Russell chats to world-renowned environmental thinker and philosopher of science, Vandana Shiva about the role and control big food and agriculture plays in the world, especially when there is a cost of living crisis. Plus, they talk about Vandana's new book 'Terra Viva: My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements' - out October 27th.To WATCH the full interview, go to: https://russellbrand.locals.com/ Find out more about Vandana Shiva: https://navdanyainternational.org/our-staff/vandana-shiva/ You can watch our live sessions exclusively every Tuesday, including Eckhart Tolle on October 25th at 7pm BST, 2pm EDT, 1pm CT and Jordan Peterson on November 1st at 1:30pm BST, 8:30am EDT, 7:30am CT.Enjoy weekly meditations and join us for a special Q&A weekdays after our new daily show streamed on Rumble from 5pm BST, 12pm EDT, 11am CT.Join our community, on Stay Free A.F here https://russellbrand.locals.com/ Come and see Vandana Shiva at COMMUNITY 2023 - https://www.russellbrand.com/community-2023/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/FOLLOW ME:Website: https://www.russellbrand.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/rustyrocketsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/russellbrand/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/russellbrandFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/russellbrand
Hello and welcome to my new podcast, Subcutaneous, which is a posh word for under the skin.
If you enjoyed Under the Skin, you're going to love Subcutaneous, particularly because half of it is free and we do a new episode every Tuesday.
We dive deep into the minds of Elon Musk, Eckhart Tolle, Jordan Peterson, Vandana Shiva, Gabor Mate and others.
In this episode, my guest is Vandana Shiva.
Who I consider to be a world teacher and the only person I'd vote for as global president, turned 70 on the 5th of November.
Her new book, Terra Viva, My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements, is out on the 27th of October.
Vandana will be joining us again for Community 2023.
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It's a three-day festival with Vandana Shiva, Wim Hof, Huron, Gracie, and obviously me and Laura Brand, my wife.
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In this conversation, we talk about the role of agriculture and big food during the cost-of-living crisis.
We talk about how food and agriculture became a commodity and how corporations got into agriculture, creating the junk food that's responsible for 75% of the diseases in our times.
It was an amazing conversation with Vandana.
I sort of asked her, at what point in agriculture did it become a problem?
At what point is it like, you know, is it the plough?
Is it the sickle?
Is it just planting seeds or animal husbandry?
And Vandana's answer, as always, is illuminating.
The reason I enjoy talking to Vandana Shiva is because I feel like there's hope.
I have so many conversations, so much analysis, the stuff we talk about on Stay Free with Russell Bradd Makes me see that corruption is so entrenching that the human condition can be so frail that I start to become despondent.
When I listen to Vandana, I believe it's possible to change the world.
Hello Vandana Shiva.
Hello Russell.
At this time where the world is consumed by a cost of living crisis,
what role does the control of agriculture and big food play?
Do you feel that there is a concerted effort to exert control over the basic components of human life?
Well, you know, trained as a physicist, I wouldn't have dedicated the last four decades of my life trying to figure out The food and agriculture system that first is very violent.
It is based on instruments of war.
Otherwise, farmers of Punjab wouldn't have been dispossessed and got into debt.
Innocent women, children, men wouldn't have died in the city of Bhopal in 1984.
That's the year I started to study the agriculture system.
And I have not stopped since that time.
Big corporations had no role in growing food.
Growing food was an act of care, an act of love.
The corporations got into agriculture first after the wars.
Same corporations that made chemicals for Hitler's concentration camps, poison gases for the war.
Corporations that started to trade in food as a commodity rather than food as nourishment and food as life.
And then, of course, a bunch of them created junk food And ultra processed food that's responsible for 75% of the chronic diseases in our times.
Globalization, you know, the rules of WTO literally were rules of handing control over agriculture to them.
This has brought us the multiple crisis, including the fact that after the financial crisis, the Wall Street collapse of 2008, the financial system has got into food.
And if you look at the current cost of living crisis, whether it's energy or it's food, both basic needs should be public goods, should be regulated as public goods.
Most of the hype in the prices is related to speculation and financialization.
