JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP}-"Let the seed be exhaustless, let it never run out," says Vandana Shiva, reciting the prayer Indian farmers have offered for generations while planting crops. For Shiva, India's biodiversity guru, preservation of traditional seeds is key to winning the battle against bioengineered farming methods and the system of toxic pesticides, chemicals and unsustainable agriculture she says it creates.
Shiva, 50, has been busy at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, billed as the largest ever gathering on the environment. Racing between venues and audiences, she has spoken before world leaders and activists, and taken to the airwaves spreading her word:
agricultural biodiversity is under attack.
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Let the seed be exhaustless, let it never run out.
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"The planet is in crisis," she says, leaning forward, her large brown eyes flashing. A black wool shawl covers her sari, and she waves her hands in fluid motions creating a blur of silver rings and conviction. Sitting at an outdoor cafeteria at the People's Earth Summit, one of the many side venues shadowing the summit, Shiva's voice rises above the thumping sound of Congo drums and chatter.
Farmers worldwide are turning to genetically modified seeds to increase their crop output and in the process are destroying traditional crops and methods of organic farming, she says.
Shiva says farmers have been driven into steep debt buying the expensive seeds, which must be bought anew every year since they cannot be replanted as organic seeds are. The farmers also must invest in costly irrigation systems and pesticides to accommodate the new system that, she says, often wipes out their savings.
She says there is a link between farmer suicides in India and the debt they have run up growing genetically modified crops. For Shiva, a quantum physicist turned ecological activist, it all goes back to the seed. In Sanskrit, the word for seed is bija, or "that from which life arises." "It has become the metaphor for me for all my work in ecology," she says.
It lead her to help found the organization Navdanya, which forms seed banks and trains Indian farmers to produce traditional crops without chemical pesticides or fertilizers. To date, she says, about 100,000 farmers have returned to traditional, organic farming methods in villages now dubbed "freedom zones." Navdanya has opened an organic market in New Delhi to sell the produce. Bioengineered crops may work in the short term, Shiva says, but because they are costly and deprive the soil of moisture and nutrients, ultimately they cannot be sustained.
Proponents of genetically modified crops argue they are the answer to helping eradicate world hunger the high yields of food they produce essential for regions plagued by drought and floods. Shiva; who advises the Indian government on biodiversity, traces her path from academia to what she calls "action research," to the example set by her parents, followers of activists in India's independence movement.
Her mother, a school inspector, became a farmer after independence, her father a lawyer and soldier, worked in forest conservation. "So I got my forest exposure from him, and my farm exposure from her, and my passion for freedom and rebellion against subjection of an unjust immoral kind from both of them," says Shiva with a chuckle.
When she decided to leave academia to become a full time environmental activist in 1981, she initially set up shop in her mother's cowshed. She has since moved on to the world stage but says her message to leaders remains simple: "They are basically children of the earth, they are not its ' masters."
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