facilitators speaking from Nepal, Morocco and the UK, what a fabulous line-up. So, thank you all very much. 

The other thing that we do is amplify the voices of women. And we do that through our annual women's rights conference, which is in October this year. I hope you can make it. And through podcasts and blogs. 

And the final thing that we do that I suppose, threads through everything is we defend women's human rights. And I just want to take one moment to say thank you to Eugenie and Salonika because they joined FiLiA recently, this is their first webinar and what a webinar to start on. And they came to FiLiA saying the environment and feminism, this is really connected and we want to do something about this. We want to bring this to FiLiA and they've done just a tremendous job at doing that. So thank you both very much. And a final, thank you, Susan, for helping to facilitate, coordinate this panel as well.

Lots of love to everybody and have a fabulous webinar. 

Sunniva: Thank you for your wonderful introduction, Lisa-Marie. 

So today our first question is how is environmental destruction related to patriarchy and why? And in what ways are women more impacted by environmental destruction? We have approximately five minutes for each speaker, and we would like it to be a sort of discussion in between you so you can interrupt each other. 

Farida Akhter: Thank you very much. Thank you for this discussion and webinar today, although we would have loved to meet each other more in person. 

I am glad that you mentioned environmental “destruction” and not “degradation”. The word ‘destruction’ is notionally ‘patriarchal’ as against ‘creation’, regeneration’ or ‘transformation’, etc. The destruction we are talking about is not only of nature and life -- visible or invisible life forms, animate or inanimate natural objects, etc., but the destruction of the very conditions of existence in general. This is why women oppose environmental destruction and resist the hypocrisy of belittling the existential question by reducing the crime into mere pollution, degradation, erosion and so on.  The culprit, destroyer or the degrader, always remains unnamed, that is Capital or Corporations.  The blame is shifted to the people who are accused of environmental degradation, people become pests. 

The premise of the capitalist-patriarchy is war, conquest and privatization of nature. It is often expressed in ideologies claiming human beings should conquer nature, initially through privatization and in the modern era through science and technology; in the digital age it is done by reducing knowledge and the living processes into information bytes. Natural environments are changed into industrial settings; villages and agrarian landscapes are destroyed to build cities and urbanization. The fossil fuel –based industrial civilization has made us alien to Nature. Agriculture has become industrial food production losing all the sensuous charm of feeling and belonging to nature, mirroring the paradigm, design and systems of factory. Factory has replaced the diverse and complex landscapes and process of multiple flows and regenerative process of Nature. War and industrial killings have become the rules of the age because industrial life styles depend on oil and gas. In the oil rich countries of the Middle East countries not only thousands of lives are lost, but the entire environment is destroyed. These are the meanings of the conquering the world by men. 

Killer technologies used in agriculture cause environmental destruction. Let me give you examples of so-called modern agricultural practices (the green revolution) that must use chemical fertilizers and pesticides. 

Patriarchy is expressed in the language of murder. Pesticide means killing of the pests, insects or any life forms that are integral to and constitute nature. The ‘cides’ in pesticide, herbicides, biocides, etc.  are substances that kill. Killing is legitimated as normal practice in daily language. Of course, life forms are interdependent, there is a food chain. They balance each other, and farmers should also manage pests. But the idea to kill insects or pests, rather than managing them in a milieu of ecological interdependence the language and practice of patriarchy has profound effects on ethics and morality of life. In a village in Hyderabad, India when I asked a farmer if crops are affected by insect what do they do? The answer was “un ka bhi to huq hai” (those also have the right to food). Similar response from women in Bangladesh, when I ask, do you use anything against the insects to save your brinjal plants? Answer is yes, we do. What? “Ashes”.  Why not pesticides? They feel it is morally unacceptable. We do not have to kill; we should only turn them away. If they are problems, we think there is something wrong in our own practices. We don’t have to kill them.

You asked whether women are impacted by environmental destruction? Yes, women are very much impacted by environmental destruction. As women are traditionally involved in the management of soil, water, forests, energy and biodiversity, environmental destruction disrupts her role and dislocates her from knowledge of the natural environment.  Environmental destruction has direct impact on health. Women are the first to suffer from the effects of pesticide. 

In the monoculture agriculture, women are limited to fewer food sources. The poor women depend on natural environment for food sources, they raise cows, goats, chicken but cannot find the feed and fodder in their surroundings if environment is destroyed. Diverse plants, herbs and trees are sources of medicine for women and their children; these are lost by deforestation.  Pesticide has created infertility and that creates another business. 

It is often expressed by geologists, claiming human beings to content initially, to privatization I in the model to size septic one natural environment planes into industrial seconds villages and destroyed cities. And the first sheet based industrial civilization had made us ADM to me. Agriculture has become industrial production music, all the senseless channel changing and belonging to mediating the paradigm design and systems affect you.

Sunniva: Thank you for that can you wrap up your points for the moment?

Farida Akhter: Thank you. No. Just the last thing to say is that the women’s seed preservation is destroyed with false arguments of “low productivity” and therefore corporate hybrid seeds are promoted. Market seeds dominate agriculture which require use of chemicals. Let me give you an example from Bangladesh. 

These technologies and pesticides have created infertility and then they start technological infertility, and then it becomes a business. Thank you. 

Sunniva:  Dr Shiva, Susan, do you have something to add to what Farida has said?

Vandana Shiva: Hello, happy Mother Earth Day all. And can you imagine how different the world would be if we realised and stayed awake to the fact that we are all children of Mother Earth and organised our politics and our democracies and our economies and our science and our technologies, according to the rights of Mother Earth and the laws of Mother Earth.

 We wouldn't have the eco-side genocide we're facing. And of course, they've been small pockets of societies that have been destructive, but then they got wiped out. But it's only in the last four or 500 years that we have had a system organised for eco-side and genocide.

And we destroyed all the bricks. We removed all the bricks. That was the civilising mission of colonialism. Maria Meese and I have called this anti- nature, anti-women, and anti-life ideology of colonising commerce as capitalist patriarchy. 

