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Aug. 3, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:01:27
“IT’S A SCAM!” | BlackRock, Fake Food & the Hidden Agenda! - Stay Free #182
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Time Text
So, we're going to go ahead and start the video. So, we're going to start the video.
So, we're going to start the video.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there you Awakening Wonders, thanks for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Today I want to share with you a beautiful conversation I had with Vandana Shiva.
What will astonish you about Vandana Shiva is her ability to confront corruption, her willingness to articulate complex issues, her willingness to confront Head on, the accusation that I know you will have faced, that you're a conspiracy theorist, that you're right-wing, how these smears and slurs are used to censor and control conversation.
We also talk about how Big Food received $400 billion in subsidies to make highly processed food look cheaper, the true power of BlackRock and Vanguard, and how the World Bank and IMF are linked, and how they really work.
You're going to love this conversation.
Let me know what you think in the chat.
Please welcome to the stage one of my great teachers, the great mother herself, this glorious woman who's peculiarly humble, who's recently given me this amazing gift that's got a great story behind it.
Please welcome Vandana Shiva.
Vandana Shiva, thank you so much for joining us for community.
You came last year.
For us, it was absolutely necessary, vital, necessary that you came again.
I'm so pleased and thrilled that you're here.
Thank you very much for this gift.
Would you mind starting off our conversation by explaining to our beautiful, loving community what this gift is and its significance, as you explained it to me?
Thank you.
Sir, as you know, since 84, I've dedicated my life to understand the puzzles of why our agriculture and food system destroys the earth, destroys farmers, and destroys our health.
And from 87 onwards, when those who, through chemicals, have created industrial agriculture, talked about owning the seed and patenting the seed through GMOs, I started to save seeds.
But originally only crop seeds and food seeds and vegetable seeds.
But in the areas where cotton was growing, an epidemic of suicides of farmers started.
Within no time, all cotton, 95% of cotton, had become Monsanto's BT cotton, a GMO cotton.
And these are the areas where 85% of the 400,000 suicides have taken place.
of the 400,000 suicides have taken place.
400,000 suicides of farmers in India.
And so I did a pilgrimage to understand why the farmers were taking their lives.
I I realized it was the seed monopoly.
So I spent years finding some place where we would have the old cotton varieties.
We found them.
Lovely!
The beauty about seed is it multiplies, just like community multiplies.
And so with little bits of seed, we started to multiply it.
We've trained hundreds of thousands of farmers to do organic farming.
And then we've taken that organic cotton to the ashrams that Gandhi, in his time, had started.
Because he fought the British Empire by bringing out the spinning wheel.
And said, till we make our own cloth, we will be slaves.
We have to learn how to produce again.
And he started spinning cloth and the whole country started to spin cloth.
So we went to those ashrams.
They take the organic cotton and they hand spin, hand weave, hand print.
Each of those leaves is printed with vegetable and natural dye, indigo in this case, with love.
So every fiber It's full of love, it's full of non-violence, and I call it the fiber of freedom.
And like that, we must grow foods of freedom everywhere!
And have pots of freedom everywhere, which is what I think you're trying to sow with the community festival.
Yes, because I believe very deeply in individual freedom.
I believe in it.
It's beyond belief.
It's a deep and intuitive feeling.
I sense sometimes that globalism is not only vast, but globalism is small.
It intercedes where we might have relationships with one another.
It intercedes where we might have relationships with nature, that all things have become commodity and commodified.
In our first conversation, I was struck by the way you spoke of the desacralization of the earth.
Can you speak to us about this desacralization, what this process means and how we might begin to reverse it?
I think most Indian indigenous cultures held the earth as sacred.
saw the earth as Terra Madre.
We have a hundred thousand names for her, Vasundhara, Bhumi, Gaia, the Greek name.
And the earth was desacralized when the land was colonized.
Because what had to be taken was the land and its productive power.
And while the land was appropriated and desacralized, the idea of knowledge was redefined.
You know, Bacon in this country used to be the Chancellor.
Ran the witch hunts.
Ran... Yeah, he ran the inquisition of this country.
What do you mean?
You mean specifically Wales and Britain, that there were witch hunts where people... No, huge!
Nine million people in Europe.
Killed for thinking independently.
Women healers knowing which plant heals.
Jonah Fark, you remember?
And he was in charge of that in this country.
And he wrote a book called The Masculine Birth of Time.
In India, we think of time as Kali.
Yeah?
She is the perennial circularity.
And in the masculine birth of time, he says, I will teach you how to make nature a slave.
At the same time, Robert Boyle, the governor of the Church of England, who was responsible for a lot of the New England colonization.
I think he was the one behind Boyle's law.
He writes, the idea that nature is sacred, comes in the way of our empire and it must be destroyed.
And the common narrative we get is the Church and the Enlightenment were in conflict.
