Author: Ophelia Benson

There is an old Chinese folk tale in which a fool
deposits 300 pieces of silver in a hole. In order to conceal his largesse, he
puts up a sign nearby to announce that “300 pieces of silver do not lie here.”
The moral of the tale was that the more you try to cover something up, the more
obvious it is that something is being concealed.

The Chinese government, fiercely vigilant when
it comes to any manifestation of press freedom, are learning this lesson the
hard way with regard to the viral condition known as SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome. It used to be thought that in China, the only way of confirming if
a story was true was if the state-owned press had already emphatically and categorically
denied it. The belief persists.

When there is a sort of institutional wall of
silence on every possible issue, information of some description still squeezes
itself out somehow. The thirst for news must be slaked, even when there is no
news. During the brouhaha of the APEC conference, held in Shanghai in Autumn
2001, the city pricked up its ears amid rumours about unexploded bombs in airports
and a terrorist assault on a hotel on the city’s main thoroughfare, Nanjing
Road. Similarly, one could hear whispers in local bars following the outrage
of 9-11, with stories concerning Shanghai-based Muslim terrorists being rounded
up by the authorities, and several of them going underground or fleeing to the
remote West, where, according to another rumour, a fierce military campaign
against insurrectionaries was being conducted by a joint Chinese-Kazakh army.
Which of these stories was true? None of them were mentioned in the People’s
Daily, the organ of the Communist Party, and even if they had been, most readers
would have remained suspicious. In the West, where the press is considered to
be relatively free, such a “wilderness of mirrors” approach to the honesty of
the media is quite commonplace in conspiracy theory circles. In China, with
the media compelled to “follow Xinhua”, the state-run news agency, scepticism
is obligatory.

The internet has offered a valuable outlet for
a nation starved of debate. But with the internet, any cockeyed rumour one cares
to invent very quickly rolls out of control. Indeed, one of the main scares
about SARS in Hong Kong was caused by a fourteen-year old boy who faked a story
saying that the region had been declared an “infected city”, prompting a wave
of panic buying throughout the former colony and a volley of denials from the
authorities.

No one, of course, trusts the local Chinese press.
Not even the local Chinese press. Couple that with an insidious network of chatroomers
and e-mailers, most of whom have heard talk of SARS victims being dragged away
in the dead of night to secret military hospitals, or of snifflers being dragged
off aeroplanes just before take-off, and at the very least you have an atmosphere
of panic. And by the beginning of April, there was a crisis of confidence. Conferences
were being cancelled from Beijing to Jakarta, and before long, everyone would
surely be wearing tin-foil hats and gas masks and joining the queue for rations.
Most of us were running through the list of symptoms, checking our temperatures
and pulses and wondering whether the malaise, myalgia and dry coughing that
had been an inevitable part of everday life over the past several years could
still be attributed merely to the drinking, smoking and late-night parties.

The lonely fight for facts, it seemed, would be
left to the foreign press stationed here in China. Meanwhile, the authorities
finally decided to make their move.

At the beginning of April, the municipal government
in Shanghai finally acknowledged that the virus had hit the city. Most of the
foreign journalists stationed in Shanghai had arrived at a small conference
room in the International Hotel. The place hissed with gossip, and there was
a pervasive sense that something momentous was about to be disclosed, that somehow,
the big SARS balloon that had been blowing up for weeks was about to burst.

Although the Health Bureau official announced
that there was only one SARS case in Shanghai, the assumption was, naturally
enough, that he was lying. At best, a turning point had been reached. This seemed
to be a compromise, face-saving revelation that would allow more frankness further
down the line. After all, the government had responded with blanket denials
up to then, and to shift suddenly from total disavowal to the announcement of
a dozen deaths would have been too great a volte face. As I write, the
official figure in Shanghai has risen, but only to two – the victim’s father
had also succumbed to the illness – and there were also a number of suspected
cases.

The reporters at that first press conference were,
of course, spitting feathers. “The Shanghai government are a responsible government,”
the spokesman said, to a chorus of groans.

The natural assumption was, and remains, that
behind all the reassuring smiles, the city’s hospitals actually resembled scenes
from Night of the Living Dead. The government had denied the issue for
so long that it came as no surprise that no one believed them when they began
to make noises.

And so, sensitive observers were suddenly noticing
the ambulances nipping through the traffic, presumably rushing to deal with
the latest sighting of SARS. Late at night, cleaners were seen to emerge, spraying
the streets with gallons of Dettol. Minor coughs and colds, common at this time
of year, were thought to be the beginning of a viral cataclysm.

It seemed at one point that the scourge of SARS
was about to bring (a) economic growth, and (b) civilization to an end. It was
probably unfair to conclude that, finally, after years covering Communist Party
puppet shows and international business junkets, the hacks at last had something
to get really indignant about: after all, the panic was palpable, and
the statistics – particularly from Hong Kong – were thoroughly disturbing. And
it was undeniable that the Chinese government, despite 20 years of economic
reform, remain culturally disinclined towards the sort of openness and transparency
that might have curtailed the spread.

Last weekend, following the revelation that there
were as many as 339 diagnosed cases in the capital, almost ten times the previously
acknowledged figure, a couple of scapegoats were identified, with the mayor
of Beijing and the head of the Ministry of Health both dismissed. The government
are now promising full disclosure, but the e-mails continue to flow, the rumours
keep on rumbling. Who the hell believes them now?

