Resisting imposed metaphors of value

Vandana Shiva’s role in supporting Third World agriculture

Abstract

Vandana Shiva is a committed scientist and environmental activist from India. As a physicist she has played a leading role in an Indian movement called “Navdanya” which is working for the conservation of biodiversity. She is Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology and also a Recipient of the Alternative Nobel Prize. She uses her analytical ability to uncover the semantic engineering that goes on when global corporations colonize and destroy traditional agriculture in the Third World. This is evident in her 2000 BBC Reith lecture (Shiva 2000a). It is a sustained critique of how global corporations, with the active support of many politicians, are forcing genetic engineering and commercial agriculture on rural communities. It was part of the “Millennium” BBC Reith lecture series entitled “Respect for the Earth”. Chris Patten talked on governance, Tom Lovejoy on biodiversity, John Browne on business, Gro Harlem Brundtland on health & population, Vandana Shiva on poverty & globalisation and His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales on sustainable development. The Reith lectures are an influential, annual BBC institution, named after the first director of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), Sir John Reith. Bertrand Russell gave the first Reith lecture over 50 years ago. They are broadcast on the BBC World Service radio frequencies in addition to the domestic transmission and are now also published on the Internet. In her lecture Shiva denounces the eradication of a sustainable way of life in the name of modernization and science. Shiva’s work (2000b and 2002) uncovers the metaphors and the models underlying the so-called modernization of agriculture. This is designed to benefit no one but the western corporations which are pursuing it. This process parallels one already far developed in Europe (Trampe 2001). Shiva’s approach can be read on two levels. First we have the factual, objective analysis of how rural traditions in India are being dismantled and the call to resist physically and politically. Then, on the meta-analytical level, Shiva critically delineates how the myths associated with neo-liberal projects and ‘solutions’ are being formulated. From a critical discourse analytical standpoint it is significant to note that Shiva is a discerning observer of how language is employed in this process. As Shiva (2000a) says: “The global free trade economy has become a threat to sustainability and the very survival of the poor and other species is at stake not just as a side effect or as an exception but in a systemic way through a restructuring of our worldview at the most fundamental level. Sustainability, sharing and survival is being economically outlawed in the name of market competitiveness and market efficiency.”