No, the Church was implementing the reductionist mechanistic philosophy that we are separate from nature.
Nature is just raw material, what Satish was talking this morning.
Nature is merely property.
At the same time, while the enclosures of the commons were taking place on this land, the colonization was taking place elsewhere.
Now forests and rivers and land were being enclosed.
But here the enclosures took two centuries.
That's how much the peasants fought.
Two centuries.
And Locke did not talk about the enclosures, but he writes about how The first nations of America are primitive people.
They don't enslave their bison.
They don't fence their fields.
And therefore we must take away their land and just leave it up for their survival.
And that's how private property... He defined private property as the mixing of human labor with nature.
But that means anyone who works the land has rights.
No.
But it's not the work of a farmer It's not the work of the horse that plows the field.
It's the spiritual labor of capital.
So capital, which was totally a construct, appropriated not just the earth, appropriates spirituality.
And that's where things started to go wrong.
And that desexualization also meant no reverence, no limits, no knowledge of living systems.
And to me, the ecological crisis begins there.
India was colonized, and in 1780s, Lord Cornwallis wrote that all the land of India belonged to England, all the soil of India belonged to England, and therefore England couldn't collect rents from the peasants who were growing the food, who became landless overnight, and they had to pay half of what they grew as taxes.
So they were driven to famine.
Forty-five trillion dollars was transferred to England.
Sixty million peasants died.
That is the economy that comes from desacralization, that comes from not respecting nature, or respecting the life of others, or respecting their work and their labor, or respecting their sovereignty.
To me, sovereignty is sacred.
It's beautiful to hear you describe it so explicitly.
Oh yes, thank you.
Because I sometimes fall into the trap of believing, Vandana, that there was a kind of inevitable momentum, almost an inertia that has led us to materialism.
That it's not the result of conscious choices and political decisions, not the result of declarations that we should separate ourselves from nature, that we should regard nature as a resource, that you have to break the nature between humanity and nature herself.
It was also, it seemed plain, Vandana, and here is some gentle rain to remind us of our fallibility and of the limitless and abundant power of nature.
I want to pay them a compliment.
Yes, please.
You know, they've stayed.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you for staying.
Thank you for being so tolerant and gracious because to remain so joyful and so abundant and so generous in such challenging conditions for me is a demonstration that you have the necessary fortitude that will be required when any change is brought about.
It will not be easy to change the world.
It is not easy to sacrifice.
It's not easy to recognize that the inner world is the real world and that we must practice there with honor and respect and regard and we must overcome our materialistic models in favor of subtler forces that are sometimes difficult to access.
Vandana, I felt that in your answer there was embedded within it, or in fact it was quite overt, that part of the process of the management and subjugation of nature involved the subjugation of women.
If this is so, as you say, how do we begin to heal this wound While honouring both the masculine and feminine, because in our culture there is a lot of opposition.
I think a lot of males are uncertain about the role of masculinity.
How can we ensure that the culture war doesn't prevent necessary conversations from taking place?
How can we celebrate and honour the divine feminine without denigrating masculinity?
How can we honor both of these forces after you have said that time is regarded as Kali and it was this masculine movement to time and it was about all of this oppression when there seems to be simultaneously a movement to alienate men and women from one another?
You know, just like the earth and nature was sacred in most indigenous cultures and actually the old research shows that even in Europe The old temples were all goddess temples.
There were no weapons.
They were all about the renewal of life, the sacredness of life, the fertility of the earth.
The same process of colonialism that desacralized the earth also created gender polarization.
First by pulling the men out to be the workers in the mines, in the factories, pulling them out from their homes.
If you went to the commons, the men and women were equal workers.
They were householders.
And the economy was oikos, the economy of the household, maintaining the earth as our home, as well as our local homes, and women and men as equal partners.
There was no gender conflict in my society, in tribal areas where I go to, you know.
In so many tribal cultures, the men are doing all the cooking.
They're taking care of the babies.
All this is industrial society labels that define men do this, women do this.
So men were pulled out.
The economy of life, of continuing to survive, was left in the hands of women.
They're the ones who continue to grow the food, fetch the water, protect the children, the old people, something that's still going on now.
So how do we overcome this very artificial duality?
First by realizing that the Divine Feminine is everything living, including in every man.
So every man should celebrate, I'm the Divine Feminine.
Who said the Divine Feminine is not in man?
You know, the birth of masculine time that Bacon talked about was removing the divine feminine and trying to crush it.
And that is what creates both the violence over the earth and violence in society, but then the emptiness within.
And that emptiness then is what allows for more violence.
I believe the femicide that is growing all the time in the world is a result Of an emptiness.
And that's why we need to go beyond this shallow identity politics.
Into a deep identity that we are all earth citizens.
We're all earth beings.
We're all part of the divine.
And together, as we waken that divine in us, Of course there are differences, but those differences aren't the overriding determining factors of who we are.
