Category: Seeds

This past Monday and Tuesday nights Vandana spoke at two places in the Netherlands, first in Zeist (near Utrecht) and then here in Amsterdam.  Wow, what an amazing woman.  She’s a brilliant person, and very well spoken.  It was really a pleasure to hear her speak.  There are a number of videos on the Internet of her speaking, and if you’ve never heard her, I suggest having a look at some of these.

Top on her agenda at both venues was to discuss farmer suicides in the Indian Punjab region, the ongoing tragedy that’s one of the most serious in modern history.  This combined with the fact that of the roughly 1 billion people in the world today who are hungry, half or 500 million work in the food production and preparation industries.  There is really something messed up in the priorities of today’s world if the people who give us our food are so poor.

Vandana is very good with facts and statistics, and I took several pages of notes.  She discussed things like GMOs, patents, world trade issues and human rights.  Most people who are regular readers of this blog will have heard a lot of these things before either here or elsewhere, so I won’t cover them now.  I’ll probably mention some in future posts, and indeed some are so important they deserve an entire post to themselves.

She took a few shots at the Netherlands too.  For example making fun of the new government’s decision to eliminate the Environmental Ministry, or the fact that the amount of land equivalent to roughly 3 times the size of the Netherlands is used outside the country to grow the soy and grains necessary to feed the animals here.  She mentioned the Dutch were involved in intercepting ships at sea transporting generic (so-called ‘counterfeit’) medicines from India to other countries.

Zeist

The symposium in Zeist was really very interesting, not just because of Vandana herself, but by who attended and how it was organized.

When Tom Wagner visited last year I briefly entertained the possibility of trying to organize something for him here, but the community of people who might be interested in attending something like that is so disorganized and everyone has their own opinions and alliances.  I quickly decided getting a group of people together here would be impossible.  I’ve approached some of these people in the past for various reasons, and it nearly always happens that we quickly decide we don’t have anything in common and go our own ways.  Part of the problem too is many people in the Netherlands don’t like having anything to do with people from other countries, which of course to most of us is a strange concept.  It’s a fact for example that I have almost no regular readers of this blog in the Netherlands.  On any given month I might only have 5 or 10 local readers, but 10,000+ from other countries.

What was interesting was no one name seemed to be associated with organizing the visit by Vandana Shiva or the symposium, rather it was a consortium of mostly large businesses and organizations.  No expense was spared, and quite a lot of money was spent on it all.  As well as paying for Vandana Shiva’s visit, they served us dinner cooked from organic and locally sourced ingredients, local organic fruit juices, organic wines.  The costs we all paid to attend did not cover all their expenses, that’s for sure.

A very broad range of people attended, including at least one identifiable representative of a Monsanto owned seed company.  There was at least one academic from the University of Wageningen.  The symposium itself was hosted after hours in a bank lobby, and there were a number of venture capitalists and investment companies present.  There were farmers and plant breeders.  There was one very passionate grower of organic flower bulbs.  There was a member of the EU Parliament.  It was a bit of a funny situation because when we registered, we had to state our affiliations, and they printed this on our name tags.  Some people were walking around with the title ‘consumer’ or ‘gardener’.

Everyone was there to talk very seriously about the future of agriculture in the Netherlands and the world.  There were some very heated debates!

Towards the end the question was posed to the panel and the audience, if you had 10 million euros to fix agriculture, how would you spend it, and it’s clear a number of people were looking to that question for real ideas to be implemented.  There weren’t really a lot of clear answers to that question however.

The following evening in Amsterdam Vandana had a very good answer when she was asked where she would like to see more money spent.  She suggested school gardens and community gardens.  She offered the challenge that in the next decade we should not let a single small farmer fail, and money should be spent to that end.

Amsterdam

Vandana’s talk in Amsterdam was of course also fantastic, but the venue was a little lacking.  First Vandana gave her talk, then someone from the University of Wageningen gave a presentation that essentially promoted modern agriculture.  Afterwards, there was supposed to be a debate between the two.

Vandana’s talk was in English, and the other person spoke in Dutch.  The debate was supposed to be in English.  There was really a lot of language conflict.  At one point there was a brief discussion in Dutch, Vandana asked for a translation, and she was told it was too typically Dutch and she wouldn’t understand.  I think that was very rude, and it left Vandana in a position where she may have felt people were telling secrets around her.

What this all meant was too much of my evening was taken up by a presentation promoting the Green Revolution, and the debate that followed was too unfocused.  I think Vandana ended up being slightly insulted.

The talk was held in a place called De Rode Hoed or ‘The Red Hat’.  Vandana picked up on the name and mentioned it was also the name for open source software.