So food and agriculture have become another commodity, an outward node of the financial system as understood through trading, city trading.
I suppose it's another abstraction of life and another opportunity for control.
What is the role of Bill Gates and other big tech moguls and titans in this increasing Technologisation.
That is indeed the correct phrase of food and agriculture.
So, you know, years ago, Gates visited India and visited our president.
And, you know, the Indian presidential palace is a leftover of the British rule.
And really brilliant banquets are put out for international guests.
And here was all this wonderful Indian food.
And Bill Gates ordered a hamburger.
Now, you know, that's the level of his food literacy.
How is he getting into the food system?
You know, two years ago, actually, no, a few years ago, he started to, A, try and control the seed.
And I know in England, there is huge uproar around deregulation of GMOs, particularly the new GMOs, which are called gene edited.
But life is complex, self-organized.
It's not a word program that you can cut and paste with no consequence.
Every change in the editing, one gene editing, 1,500 other genes get destabilized.
And now the results are there because there's enough experimentation.
And the first company that brought a gene edited food, Calix, was going to be an absolute big return on investment.
Well, it just collapsed about three days ago because you can't fake Growing food.
You can't fake self-organization of the seed.
So Gates started to try and control the seed through gene editing.
Monsanto had tried to control it through genetic engineering, you know, putting toxic genes into the plants and then taking a patent.
Gates is taking patents through editing.
It's a wrong term.
It's just the wrong term.
He actually has a company called Editas, which rakes in all the patents.
I mean, we know what happened with the vaccines.
The very people who were supposed to be regulating were taking the patents for the vaccines, rather than be detached, work in the public interest, work as independent regulators.
The second way in which Bill Gates is getting into agriculture is by what he calls digital agriculture.
You can't do digital agriculture.
Agriculture is about living seed.
It's about living thought.
It's about trillions of organisms, trillions of organisms outside and trillions in our gut.
What is he meaning by digital agriculture?
Basically a surveillance agriculture.
If the farmers first were forced to get addicted to chemicals and chemical fertilizers I want some of the most destructive elements in the world.
They're killing the oceans with dead zones.
They're leading to emissions of nitrous oxide.
Which is 300 times more damaging to the climate and the soils are being killed because soil organisms need organic matter.
They don't want a chemical that was made first for explosives and ammunition and is now being used for the soil.
Gates is taking the next step after the Monsanto control.
The Monsanto control was adapt engineer seeds to take more chemicals.
So the explosion of glyphosate and use of Roundup is because of the Roundup ready crops.
Gates is now wanting a new dependence.
The farmers have to have their minds.
Farmers have knowledge.
He is trying to treat them as empty heads, just like they define the soil as an empty container.
And He has signed agreements all over with the Mexican IT, you know, the person who controls the smartphones of Mexico, that farmers will have to take instructions from the billionaires and the poison cartel of the world.
So they depend on chemicals, they depend on seeds, now they have to depend on them.
on their knowledge, and this total control can only happen.
It can't happen on a farm like Nafdanya's where we are just concluding a beautiful course with people from around the world called Return to Earth.
For us, doing good farming is returning to the earth as earth beings, taking care of the earth, growing diversity.
Our farm is so diverse, there is no way a drone Could monitor it, it'll get thoroughly confused.
But to do the kind of agriculture Gates wants, he wants an agriculture that will have very large scale monocultures, will be chemical, except that you will now, you know, have precision agriculture to tell the farmer, you know, put five kilograms of nitrogen here and put 5.2 kilograms of nitrogen here, and would try and engineer the entire industrial agriculture operation.
But even more seriously, Gates wants to control our food, you know.
He is the biggest financier of fake food, lab food.
So, Bayer and Monsanto are already planning a large-scale agriculture where agriculture doesn't produce food that we eat, but raw materials of carbohydrates and proteins for fake food to be manufactured in the lab.
So, it's the ultimate fake.
It's fake science.
It's fake food.
It's fake knowledge.
And, you know, stay free.
Your program Russell, you know, staying free today is about seed freedom and food freedom.