Who we are, being alive comes as being part of the earth.
The spirituality comes from both going within, but through that being connected to the larger consciousness.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Vandana, when you talk about this emptiness, it really resonates with me and I think it resonates with all of us.
I think we understand what is being said.
This emptiness, this sense that something is missing, that there is something that has been absented and extracted.
I speak from the perspective of an addict, where there is unbridled yearning and longing and a sense somehow that the material or external world is going to provide the solutions to this.
When you speak about the nature of identity, that we can honour individuality and diversity without creating unnecessary conflict, I understand what you are saying and I believe you, I believe you.
How is it then, Vandana, that over the last three years we have found ourselves fraught with conflict, we have found ourselves to some degree imposed in places of division and isolation?
Sometimes it feels, as with the example of the establishment of masculine time, that there is some coordination at play when it comes to this divisiveness.
The power, while opaque, insidious and difficult to track, must be somewhere.
Somewhere, decisions appear to be being made to turn people against one another, to make people sick because of the food they are eating, to perpetuate cycles of ill health.
Where are these decisions being made?
What are these systems?
How do we identify them so that we can oppose them?
You know, when the East India Company was created, which is the first corporation, you know, corporations haven't been around forever.
Businesses have been around, trade has been around, but not the corporation.
As a corporation that has rights, but no responsibilities.
That's what limited liability really means.
No responsibility.
There was just 300 men.
Merchant adventurers, they were called.
And they got together to say, you know, if our ships come home, we'll divide the wealth.
If they don't, we take it from society.
And that's what's going on.
You know, the beautiful group of singers earlier were telling me that they still, in their salary, there's a deduction of a reparation that goes to the old slave owners who have to be paid because they lost their profits of slavery.
Something we should be looking into.
So where does all this thinking happen?
At that time, 1600, you know, 300 people got together.
And every time they start losing power, because then, you know, we threw out the East India Company.
1857, first freedom movement around bread.
Always around bread.
And then the British crown took over.
But in 1947, we became free by spinning cloth.
That's how we became free.
Around the time we were becoming free, the rich men became the World Bank and IMF.
You know, they created these instruments.
I was at the 50th anniversary of the World Bank-IMF in a place called Bretton Woods.
It's a tiny place in New Hampshire in the U.S.
And I went down to the basement where they had a shop.
And the shop had the first day covers of that event.
And the title of the first day covers Money Men of the World Meet.
And they created the three Bretton Woods institutions.
The World Bank to lend and get you into debt.
The IMF to bail you out of the debt.
And GATT, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, which then became the WTO now, for the trade issue.
It didn't become an institution because Cuba was put in charge and Cuba said what we need in trade is a correction of the harm of exploitation.
So there was no acceptance of that till a new recolonization was put in place with the WTO in 1995.
But these bureaucracies don't do the thinking.
It's the corporations who want to use it as an instrument that does the thinking.
So, this I know deeply because I spent a lot of my time on this.
When Monsanto wanted to own seed, then I started to follow GATT and WTO.
Monsanto wrote the Intellectual Property Rights Agreement of WTO to define seed as their property, as their invention.
And that's why I've dedicated my life to saving seeds and keeping seed free.
And keeping farmers free to have the right to save and exchange seed.
And you know, for those of you who want to know more about this, do come to Navdanya where we save seeds and we learn how to do all this.
We do a whole month course of returning to the earth because that's what we have to do.
And the beauty is returning to the earth is both about a spiritual return home And a material return in an ecological sense, not in a mechanistic sense.
So, Monsanto wrote the Intellectual Property Agreement, Cargill, who's polluting this river.
You know, those chicken farms, those chicken farms, ultimately the chicken is owned by Cargill, and their big shares are in all the chicken companies.
The farmer is just a passive instrument in the hands of these corporations.
And then the next, how do we make become sick?
Because the sickness creators became in charge of health and safety.
There's a treaty in WTO called Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement.
Sure enough to not let you know what it's all about.
And this was drafted by Pepsi, Coke and Nestle.
And it was drafted so that all local artisanal food would disappear.
And they actually have destroyed... India was a very big economy of artisanal food.
They destroyed all our cold press mills, five million of them.
Every woman used to make pickle and sell it.
Pickle's gone from the market.
Papad's gone from the market.
All the snacks gone from the market.
And all the junk food is in the most remote part of the Himalaya.
So those three treaties were written by these companies.
Now where we are is, because when I wrote Oneness vs. 1%, I wanted to understand, how does Gates rule the world?
How did Bayer buy Monsanto?
And then I found that after the 2008 financial crisis, the biggest players are the large investment asset funds, financial asset funds, called BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street.
They own every corporation.
They control every government.
And they decide how... And in fact, the other day, Fink, who's the Blackrock chief... Yes, Larry Fink.
He's sitting there and saying, we have to force behavior.
No, Mr. Fink.
