Each sentence of renowned Indian activist Vand
ana Shiva’s book, “Stolen Harvest,” is the impassioned bark of an angered watchdog.“Stolen Harvest” is a vivid description and sharp condemnation of corporate control over the global food supply. Shiva distrusts the totalitarian system in which “the same company may perform the research, sell the seeds, and provide the data about its products; rolling the patient, diagnostician, and physician into one.”
The robbers in this story are multi-national corporations, such as Monsanto and Cargill, and policy makers, such as the WTO and USDA, with whom they cooperate. Their tools of theft are “free trade” policies, intellectual property rights, and subsidies that keep the prices of industrial food artificially low. The victims are farmers, consumers, and eco-systems. Consequences of the theft include jeopardized food security, public health, infringement on human rights, ecological devastation and cultural obliteration, to name a few.
Shiva tells the story with chapters on the takeover of soy monoculture at the expense of crop diversity and the force feeding of meat to herbivore cows. She describes the devastation and injustice caused by the patenting of seeds by mega-corporations and the illogic of industrial aquaculture that requires more trawling of the ocean floors for fish meal than simply trawling for the shrimp themselves.
If this is a stolen harvest, Dr. Shiva is a diligent detective and her readers are well-briefed on the crime. Published just one year after the 1999 action outside the World Trade Organization Third Ministerial meeting in Seattle, this book is part of a wide spread call for a new global democracy. Dr. Shiva heralds the work of farmers, consumers, activists, and public-interest scientists and their solidarity movement to topple the industrial food totalitarianism. “Stolen Harvest” calls on us all to reclaim the harvest and to “celebrate the growing and giving of good food as the highest gift and the most revolutionary act.”