This is the movement I've been building for 40 years.
Each of us, each of us has a right to food freedom.
And food freedom means to know what you're eating, how it was grown, and to eat what's healthy for you, rather than eat what will kill you with disease and will kill the planet with chemicals, fossil fuels, because industrial agriculture is a fossil fuel agriculture.
It feels like extremist materialism to the point of ecocide, where the idea of spirit or mystery or symbiosis or Gaia has been extracted by this advanced rationalism, this obsession and fetishisation of measurement and control, To the point where our planet becomes unviable.
It's almost a trope, Vandana, in the sci-fi world that the mechanical mind of an AI entity will one day, in a dystopian twist, decide that there's no point in humanity, that life itself is unviable.
But it appears that we're doing this already by adopting a kind of AI rationalist mentality that excludes the immeasurable value of that which is difficult to know.
Other than what you've just said, and I reckon it is contained in what you said, other than returning to practices of agriculture and indeed life that are at odds with and oppose this advancing ideology, How do we re-engage with nature in a way that can oppose something that's so vast, so powerful and hegemonic?
Something as potent as Bill Gates and all of his wealth and power and infrastructure, all veiled under philanthropy.
What kind of movements can we practice and support?
Well, you know, what I've always done is first understand what are the instruments of control.
When I understood the instruments of control were the chemicals and poisons in agriculture, I said, let's grow food without chemicals.
And that's totally possible in ecological agriculture, agroecology, organic farming, biodynamics, give it whatever name you want to.
Then I found seeds were to be patented and genetically engineered seed forced on us.
So freedom, staying free was saving the seed.
Now we have this horrible convergence of failed biotechnology, the genetic engineering biotechnology edifice, totalitarian information technology, and the financialization of the world Through a new technologizing of money, turning it more and more fictitious.
And, you know, the Gates and the Rockefellers and the New York Stock Exchange are already talking about owning every bit of nature through natural asset companies.
and making money on the financial markets. A river flows, it's got that much water. You can't
fictitiously multiply water, but if you turn it into a financial asset, you can multiply
fictitiously while appropriating the natural resources. So they're talking of $4,000 trillion
of gambling on nature and making money out of it.
So if this is the instrument, I mean, this fourth industrial revolution that Mr. Paul Schwab keeps talking about is this convergence of power.
And its illusions include, just like our seeds were called primitive, we in the colonial period were called primitive and we could be colonized.
Humanity is being called primitive and, you know, unevolved.
Being, and therefore needs to be enhanced by being totally enslaved, you know, through the algorithms and the computers, the machines.
And, you know, Gates has a patent called 060606, exactly when COVID was locking us all in.
He had already applied a Microsoft patent of us as users and the gadgets as the determinants of our value through the algorithms and the social credit system.
Would they decide whether we are worth having freedom or not?
That to me is an unlivable word.
I think there are two forms of resistance.
One is when farmers whose livelihoods are threatened by laws like the Dutch laws.
The last time we met and we talked, that was what was the big issue, the Netherlands laws that would wipe out small farms, that would wipe out animals, or the Indian protests.
Everywhere, everywhere where laws are brought in to make it more difficult for farmers to farm, there are protests.
But I think an even bigger movement is the movement of reclaiming food sovereignty and growing your own food.
And this got accelerated during COVID because people, A, the supply chains were shut down, but more than that, people started to make the connections between food and health.
And they realized there's no food better than food you've grown with your own hands and your own heart.
And the explosion of organic gardens around the world You know, in our movement, about 6,000 Gardens of Hope were created by the women in this period of when we were locked down.
So, both are resistances.
One is a creative resistance.
The other is a resistance that says a clear no.
But every no that comes from a deep conscience is a powerful no.
You asked about coordination.
There are two kinds of coordination.
There's a coordination from the top.
Where a centralizing force puts autonomous things together.
That's the kind of totalitarian control the billionaires, the Gates, the Klaus Schwab's want to be.
The second is the autopoietic organization.
Think of the fact that there are thousands, A hundred trillion microbes in our gut, and they're working in coordination.
And our body's working in coordination with them.