Dictators force behavior.
You can't do that.
But they've allowed it to be accepted that not only will they control corporations, they'll control governments, they'll control our lives.
And that's where festivals like this are so important.
Stay free.
She did the goddamn tagline.
Cut it, print it.
You know, like, often what people ask is, what can I do as an individual?
But when you're talking about the World Bank, and you're talking about IMF, and you're talking about Monsanto, and you're talking about Vanguard and Blackguard, you're also talking about the significance of making pickles and artisan economies.
Because the thing you can do yourself is the only thing, and it's the necessary thing.
It's not like, oh no, I can only do these small things.
That is the thing.
That is the answer.
That is ultimately and necessarily the answer.
Not only is it vital because it's the only way to create another economy, but it's also necessary because if each of us does it, I mean, just imagine if this community would go home and say, from today onwards, I will not support the earth-destroying, health-destroying, farmer-destroying food economy.
I will support the economy of ecological agriculture, local farms, and healthy food.
And I know from farmers around here, they're already doing a lot of this work.
But if you reached out to them, or every one of you, wherever you are, reached out to them, and just said two things to yourself.
I will grow some of my food if I can.
And if I can't, I will find a farmer In my vicinity, or a group of farmers in my vicinity, to take care of the earth, the farmer and myself.
Because the beauty about community is, it's both about ultimate freedom of each part of the community, but it is about freedom of the community as an indivisible quality.
And we will not have food, you know, the next step of Corporate colonization is going to be fake food.
Yeah?
And that's why there's such a war against the farmers.
Because as long as the farmers are there, there'll be food.
Destroy the farmers, let the food disappear, and then feed the people.
Impossible burger.
Lab-made bread.
And we know processing ultra-processed food is already responsible for 75% of the disease.
Every ingredient made synthetically is what destroys the system.
Because everything in nature moves in a circular flow.
It comes from nature and goes back to nature.
Nature has no pollution, no waste.
But nature has no extraction.
Nature takes and gives back and takes and gives back and takes and gives back.
So for those who want to live outside the nutrition cycle and the food cycle that makes us Earth beings and say, no, we live outside it with food from labs.
To me, they are the same mentality of escape from our Earth being as the Jeff Bezos and the Elon Musks want to fly to Mars.
You know, they want to escape and let the earth, abandon the earth.
No, escape is irresponsible.
Taking care of the earth at whatever scale you can take care of the earth is your duty.
And it begins with agriculture.
So the war against farming is a war against the human capacity to take care of the earth.
And that's why we must all join in a resistance against fake food and the attack on farmers.
I suppose that gives us an opportunity to redefine what our relationship is with, well,
Thank you.
We've come to be regarded as consumers.
We're spoken of primarily as consumers.
And even when you say that we have individual freedom and choice when it comes to the food we eat, to a degree, of course, that is true.
And I love your suggestion that we must grow our own food, although it's quite hard, isn't it?
It's quite hard to grow food.
I've got to get better at things like that.
The patience, the patience, the negotiation with the soil and the seed.
I've not been granted those skills.
I've not been taught those things.
And the necessity to... Oh, you do a course.
Yeah, we do a course.
Is there anything I could say where you won't say, we do a course?
There will always be a course.
There's a course on Gandhi.
There's a course on everything.
There's always a course.
Thank God we can learn.
Thank God we can grow.
Thank God I'm not going to be stuck at my present state.
Thank God I can move forward.
Thank God I don't have to be a consumer forever.
Thank God I don't have to be just a cipher for other people's ideas, latched onto this vampiric and parasitic system.
Um, Vandana, um, but what about like, uh, it's very cheap, the mass-produced filthy food, and a lot of people, the food they eat, I believe, is determined by their economic status.
I believe that people are trapped in a cycle of poverty and sickness.
How do we ensure that good, wholesome food is economically viable?
How can we do that?
What level of institutional, global, political change is required to make that plausible?
So in nature...
Will you stay on the microphone please because I respect you so much, I can't offer you instruction
because it's not the dynamic.
But I do need you to...
I'm used to talking to you and this instrument.
You have to because everyone needs to hear you.
Look how patient they are, it's raining and stuff, if I may say.
So in nature, everything eats.
You know, the soil organisms are eating and feeding, eating and feeding, eating and feeding
all the time.
The mycorrhizal fungi is picking up the nutrients and bringing it to the plant.
And the plant is feeding the mycorrhizal fungi.
The bee is coming and pollinating the flower, but the flower is feeding the bee.
So the symbiosis is going on all the time.
In all cultures before colonialism and industrialism, if there was hunger, it was, it passed.
It was local.
It was limited in time.
It was never permanent.
What we now have is a structural hunger that doesn't go away.
You might have a good rainfall.
You might have a very good crop, but as a farmer, you could still be starving.
Half the hungry of the world are farmers because they're not growing food.