And it's based on the assumption that nature is dead matter. Women are objects with no creativity, no intelligence, no autonomy, no agency, no subject hood. So worldview in a system of knowledge as well as a means to organise trade and commerce, it's been institutionalised very carefully, very, very calculatedly over the last few centuries. There's no evolutionary trajectory to it.

Fossil fuels and fossil fuel colonialism and colonisation, and the rule of violence, greed and destruction of nature and cultures is at the heart of it. But sadly, it's very clever mind, while it works out how to take everything away from nature, from women, from peasants from tribals, it also creates these boxes of separation in our thinking. And so we don't see interrelated phenomena as interrelated, the feminist movement by and large ignores the fact that the first woman who was being violated is Mother Earth and our sisterhood has to be a sisterhood in a planetary consciousness.

So of course, there was the urge to colonise the Basques, the De Gamma's and the Columbus's were there, but the organised capitalist patriarchy can be marked to 1600 when the East India company was formed. And what this did was the patriarch, the greedy irresponsible, rich 300 individuals of England or Europe got together and went to the queen and said, give us these funds, you know, very equivalent to the Columbus letter patent that said those barbarians must be colonised. They just take over all the territories of the world.

 The text of this East India Company charter, which was called John's company when it was founded is exactly the same language. Except now, instead of having a king and then a Columbus, it was all lumped into one corporation, East India Company.

We're all affected by this one construction. Obviously, the company created genocide everywhere. I just give you the figures take Susan's land. The most ancient farmers of the world, their farming heritage was denied to them. Their land was denied to them. They were called Bushmen. When they are the best gardeners of the world who have guarded for 60,000 years on the same land and not destroyed it.

I think the Aboriginal farming and agriculture is the missing piece in our understanding of our relationship with the earth. But even then, I would have been one country. If the British divide and rule had an in 1905 and they realised the Indians were rising against them, Muslims and Hindus joined together, said, let's split the Muslims and Hindus. And they split them all in 1905. 

And then they created Pakistan. All this divided rule, it continues, it continues. It continues to prevent the unity. So a very important part of capitalist patriarchy is a construction of male form to create limited liability.

The latest of this is Bill Gates. Today they're meeting in America solutions to the climate problem. This is the rubbish they'll be implementing. It is the latest project of the capitalists where a handful of billionaires, you can count them on your fingertips. They are now trillionaires these trillionaires got rich by deregulation, which was re-colonisation and now they want to colonise the world in the name of saving the earth.

They don't use the word ‘earth’. They're scared of nature. They're scared of the earth has living systems. So they're co-opting the word nature. They don't use the word earth because that means she's living. And now they've created a whole new vocabulary. I've just done a piece for today. Please go to the website and you'll find two sets of reports. One we wrote for women's day, which is Earth Rising Women Rising. And it's our work on agriculture very much like Farida’s work in Bangladesh, saving seeds, doing agro-ecology doing local trade. They are assuming that every piece of food will be manipulated and moved on container ships, and they call it supply chains.

No, in nature, there's a web of life in nature there's a food web, supply chains that they're leaning extractive of colonial system of take, take, take, take, take in our land which was our land. 60 million people were pushed into famine. Not because they weren't growing enough rice or food, it was being extracted for profits and trade.

The last big one was the 1942. At that time, we were still one, divided as regions, but 1947 was the partition.  

The great reset of the World Economic Forum is basically takeover every public institution that was created to protect the earth, protect human rights, workers’ rights, labour rights. Women's rights. Just get rid of them and hijack the UN system and hijack all governments. It's happened to the WHO already.

It will happen in October, September where they want to reduce agriculture. You know, we know we have the path. Nathania in India and in Bangladesh. We have the path, we grow more food, we grow more nutrition. We have more biodiversity. We can address climate change. 

All of this mega crisis of today, we can address through both good farming, which I call care for the earth, and most cannot count it as work because anything that will make profits was not work. Women's knowledge was removed. Women's work was treated as non-work. So, we are at the point where all knowledge is being erased in the name of artificial intelligence and all our work will be destroyed in the name of robotics and efficiency and digitalisation.

So what I would request all of your listening to do is please follow these trends of the new, the new colonisation, the latest stage of capitalists, patriarchy, Maria Meese. And I, when we wrote our book Ecofeminism, we said, it's a world that recognises that humans are part of nature, not separate from nature and in their connectedness through life, both nature and women are alive and autonomous, not dead passive objects, and we are going to make the change.

Sunniva: Thank you Vandana. So, I think that really summarised well, the parts of women and the nature of being linked and affected by patriarchy. 

Susan Hawthorne:  Before I begin in Australia, we have a protocol which is a sort of resistance to the Terra nullius that was put about when Australia was colonised and we acknowledged the lands of the Indigenous peoples on whose land we live and work. And we also respectfully acknowledge the wisdom and the knowledge of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and their custodianship of the lands and waterways. In the case of Spinifex, we have offices around the country and they are situated on Djiru, Bunurong and Wurundjeri, Wadawurrung, Eora, and Noongar Country. 

And we also acknowledged the history of women who have fought for women's freedom and the freedom of lesbians often at the cost of their lives. And for that, that's a really important part of our resistance to colonisation in Australia.

Patriarchy has been around about for about 6,000 years. So compared to Aboriginal habitation in Australia, it's really very short and it's neither universal nor inevitable. And there are societies around the world who are not patriarchal, even though they are surrounded by patriarchal societies. And the problem with patriarchy is it's a hierarchy. And in the contemporary world, the people with the greatest power, men with wealth, mostly white, but not entirely, along with wealth comes an awful lot of class privilege, the most powerful are also very mobile, they have been able to fly around the world, even during the pandemic. Very few of them have debilitating disabilities and almost none are Indigenous. And when you look at women and the billionaires and trillionaires, there are something like 3000 male billionaires and maybe 250 women.

It's not a great thing, but it's going take a long time for that to get up to 3000. But that is not my most important goal in life. The problem is that the poorest of the poor across the world are women. I think that that can be seen in the ways in which there are an increasing number of women across counties who are being used as breeders by the rich and entitled baby buyers who believes that they have a right to a child.