And so, the panic grows. Staff at the US consulate
here in Shanghai were heard on Friday April 11 to be suffering from SARS-related
symptoms, and Reuters breathlessly issued a report. “The US consulate
in Shanghai said in an email seen by Reuters that two Americans were
among nine being treated at the Shanghai Pulmonary Disease Hospital with symptoms
of SARS.” That night, an ominous air seemed to pervade the clubs and bars scattered
throughout Shanghai.

But it turned out to be untrue. The victims were
released from hospital shortly after having been shown to be suffering from
nothing more than severe colds.

Meanwhile, the Australian government have now
put SARS in the same category as the Plague, Cholera and Yellow Fever. This
follows comments by the New Zealand prime minister, Helen Clark, warning that
the problem could be even worse than the 1918 flu epidemic.

Many of the news agencies based in China have
imposed emergency measures. Among the foreign community, rumours spread very
quickly, and an otherwise luxurious existence has been laced with danger.

Even sceptics are hedging their bets, citing the
belated reaction of the Chinese government as well as the traditional sources
at the World Health Organization. Public occasions are marked with a curious
sense of esprit de corps in a climate of pre-storm calm, almost as if
we are amazed that we have found the courage to leave our homes. The vocabulary
of foreign residents is now larded with the jargon of virology, and their tales
– hushed and weary – resonate with all the old fears. We listen to third-hand
hearsay about the woman in the flat below or some friend of a friend currently
manning the hospital barricades

It is better to be safe than sorry, say some.
Hong Kong – which has already seen its confidence battered in recent years –
has been shaken to its boots by the SARS crisis. Receipts at Hong Kong’s restaurants
are reportedly down 50-80%, and its cinemas are empty. Housing sales are down
65%. There are 70% fewer tourists. One estimate suggests monthly economic losses
of HK$8billion.

Analysing the current figures is a difficult business,
not least because they are rising every day. It is worth noting, however, that
even if the accumulated total number of cases in Beijing reaches 1,000 in the
coming days or weeks, it still represents only 0.0075% of the total population,
and that of all the cases, there seems to be a survival rate of well over 90%.
The rate is much more worrying in Hong Kong, with an infection rate of about
0.02% and a fatality rate currently at 6.7%.

But is the figure worrying enough to justify the
recent claim made by the popular local e-newsletter and website, www.c-biz.org,
unerring advocates of the “we’re all going to die” school of journalism? Citing
the Hong Kong Standard, the newsletter claimed that preventative measures had
come too late, and that the virus was now “threatening virtually all the country’s
1.3 billion people”.

There are other things happening throughout China,
of course, none of which are covered by the domestic media. There are mass lay-offs
at state-owned companies leading to strikes and police crackdowns. There is
the endemic corruption and gangsterism throughout the provincial-level cities.
There is the ongoing scandal of the Falungong, a tawdry, superstitious little
cult that was transfigured by the excesses of the State into a pious order of
martyrs, to which Western pilgrims regularly pay homage on Tiananmen Square
before being unceremoniously expelled.

The spread of HIV/AIDS in China has also become
a subject of concern, with the official number of sufferers currently standing
at 850,000 and thought to underestimate the real total. According to the darkest
predictions cited by Kofi Annan in his visit to China last year, that figure
threatens to multiply to as many as 10 million by 2010. Meanwhile, a recent
report revealed that tuberculosis still kills 2 million people worldwide every
year, 98% in developing countries, and that a third of the world’s population
is infected with the TB bacillus.

There is something about infectious diseases that
brings out the worst in us. On April 20, the International Herald and Tribune,
reporting from Hong Kong, told of yet another side effect of SARS. Victims,
the report said, were being ostracised. In accordance with government regulations,
buildings in which infections have taken place are marked clearly with a sign.
Hong Kong officials were initially reluctant to impose harsh restrictions for
fear that victims would be “driven underground”.

Amid the mayhem, I look for rational voices. I
am consoled by the words of Christine McNab, a spokesman for the WHO speaking
to The Guardian, who said that most of the cases were in a hospital setting.
“The rest seem to be people in very close contact with affected people. That
narrows the risk to the general population. The pattern of how this is moving
does not indicate at this point that there is a widespread risk to the general
population.”

I listen carefully to the words of John Oxford,
professor of virology at the Queen Mary School of Medicine in London, who said
that more attention should be paid to the potentially greater threat posed by
new strains of influenza. “SARS does not look like it is explosively infectious,”
he said. “Most of the cases seem to have come out of hospitals, among doctors
and nurses, all of whom have been in very close contact with ill people. It
is causing problems in certain environments, but it’s not zipping around the
globe.”

And yet, by now the panic is more infectious than
the virus itself, and even the sturdiest of observers are struck regularly by
the thought that infection is just a stray droplet or contaminated elevator
button away. As is the case in most health scares, the very act of paying attention
– of isolating, analysing and comparing statistics – creates a potent symbolic
space, one which draws on all our fears about mutating bacteria, outfought immune
systems, and mass pandemics, and leaves very little room for a sense of proportion.

David Stanway is a writer, editor and translator living in Shanghai.

