“Food is a weapon. When you control seed, you control life on earth.”

This special stream of “The Seeds of Vandana Shiva” will be available to watch here for one week only – April 15th to April 22nd, 2021. Sorry, the free viewing period has ended. Click here to find future showings and find out how you can get involved.

“What an inspiring film! Such an important message in this time when people are called to redesign their realities to suit their authentic heart. Watching the film came at a perfect moment.” – Robyn Norwood
 

The Seeds of Vandana Shiva Trailer from Becket Films on Vimeo.

Review of ‘The Seeds of Vandana Shiva’

By Ronnie Cummins
 

The new movie, The Seeds of Vandana Shiva, (available this week as a Live Stream for our subscribers) is not only a biography of Vandana Shiva, but also an historical reminder of how the forces of life and biodiversity, inspired by Mother Earth and indigenous tradition, have managed to hold back the forces of corporate greed and monopoly control, not only in India, but at many of the front lines of grassroots struggle throughout the world.

It is no exaggeration to state that Vandana Shiva is one of the most important visionaries, authors, public speakers, and activists of our era. Once “profit at any cost” agriculture and globalization are finally defeated, once we turn around the climate crisis and the crisis of democracy, and join hands together across borders and continents to celebrate, we need Vandana Shiva and the traditional farmers and rural villagers of India and the indigenous world to sit at the head of the table.

I have worked with, and been inspired by, Vandana for almost three decades starting with a solidarity picket line and press event that I helped organize on October 2, 1993 (Gandhi’s birthday) in Boca Raton, Florida, protesting the WR Grace Company’s attempt to patent India’s Neem tree, and a simultaneous protest against Cargill, Monsanto, and “Patents on Life” in front of the Minneapolis, Minnesota Grain Exchange.

In October of 1994, the network that I helped coordinate, The Pure Food Campaign, joined forces with Navdanya, 
https://www.navdanya.org
Vandana’s India-based organization, and activists in over two dozen nations to launch the Global Days of Action Against Genetically Engineered Foods. This was the beginning of a global grassroots Movement against GMOs and for organic and regenerative agriculture that has persevered until this day, nurturing, not only resistance, but a healthy, organic, and regenerative alternative to what Vandana aptly calls the Poison Cartel.

At the close of the 20th Century, Vandana and our growing global Movement helped organize the teach-ins and protests at the “Battle of Seattle,” successfully blocking Monsanto and the Gene Giants from extending their monopoly patents and control over seeds and agriculture across the entire world. More recently, in 2015, Vandana and I, and a network of food and climate activists met in Costa Rica and formed Regeneration International, www.RegenerationInternational.org
dedicated to reversing global warming through regenerative food, farming, and land-use. Vandana and I currently serve together on RI’s international steering committee.

The so-called Green Revolution of industrialized, energy and chemical-intensive agriculture, GMO foods, and seed patents have not only degraded our health, our biodiversity, and our environment, and driven hundreds of millions of small farmers and rural villagers into poverty, forced migration, and desperation, they now threaten our very existence. As world scientists and our own everyday experience warn us, we are facing nothing less than a climate catastrophe and a Sixth Great Extinction of biodiversity that will unravel the fragile life-support systems of our planet. Along with burning fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow, our current degenerative food, farming, and land-use practices are pumping billions of tons of climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and our oceans every year.

Fortunately, people all over the world are turning against the fossil fuel corporations, Bayer-Monsanto, lab foods, and all the other multinational corporations and indentured politicians that threaten our well-being and the future of humankind. Fortunately, people all over the world are turning back to nature and taking back control over their health, diets, seeds, agricultural practices and political destinies.

As we move forward out of these dark times, let’s remember and celebrate the history of our struggles for seed and food sovereignty, the preservation of indigenous knowledge, and our precious biodiversity. This Seeds of Vandana Shiva is a valuable source of information for ourselves as well as those who will follow in our footsteps. Long live Mother Earth and inspired visionaries such as Vandana Shiva!