Vandana Shiva visits Vasteras
Very inspiring evening last night. Vandana Shiva made a detour here from a visit to Stockholm, together with the two filmmakers who recently made a Swedish documentary about her called "Bullshit", named after an award she was given by a group called the Liberty Institute, who claim that she is a "mouthpiece of western eco-imperialism" - interesting charge considering she's Indian!



They presented her with cowdung at the WSSD in Johannesburg, and she seems very amused about the whole thing - there is of course a glorious irony in the fact that, to the Liberty Institute, cowdung is considered insulting, whereas to an organic farmer it's actually very valuable (Shiva has written an essay in praise of cowdung).

For those who haven't heard of her, she originally trained as a nuclear physicist, then veered away from that into theoretical physics after becoming concerned about the environmental risks of nuclear power, and is now promoting organic farming and campaigning against corporate agribusiness, in particular GMO agriculture. She is very skeptical of the World Bank/IMF/WTO's efficacy in reducing poverty and instead advocates local food production and fair trade.

We saw the documentary and also got the chance to ask her questions. The documentary focussed partly on the recent spate of suicides among Indian farmers, which was of course quite grim, but it also did a good job of showing the wonderful colours and sounds of India, and the vast variety of humanity there (parts of it were filmed in Mumbai, Karnataka and Kerala, areas which I'm fortunate enough to have visited ten years ago, and it brought back a lot of memories). At the Coca-Cola protests in Kerala, (in which local people undertook a very long sit-down strike to protest the actions of a nearby Coca-Cola plant which was using their groundwater), elephants dressed up in golden tassels were paraded up and down in front of the plant and groups of people sang "Water, water, water" into microphones, using those incredibly subtle Indian tonalities and somehow all managing to stay on the same note at the same time. Eventually they won and the plant had to close down. There has also been some success is preventing the patenting of various traditional Indian crops such as Basmati rice and the Neem tree. All in all it was quite a cheerful evening and it was nice to see how much interest the people of a small city in central Sweden took in sustainable agriculture.