Postmodernist anti-science thought was once primarily associated with European
and North American academics in the humanities. Now not only has its influence
become international, but it has become integrally intertwined with a number
of other issues such as anti-globalization, anti-transgenic technology in agriculture,
and conservation. Nobody can fault the prevailing internationalism of postmodernists
and their respect for different cultures and peoples (except for the culture
of those who are committed to modern science/technology and its benefits). Nor
can we fault their argument that all of us have biases, though they fail to
comprehend the vital role that scientific method plays in helping to overcome
the limitations which personal and cultural biases impose. Their belief in the
worth and dignity of all human beings is unexceptionable. Some of us critics
would suspect, however, that in going global, postmodernist thought does not
necessarily impact on other political/cultural traditions in a way which upholds
the worthy ideas that most postmodernists claim to espouse. To the extent that
these postmodernist ideas have become part of the globalization debates, there
is a legitimate issue of consistency if in fact what is being forcefully advocated
produces adverse outcomes contrary to what its proponents claim for them.

None of us are totally consistent in all our beliefs, nor can we find total
consistency in the various political or social movements we may be committed
to. Life and the world of ideas are messy, and so we can take heart with Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s strictures against that foolish consistency which is the hobgoblin
of petty minds. A little untidiness and a few gaps in our knowledge here and
there are probably healthy, and facilitate the emergence of new ideas. However,
the argument to be pursued here is that there is a basic inconsistency, or more
accurately, a fundamental contradiction between what has been advocated
by a type of postmodernist thought, and its practical outcome in developing
countries. It is a contradiction that is often so blatant as to undermine whatever
merit there may be in the avowed postmodernist respect for other cultures. Stated
baldly, the respect for “local ways” of knowing, rather than promoting multi-culturalism,
ends up instead promoting crass forms of cultural chauvinism and intolerance
that can devolve into violence. In our internet/information age, there is no
excuse for those who have entered various globalization debates without knowing
the outcomes and implications of their advocacy.

 

Local knowledge and reactionary politics

Dr. Vandana Shiva is likely the world’s most celebrated holistic ecofeminist,
deep ecologist, postmodernist luddite, anti-globalizer, and spokesperson for
those she claims are without a voice. Because she has advanced degrees in science,
Shiva is useful for providing legitimacy to a range of anti-science views on
the part of those who mistrust scientific inquiry (except where they think that
it will promote their ideological agenda). Contemporary ecofeminist literature
is almost unreadable, particularly on the Green Revolution, which ecofeminists
deem to be a failure, and on “organic” agriculture, which they favor. Being
able to cite Shiva as a presumed authority allows them to talk about global
agriculture without any substantive knowledge of how peoples around the world
raise crops and feed their families. One wonders how many academics obtained
tenure on the basis of books and articles for which Shiva was a major source.

One leader does not fully define a movement, to be sure, but Shiva with her
condemnation of “scientific reductionism” has become so preeminent in the global
deep ecology/ecofeminist movement against modern science that raising serious
questions about her does in many respects raise questions about the entire movement.
Shiva’s ideas, which are shared and promoted in the West by ecofeminists and
others as radical and revolutionary, often turn out to have reactionary consequences
where they are practiced in India.

This may come as a shock to the true believers, but for many the faith in the
fundamental rightness of Shiva’s message is so firm that it would be a near
impossibility to convince them otherwise. The philosopher of science Meera Nanda
shows that the much revered “holistic way of knowing … lies at the very heart
of caste and gender hierarchy in India” (Nanda 2002, 54).”The role that the
goddesses and the idea of sacredness of nature have played (and still play)
in perpetuating the oppression of actual women is not adequately understood
by the enthusiasts for alternative sciences” (Nanda 2003a). It is the much venerated
“local knowledge” of the Hindu cosmology of “Karma and caste” which was used
to justify the repression of Dalits (the crushed or oppressed – untouchable).
The liberation of women is “linked” to overcoming the “kind of cultural assumptions
about sacredness and holism” that are promoted by Shiva (Nanda 2003c).

Many of those now promoting the virtues of “local ways of knowing” were, we
hope, opponents of it in its pre-postmodernist manifestations. From 1948, with
the election of the National Party in South Africa, to the early 1990s, a similar
reverence for “local ways of knowing” appropriate to the culture was proclaimed
and promoted as “Bantu education.” It was called Apartheid and many of us spent
most of our adult life in active opposition to it, as, undoubtedly, did many
of today’s activists who tout the special virtues of local knowledge.

Among the many reasons for opposition to Apartheid and its repressive policies,
was that the so-called “Bantu education” would handicap the student even in
a non-Apartheid society by not providing her or him with the knowledge necessary
to survive economically. Today we have what is misnamed as “Science Studies”
promoting a “Navajo way of knowing” (which is “assuredly more spiritual and
holistic than European ways”) in learning mathematics by “teaching calculus
before fractions” (Olson 1999). Among many problems with this method of teaching
is the “difficulty of expressing the slope of a line, one of the fundamentals
of calculus, in any way other than by using a fraction or decimal” (Olson 1999).
Thus, “while well-meaning teachers puzzle out such difficulties, Navajo children
are … to grow up without learning how to compute sales tax” (Olson 1999).
From the elite precincts of Western universities, “multi-culturalism” has spread
to other parts of the world. Across the border from where Shiva’s ecofeminism
lends support to Hindu chauvinism, Pakistani proponents of “Islamic science”
and “Islamic epistemology” have been:

citing the work of feminist science critics in their campaign to purge
many Western ideas from the schools, and certain feminist professors in
the West–perhaps caught up in the thrill of having their work cited half
a world away–have favorably cited the Islamicists right back (Olson 1999).