And in community, you know, you celebrate community.
What is community?
No one controlling from outside, but autopoietic, self-organized, autonomous beings sharing.
Sharing the same concerns, the same love for life, the same love for freedom.
That is the bond that brings us together.
And Gandhi called it, he had a beautiful word for it, Swaraj.
He wrote a book before he came back to India.
He wrote it while he was still in South Africa.
He wrote it while Traveling from England to South Africa, fighting the racist regime.
And the book is called Hind Swaraj, and we do a course every year with Satish Kumar, who's at Schumacher College.
Satish and I have been offering this since the year 2000, when we started the Earth University at Navdanya.
And Swaraj, that's a beautiful, powerful word.
Swaraj means self-rule.
Swaraj does not mean atomization.
Swaraj does not mean isolation.
Swaraj does not mean Insulation from each other.
Swaraj means each being governing themselves with the highest consciousness and the highest values and beings with high value and high consciousness coming together in larger and larger wholes.
He had a beautiful quotation for this.
He said, I do not see the world where the pyramid, where the top of the pyramid crushes the bottom that supports it.
That's the pyramid we are trying to create.
I see the world as ever-expanding, never-ascending oceanic circles, where every circle gives love, care, and strength to all circles within.
So I believe that life's self-organization is from the molecule to Gaia.
There is amazing coherence.
And you know, my dear friend May Wan Ho used to talk about quantum coherence.
That every molecule, every cell knows how to function.
And every cell together knows how to function.
Every organ knows how to function.
Every body knows how to function.
Every community knows how to function.
And all the way to Gaia, as a self-organized being.
That's why James Lovelock called her Gaia.
She managed her temperature.
She managed her I see parallels between the disruption of the human body's metabolism with junk food and fast food and ultra-processed food and the destruction of Gaia's metabolism through junk energy.
Gaia has her energy.
Regenerative living energies.
And then we turn to fossil fuels.
And in two hundred years, they've totally messed up.
Of course, they now are coming up with new jugglery.
Gates jugglery.
I have his book here to remind me all the time.
Yeah.
And he's got a net zero section where he's been saying net zero doesn't mean zero.
It doesn't mean we'll get rid of our emissions.
Just means we've got to fix it.
They want to fix it financially and they want to fix it through a new resource grab.
Yeah.
We call it carbon colonization.
They'll keep emitting carbon dioxide and they want our land.
As Carbon Secretary.
So I've said, you know, our Mother Earth is not your sink.
We're sorry.
You know, we are not here to be dumped on all over again.
We will live lives of love, taking care of Mother Earth, and we will together generate the kind of power that makes your system redundant.
As long as we know you are cooking up structures of further control and extinction, as you said, ecocide, you know, Their idea is destroy the earth and destroy all human freedom and our idea is regenerate the earth and grow human freedom even deeper.
I need to speak to you every day because like I return to a kind of, even though I oppose the ideas that I frame in the questions, in another way, Vandana, I am sort of similarly seduced by Ideas of materialism and individualism and competition and almost in a way it's like I want to challenge these centers of power with the same frequency of force that they espouse that I feel like a sort of an individualistic, priapic
Urgency to oppose it.
When I hear you describe the organic systems that are in place from the sub-molecular to the cosmic that in their own almost archetypal rhythms are already assuring a certainty in survival.
That there are cooperative systems that don't need like overt masculine assertion in order to be resolved.
I feel like, God, I'm sort of just part of this.
I'm just another person in the mix, sort of fighting for a kind of form of individualism.
Like that what you say, it sounds, you know, the when it entered Western culture, so sort of Rousseauian and idealistic that it's, unless it's directly coming from you, I sometimes feel like, no, this is like, this is utopianism.
Like I've been schooled in the West.
I've been schooled in individualism and the kind of self-centeredness that our system inheres and encourages.
Like I've had my own journeys of feeling weak and unempowered and then my own journey of feeling personal success and personal prowess and personal potency so that I've sort of it's somehow in my body and in my blood to kind of to even to unconsciously somehow agree with The systems of power that we are describing and that my questions are directing you to condemn.