They're growing commodities.
They're not growing food that they can eat.
They're growing food with huge borrowing for chemical fertilizers, pesticides, seeds.
And then they're having to sell what they grow to pay back the debt.
And then borrow once more to buy to keep themselves alive.
And that's happening even at a country scale.
So, the issue of hunger today And the issue of price today has to be seen through the lens of the fact that there's structural systems to deny people their right to food.
And the denial begins with denying them the right to produce food in a way that they can access their own production.
But the second very big issue is this entire industrial globalized food system is supported by stealing our tax money.
It cannot run on its own without subsidies.
$400 billion a year, more than a billion a day, is what's taken from our pockets, given to the corporations, to take high-cost production and make it look cheap.
And so, industrial globalised food looks cheap even though it's much more costly to produce.
I mean, how can it be that food produced by a patented seed that is used round up and all kinds of chemicals and by the time it becomes processed, it becomes cheaper food.
Because the costs are not internalized.
They're externalized to nature and society.
So where do we begin by correcting what I've called the nutritional apartheid?
You know?
Like apartheid is separation.
I mean, separateness is the African's word.
And I call it ecological apartheid when we pretend we are separate from nature.
And it's nutritional apartheid when we divide society up to deny large numbers their right to eat healthy food.
Because food is not a commodity, as you said.
Food is us.
It becomes us.
And the longer you eat processed junk food, the sicker you will be.
So during COVID, most of the people who died didn't die because a little virus gave them an infection.
The virus didn't kill them.
What killed them was the diseases of bad food.
9.6% higher risk with Diabetes, 7.6% higher risk with cancer, both of which link to a food system.
So I think what we have to do is a multi-layered movement.
First begin with changing the system where you are.
Protect the farmers, create markets, do the direct links, stop the separation.
Because community building to me is we've been made separate from each other.
And all we have to do is allow the flows between each other to rebuild community.
And food is a very good place to start because it's real and you need it.
So, you know, begin with local food community and whatever you can do with your means.
Now most places where I know farmers markets have been created or the CSAs have been created, people have done it with their own initiative.
They've done it to civil society.
Some places they've been able to go to regional level, local town level.
Some places they've been able to go to country level.
I just gave an award to Denmark Denmark procures all the food for its schools and hospitals from organic farms.
That's where you make the shift.
But I think we absolutely need a rebellion against our taxes being stolen from us without our permission and being used to finance systems that are destroying the earth and destroying our health.
And when we see the full connections, That movement will be easy.
Remember the big, the US freedom began with saying, no taxation without representation.
Now we should say, no stealing our taxes without our permission.
This is a very unifying idea.
Of course, I'm sat here as an English person, and all these revolutions, like, we had to kick some people out of India.
Yeah, I can't remember who that was.
Then there was the American Revolution.
I don't know what was going on there.
We're simply trying to help everyone.
Vandana, it's sort of hidden in plain sight that food is sacred, not least in the word festival, that is surely connected to the word feast.
Most religious practices honor the process of eating your grandmother's food, your community dish, your national vegetable, the continuing instantiation of meaning connected to food.
Meaning that perhaps might fill this spiritual void, this emptiness to which you referred, in the same way that substantive food might provide us with succor and nutrition anatomically and biochemically.
It's interesting for you to hear you, Vandana, describe how integral the relationship between the farmers and the earth and the farmers and the rest of us and our obligation in a sense to become farmers is.
Curious I am also that when we hear that the global farming movement Well, let me say there are global farming protests in Sri Lanka and in India and in Germany and in England and in the Netherlands because it seems as if there is one central movement that is impacting and infecting people from, let me use this word, diverse communities of multi-races and yet much of the rhetoric that is used to dismiss, disparage, smear and attack them relates to fascism.
and being right-wing.
Why is there such a conscious and deliberate effort to divide people along these lines?
Why in particular is this movement around food autonomy and community autonomy being targeted so aggressively?
And how might we reverse and neuter some of these arguments?
Because I've been called a right-wing fascist and conspiracy theorist.
It really hurt my feelings.
What are we going to do?
So three quick issues.
The first is that we have to create another narrative.
We have to create a narrative that brings together the sacredness of food, the vitality of food to our health and well-being, both mental and physical, and the fact that food can.
Food has been a destructive force under the industrial globalized system, but food is a regenerative force.
In any system that works for the earth, and works in service for the earth, and works in care for the earth, food is a by-product of love and care for the earth.
Wow.
Yeah?
I heard that about pleasure.
That pleasure is meant to be a by-product of doing stuff, not the end point.
It helped me with addiction.
So food is a by-product of doing the right thing.
And by the way, on the issue of spirituality and the material, I think it was already a strange division But now even the materialism is being hijacked because the last time I was in FAO, they were talking about dematerializing the seed and food.
What is FAO?
FAO is the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations that takes care of the food.