Not to be outdone by Shiva’s Indian advocacy, in the United States there are
advocates of a mysterious entity called “feminist algebra” (Bookchin 1995, 212).
When the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in Uttar Pradesh,
India, in 1992, they sought to awaken “national pride” by making “Vedic mathematics
compulsory for high school students” (Nanda 1996). “Hindu ways of knowing” involved
government-approved texts replacing standard algebra and calculus with sixteen
Sanskrit verses. Leading Indian mathematicians and historians examined the verses
and found “nothing Vedic about them,” thinking them merely a “set of clever
formulas for quick computation” and not a “piece of ancient wisdom” (Nanda 1996).
According to Meera Nanda (1996), “in the name of national pride, students are
being deprived of conceptual tools that are crucial in solving real-world mathematical
problems they will encounter as scientists and engineers.”

Hinduization extends beyond mathematics to promoting the “Aryan race” together
with a disdain for all “foreigners including Muslims.” The BJP along with the
VHP (Vishva Hindu Parishad or World Hindu Council) are offsprings of the RSS
(Rashtirya Svyamsevak Sangh or Organization of National Volunteers) which has
been actively promoting hatred of Muslims and Christians in India, and has been
involved in the destruction of Muslim and Christian places of worship and fostering
deadly riots against non-Hindus. Postmodernist/ecofeminist multi-culturalism
might be a worthy idea in some ways, but when it is integrated with a “suspicion
of modern science as a metanarrative of binary dualism, reductionism and consequently
domination of nature, women and Third World people” it supports Hindu reactionary
modernists who claim the “same holist, non-logocentric ways of knowing not as
a standpoint of the oppressed but for the glory of the Hindu nation itself”
(Nanda 2000, 2001a).

 

The Chipko "Movement"

Many activists like Shiva, who are promoted in the West by the anti-globalization
Greens and who receive uncritical acclaim, are often the object of very severe
criticism in their own countries, a fact which goes largely unreported. After
an article in a Malaysian newspaper talked about Shiva in highly flattering
terms, claiming that she was a leader of the famed Chipko (tree huggers) movement
in India, the Chipko local activists sent a letter of protest to the editor,
arguing that the interview was based on false claims and noting that it had
angered many people. Those writing the letter saw themselves as being the “real
activists,” who do not understand why Shiva is “reportedly publishing wrong
claims about Chipko in the foreign press.”

Shiva uses Chipko as a model for Green ideologies from deep ecology to eco-feminism.
Jayanta Bandyopadhyay, a distinguished scientist and environmentalist, examines
each of these ideologies and deems them myths without any basis in fact (1999).
He is an active supporter of the Chipko villages, in which he finds “a movement
rooted in economic conflicts over mountain forests,” and a “social movement
based on gender collaboration” and not a “feminist movement based on gender
conflicts” (Bandyopadhyay 1999).

Chipko is but one example where external activists, even those who may be well
intentioned idealists, in effect hijack a movement and use it to promote an
ideological agenda. The original motivation for “participating in Chipko protests”
was to gain local control of forest resources in order to create a forest-based
industry which offered the Himalayan villagers the possibility that their kinsmen
who had to migrate to find work, might be employed closer to home. Further,
increased local access to forest resources might “have offered women the possibility
of adding to their meagre incomes and insuring themselves from potential crisis
if remittances ceased or became intermittent” (Rangan 2000, 199-200).

Chipko is one of many cases of environmental groups in developed countries
co-opting a cause like wildlife or habitat conservation, or a local movement
with legitimate grievances, and then subverting them. In the case of Chipko,
the co-option was initially by people from the urban elite in India, who received
international acclaim as a result. As with other cases that I have examined,
in places like Africa and the Americas, not only do local concerns get brushed
aside, but often the locals are worse off because of the external “support.”
This is particularly true in case after case that I have examined for conservation
projects, be they in Africa, Central America or India, where local interests
are swept aside in favor of saving the environment from those who live there
(DeGregori, 2004, Chapters 4, 10 & 11 and DeGregori 2002, Chapter 2).

One of Shiva’s ‘Chipko women’ from the Pindar Valley in Chamoli District, Gayatri
Devi, bitterly states that the movement has made life worse in the valley:

Now they tell me that because of Chipko the road cannot be built [to her
village], because everything has become parovarian [environment] … We
cannot get even wood to build a house … our ha-haycock [rights and concessions]
have been snatched away (Rangan 2000, 42).

This helps to answer the questions which Rangan raises:

Why do words like environment and ecology make so many people living in
the Garhwal Himalayas see red? Why do so many of them make derisive comments
when the Chipko movement figures in any discussion? Why is it that in most
parts of Garhwal today, local populations are angry and resentful of being
held hostage by Chipko, an environmental movement of their own making (Rangan
1993, 155)?

When the world community was ready to hear the claims of the Garhwal Himalayan
villages,

their voice in the Chipko movement had all but ceased to exist. The brief
love affair between Chipko’s activists and the state had resulted in the
romantic ideal that the Himalayan environment by itself mattered more than
the people who eked out their existence within it.

