DAMODARAM SANJIVAYYA NATIONAL LAW

UNIVERSITY

SABBAVARAM, VISAKHAPATNAM, A.P., INDIA

PROJECT TITLE
A Study of the Contribution of Vandana Shiva for the
Development of Environmental Law in India

SUBJECT
Environmental Law

NAME OF THE FACULTY

Assistant Professor, Dr. K. Sudha

Name of the Candidate: Sai Suvedhya R.

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 Roll No.: 2018LLB076
Semester: 5th semester
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The final outcome of this project required a lot of guidance and assistance from many people
and I am extremely fortunate to have got this all along the completion of my project work.
Whatever I have done is only due to such guidance and I would like to thank them for the
same.

I thank my respected Environmental Law Professor - Dr. K. Sudha Ma’am, for giving me the
opportunity to do this research paper and for her unfailing support and guidance which
enabled me to finish it on time.

I would like to express my gratitude to DSNLU for providing me with all the required
materials.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION – 4

ACTIVISIM – 5

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INTRODUCTION

Vandana Shiva (born 5 November 1952) is an Indian scholar, environmental activist, food

sovereignty advocate, and anti-globalization author. Based in Delhi, Shiva has written more
than 20 books.

Shiva is one of the leaders and board members of the International Forum on Globalization
(with Jerry Mander, Ralph Nader, and Jeremy Rifkin), and a figure of the anti-
globalization movement. She has argued in favor of many traditional practices, as in her
interview in the book Vedic Ecology (by Ranchor Prime). She is a member of the scientific
committee of the Fundacion IDEAS, Spain's Socialist Party's think tank. She is also a
member of the International Organization for a Participatory Society. She received the Right
Livelihood Award in 1993, an award established by Swedish-German philanthropist Jakob
von Uexkull, and regarded as an "Alternative Nobel Prize".

Vandana Shiva has written and spoken extensively about advances in the fields of agriculture
and food. Intellectual property rights, biodiversity, biotechnology, bioethics, and genetic
engineering are among the fields where Shiva has fought through activist campaigns. She has
assisted grassroots organizations of the Green movement in Africa, Asia, Latin America,
Ireland, Switzerland, and Austria with opposition to advances in agricultural development via
genetic engineering.

In 1982, she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology. This
led to the creation of Navdanya in 1991, a national movement to protect the diversity and
integrity of living resources, especially native seed, the promotion of organic farming and fair
trade. Navdanya, which translates to “Nine Seeds” or “New Gift”, is an initiative of the
RFSTE to educate farmers of the benefits of maintaining diverse and individualized crops
rather than accepting offers from monoculture food producers. The initiative established over
40 seed banks across India to provide regional opportunity for diverse agriculture. In 2004
Shiva started Bija Vidyapeeth, an international college for sustainable living in Doon Valley,
Uttarakhand, in collaboration with Schumacher College, UK.

In the area of intellectual property rights and biodiversity, Shiva and her team at the Research
Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology challenged the biopiracy of neem, basmati
and wheat. She has served on expert groups of government on Biodiversity and IPR
legislation.

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Her first book, Staying Alive (1988), helped change perceptions of third world women.In
1990, she wrote a report for the FAO on Women and Agriculture titled "Most Farmers in
India are Women". She founded the gender unit at the International Centre for Mountain
Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu and was a founding board member of the Women's
Environment & Development Organization (WEDO).

The Australian publisher Spinifex published Shiva's book Making Peace With the Earth, said
to be based on her 2010 Sydney Peace Prize Lecture about Indian social-ecological concerns
and insights. This book discusses biodiversity and the relationship between communities and
nature. "Accordingly, she aligns the destruction of natural biodiversity with the dismantling
of traditional communities—those who ‘understand the language of nature'". [19] David Wright
wrote in a review of the book that to Shiva, "the Village becomes a symbol, almost a
metaphor for ‘the local’ in all nations".

Shiva has also served as an advisor to governments in India and abroad as well as non-
governmental organizations, including the International Forum on Globalization,
the Women's Environment & Development Organization and the Third World Network. She
chairs the Commission on the Future of Food set up by the Region of Tuscany in Italy and is
a member of the Scientific Committee that advised former Prime Minister Zapatero of Spain.
Shiva is a member of the Steering Committee of the Indian People's Campaign
Against WTO. She is a councilor of the World Future Council. Shiva serves on Government
of India Committees on Organic Farming. She participated in the Stock Exchange of
Visions project in 2007.