That's just one way in which it happens. And another way women, all women fear being raped. All women can be raped. And there's a lot of fear about rape and sexual violence. And it is really sensible to fear rape and sexual violence. Across the world in 2018, something like 50,000 women were killed by either family members or intimate partners.

The other thing that patriarchy does is it diminishes almost everything that women do. And Vandana, you referred to that. Basically, if it's a woman's job, it doesn't have as much value that that's something that women and Indigenous peoples share because Indigenous people are also seen as not having any value and women's achievements are erased and our traditions are devalued, and as Marilyn Waring back said back in 1988, counting for nothing. 

And because women are more likely to live in poverty when there are environmental disasters, they're much more likely to be affected where they live may be an area that is polluted in some way or is vulnerable to environmental damage. Their houses are much more likely to be not set up for things like say cyclones and other events. They might live on a flood plain, which means that if there's a flood, they will suffer. And we see that in the Torres Strait at the moment where the Islanders of the Torres Strait are taking the Australian government to court because of rising sea levels and that could inundate their entire island and Kiribas in the Pacific is also vulnerable in that way as are many of the Pacific Islanders.

That global system is both patriarchal and capitalist and it's killing all the important things that can sustain people and the planet and biodiversity is absolutely key among these things.

And it's actually a very good example of a system that is self-sustaining and it's complex. And each part of the system supports another when it's in balance, it's local, it's interdependent and it survives in the long term. And I think biodiversity really is a counter to globalisation. 

And then the other thing is that patriarchy is destroying the environment in multiple ways. War is one of the problems of patriarchy, war is continuous around the world. 

So, one of the great quotes from Cynthia Enloe, she wrote ‘Masculinity is a foreign policy issue’ And I think that that's a really great summary of part of where the world is at the moment and the way in which the military industrial complex is ramped up and has become universalised in lots of ways. 

Sunniva: Thank you so much, Susan. Yeah. I'm looking forward to listening to more of that in the future, like in the next section. So, thank you to all for the wonderful discussion. So now I'd like to move on to Farida. Will you please tell us about your work particularly about women's roles in seed saving and maintaining uncultivated land and how is it related to the wider destruction of land and surrounding ecology?

Farida Akhter: Thank you very much. Actually, I will just talk about my work and also my friends Vandana, Renate, Susan, they are also connected to it. UBINIG (Policy Research for Development Alternative) since the beginning in 1984, was actually challenging the imperialist, racist, anti-poor and anti-women population policies that were imposed by the World Bank and other international institutions blaming the poor for poverty, food deficit and environmental destruction. While we were busy in doing these, I was invited in some international meetings and where I met Renate Klein, Maria Mies and then we formed the feminist international Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE) and we clearly could link the connection between pro-fertility and anti-fertility technologies promoted by capitalist-patriarchal institutions and made women’s body as their market. They needed to control women’s body. 

And Vandana, you had come to the first FINRRAGE meeting in 1989 where Renate and Maria were there; and you spoke about GMOs even at that time. And many people thought that what is it? But we found the link between not only the population control but Green revolution was also part of their prescriptions on the developing countries – creating another market for chemicals (pesticides, fertilizers) left over after the World War II.  Our soil, land, seeds, water became their market.   

By 1990’s we started Nayakrishi Andolon, a farmers’ movement of small-scale farmers who could not cope with the rising costs of inputs, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, deep tube-well water. Farmers identified the problems of modern agriculture and monoculture practice and it was going beyond their capacity. In search for alternatives to chemical fertilizers and pesticides, farmers in the Tangail area started Nayakrishi Andolon, which later became a movement of biodiversity-based ecological farming. So at that time, it was basically a need for alternative farming practices that is affordable to the small scale farmers. 

The story with the women was different. Women felt that they were becoming redundant from farming practices. Modern agriculture was male-biased, market oriented and environmentally destructive. Women’s role was undermined. More importantly, women were concerned that excessive use of chemicals was harmful for “environment”. “It destroyed my body” Amar deho nosto koreche – the statement by a Nayakrishi woman farmer is significant. By the word ‘body’ she meant the land, water, seeds, birds, insects, butterflies, earthworms, micro-organisms and all life forms. 

Bangladeshi farmers are mostly growing rice as Vandana has mentioned. We had 15,000 varieties, but modern agriculture has produced on few IRRI rice varieties or the numbered varieties like IRRI 11, IRRI 30, IRRI 50 as against farmers varieties named hijol digha, Tulshi mala, Badsha bhog, Ratar boro. Farmers were not encouraged to grow these varieties and those were disappearing. So one of the important task of Nayakrishi Andolon became active in collecting and regenerating rice varieties that were endangered, disappearing and having special qualities of resistance against drought or flood conditions. 

Women again gave a different direction of work. They said, you need to have the right seeds for particular season and for the particular land defined by definite agro-ecological condition. Farmers rejected HYV or Hybrid seeds.  That’s why the work on seed saving by farmers and formation of the Nayakrishi Seed Network with establishing Community Seed Wealth Centre started by 1996. It means farmers will have seeds in their own houses and there will be community seed hut in their villages and there is a community Seed Wealth Centre. 

I remember in 1994, we organized festivals, because festivals are way of making interaction with each other and share their knowledge. Farmer Jahanara, who was never on a stage before, spoke out at a gathering of over 5000 people:  “Sisters do not let the seeds go out of your own hands” (Bonera Beez hatchara korben na). From that became the slogan “Sisters keep seeds in your hands”. She was one of the thousands of women farmers who lost control over seeds as modern agricultural with HYV and Hybrid seeds used by their male family members. We felt that in modern agricultural practices instructions came from Agricultural extension officers about seeds, fertilizers, pesticides. But in traditional agriculture, farmers used their knowledge, intuitions, experiences. So festivals were good way of bringing farmers to demonstrate and to interact among themselves.  So seed saving work became a strategic intervention in the Nayakrishi Andolon and women became the leaders of the movement. Women’s fight against patriarchy surfaced as possession, command and control of seed and genetic resources in order to secure her power over agrarian production systems in general and caring of life forms in particular. We have 2247 varieties of rice, 99 kinds of vegetables, different spices, we have 33 varieties of brinjals, 40 varieties of chilis in our collection.  This is to show how Nayakrishi is so important to the small-scale farmers. They have so many varieties, they are harvesting and planting another variety. But they do not only depend on the cultivated crops. 