So how is it that, what kind of faith is it that you have, as well as the action that you're undertaking?
I didn't know, for example, about that Earth University and that Satish Kumar comes there and teaches.
And I thought, my God, I want to come to that place.
I'd like to go there and... Yes, come!
You come and offer a course!
Come and offer a course!
I can do it!
Do a course.
I've got to sit there quietly for at least a year.
I shouldn't be allowed to speak for a couple of terms at least.
Do you see what I mean?
The level of the individual, this kind of individual autonomy that you're describing for someone from my culture requires a degree of personal surrender and I wonder if you encounter that a lot with Western people even when they're being condemnatory of their Well, you know, I am, of course, grateful that, you know, I'm born in India.
Of course, there's a huge consumerist India now.
There's a globalized India today.
There's a careless India today.
I mean, look at the mountains of waste that are being generated and the mountains of plastic that we have been immersed in.
So, I mean, I won't think and talk about an India that is not contaminated by the limitless greed of consumerism.
Where do I, you know, my own worldview comes first and foremost from my own studies and reflections on quantum theory, so much of my thinking.
is about the interconnectedness of the world that the quantum world teaches us, that there is no separation.
Second, that there's only potential.
There's nothing like fixed things, this idea of essential entities, fixed entities that can't change.
That too is totally obsolete.
But my second stream comes from the fact that, you know, now it's, you know, I'm going to be 70 this November and And, you know, and that's part of the reason my publishers wanted me to write my movement memoir, The Terror Viva.
And I hope we'll have time to talk about it.
But, you know, it's 50 years since I've been doing ecological.
Yes, that's it.
That's it.
This right here.
Best bit of publishing promotion since you held up Bill Gates's book.
That's me with my big bindi.
I recognise you.
So I think the second, you know, 50 years of ecological work, learning from nature, learning from communities, it allows you to shed some of these mechanistic ideas that are at the foundation of how we think of the economy, how we think of political power, how we think of society, you know.
This idea of atomized individuals who need hubs to control them, that's what's blocking community.
But our basic urge is relational.
Our basic urge is to be cooperative, not competitive.
And that's the way nature behaves.
When Gaia The idea of Gaia was created.
It was Lynn Margolis with James Lovelock.
And Lynn Margolis was the biologist to show the world that the idea that species compete with each other, that parts of a body compete with each other, are so false.
If we didn't have cooperation, we wouldn't be alive.
And that applies for the microbes, and it applies for the plants and the forest, and it applies to the human community.
So I think, basically, it's partly A paradigm shift in terms of the way we think of science.
You know, Cartesian and Baconian science is so disconnected from the world.
It was very good for control.
It was very good for extraction.
It was very good for colonialism.
It was very, very good for trying to subjugate nature.
But as you said, you know, nature cannot be subjugated.
No matter what kind of paths we bring, there's always a path.
You know, I mean, I have seen You know, bridges blown away.
I've seen dams washed away.
I've seen, you know, everything we think we are building strong, you know, build back better, their slogan.
No, with nature, there's nothing you can't build back better if you don't work according to her ecological laws.
And that is knowledge.
You know, that is following the way the earth systems work.
Tell us about your book then.
You've just told me that this is what I am to do, and as you know, I do what you tell me.
I've already made that clear to you on a number of occasions.
You've written this because it's your birthday coming up.
Happy birthday for your birthday in November.
What is it that you in particular cover in Terra Viva, Vandana?
Well, I basically cover my life.
It's not my autobiography.
It's not my personal autobiography.
It is, as the title says, Terra Viva, my life in a biodiversity of movements.
And my first involvement, of course, with the Chitco movement, the beautiful movement where women came out to hug the trees and stop the logging, which was leading to deforestation, landslides, floods, disasters.
And then, of course, my work on the seed and how and why I started to save seeds.
How I absolutely rejected the idea that seeds were a machine and invented by Monsanto.
And they could have intellectual property rights on this machine.
Now, seed is the ultimate self-organized expression of life.
And the word for us in India is bija, that which arises on its own forever and ever and ever.
