Lady Commonwealth (Commonwealth Union) _ With a vast array of life’s work that spans over and interconnects science, activism, and feminism, Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva has been a representative of agricultural and ecological issues, including farmers’s rights and seed sovereignty, for nearly four decades. The founder of Navdanya, an earth-centric, farmer-driven movement led by women, Dr Shiva, has greatly contributed to the global understanding of agriculture, food, and ecology.
A trained physicist born in India, Shiva’s work on the intersection between ecology, feminism, and food was prompted by the environmental injustice during the Chipko movement. To protect cultural and biological diversity, the sovereignty of seeds as well as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), Shiva founded Navdanya, meaning “nine seeds” in Sanskrit, in 1987.
The concept of Navdhanya is rooted in the philosophy of a self-coined term—earth democracy. Earth Democracy envisages a world where everything, including humans, animals, plants, and soil, is all linked to form a family, sharing the view of “Vasudaiva Kutumbakam”; a Sanskrit phrase that means “the world is one family”. This philosophy presents a perspective with no separation between nature and humanity, stripping away conflict-causing hierarchies such as race and gender.
Dr. Shiva’s ecofeminist perspective plays a major role in her work, including her book on ecofeminism that she co-wrote along with Maria Mies, a German feminist, which suggests that the same systems that enforce female oppression are responsible for the exploitation of the earth. According to Shiva, it is this same patriarchal logic of exclusion that restricts the role of women in agriculture, and the revival of that role is vital to the future of building a sustainable agricultural system.
Dr. Shiva, along with her team at Navdanya, has established over 150 seed banks across 22 states in India, which contribute greatly to the preservation of nutritious indigenous seeds that are climateresilient, offering farmers a much more reliable option than costly and unreliable commercially supplied seeds. Freely cultivated and shared by local communities, the initiative is an embodiment of Dr Shiva’s views that food not only restores biodiversity but also human dignity and autonomy when cultivated in a respectful manner.
Also renowned for her critique of genetically modified seeds, Dr Shiva brings forward the claim that it has been a leading cause for the vast number of farmer suicides in India. She emphasises that the high cost of the seeds, along with their dependence on chemicals, has driven small-scale farmers into debt. Shiva reiterates its role in economic and ecological collapse, with seed monopolies and monoculture farming creating vulnerabilities within agricultural systems, famously states, “GMOs are seeds of poison”.
Although her stance has also gathered controversy, with the International Food Policy Research Institute issuing reports that call into question the connection between suicide rates and GM crops, her critiques resonate greatly with those who agree with her views regarding corporate agriculture, loss of biodiversity, and its connection to social injustice.
Dr. Vandana Shiva provides a clear vision of an agricultural system based on compassion, cooperation, and deep ecological understanding and, through her work, provides a simple yet radical solution to this movement—letting the seeds grow.