Rangan adds that:

if some of the communities are ready to banish their axes today, it must
be seen as yet another attempt to affirm themselves and give voice to the
difficulties of sustaining livelihoods within their localities (174-175).

From Agarwal and Narain, we learn that the situation has driven some to advocate
practices that violate laws which the urban conservationists have imposed. “Uttarkhand,
the land which gave birth to the Chipko movement, now even has a Jungle Kato
Andolan (cut the forest movement). Thanks to the ministry of environment, ‘environment’
is no longer a nice word in Uttarkhand” (1991). Rangan argues that the Chipko
today is a “fairy tale,” a myth sustained and propagated by a few self-appointed
spokespeople through conferences, books, and journal articles that eulogize
it as a social movement, peasant movement, environmental movement, women’s movement,
Ghandian movement–in short, an all-encompassing movement (Rangan 1993, 158).

 

The Green Revolution

Dr. Vandana Shiva, in a book length diatribe against the Green Revolution,
frequently refers to its voracious demand for chemical fertilizers and indicates
that there are alternative ways, more benign, of achieving these outputs (Shiva
1991). Plants need ingredients (nutrients) in order to grow. If a molecule is
in the plant, it or its constituent elements must come from somewhere. Except
for carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, plants derive their nutrients from the
soil, or in the case of nitrogen from atmospheric nitrogen mediated by cyanobacteria
(other than that from fertilizer). More plant output means more nutrient input.
The often repeated claim that Green Revolution plants need more fertilizer has
about as much meaning as saying that it takes more food to raise three children
than it does to raise one. If sufficient nutrient is not in the soil, it must
be added. Shiva’s argument in essence is that one can grow plants without nutrients
or that one can achieve the same output as Green Revolution seeds yield without
providing nutrient input other than available “organic” sources. This is patently
nonsensical and violates our fundamental knowledge of physics.

Shiva has made a number preposterous statements over the years about yields
in traditional Indian agriculture or traditional agriculture elsewhere such
as among the Maya. Even before the Green Revolution dramatically increased the
demand for and use of synthetic fertilizer, there was a large difference between
the nutrients extracted from the soil in India and the “organic” nutrients available
to be returned to it. In fact, nearly twice as much nutrient was being withdrawn
from the soil as was being returned. Contrary to Shiva’s assertions, this process
was not sustainable. Given the dramatic increases in Indian agricultural output
over the last four decades (which more than accommodated a doubling of the population),
the deficit in “organic” nutrient must be vastly greater today. Shiva cites
Sir Albert Howard, whose vitalist ideas on “organic” agriculture were developed
in colonial India (Howard 1940). But though he was a strong proponent of composting
(“Indore method”), Howard recognized the need for additional synthetic fertilizer
and improved seeds, which means he might have favored GM crops if he were alive
today.

Shiva has a belief that “food crops for local needs” are “water prudent” (Shiva
2000). For the Green Revolution grains, the primary output is a larger percentage
of the plant (harvest index) and therefore requires less nutrient input per
unit of output. These gains in agricultural efficiency and in yields per hectare,
particularly for the Green Revolution grains, has accommodated a doubling of
the world’s population, with about a 30% increase in per capita food consumption
with only a slight increase in land under cultivation (about 4% for grains).
For rice, the gains in water use efficiency have been nothing less than astounding.
According to a recent FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization) report, “the
modern rice varieties have about a threefold increase in water productivity
compared with traditional varieties” (FAO 2003, 28). Overall, for water use
in agriculture, “water productivity increased by at least 100 percent between
1961 and 2001” while water use per capita was falling about in half (FAO 2003,
25-26). What the FAO is primarily describing is the yield increases and greater
plant efficiency of the Green Revolution technologies so sharply criticized
by Shiva.

Biotechnologists are working to create even more efficient plants, a goal which
is opposed by Shiva and her followers. In her paeans in praise of cow dung,
Shiva’s pre-Green Revolution Indian agriculture is one of a healthy, self-sufficient,
calorically adequate, nutritious food supply produced in an ecologically sustainable
manner (Avery 2000; for a critique of Shiva by an Indian scholar, see Nanda
1991, 1997 & 1998.). Why hundreds of millions of peasant agriculturalists
in India and around the world have forsaken this utopian existence and adopted
the Green Revolution’s crops and modern agricultural technologies is never explained.
Maybe those actually raising crops and feeding their families know something
about agriculture that Shiva and her fellow activists don’t?

Equally unexplained is why, if, as Shiva argues, modern technology is pauperizing
populations and in many cases driving people to suicide, life expectancies have
risen so dramatically throughout Asia for both rural and urban populations.
Even more difficult to explain is why those in developed countries, who are
presumed to be educated and informed, uncritically accept her musings and pay
her homage, including selecting her to give prestigious presentations such as
the Reith Lecture (Shiva 2000 and Scruton 2000).

 

Contradictions, Mistakes and Double Standards

Contradictions and mistakes are all too prevalent in the work of Shiva and
those who revere her. For example, in a public lecture in Toronto, Canada, she
claimed both that the price level of food in India was doubling and that it
was falling. Arguing that the technologies of the Green Revolution have failed,
she has the price of food in India doubling so that consumers can no longer
afford it. But when she wishes to criticize the United States for “dumping”
food on the Indian market, pushing Indian farmers to commit suicide, she claims
that subsidized foreign food is “driving down prices” (O’Hara 2000 and Oakley
2000).