I am going to talk about the uncultivated crops. In a cultivated crop field, there are plants which are growing on their own; because the environment is (free from chemicals) so these are safe. Poor women have the right to take it even though the land does not belong to them. 

Pictures of different shak (edible leafy greens) which are not cultivated but growing on their own in the waterbodies, cultivated and in different places. Bangladesh has a culture of celebrating the last day of the Bengali month Chaitra (13th April) of the Bengali year. The next day is Noboborsho or Bengali New Year (14th April). 

On the day of Chaitra Sangkranti, women go out to collect uncultivated green vegetables called Shak. They must find 14 different kinds of shaks, which are uncultivated which grows near the homestead land as well as in the further places and in open water bodies. This becomes the most important part of Chaitra Sangkranti - cooking 14 different kinds of shak (herb), preferably uncultivated; among them one shak must be of bitter taste. Usually they find Gima Shak (a bitter shak) in their surroundings. It becomes the environmental and ecological audit to find the natural balance in their areas. No fish or meat is cooked. However different varieties of dal (pulses) are cooked as supplementary food.

Here I am so showing two pictures (Gima Shak) 

GIMA SAK

Botanical Name: Hydroctyle Sibthorpiodes

Availability: Gima is a very popular uncultivated sak grown near the dwellings, road side, pond sides. It is found in winter as well as in summer.  

Collection: Women go in-groups to collect the sak. The tender leaves with stalk are cut. The plant is kept for regeneration. 

Gima is bitter in taste, village women believe that if you have Gima in your food in the summertime, it gives protection against diseases. But you have to find it. Another vegetable Korola (bitter gourd), a cultivated vegetable. Many poor women may not have the land to grow korola, but she can find Gima if she goes around. So the nature gives these people the source of protection against diseases. 

Many of the shaks (leafy greens) have medicinal qualities, nutritional content, etc. and women know exactly which they need for what. 

Our work also included fighting against GMOs, e.eg golden rice[1]. We could argue with them that we have all these shaks and vegetables that contain the vitamins that we need for our body. We are also fighting against Bt Brinjal and Vandana and Susan we are working together. Our fight will go on. 

Sunniva: Thank you so much for you for all the work that you have done and for your great presentation.

And now Vandana Shiva. Could you tell us more about your work? I know you do a similar work in India. 

Vandana Shiva: Yeah. So, you know, as it was mentioned, I'm trained in physics. Even in physics, we know everything is interconnected and nothing is fixed. There's nothing like essential properties. So, sexism is just wrong anyway, because it is not the case. Women are inferior, indigenous people are inferior, all of those are constructs.

We will not be able to really have freedom for all life on earth and freedom for all human beings on Earth without dismantling the constructions of the age of colonialism and the age of capitalist patriarchy.

 Why did I end up working on, I mean, of course I began many colleges, very early I joined the beautiful movement as a volunteer, even while I was doing my PhD, the movement of women who came out and hugged the trees in my region and said, these are our mothers, they gave us soil and water and pure air not timber and profits and the Chipko movement eventually got a logging ban. So for 10 years, we were fighting all the time to protect the forest as the providers of life, not the generators of profits and Chipko means to hug and in a way that training of the first decade of my life as an ecological activist shaped everything else I’ve done.

Since then, I say, I went to the Chipko University of organising. You don't have to have money to get together. You need sisterhood. So, the first thing is don't panic. Just join hands. Second. We have the power to recognise we are part of nature and there is no power bigger than that, that act of doing Chipko of hugging the tree. Stop the loggers. 

And every time there's been a hugging between the attacker and the destroyer and those who love nature, the axe has had to go, the bulldozer has had to go. And most importantly, the colonisation of the mind has got defeated because the violence stands naked and brute. 

It was 1984, in Amritsar, I had done my MSC honours in particle physics, an eruption in violence, 30,000 people were killed in those few years. And the military was sent to the Golden Temple and that same year in on 2nd of December the pesticide plant leaked in the city of Bhopal.

 I was working then for the United Nations University on conflict. So the natural resources, and I said, there's something going on here, but they are not typical people fighting people, this is a bigger conflict, deeper conflict, and I want to study it. 

So, I wrote my book, The Violence of the Green Revolution. And that's when I realised that industrial agriculture was really nothing but continuation of Hitler's war after the war had ended. Every chemical in industrial farming is a descendant of the chemicals that were generated then by the IGU farm and working with them on Santos and the DuPont.

So, you know, the Americans and the allies were fighting against Hitler, but the companies were working together to create the poisons and create the profits and the control. So the experiment of extermination is where these chemicals began and they have continued with industrial agriculture.

Years ago in Bangalore on a big, big wall, there was a sign saying ‘Liberate yourself, use Roundup’. And showing those greens that are the necessary part of our healthy diet as they, as if it was an imprisonment and Roundup participants of Monsanto say it kills everything green, it comes in contact with.

 So here is an eco-cidel chemical that has spread everywhere. And then of course they created the GMOs and the first generation of GMOs, were Roundup resistant crops that you would spray more Roundup 15, fold increase 1500% increase in. And BT toxin crops like the BT eggplant in that we rejected and had a moratorium and then Bill Gates then took it to Bangladesh.

We have the golden rice thrown out of India and Bill Gates took it to IRRI the International Rice Research Institute. Why was it created? We had all the rice, India, which is part of Bangladesh as part of India, 200,000 rice one wide grass or rice.

We can give them names that tell you what the rice is. Basmati from our valley is an aromatic rice, the flood resistant rice. It’s in the name, the farmers knew what they were breeding. And then the chemical warfare system decided they used an opportunity of a drought in India and forced the green revolution, the word ‘green’ which is our word, the word for life was usurped in the sixties by the green revolution and as being usurped now by the so-called green economy, but this is the green of green. It's the green of money. It is not the green of life. 