And for me, that's freedom.
If we can be like the seed, then we will stay free.
I talk about the movement globally we created of diverse women for diversity because for me, the idea of monocultures is so perverse because the world is diverse culturally, it's diverse biologically.
And when we got together as a movement of diverse women for diversity, and of course, my years of fighting globalization and GATT and WTO and the creation of the International Forum on Globalization, which shut down WTO in Seattle, reminded us that when people get together, they have the power to stop the biggest institution.
The whole issue of water, privatization, Including Coca-Cola trying to steal the water and the women rose up and shut the Coca-Cola plant down in Plachimada.
And I have the privilege to support them and join them.
Or the Ganges River being privatized by Suez.
And now there are attempts to financialize water, biodiversity, nature as a whole.
So the issue of financialization will be the big issue in the years to come.
And of course, my dedication to reject the idea of patents on life, because a patent is given for an invention.
Life is not invented by humans.
We can modify, we can modify badly like GMOs, we can modify brilliantly like Indian peasants involving 200,000 varieties of rice out of one grass.
And all my battles on fighting biopiracy, big corporations.
Monsanto claiming to have invented our ancient wheat that does not lead to gluten allergy.
A Texas company claiming to have invented the basmati rice, you know, the aromatic rice from my valley.
Or the big name, you know, 11 ears.
I fought against the patenting of neem, a tree that we have used for pest control.
My grandmother used it.
My mother used it.
And then a corporation in 94 claims they have invented the use of neem for biopesticide.
And then the climate issue.
And finally, you know, because we are interbeings, you know, I think, I think the big breakthrough we have to make in our time, if we have to stay free and stay alive, is to realize that we are inter-beings.
90% of us are microbes.
90% of us.
We are only 10% human cells.
And especially with the COVID, you know, just like earlier, every insect had to be killed with insecticides and every plant had to be killed with Roundup.
You know, there was so much writing on this war against the virus.
But we are the viral, you know?
We, our skin, we are just walking my viromes.
So I think instead of this cultivation of fear of the diversity of which we are a part, my book Terra Viva is about the celebration of diversity and interbeing.
Bloody hell, thank you.
That's pretty incredible.
A few things.
One is, when you get to the point of patenting life itself, I suppose that is the usurping of the divine in a very practical sense.
It's almost like the supplanting of God of our understanding as the apex and creator and genesis of all existence.
Once you arrive at that point in a kind of a clerical and bureaucratic and indeed patented form, then truly then, Nietzsche's prognosis is carried out.
Russell, if I can interrupt there.
You know, the issue of genetic engineering was really a path to patenting.
Genetic engineering wasn't being done in order to feed the world or anything like that.
They said it at this meeting in 87, about which I've written in Terra Viva.
We have to do GMOs in order to own life.
And over the years I always say a GMO for them means God move over.
We will now be the creators.
We will be the rent collectors from life.
We've just, you know, we're looking at our paddy, which sadly, you know, we have 750 varieties of rice growing on our farm.
And the rains haven't stopped.
By now we should have been harvesting, but there is no sun to ripen.
And while I was looking at the rice, you know, and I'm thinking, here is this amazing seed that became a thousand seeds.
And here are the Monsantos and the Gates thinking, oh, we will prevent the seed from renewing.
We will terminate the fertility of seed and we will be gods.
So God move over is what GMOs actually mean.
You're so right.
Yes, and when Foucault talked about biopolitics, the control of life itself, I can see now how, through technology, life in a botanical sense is being patented and controlled, and in the form of human consciousness, through the management and control of attention, as well as obviously behaviour, You can see how every aspect of life is being controlled and curated.
How spontaneity is being extinguished.
Remember now, you can listen to and watch the full conversation by joining Stay Free AF.
If you do, you can watch our live sessions exclusively every Tuesday.
For example, on the 25th of October, if you're a member of Stay Free AF, you can join me while I talk to Eckhart Tolle.
And you can type out little questions and I'll ask him.
And on the 1st of November, I'll be talking to Jordan Peterson.
Thanks for joining us.
See you next week with another fantastic conversation.