The following excerpt from a news item on Shiva’s visit to Houston in the October
of 2000 is indicative. Shiva appears not to know the difference between a field
of rice and one of weeds.

Shiva walked across the road and looked out into a shaggy field.
“They look unhappy,” she said. “The rice plants. Ours at home look very
happy.”
“That,” RiceTec reports, “is because it’s not rice. That’s our test field,
it was harvested in August. That’s weeds” (Tyer 2000).

Shiva inspired anti-technology criticism reached its true nadir when humanitarian
aid for people in need was attacked because of the technology used to produce
it. In India, following a “super-cyclone,” a team from Vandana, Shiva’s “research
foundation”, gathered samples of donated grain while involved in “relief work”
and had them tested in the United States to see if they were genetically modified.
Claiming that they were genetically modified, Diverse Women for Diversity
then demanded that the government of India “immediately withdraw the corn-soya
blend from Orissa,” seemingly preferring starvation for the cyclone victims
to a presumed but unproven contamination from GM food (RFSTE 2000, Devraj 2000,
Lean 2000 and Jayarsman 2000c).

Possibly, Shiva could arrange for “organic” agriculturalists like Prince Charles
to provide famine relief using funds from Greenpeace and other environmental
groups with annual budgets into the tens of millions of dollars. And once again,
it is appropriate to ask how many poor farmers have Shiva’s Diverse Women
for Diversity or The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and
Ecology helped to grow more food? How many of those in need have they helped
to feed? And in the name of transparency, what are the sources of its funding?

These questions are legitimate because too many groups that raise and spend
significant amounts of money and help feed no one, demand transparency from
others and criticize groups and individuals who have assisted those in need
by helping them to grow more food or by providing relief food that modern agricultural
surpluses facilitate. Many “Civil Society” groups in developing countries are
largely and in some cases fully funded by developed country NGOs, so one can
legitimately ask questions about the independence of their judgements in much
the same way that one would question the independence of a statement by a developing
country employee of a multinational corporation (see DeGregori 2002c).

Nanda accuses “populist intellectuals like Shiva” of being “guilty of hypocrisy
and double standards” for failing to recognize that “their own growth as intellectuals
and activists owes a tremendous debt” to the very ideas that they disparage
(Nanda 1991, 55). It has not gone unobserved that those like Shiva who are most
critical of modern science have gained favor in Western universities and have
often benefited greatly as a result.

Furthermore, the jet-setting, globe-trotting neopopulist intellectuals’
propensity to project the life style of the poor as being morally superior
and socially richer than that of the Western oppressors is hypocritical
to say the least … (and) fails to offer a progressive and feasible program
for change (Nanda 1991, 39).

 

Local Knowledge versus Modern Knowledge

We talked earlier about the Chipko movement in the Himalayan Garhwal region
of Uttar Pradesh, India for whom Shiva presumes to speak and for which she has
won international acclaim. When the Chipko movement’s battle for local control
of vital forest resources was taken up by Shiva and other “deep ecologists,”
the local struggles for resources and development were sacrificed to global
environmental concerns by groups that “tacitly support coercive conservation
tactics that weaken local claims to resource access for sustaining livelihoods”
(Rangan 2000, 239, see also Peluso, N. 1993).

Those who champion local wisdom too often respect it only so long as it is
in line with their ideological agenda. Ideas that are presumed to liberate end
up being instruments of oppression. Their advocates in developed countries seem
to live in a virtual Potemkin village, blissfully unaware that local knowledge
and control privileges traditional elites who tend to be dominating upper class
males who find the rhetoric of ecofeminism useful, but not its desire for equality
of classes, races and genders. Anyone who has been involved in economic development
is aware of the importance of local knowledge and the need to use it along with
any other available knowledge. But there is a very big difference between using
local knowledge and being dominated by it. And it is important to distinguish
between local knowledge and local myth, particularly myths of domination that
deny some people access to productive resources.

Intellectual elites in some developing countries such as Mexico promote local
use and custom (usos y costumbres) with the same outcome of male domination.
The modernism which opened up society and allowed racial and other minorities
to demand equal rights and women to challenge male domination is being denied
those who are most in need of change in poorer countries. “The oppressed Others
do not need patronizing affirmations of their ways of knowing, as much as they
need ways to challenge these ways of knowing” (Nanda 1996 and Nanda 2003b).

Modern knowledge allowed Nanda to escape from such practices as forced marriage
and other forms of domination but still allowed her to retain a sense of shared
identity with the culture of her origin. It is the rationality of the Enlightenment,
science and modernity that were instrumental in the creation of more tolerant
multi-cultural societies. As Nanda states it, “We Are All Hybrids Now” (Nanda
2001). I would add that we have been hybrids for some time. Over 60 years ago,
the anthropologist Ralph Linton had a sketch of a “solid American citizen” awakening
in a “bed built on a pattern which originated in the Near East” traversing the
day taking for granted the diverse global origins of the items of his daily
routine, ending it by thanking a “Hebrew deity in an Indo-European language
that he is 100% American (Linton 1963, 326-327).