Green revolution took the seeds of the farmers. The world bank was financing, Rockefeller USA. They took these seeds and then put them in the CIGIA or systems Consultative International Group of International Agricultural Research. And now this year, the 780,000 collection from farmers, Gates is getting control of it. He's the biggest funder. Now the CIGIA system, which means he controls the seeds. 

Then the Monsanto's brought the GMOs Roundup resistant, BT toxin. Gates now is pushing the next GMOs preaching life is just complex, self-organised, intelligent as if it's a word program, you can cut and paste. And all the research is showing that you cut one gene, 1,500 other places where the genes get scrambled because it is an interconnected living system.

It's not a game. It is not a word program. And then Gates is financing the undoing of the laws we put in place.

 I worked very hard at the convention on biological diversity. We put in place laws for safety to assess GMOs, and I was appointed by the UN on the expert group to make that framework as with the Yogyakarta protocol. 

He has spent 70 million Euros to dismantle the safety laws and let these new GMOs unregulated, and they want to call them natural to fool the public. 

But on the other hand, we also fought against the patenting of seed and that's why I started on to save seeds because we do not believe seeds are a machine seeds are not an invention, Monsanto and the corporations are not the creators of the seed.

The seed makes itself, women farmers have evolved seeds further, and this is common properties. So, in India, we managed to make laws that said, plants, animals and seeds are not human inventions and therefore cannot be patented. And since that time, I've been fighting Monsanto in court because they constantly challenged this law.

 The seed as an empty container and we give it life. That is the central illusion of capitalist patriarchy, that there is no life, but their destruction is creation. Until we get over this, we will never be able to address the sources of their destruction. Right now, Gates is trying to undo the international laws on biodiversity, the convention on biological diversity, the seed treaty of the FAO through digital general mapping.

Now I have seen it, you know, they take the seeds and turn them into little cells, put it in a Petri dish from the passport data they know these thousand varieties are drought resistant, or these a hundred varieties are soil resistance. They just run them through an average general map, and they take a patent.

Algorithms are just reading the map. And my mind went down to the colonisers who said when they come to India, we came with a sword in one hand and a yardstick in the other because colonisers make maps on a piece of paper. They make maps. That's what they did to the country in Australia. That's what they did. And then divided it by making a map of the partition. 

A Britisher was brought to just make a line to divide Pakistan from India. My mother became a refugee and today's lines are digital but interestingly, the digital lines are just lines of creation of property, they are also lines of turning us into raw material. They are the digital chains. 

So, I have a little book, which I did with an Ayurvedic practitioner. It's called The Two Futures of Food, Health, and Humanity. And because the group that published it, it was lock down time, it's available on Amazon, sadly, sadly, Amazon, but, uh, I've analysed three patterns, which show where the billionaires, the patriarchs want to take us, patent number one, impossible foods.

So golden rice is one, but we don't need it but fake meat burgers, fake breast milk, Gates is financing, fake lab breast milk as a climate solution. Tell me, I mean, if he can stretch women's bodies in this distortion, we really need a stronger voice together. And I would say to Susan, let us react with rage to the global empire of Gates.

For those want to know more about the Gates empire read my book Oneness was 1% also read a book, a report called Gates to a Global Empire. 

Second patent. You know, all those greens, they give you Iron. They give you a vitamin, women who are eating that will never have anaemia, but because you sprayed Roundup, women have anaemia.

What is Google solution? I'm sure you don't know. Google is invading into your bodies. Google has a new life sciences company. And the motto is ‘we have to defeat mother nature’. They want to put nanoparticles into our blood untested technology. You cannot even assess it. 

And then of course the best is the Microsoft patent. Granted literally as the Corona crisis started, and the lockdown was announced, this patent has turned human beings into users of machines. We are not autonomous being. We are users of machines and the algorithms, and these machines are going to pirate our brain function and our body function, process it through algorithms and the algorithms will decide our value.

We know the colonisers decided the Aboriginals don't count, wipe them out, indigenous people don't count, wipe them out. Local cultures don't count, wipe them out. The women don't count, kill them as bitches. We know this culture has grown from a genocidal. So, if they are now saying our algorithms will value you, do you think they believe any human being will have place to live?

If they can't leave the grass alone, they can't leave the insect alone. Femicide is already such a violent reason for women dying. So we are in a whole new movement and there's a whole new challenge to us. 

The beauty is we've always organised with very little money, lots of love, big hearts, not deep pockets, no pockets at all in my sari.

 Love to all of you tell one more thing. So I think in our first round that talked about biodiversity as the key issue for us biodiversity is the web of life. 

This economics of biodiversity. You don't find a plant. You don't find an insect. You find grass like this to put by diversity on the assets of the billionaires and their portfolios to make money. Where will they make money? through GMOs and patenting, not by conservation, not by growing biodiversity. So we have a big challenge because capitalist patriarchy is at its peak and they think no-one will take them on, but women have always taken on the patriarchs.

Sunniva: Thank you, Dr Shiva, is there anything that Susan and Farida would like to add to this?

Farida Akhter:  Thank you Vandana for saying that we have to reactivate FINRRAGE. We have started in 1987 and now in 2021 I think it is very much needed. And Susan and Renate, we all can come together.

And with you Vandana, we have been in Diverse Women for Diversity also. So, these were the actions we were doing together. I just want to acknowledge FINRRAGE is one of the important issues. 

Sunniva: Thank you for you that. 

Susan Hawthorne: I wanted to speak about three things in this section.

One is the sex trade. Climate catastrophe is the next one and billionaires the third.

 On the sex trade. What is so terrifying is that the sex trade is the third largest trade market in the world after weapons and drugs. So, if you can imagine just how many women's bodies are being used in the sex trade around the world every day, every week, every month, every year, it is really quite horrifying.

And the problem is that there are movements to legalise or do even worse decriminalise the sex trade, which just allows anything to happen. You know, there are no laws at all if you decriminalise it, and prostitution creates despair, it creates ill health. Many women are murdered. It just goes on. It has horrendous impacts not only on the women in the sex trade, but when they leave, it has an impact on the next generation and so on. 