Anyway, what they call dematerialization is not the seed will disappear.
No.
It just means Mr. Gates will take a genomic map, a digital map, and take a patent of it.
He's still on the seat, and the same is happening with land.
They keep telling people, telling farmers, leave the land.
If you don't do it on your own, we'll force you off the land.
This is happening in every... It's happening in this country.
It's happening in Netherlands.
It's happening in India.
Everywhere, farmers, leave the land, leave the land, leave the land.
Agriculture is a primitive occupation.
Growing food is obsolete.
And each of these billionaires is buying the land.
So they're using dematerialization as the new trick of taking away the gifts of the earth.
And, you know, they took the seed, now they already took the land, but now they want to take it all over again.
The issue of labeling as fascism those who challenge fascism is a typical trick of double speak.
You know, remember?
1984?
It's 1924!
And I wrote, you know, when the junk food industry was trying to rewrite our laws on food safety, food and health safety, I wrote a very quick briefing paper for our Parliament.
And it's called Food Fascism.
And I said, stop this food fascism.
So when your seed is controlled by Monsanto, your trade is controlled, your chicken are controlled by Cargill, your junk food and therefore you're creating disease is controlled by Coke, Pepsi, Nestle, all of this is a system of food fascism.
And then the next step of Silicon Valley and the techno-billionaires wanting to invest in fake food so that not only do you have one patent on a seed, now you have 14 patents on an impossible burger.
On every fake food, there are hundreds of patents because every synthetic artificial element has a patent behind it.
Can you imagine if the whole world would shift to fake food?
How much royalty collection they'll have.
That's what they are looking at.
And what we have to do is take the simple thing.
Same simple thing as a scarf, right?
If Gandhi could spin and say, we will make our own cloth.
And we said in Navdanya, we will save our own seeds.
We will never let seeds be the monopoly of the Monsantos and the buyers.
We have to do that now.
And we have enough time because not only is their fake food not ready, it's failing financially.
We're doing a report.
Many companies have gone bankrupt.
Many companies have gone bankrupt.
So we need to look at the failed system, the fascist system, and say, no, you're part of the fascist system.
Don't try and call us fascists.
We are the new freedom movement.
Often we think of talking about Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley and these powerful new emergent titans in the global economic space who appear to have influence in areas of health, commerce and agriculture.
I'm speaking of Bill Gates in particular there.
It's become, in the same way as it's become fascist and right-wing to have conversations about personal freedom and conspiratorial, it's become conspiratorial to talk about some of the figures who appear to be benefiting from these new institutional and systemic changes that are taking place undemocratically without anybody voting for them or even being invited to have the conversation and often the conversation itself is shut down.
How is this happening?
How is reality being presented to us in this peculiar way, Vandana?
What is the agenda?
It seems to me that what you're suggesting is the agenda of Bill Gates and this new cadre of technocrats and this elite billionaire class is a new kind of Total domination, a new kind of globalist imperialism, the likes of which we've never before seen because the technology didn't exist before.
And whilst the technology for instantaneous communication exists now, which could be used of course positively, that we could organize and communicate differently, that we could form new confederacies, that we could form new independent communities that took responsibility for their own agriculture, that traded only when necessary in forms of currency that are decentralized and not attached to them, it also seems that there is A very, very powerful resistance to these freedom movements.
How are they getting such good PR?
I sometimes see them on TV represented as, well, philanthropists and stuff.
How is this happening?
Well, it's happening, of course, because any regime that takes power without the permission of people is a regime that lives under fear.
It's always afraid of losing power.
And I've watched this with the process.
We create the anti-globalization movement.
We created IFG.
We stopped the WTO in Seattle democratically.
And after that, they militarized the system.
They actually started to send armed people to every protest.
They killed a young man in Genoa.
You might remember the G7 protests.
So, earlier they used to use, you know, military and police.
Now they're using instruments of surveillance and control.
And the instruments of surveillance and control perform three functions for them.
The first is to declare any dissenting voice.
Because in a period of unfreedom, freedom is a dissenting voice.
So to declare it as a threat and a conspiracy, and we watch that, a lot of it.
The second is, we are living through a convergence of technologies.
So Mr. Gates is key to the fact that he wants to digitalize agriculture.
He's desperate to digitalize The economy, the financial... On India they pushed it in 2016.
But you might have heard of the digital currencies.
And basically every time anything is taken out of a direct interaction between community and taken into the digital realm, it's generating a rental income to Mr. Gates.
Because some processing by Microsoft has to happen.
So, of course, the desperation of digitalization, including digitalization of farming.
And the third is that the surveillance economy is what they hope will be the new economy.
That the surveillance itself will be the generator of the capital and the profit.
And it's been called the surveillance capitalism.
And just like nature was reduced to raw material, as we are being mined for data, we are the new minds.
Earlier they went for coal mines and cobalt mines and bauxite mines.
