Back to index of Nerve 14 - Summer 2009

Vandana Shiva
Soil Not Oil: Climate Change, Peak Oil and Food Insecurity

By Val Walsh

Vandana Shiva, an Indian physicist turned activist and campaigner, has been a key environmental thinker on the world stage since her groundbreaking book, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (1989; reprinted 2009). Soil not Oil is an urgent take on the accelerating global reality/destruction, but Shiva sees crisis as opportunity, and she is not talking minor adjustments: ‘We need to reinvent society, technology, and economy’. She links throughout ‘the triple crisis of dehumanisation, economic inequality, and ecological disaster’. There is, she says, ‘no place to hide’.

She advocates we move: ‘from capital-intensive energy to low-cost energy, from labour-displacing energy to livelihood-generating energy’. This is also the rejection of ‘an economic model that creates growth by extinguishing people’s rights’.

Shiva’s insights are rooted in her experience and understanding of women’s lives and the lives of rural communities of the south. She goes beyond critique, to reclaim and re-conceive ethics as much as politics.

Authentic democracy, like plants, grows from the ground up. It is fertilized by people’s participation.

Shiva rebuts carbon trading and ‘solutions’ generated from within the framework of market fundamentalism, which entail ‘privatising the atmospheric commons, creating a supermarket of pollution’. And nuclear energy is an example of:

social irresponsibility built into war- and profit-centred science, and the field’s wilful mystification regarding matters of social conscience, which shuts out democratic control of dangerous technologies.

Shiva combines the economy and insight of a poet with the forensic attention to detail of a good scientist or detective, while also reminding us of the bigger picture: that energy, foreign policy and security policy are linked enterprises; and that the technical fixes and mechanistic ‘solutions’ proposed by scientists and industrialists treat the sun as the problem, rather than industrial activity.

Shiva highlights how much of UK carbon emissions are outsourced: emitted around the world on the UK’s behalf in China, India, Africa and elsewhere. So much for our clean British hands. She suggests that corporations, not nations, are the appropriate basis for regulating atmospheric pollution in a globalised economy.

What is needed is a carbon tax on corporations – both for their production systems, no matter where their facilities are located, and for transport.

The root of the problem lies in the speculative economy of global finance, which ‘must commodify everything on the planet – land and water, plants and genes, microbes and mammals’. Shiva points to two key features of this deadly scenario:

First, ‘today’s economic growth is jobless growth, it is not labour-intensive and employment-generating’.

Second, stating what you might think is the obvious: ‘No society can become a post-food society’.

And the evidence closest to her heart is the rising predicament of India, as it seeks to emulate the West, in its effort to become ‘modern’ and ‘developed’, rather than ‘backward’; and in the process systematically destroys its rural economy and self-sustaining ability to feed its people and to provide for their livelihood. Shiva argues: ‘Food democracy paves the road to energy justice in a period of climate chaos’: How land is used, how we grow our food and how they are distributed, is part of the politics of climate change.

Debates about these crises ‘have been narrowed down to problems and solutions from the perspective of the rich, from the perspective of industrialised, urbanized societies’. Shiva suggests the West learns from successful, localised economies, hitherto on the fringes of global market capitalism: while there is still time.

Industrialised agriculture and globalised food systems have been put forth as sources of cheap and abundant food, yet from 2007 to 2008 the price of wheat increased by 130%; and the price of rice doubled during the first three months of 2008. ‘While millions go hungry, corporate profits have increased. Cargill saw profits increase by 30% in 2007; Monsanto’s profits increased by 44%’. These multinationals are global dominators with regard to the food economy: as far as possible, a law unto themselves. A bit of extra regulation is insufficient.

Shiva points to the violence inherent in existing arrangements: the impact of luxury exports and corporate profits on India’s rural communities; land grabs that have already wiped out whole villages and communities, in order (like Germany) to build roads for long distance travellers (lorries, containers, tankers, tourists). The shift from oil to soil ‘addresses the triple crisis of climate, energy, and food’, not least because fossil fuels are at the heart of industrial agriculture.

‘When something is sacred, it is inviolable’.

In India, cows and trees used to be inviolable; and the lives of the poor were inviolable under Article 21 of India’s constitution, which guarantees the right to life. Now: ‘Culture and constitution can be violated to protect the car. Humans and other species can be sacrificed to make way for the car’. This profound (and undemocratic) change of heart and values marks the disposability of people within the global market economy.

Global retail chains like Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Wal-Mart are increasingly sourcing fruits and vegetables from Africa and India. This is leading to the large-scale uprooting and impoverishment of farmers, and is contributing to drought and desertification.

Shiva makes the arguments for localization of food production, and counters the idea that we need to resort to genetic engineering. She points out the importance of planning for change, drawing on Richard Heinberg, one of peak oil’s pre-eminent theorists, who concludes that this will require the ‘de-industrialisation of agriculture’, but adds:

It is fairly obvious that if we don’t plan for de-industrialisation, the result would be catastrophe.

Shiva’s Earth Democracy seeks solutions ‘from those who know how to live lightly. Resource exhaustion, peak oil, climate change, disposability of people, and the erosion of democracy are not separate, unconnected crises.’ This is the main lesson to be learned, while there is still time. As Shiva says: there is nowhere to hide.

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