And just as there's transgenerational trauma amongst Indigenous peoples, because of the dreadful things that have been done to them, there is also transgenerational trauma amongst the women who have been in the sex trade, and who somehow have managed to escape it. And it takes enormous courage and enormous determination to do that. 

And as I mentioned before, surrogacy is, is also increasing. And poor women are being turned into breeders. And as Kajsa Ekis Ekman said that surrogacy is babies without sex and prostitution is sex without babies. Although that's not quite true because of course some of the women do become pregnant, but that's the sort of concept of it.

I think that the movement to abolish the sex trade altogether, need to be as strong as the movement to abolish capitalist, patriarchy, the seed companies, the Monsanto's, the Bayers who's now bought Monsanto. And so, Monsanto has just been deflected off the page as if it doesn't exist. But of course, it does. 

Now the thing is that Christine Stark has written a book in which she talks about the first trafficker in America was Christopher Columbus. And we have similar histories here in Australia of prostituting of Aboriginal women as part of the colonising process. There's a wonderful book by Cassandra Pybus called Truganini: Journey through the Apocalypse about the way in which Tasmania was colonised and the dreadful things that were done there. And you see some of that in there.

The climate catastrophe. Now in Australia, we have had a series of climate catastrophes, but probably the worst was the summer of 2019/20 in that year, there were so many fires that went for six months. They start in Queensland, the fire season starts earlier in Queensland, and then they went down the coast.

I was writing my book Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy at the time, and I was trying to write stuff about what was going on. And every day I looked up the figures and the numbers just kept going up and up by the end of March in 2020 18.6 million hectares were burnt out and that's a horrifying figure. And it's a huge area of land.

And what surprised me was that it was more than had been burnt out in the Amazon by several times. So, the recognition of the absolute sheer catastrophe of those fires really is a very important, and of course, in Australia, we will continue to have droughts. 

The only good thing to come out of it that although it's been known for several decades about cultural burning, which Indigenous people have been doing for some 65,000 years until the fires, nobody really took much notice. And there has since then been more discussion because what happens is the national parks people go out into the forest and they do what's called back-burning. But often these back-burning things start the fires in the first place. And because they don't understand how cultural burning operates, they do the wrong thing. It's a bit like having a blowtorch and blasting a pile of paper. That's the effect of the Western approach to back-burning in the forest. 

Whereas the cultural burning is very specific. They burn small plants, they burn them in particular areas, they burn them at particular times of the year. And these I think are absolutely critical.

Now, the other thing is about the billionaires and thank you Vandana for your book Oneness and how much of that is fabulous. But the other name that we all need to know is George Soros. George Soros has his finger in so many pies. The main one is in promoting prostitution, giving money to organisations who are trying to decriminalise prostitution.

He also has fingers in many other pies. He has fingers in the transgender lobby pie and going to the UN and really affecting the way that the UN talks about things and the way in which women are being written out of the language. You know, I don't know if you're aware of it, but in the transgender lobby language, women have front holes. I mean, technically it's wrong anyway (every woman knows there are ‘three holes’ only men think there are two) and women ‘chest feed’, our breasts are figuratively erased. So immediately there is a denial of women's bodies in this particular male-centred lobby. And the billionaires are also funding that and there's a significant number of them. And I write about it in my book, I connect it to the way in which you, Vandana, talk about the financing of climate change and the drugs and the chemicals that are used and so forth. So, I think these things all run together. There is a lot of misogyny that runs through absolutely all of this. And I think that's for me, the three things that I will just keep on working on somehow.

And then on a nicer front I grew up on a really drought prone area in Australia, and I now live in a place where you get four meters of rain a year. And up here we have the Southern cassowary. not everybody knows what a cassowary looks like. It's taller than an emu and it's bigger and it's heavier and it's got great big claws. And it has this wonderful wattle on top. And I've been involved in a program to protect the local area from having a helicopter base. Now where we live is in the wet tropics world heritage area. So, it is protected by the UN and the Southern cassowary is a threatened species. And it lives up here and occasionally we see them just wandering around. The Indigenous people of this area have a saying no wabu, no wuju, no gunduy ‘No forest, No food. No cassowary’ And the reason for that also is that the cassowary eats fruit and disperses it throughout the forest, creating a virtuous circle of renewability. The cassowary eats the fruit, it disperses the fruit and then the fruit in turn feeds the cassowary the next time round and Mission Beach, where we live is a biodiversity hotspot.

And my key argument against this building of a helicopter base is that it will destroy the biodiversity that makes this area so special. And what they want to do with this helicopter base. They want to stick it right next to a cassowary corridor. I mean, how idiotic can you be? But, you know, these are people with more money as my mother would say more money than sense.

And yes, we would like to get rid of this particular person from the community, but it's not looking hopeful. 

Sunniva: Thank you so much, Susan for your work and for sharing us about your life. And would you like to say something more about how your passion for ecological feminism emerged? 

Susan Hawthorne:  Oh, well, yes. Farida, Vandana and Maria were probably the 3 most important people because I went to Bangladesh in 1993 as part of a conference with Renate as well. And the way in which farming happened in Bangladesh was so unimaginably different that it made me think again, because I grew up in an area where in order to survive, you needed hundreds of hundreds of acres of land, you know, just to make a living.

When I looked out the window of the bus in, in Bangladesh, I saw these giant, absolutely giant cauliflowers and mounds of them, not just one or two, but great mounds of them. And the soil in Bangladesh is so rich. It's alluvial and you can get so much out of it. 

I spent several days in a group with Maria Mies and I learnt about what you were doing, Vandana. Now, although I had heard you speak in Barcelona at the feminist book fair and out of that, I wrote a three page, very short manifesto called The Wild Politics Manifesto.

And that was what got me going there were lots of things I hadn't thought about before, but I decided I did need to know and understand about economics. And so I gave myself a few years to learn economics, which actually is not that hard. I mean, any reasonably intelligent person can get economics.