Now they go for data mining.
Every time they mine our data, that's the raw material.
We are raw material suppliers.
Then it's processed through the data collection and the algorithms.
And using that, they control our ideas, they control communication, They control the economy and choices.
And just at the time, in March 2020, when COVID was hitting and the lockdowns were beginning, I received a patent.
It's called 060606.
Oh no!
It's a sign, dammit!
And it's a world patent by Microsoft.
And you read the patent, it says, Patents for a user, that means the patents on us.
Patents on a user using an equipment, and on the basis of what they're doing, assessing what they are about, which is surveillance, and then having algorithms allocate value on the basis of their functioning.
And assign this value as a cryptocurrency.
This is the social credit system in China right now.
You can't go from one neighborhood to the next without passing your social credit system, if you have a bad social credit system.
You can't go to a movie.
You can't go to a cafe.
I mean, it's not fiction.
It's happening right now.
So, it's a policing system, it's a profit generating system, and it's a convergence of control system.
And what we have to do, of course, is to bring technology back to where it belongs as a tool.
To be regulated by society.
Tools that impact society must be regulated by society.
They can't be left in the hands of those who want to control society using it.
That's why we have biosafety laws for GMOs, you know.
That's why we now have a few places, laws for regulating mergers between giant companies.
And this will have to be about the next human rights movement.
Because it's taking away our very authenticity, autonomy, as free human beings.
We are being made raw material.
And I don't think we should accept it.
We should resist nature being reduced to raw material, but we should also resist humans being reduced to raw material.
We are not your raw material.
Yeah, I get it.
Yeah, that's how the materialistic model works.
Everything becomes like a commodity.
Everything becomes objectified.
We objectify one another.
We regard ourselves and one another as objects.
Our education system only prepares us for labor markets.
If you can't function in the labor market, Then you have no value.
Everything that is sacred is being stripped of its sacredness.
The process of eating food becomes the dumb imbibing of intense sugar and oil and salt making you sick.
Then you've got to be kept healthy.
You're just on a loop.
You're on a conveyor belt of sickness.
Then attention, consciousness itself becomes a commodity.
Your very beingness, our very beingness is turned into an object that can be controlled and patented.
And Russell, you know, when the early stages of COVID, it was the older people who were dying in, in care homes.
And the paper was published called the case for killing granny in a medical journal.
And I was rushing back to India before being locked down.
And, and the New York times of that day was saying, it's time to decide who will live and who will not live.
In Canada, where I did my PhD, so I knew it as a society, but there were no homeless people.
Now, they're not just arresting the homeless, they are saying, we will allow you to commit suicide.
They passed a law, so that instead of the society ensuring no one is homeless, the dominant system is ensuring the homeless die.
So, it is a new level of extermination and genocide.
Because when large numbers are made disposable in society, then any instrument will be used to get rid of them.
And to me, the only way you challenge this is recognizing there's no being on the earth that can be exterminated and pushed to extinction with pesticides and insecticides.
Everything else that kills.
But there's no human being who is dispensable.
Every human being, no matter who they are, has a place to care for the Earth and regenerate our beautiful planet.
We need all the hands, all the hearts, all the minds.
Applause Sometimes I wonder what the face of Armageddon may look
like, what the apocalypse may feel like when it impacts our skin.
Then I think perhaps it's already among us that if you're already a person that is sleeping on the street, then you are a forebear, a harbinger of an already present apocalypse, an already present Armageddon, the observable symptom of an already emerging phenomena.
Fandana, it's very important that you convey this, and that when you...
present the idea that it is possible to eliminate human life or control human life.
This, I think, is a gentle suggestion.
This is a forebear.
This is an indicator of an idea that they are beginning to wonder if it might not be good to popularize it.
And, you know, I just want to say that, you know, the rain came and you stayed.
And now the sun is there.
So we've got to keep working through the period where it looks like it's rainy and stormy
because the sun will shine.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE What is most heartening is that, obviously, I've been at
this festival and I'm speaking with everybody, and people are so
optimistic and people are so untroubled by the conditions
and people are willing and awakening.
And in fact, what's been different about this part of my own life,
as opposed to the previous period, where it was more what you'd recognise as conventional
celebrity in so much as I was participating,
In systems of media that convey very particular and obvious messages that are to do with materialism in a sense and the valorization of low behavior.
But at that time...
I didn't have the same kind of connection with people and the same kind of communication.
And now I have learned so much.
I learn continually.
People tell me about their personal challenges, personal losses, about things that people are personally overcoming.
People everywhere, like, you've got to do this thing, you've got to learn about this thing, here it is, I've written this thing down.
Already, as you say, when nature is regarded as a resource and human beings are regarded as a consumer, there is no answers.