More important, modernity allows one the freedom to participate fully in modernity
while still being able to retain a more localized personal identity. This is
a tolerance for diversity which is rare in the traditional societies that Shiva
seeks to promote. Modern science and technology are central to this hybridity.
As many of us (including Nanda) have long argued, calling science and technology
“Western” is to accept the 19th century claim of exclusive authorship to what
has been and remains a universal endeavor to which all peoples have contributed
just as they contributed to the artifacts of Linton’s 100% American.

Shiva and others can call modern science logophallocentric reductionism and
any number of other pejorative slogans in contrast to Prakriti or the feminine
principle, but, in fact, modern knowledge is liberating. Shiva and her cohorts
may feel “victimized” by “alien” ideas, but it is doubtful that this is the
case for many throughout the world who have benefited from it, whether by a
larger crop or lives saved by immunization or antibiotics. Nanda suggests that
it would be “interesting” to see the reaction of “untouchables” to the “knowledge
that DNA material … has the same composition in all living beings, be it brahmin
or bacterium. Or what would a women do with the knowledge that it is the chromosome
in sperm that determines the sex of the new born?” (1991, 38).

May we add that over 99.9% of the human genome is shared by all human beings
and that of the less than 0.1% that differentiate us, only about 3 to 5% of
it is between groups, with about 95% being intra group variation (Rosenberg
et al. 2002). If Shiva wishes to help women and those in need in India, she
should be promoting an understanding of DNA and molecular biology and its liberating
implications rather than fostering false fears of its use for human betterment.
Not only is the genome that unites us as humans vastly greater than that which
differentiates us, but the portion of the genome that defines our individual
biological differences within our culture is vastly greater than the minuscule
portion of the genome, 0.05%, that defines differences between groups (Rosenberg
et al. 2002, King et al. 2002 and Wade 2002).

We can argue as to how far we have come on the road to a more just society
or how much farther we have to go, but it is undeniable that in countries like
the United States, the rights of minorities and women have been greatly expanded
over the last decades. Shiva has been promoting a road to a past that never
existed and to a future where nobody really wants to go, including those who
blindly follow her.

 

*(The article is largely drawn from the author’s book manuscript, Origins of the Organic Agriculture Debate. Ames:
Iowa State Press, A Blackwell Scientific Publisher (in press) http://store.yahoo.com/isupress/0813805139.html. Additional material
is taken from two recently published books, Thomas R. DeGregori, The Environment,
Our Natural Resources, and Modern Technology. Ames: Iowa State Press, A
Blackwell Scientific Publisher and Thomas R. DeGregori, Bountiful Harvest:
Technology, Food Safety, And The Environment. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute,
which was originally published as Agriculture and Modern Technology: A Defense,
Ames: Iowa State University Press. Author’s homepage is http:www.uh.edu/~trdegreg).

 

References

Agarwal, Anil and Sunita Narain. 1991. "Chipko People Driven to Jungle
Kato [Cut the Forests] Stir", Economic Times (India), 31 March.

Agarwal, Radha Raman. 1965. Soil Fertility in India. Bombay: Asia Publishing
House.

Anker, Peder. 2001. Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British
Empire, 1895-1945. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.

Avery, Alex. 2000. "Vandana Shiva Antoinette: Let Them Eat Weeds!"
Global Food Quarterly (30):6, Spring.

Bandyopadhyay, Jayanta. 1999. Chipko Movement: Of Floated Myths and Flouted
Realities. “Mountain People, Forests, and Trees,” Mountain Forum’s on-line
library, (http://www.mtnforum.org/resources/library/bandj99a.htm)

Bookchin, Murray. 1995. Re-enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the Human Spirit
Against Antihumanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism, and Primitivism. London and
New York: Cassell.

DeGregori, Thomas R. 2001. Agriculture and Modern Technology: A Defense,
Ames: Iowa State University Press.

DeGregori, Thomas R. 2002a. The Environment, Our Natural Resources, and
Modern Technology. Ames: Iowa State Press, A Blackwell Scientific Publisher.

DeGregori, Thomas R. 2002b. Bountiful Harvest: Technology, Food Safety,
And The Environment. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute.

DeGregori, Thomas R. 2002c. "NGOs Don’t Speak for the Hungry", AMERICAN
COUNCIL ON SCIENCE AND HEALTH, Health Facts and Fears, 26 August. (http://www.healthfactsandfears.com/featured_articles/aug2002/ngo082602.html).

DeGregori, Thomas R. 2004. Origins of the Organic Debate: Vitalist Junkscience
vs. Scientific Inquiry. Ames: Iowa State Press, A Blackwell Scientific Publisher
(in press).

Devraj, Ranjit. 2000. Cyclone Victims Are Guinea Pigs for Mutant Food.
Inter Press Service atimes.com online, 13 June.

FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). 2003.Unlocking
the Water Potential of Agriculture. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations. (http://www.fao.org/ag/AGL/aglw/aquastat/kyoto/index.stm)

Friedmann, John and Haripriya Rangan. 1993. "Introduction: In Defense
of Livelihood." In Defense of Livelihood: Comparative Studies on Environmental
Action edited by John Friedmann and Haripriya Rangan, pp.1-21. West Hartford,
Conn.: Kumarian Press.

Howard, Sir Albert. 1940. Agricultural Testament. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Jardhari, Vijay. 1996. Letter Dated 01 May 1996 from Vijay Jardhari and
other Chipko Activists of Teri Garhwal to the Editor of the Star (Selangor).