There are many harder things in the world to learn about like seeds, for example, So I think that that's what got me going. And I have to thank everybody who was at that conference, especially Farida for organising it and for changing my life. 

Farida Akhter: Just the one line that you mentioned about uncultivated food in your book Vortex.

Susan Hawthorne: yes. that was another sort of moment where I saw the world differently when you started to talk about uncultivated plants. And I thought about all the ways, all the abusive ways that the word uncultivated is used. And I think we need to reclaim words like that.

Sunniva: Thank you. I think now it's time for the QA we had the question from the audience asking, how did you all meet and where have you been able to work together? I know Susan, you actually published one of Dr Shiva’s books, 

Susan Hawthorne: Many – six.

Sunniva: And, did you meet once all of you together or was it always separate one-to-one?

Vandana Shiva: I think Susan has already mentioned that the launch in Bangladesh is where we were all together. I think Farida that I met you first time there too, isn't it? 

Farida Akhter: Yes

Vandana Shiva: Spinifex has been publishing in Australia, if ever I make a trip, we do something together in Diverse Women for Diversity, which we started basically you know, these billionaires who have more money than sense as Susan said, they also are a monoculture of the mind.

So, when the WTO was established, we created Diverse Women for Diversity. They want the world to be a monoculture. And my dear friend, Jean, who is no more and has passed on and Beth Burrows, we basically on a napkin drafted the manifesto and it's available on the number on your website on the Diverse Women for Diversity page, our original declaration, and then Maria Mies and I wrote at the Leipzig conference in 1996 or 95, on women and agriculture and women and food security. And then Farida was there in the food summit, in Rome. This was before digital, a hundred thousand women from around the world, signed a document saying we will keep food sovereignty and security in our hands.

And I would say, we will keep the knowledge of how to grow healthy food, what our bodies are about Yeah. When Susan talked about the language being introduced in UN treaties, you can see it's basically doing exactly to women's bodies. What's been done to plants and seeds, turn them into parts and then move them around and take intellectual property at every level and all integrity, self-organisation autonomy taken out. 

So, it is really in my view at this point, the eco-feminist movement is really about diversity, autonomy, self-organisation freedom for all life and wellbeing versus the billionaires, wanting to reduce everything which there or anywhere treated as an object, but now object to be reduced to pieces for making the next level of intellectual property and their next economy.

When Susan mentioned about the sex trafficking against sex trade, I have been going to Mexico supporting them for protecting their corn, but also fighting GMO corn. And there was a public hearing where I was on the jury and an economist laid out the because of free trade because of NAFTA. One third of the economy of Mexico had been destroyed and that one third had moved into drugs and the sex industry because people still find a way.

So, the more we destroy the living economies that women create, which are not counted as economies, we are going to see. I mean, already in India with the lockdown, we are seeing people are selling their children. The sex trade has increased. Of course, that's not what gets counted. You know, it takes feminists like Susan to bring these issues out.

So, the violation of the Mother Earth's body is the ecological crisis violation of our bodies and all their multiple parts. And the problem is that there's money to be made in these factions. Yeah. And that's why it seems unstoppable. yesterday, I had done a webinar that, you know, any action that is violating a right, is a crime.

So, rights against, Mother Earth being violated as an equal, eco-side and the rights of women being violated is femicide the rights of people being violated, and people being pushed to the brink, including the COVID disaster. It's a totally manufactured disaster. Whether you believe of it coming from the forest, or you believe in it escaping from the lab, it is the masculinist urge to invade into the forest, creating epidemics Ebola, HIV. And if it is from the lab, manipulated for gain. 

 Either way doesn't matter what story you believe COVID is a manmade crisis. Again, look at the way farmers making money out of it. Look at the control over all of humanity, all of humanity in one surveillance net. So, we should be watching. Of course, you know, the COVID has created such fear, but we should be looking at what is the economy and politics they're putting in place.

That's the great reset of the World Economic Forum. 

Susan Hawthorne: Farida actually has a wonderful quote that you said in 2002, I can't remember exactly you were talking about the new agricultural movement of farming for happiness, you said ‘the main capital is not cash, but farmer’s knowledge, it's about restoring culture in agriculture.’

I think that that's really profound. I think it's terribly important thing to keep remembering. 

Farida Akhter: I want to add one thing after listening to you. 

We also did one study on sex trafficking and found that the village s where there is food is insecurity. From those villages, more girls can be trafficked with promises or false promises of jobs and marriages.

Another thing I have noticed that the ready-made garment workers. These young girls were coming out of the villages. They are actually the products of the destruction of agriculture in the villages; their families are no more able to sustain and then letting their daughters go out of the village and take any kind of jobs. They may die because of building collapse, fire. 

And Vandana you may remember that Maria, you and I, went to Maria’s village and we stayed maybe two nights together in the village. Maria was doing gardening. We were constantly talking about all these issues and that was such a good time for me. And we were cooking rice and dahl.

Vandana Shiva: One more thing because of the reminder of what Farida has said about the garment industry, you know, the non-thinkers of the world are writing rubbish like this. There was one book written by Jeffrey Sachs. Who's destroyed so many countries while he was in the IMF world bank. Jeffrey Sachs actually wrote a book on ending poverty and he says the women in the garment industry, they're taking the first step to development. Their life in the villages is brute and poor. 

And so, they already define you into poverty to then define the exploitation as liberating you from you from poverty. And that's how they've taken abundance away from every culture. They took away, the abundance of Aboriginal Australians and defined poverty. Then created poverty. 

They've done this again and again and again, you know that what we are, what we choose to be our cultures of care for the land that is primitiveness. So please become a slave to be liberated. So they sell the slavery as liberation that's colonialism.

Susan Hawthorne: And I mean, one of the other things that we have to do is we actually have to dismantle patriarchy.

Now, you know, this is not going to happen overnight, but I also think it's really important to recognise that in order to change the world and societies, we have to be able to visualise it, to imagine the world operating in a different way. And obviously there have to be enormous shifts in power relations, across race and ethnic lines as well as for people with disabilities.