ACTIVISIM

Shiva has worked to promote biodiversity in agriculture to increase productivity, nutrition,

farmer's incomes and it is for this work she was recognised as an 'Environmental Hero'
by Time magazine in 2003. Her work on agriculture started in 1984 after the violence in
Punjab and the Bhopal disaster caused by a gas leak from Union Carbide's pesticide
manufacturing plant. Her studies for the UN University led to the publication of her book The
Violence of the Green Revolution.

In an interview with David Barsamian, Shiva argues that the seed-chemical package

promoted by Green Revolution agriculture has depleted fertile soil and destroyed living
ecosystems. In her work Shiva cites data allegedly demonstrating that today there are over
1400 pesticides that may enter the food system across the world.

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SEED FREEDOM

Shiva supports the idea of seed freedom, or the rejection of corporate patents on seeds. She
has campaigned against the implementation of the WTO 1994 Trade Related Intellectual
Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, which broadens the scope of patents to include life
forms. Shiva has criticised the agreement as having close ties with the corporate sector and
opening the door to further patents on life. Shiva calls the patenting of life ‘biopiracy’, and
has fought against attempted patents of several indigenous plants, such as basmati. In 2005,
Shiva's was one of the three organisations that won a 10-year battle in the European Patent
Office against the biopiracy of Neem by the US Department of Agriculture and the
corporation WR Grace. In 1998, Shiva's organisation Navdanya began a campaign against the
biopiracy of basmati rice by US corporation RiceTec Inc. In 2001, following intensive
campaigning, RiceTec lost most of its claims to the patent.

GOLDEN RICE

Shiva strongly opposes golden rice, a breed of rice that has been genetically engineered to
biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of Vitamin A. It has the potential to assist in
alleviating the vitamin A deficiency suffered by a third of preschool-aged children
worldwide.1 Shiva claims that Golden Rice is more harmful than beneficial in her explanation
of what she calls the "Golden Rice hoax": "Unfortunately, Vitamin A rice is a hoax, and will
bring further dispute to plant genetic engineering where public relations exercises seem to
have replaced science in promotion of untested, unproven and unnecessary technology... This
is a recipe for creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it."2 Adrian Dubock says that
golden rice is as cheap as other rice and vitamin A deficiency is the greatest reason for
blindness and causes 28% of global preschool child mortality. 3 Shiva has claimed that the
women of Bengal grow and eat 150 greens which can do the same, 4 though environmental
consultant Patrick Moore suggests that most of these 250 million children don't eat much else
than a bowl of rice a day.5 In the 2013 report "The economic power of the Golden Rice
opposition", two economists, Wesseler and Zilberman from Munich University and

1
 Global prevalence of vitamin A deficiency in populations at risk 1995–2005, WHO Global Database on
Vitamin A Deficiency. Geneva, World Health Organization, 2009.
2
"THE "GOLDEN RICE" HOAX -When Public Relations replaces Science". Online.sfsu.edu.
3
No, Zac Goldsmith, golden rice is not 'evil GM'. It saves people's lives , Adrian Dubock, The Guardian, 4
November 2013.
4
Can Biotechnology Help Fight World Hunger?, CONGRESSIONAL HUNGER CENTER BIOTECH
BRIEFING. Washington D.C., Capital Hill, 2012.
5
By opposing Golden Rice, Greenpeace defies its own values – and harms children, The Globe and Mail, 15
October 2013.

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the University of California, Berkeley respectively calculated that the absence of Golden Rice
in India had caused the loss of over 1.4 million life man years in the previous ten years.6

GM, INDIA AND SUICIDES

According to Shiva, "Soaring seed prices in India have resulted in many farmers being mired
in debt and turning to suicide". The creation of seed monopolies, the destruction of
alternatives, the collection of super profits in the form of royalties, and the increasing
vulnerability of monocultures has created a context for debt, suicides, and agrarian distress.
According to data from the Indian government, nearly 75 per cent rural debt is due to
purchased inputs. Shiva claims that farmers' debt grows as GMO corporation's profits grow.
According to Shiva, it is in this systemic sense that GM seeds are those of suicide.