Jayarsman, K.S. 2000. GM Food “Dumped on India as Food Aid,” Nature
405(6789):875, 22 June.

King, Mary-Claire and Arno G. Motulsky. 2002. "Human Genetics: Mapping
Human History", Science 298(5602):2342-2343, 20 December.

Lean, Geoffrey. 2000. "Rejected GM Food Dumped on the Poor." The
Independent (London), 18 June.

Linton, Ralph. 1963. The Study of Man. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Nanda, Meera. 1991. Is Modern Science a Western Patriarchal Myth? A
Critique of the Populist Orthodoxy, South Asian Bulletin XI(1&2):32-61.

Nanda, Meera. 1996. "The Science Question in Postcolonial Feminism".
In The Flight From Science and Reason, edited by Paul R. Gross, Norman
Levitt and Martin W. Lewis, pp. 420-436. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences.

Nanda, Meera. 1996. "The Science Wars in India", Dissent 44(1),
Winter.

Nanda, Meera. 1997. “History Is What Hurts: A Materialist Feminist Perspective
on the Green Revolution and Its Ecofeminist Critics”. In Materialist Feminism:
A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives edited by Rosemary Hennessy
and Chrys Ingraham, pp. 364-394. New York: Routledge.

Nanda, Meera. 1998. "The Episteme Charity of the Social Constructivist
Critics of Science and Why the Third World Should Refuse the Offer". In
AHouse Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science edited
by Noretta Koertge, pp. 286-311. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nanda, Meera. 1999. "Who Needs Post-Development? Discourses of Difference,
The Green Revolution of Agrarian Populism in India", Journal of Developing
Societies 15(1):1-31.

Nanda, Meera. 2000. Dharma and the Bomb: Post-Modern Critiques of Science
and the Rise Reactionary Modernism in India, paper read at the American
Sociological Association, August.

Nanda, Meera. 2001. "We Are All Hybrids Now: The Dangerous Epistemology
of Post-Colonial Populism", The Journal of Peasant Studies 28(2):162-187.

Nanda, Meera. 2002. Breaking the Spell of Dharma: A Case for Indian Enlightenment.
Delhi: Three Essays Press.

Nanda, Meera. 2003. "Do the Marginalized Valorize the Margins: Exploring
the Dangers of Difference". In Development or Post Development: Which
Way for Women in the 21st Century, edited by Kriemild Sunders. London: Zed
Books.

Nanda, Meera. 2003a. "Anti-Science". In The Oxford Companion to
the History of Modern Science. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nanda, Meera. 2003b. Prophets Facing Backwards: Postmodern Critiques of
Science and Hindu Nationalism in India. New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University
Press, New Delhi: Permanent Black (in press).

Nanda, Meera. 2003c. Do the Marginalized Valorize the Margins: Exploring
the Dangers of Difference. (in press in an edited book – citations taken
from manuscript provided by the author).

Oakley, Aaron. 2000. "Hating Modern Agriculture", The New Australian,
No.151, 10-16 April.

O’Hara, Kathleen. 2000. "The Stolen Harvest", The New Australian,
No. 151, 10-16 April.

Olson, Walter. 1999. "Benighted Elite: Postmodernist Critics of Science
Get Their Comeuppance", Reason online, June.

Pearce, Fred. 2003. "The Greening of Hate: An Interview With Betsy Hartmann",
New Scientist, 177(2383):44-47, 22 February.

Peluso, N. 1993. "Coercing Conservation: The Politics of State Resource
Control", Global Environmental Change 4(2):199-217.

Rangan, Haripriya. 1993. "Romancing the Environment: Popular Environmental
Action in Garhwal Himalayas". In In Defense of Livelihood: Comparative

Studies on Environmental Action edited by John Friedmann and Haripriya
Rangan, pp.155-181. West Hartford, Conn.: Kumarian Press.

Rangan, Haripriya. 2000. Of Myths and Movements: Rewriting Chipko into Himalayan
History. London; New York: Verso.

Randhawa, Mohindar Singh. 1983. History of Agriculture in India. New
Delhi: Indian Council of Agricultural Research, Vols 1-4.

RFSTE. 2000. US Government Dumping Genetically Engineered Corn-soya Mix
on Victims of Orissa Super-cyclone. New Delhi: Press Release, Diverse Women
for Diversity, The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology 2
June.

Rosenberg, Noah A.; Jonathan K. Pritchard; James L. Weber; Howard M. Cann;
Kenneth K. Kidd; Lev A. Zhivotovsky; and Marcus W. Feldman. 2002. "Genetic
Structure of Human Populations", Science 298(5602):2381-2385, 20
December.

Scruton, Roger. 2000. "Herbicide, Pesticide, Suicide: Seed Merchants Prosper
and Farmers Wither; That’s the Truth of Global Agribusiness", Business,
Weekend FT Magazine, Financial Times, London, 6 June.

Shiva, Vandana. 1988. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India.
London: Zed Books.

Shiva, Vandana. 1991. The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third
World Agriculture, Ecology, and Politics. London: Zed Books.

Shiva, Vandana. 2000. BBC Reith Lectures 2000, BBC online network, 12
May Tyer, Brad. 2000. RiceTec Paddy Whack, Houston Press, 23 November.

Wade, Nicholas. 2002. "Gene Study Identifies 5 Main Human Population",
Science 298(5602):2381-2385, 20 December.