SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA, June 7, 2004: The sari-wearing firebrand who for two decades has fiercely fought biotechnology in her native India was complaining yet again about the men in lab coats who say they know best how to manage the world’s food supply, according to this long article in the New York Times. And the audience was enthralled. “Ten thousand years of expertise in feeding us is a woman’s expertise,” Vandana Shiva railed, her forehead dotted with the traditional Hindu bindi. “That work is now being claimed as an invention by a handful of corporations.” The decidedly liberal crowd at the University of California at Santa Barbara whooped and cheered adoringly as Shiva took on the likes of Monsanto Co., a company she sees as bent on overtaking India’s centuries-old agricultural practices.
She’ll be repeating the message to a less-friendly crowd as she joins demonstrators outside the annual convention of the Biotechnology Industry Organization that opens in San Francisco on Sunday. She’ll also be leading anti-biotech workshops. Then, Shiva is off to deliver the commencement speech at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. Shiva, who lives on a farm outside New Delhi, brings an image of Third World authenticity to an organic farming crusade that wraps Luddite sensibilities in a fiery anti-imperialistic message. To Shiva, biotechnology is an ecologically dangerous tool for Western corporations to win global domination of agriculture. Shiva, 51, made her initial mark in the West in the 1980s when she and Jeremy Rifkin were among the few voicing opposition to the then-novel technology of combining genetic material from separate plant species to produce food.
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