International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) twice analyzed academic articles and
government data and concluded the decrease and that there was no evidence on "resurgence"
of farmer suicide.78

Shiva replied to these assertions, that her critics had reduced the issue to GM cottons and
ignored the issue of seed monopolies, and that the suicide figures were from the government
statistics of the National Bureau of Crime records.9

By challenging the neo-liberalization of Indian agriculture, Shiva has opposed multinational

companies such as Monsanto and Cargill. In her book, Cargill and the Corporate Hijack of
India’s Food Agriculture, Shiva examines the actions of both the U.S. and Indian
governments which enabled policy shifts which have driven India to become the largest
wheat importer in the world, when it already stood as the second-largest wheat producer,
which would have satiated most of the nation's needs. She also describes methodologies of
food-policy decentralization in government and industry, and says that centralization has
disproportionately benefited large multinationals without achieving the promised food
security and nutritional requirements where Indian farmers adopted bio-technologies en
masse. Under globalization, portions of arable land cultivation turn to non-food and/or non-

6
Wesseler, J.; Zilberman, D. (2014). "The economic power of the Golden Rice opposition". Environment and
Development Economics. 19 (1): 1. doi:10.1017/S1355770X1300065X.
7
 Bt Cotton and farmer suicides in India: Reviewing the evidence, International Food Policy Research Institute
(IFPRI), 2008. Abstract, page 27 and Figure 11.
8
Jon Entine; Cami Ryan (29 January 2014). "Vandana Shiva, Anti-GMO Celebrity: 'Eco Goddess' Or
Dangerous Fabulist?". Forbes.
9
 "Seed Monopolies, GMOs And Farmers Suicides In India By Dr Vandana Shiva". Countercurrents.org.

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staple agricultural production; with increasing access to food export to markets where profit
margins can rise. This can lead to the aforementioned restructuring of national import
economies.10

ECOFEMINISM

Ecofeminism opposes the dominant paradigm in green theorizing and rejects its reformist
environmentalism—in which opponents say environmental problems are solved by the
externalization of their costs (onto developing countries), thereby presenting the Western
model of development and knowledge as the only acceptable model for mankind in
modernity. Ecofeminism, part and parcel of radical ecology, addresses possibilities for
changing the hegemonic patriarchal paradigm whereby nature and women are conflated and
delegitimated as inferior, passive, and non-productive categories, by means of domination
and exploitation.11

Shiva plays a major role in the global ecofeminist movement. According to her 2004
article Empowering Women12, a more sustainable and productive approach to agriculture can
be achieved by reinstating the system of farming in India that is more centered on engaging
women. She advocates against the prevalent "patriarchal logic of exclusion," claiming that a
woman-focused system would be a great improvement. She believes that ecological
destruction and industrial catastrophes threaten daily life, and the maintenance of these
problems have become women's responsibility.13

Cecile Jackson has criticised some of Shiva's views as essentialist.14

Shiva co-wrote the book Ecofeminism in 1993 with "German anarchist and radical feminist
sociologist"15 Maria Mies. It combined Western and Southern feminism with "environmental,
technological and feminist issues, all incorporated under the term ecofeminism”. These
theories are combined throughout the book in essays by Shiva and Mies.

10
 Vandana, Shiva (2007). Cargill and the Corporate Hijack of Indias Food & Agriculture. New Delhi:
Navdanya/RFSTE.
11
Zurzulovic, Mirna (2000). "Ecological Feminism of Vandana Shiva". Socijalna Ekologija.
12
Dr. Vandana Shiva: Empowering Women 10 June 2004 by WordPress.com
13
Shiva, Vandana (1993). Ecofeminism. Zed Books.
14
Cecile Jackson: Radical Environmental Myths: A Gender Perspective, 1995
15
Utzeri, Mounia (2017). "Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division
of Labour". Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism.

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Stefanie Lay described the book as a collection of thought-provoking essays but also found in
it a lack of new ecofeminist theories and contemporary analysis, as well as "overall failure to
acknowledge the work of others".

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