And I think maybe one of the really good things we could aim for is to allow elder women to have more say, anybody over 60.

Sunniva: Actually, our last question was actually about efficient way as an organisation, as an individual, we could actually fight and slow the end of destruction. So, I think that adds on your point on like, we all need to fight patriarchy.

What do you think are the solutions like the easiest solution for individuals, but also as an organisation, what are the most efficient ways we can fight environmental destruction?

Vandana Shiva: I have put in the chat, a number of other recent reports. One is Earth Rising Women Rising, which has all the actual impact women are having, you know, in India, we save seeds, you have seeds, you don't get into debt. If you're growing diversity, your monitor-ship per acre. You have more well-being you have more incomes. 

We have books and books and books on that, but this is actual data from women and a lot of co-writing with peasant women.

And on the imagination of another world through another practice, that's the Earth Democracy Report it's released for today, connecting rights of Mother Earth, human rights and the wellbeing of all, because the patriarchs have taken humans and separated from them nature.

And then of course, nature has no rights. And then they've defined humans. According to the rights they want to assign in the way the dismembered woman's body becomes the new way of getting rights. This fragmentation is equivalent to the divide and rule of the British time that Muslims and Hindus were divided. Then we've talked about wellbeing for all.

Well, how can they be wellbeing for all? If there isn't enough immunity in the body and one virus can just keep knocking people out. If the greedy invaders can go into every forest and chop it up, the Indonesian forest will be gone by 2030 because of palm oil.

And it is displacing real oil. It's displacing our mustard in a coconut. It is displacing livelihoods. So, I think we have a vision. We have a practice we just have to become stronger through solidarity. 

Susan Hawthorne: That's very well put. I think one of the other things that I think is useful is that our current society is clearly inspired by money and violence, but money is really at the core of it.

If you are inspired by money, then you want to do things like bomb other people. So, you can get their riches. You want to colonise them. You want to get in and create new biotechnology. Even if you know it's going to fail, because when it fails, it will be another business opportunity. Whereas if you are inspired by biodiversity for start, you cannot drop bombs.

It is very, very bad for the environment. You can’t create biotech and what biodiversity does is that it creates a way of making the world sustainable. And it means that you actually have to care for and look after your local areas, which is what Vandana and Farida are both doing and in my small way with the cassowaries are trying to do that as well.

So, I think creating an inspiration for biodiversity is a helpful way to getting it and inspiration for gynocentric societies as well. Just to add that in. 

Farida Akhter: I would like to just add. The groups we are working with and I want to reiterate that FINRRAGE needs to be active again. Even if it is a small group, we have to work against environmental destruction; we have to work against biotech industries; we need to support each other, have solidarity relationship. One do-able thing is in Bangladesh and India that we can connect ourselves with the rural women, the farmer women. Their leadership is very strong and we have so much to learn from them. 

We can replace the corporate market with the farmers’ market. It is possible. Whatever scale of operation it is, it helps change people’s mind. So that task we have to take up.   

Sunniva: Thank you so much for this wonderful discussion. So, the panel discussion has now come to an end and I'd really like to thank Farida, Dr Shiva and Susan for this wonderful discussion. Your work is an inspiration to all the women fighting against patriarchy and every person fighting for Mother Earth.

And it was an honour to have this discussions, especially on Mother Earth Day and thank you to all our audience for joining and taking the time today. And finally, we'd like to thank Mother Earth for keeping us alive and for these strong bonds between your amazing daughters. So will not end on a few lines from one of Susan's poem.

And the poem is called Yuganameghaha, and it was published in 2008. It is a Sanskrit word, meaning a gathering of clouds at the end of an epoch. It comes from Hindu cosmology, where the Kali Yuga in which period we are living i is also a time of destruction. Susan, would you like to go ahead?

Susan Hawthorne: I discovered this word trolling through my Sanskrit dictionary one day and I thought it was such a wonderful word. I had to use it somehow. 

yugantameghahah

At the end of every cosmic cycle,

at the end of a generation – yuganta-

meghaha – clouds congregate

gathering souls for the next yuga

cloud breath, soul mist

rasping winds, rattling bones

here come the galloping horses

humans astride their flanks

here come the thundering clouds, 

breaking the world apart

the Hercules moth climbs every building

rising upwards through 110 floors

scaling the earth to find the moon

that light in the sky through which

he might escape earth’s pull

and melt into the inferno of light.

yugantameghaha is a Sanskrit word meaning a gathering of clouds at the end of an epoch; a yuga is an epoch and some say we are currently living in the Kali yuga, an epoch of destruction.

2009  Earth’s Breath, 2009. Melbourne: Spinifex Press.

And that is in my book called Earth's Breath. Thank you. 

Vandana Shiva: Thank you.

[1] Golden Rice, the genetically modified rice, has been on trial in Bangladesh for a long time.  Golden Rice was evolved by incorporating bita-carotene gene of daffodil flower into BRRI Dhan 29, a High Yielding Variety of Rice in Bangladesh. The effort for introduction of Golden Rice was carried out for ten years. This effort ended without any success. Later, it was claimed that the second Genetically Modified Golden Rice was evolved by incorporation of bita-carotinoid from maize instead of daffodil into BRRI Dhan 29.  But we have enough vitamin A enriched food in our country. Sufficient research activities have been conducted in the Bangladesh Nutrition Institute. A handful of vegetables have been identified to be rich in vitamin A. These are available from both cultivated and uncultivated sources. The leafy vegetables include katonotey, sajnapata, kolmi, puisak and data (various uncultivated shaks). The fruit vegetables include sweet gourd, field bean, okra, etc. The ripe fruits like papaya, melon, jackfruit, mango, banana and pineapple are rich in vitamin A. Sufficient vitamin A is also available from rice polished by wooden husking pedal.
We have been battling against genetically modified Bt Brinjal since 2013. The genetic engineering has been done by inserting a crystal protein gene, Cry1Ac from a soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) into the genome of brinjal cultivars. Nine varieties of Bt Brinjal are already patented by Monsanto as Bt Brinjal to control Fruit and Shoot Borer (FSB) pest.