But when we make the minute internal transition that we are are awakened citizens, awakening wonders as I continually
say, when we are awakening then we are no longer participating in that and when we regard
nature as not something separate that is a resource but as something that we are
participating in, then suddenly the paradigm is different and we cannot be utilised.
It's like a reversal of this metastasization into some dark, dark age.
Some dark, heavy age.
Do you think sometimes that when they talk of the Kali Yuga, that they mean everything heavy, everything dumb, everything not including light, everything not awakened, everything not vital with interconnectivity?
Well, the Kali Yuga is basically the process of disintegration of a system that should pass away.
And that creates the opening up for the regeneration of a new system.
Kali is always in cycles.
It's not linear.
I mean, there's no linearity in nature.
And linearity is a part of a Cartesian worldview, which has created so much despair for so many people.
You know, when people talk about, oh my God, I'm living through climate despair.
I'm living through climate trauma.
I said, go do something.
Plant a garden.
Your trauma will go and you'll have food.
Yeah.
And the beauty of it is the science is teaching us that, you know, the figures are so clear.
And I wrote a book way back, Soil Not Oil, and the wonderful singers yesterday, it seems, put it to music.
And I said, the oil empire has given us the entire climate havoc.
But returning to the soil, knowing that we are part of the soil, we are humans because we are humus.
Yeah?
That is where a new economy, a new imagination, a new identity gets created.
But in these many, at that time, I knew that 45% of the climate pollution comes from an industrial food system that's also making us sick.
And destroying the land and the biodiversity, everything.
But we can regenerate, we can create a 100% solution to hunger.
We can create a 100% solution to regenerating biodiversity.
We have six times more pollinators on our farm than in the forest next door.
So it isn't true that farming always degrades.
We have more mycorrhizal fungi in our soil than in the forest.
Because care, you know, I think earlier Satish was talking about how love is powerful.
To me, care Love calls for care, you know?
And that is powerful and creative.
Care is a very creative force.
It's the true economic force of creating life.
And just the other day I was reading, you know, this fake food.
Some of those people who accuse us of being right-wing and fake food being a climate solution.
Give it all in the lab.
Put it all in the lab.
It's 25 times more greenhouse gas emissions than ordinary food.
What they're offering as a solution is 25 times more polluting, but just growing a garden or doing organic farming, just the mycorrhizal fungi can hold enough carbon to hold one third of the emissions, just the fungi, the tiny little invisible fungi.
And the data is showing that if even 10% farms and pastures and forests started to work according to ecological laws, we could draw down all the excess carbon and And of course not continue to emit.
But the climate problem, the biodiversity problem, the hunger problem, the alienation problem, are all one problem.
Yeah.
It's one problem of working as if we are at war with the Earth.
And with each other in competition.
Yes.
And the solution for everything is, knowing we're part of the Earth, that taking care of her is what being on the Earth is about.
And And from there comes taking care of each other, and that's building community.
because what connects community is care, compassion, love.
Vandana, whenever we communicate...
I I feel like I'm learning information.
I feel like I'm learning information.
There is so much information.
But I also feel that my heart is opening.
Something happens to me that I need.
There's something that you have that I need.
You're conveying something that I need.
It's really, really valuable and important to me.
Thank you so much.
When we were speaking a moment ago, Vandana, you told me about the three principles.
Because this is what I've become aware of.
I've become aware that everywhere there are anti-protest laws being passed.
I've become aware that there are Censorship laws simultaneously being passed, what are known as the Five Eyes countries, the countries that Edward Snowden exposed, were trading each other's data where their national laws prohibited surveillance that Edward Snowden revealed was happening.
But these Five Eyes countries are introducing new censorship laws, the EU is introducing new censorship laws, they're trying to close down free speech, they're militarizing the police force, they are closing down the possibility for protest, they are shutting down good faith communication between different people, and all people are different people because we are They're of course unique.
They're creating cultural conflict where it needn't exist, as well as the ongoing annihilation of nature.
And whenever solutions are proposed, they are solutions that always impact ordinary people much more than they impact the institutions that are primarily responsible.
One argument being the one that you have just espoused, that when it comes to the solution for agriculture is fake lab food and they are 25 times Worse.
The solutions that Big Pharma propose make people sick in many cases, and of course, I'm not naive or foolish enough or ignorant enough to suggest that there aren't wonderful people working in science and medicine and in all of these disciplines, of course.
And I will just mention as a side note, you can always tell at any festival, no matter what type of festival it is, a conventional music festival or a comedy festival, it's always a good sign when the other acts are watching the headliner.
And here I can see Tommy Rosen, and everywhere I look there are people speaking.
Satish Kumar is sat quietly observing, Helena Norberg, everybody is stopping.
Tahir is still here to watch Vandana Shiva.
Before we finish, I've got a few more things to ask Vandana, but please may we celebrate her just spontaneously in this moment with a glorious round of applause for this incredible teacher that we have been granted.
Man switching, switching, switching.
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