A better world is possible - Global Commons Institute

Copyright Bruce Nixon 2010. All rights reserved. This electronic copy is provided free for personal, non-commercial use only.
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blown onto their property from nearby farms, controlling the sale of seeds, previously saved by peasant
farmers for generations and attempting to patent plants like the Neem tree. Read about the Neem tree on
the Third World Network (TWN).
The ruthlessness is staggering.
I urge you to do your own research. Here I make some suggestions as to what you might investigate by
using your search engine.
Read about small farmers and peasant people in India. A source of information about the harms done by
big corporations to farming and food security in India is Vandana Shiva’s website Navdanya. She provides
profound insights into the workings of the global economic system. Her work is equally relevant to the
production of good food and farming in rich and poor countries. She defends and supports small farmers in
India, many of them women, demonstrating how they can be successful using organic farming methods and
training them. She has a huge seed library of diverse grains and her farm is a demonstration of how
completely degraded land can be restored to high fertility by composting. At her international conference
centre on her beautiful farm, she offers courses about farming, food, and the relevance of Gandhi to our 21 st
century world.
She exposes the effects of transnational GM seed corporations linked with chemical fertilizers, herbicides
and pesticides. Often farmers became heavily indebted. Thousands committed suicide as a result of the
failure of their farming businesses. She campaigns against the acquisition of the lands of poor farmers, who
thus lose their livelihoods, for factories and huge development schemes like dams, created to provide
hydroelectric power and irrigation, and the exploitation of wilderness and forest s that provide a living and
way of life for tribal peoples.
After the end of the British Raj the Indian government was faced with the huge problems of poverty and the
desperate need to feed millions of poor people in danger of starving. They sought to feed the population and
overcome poverty through a Green Revolution, modernising agriculture, bringing electricity and roads to
rural areas developing the economy and building of factories. As in other places, these developments had
unintended consequences.
Read the story of the attempt to patent use of Neem tree seeds for pesticide purposes. The Neem tree had
been used for centuries by Indian farmers to provide insecticides. A corporation attempted to patent the use
of seeds from this tree for pesticide purposes. 200 organisations from 35 nations mounted a legal challenge
in the US Patent and Trademark office against a patent granting the multinational chemical corporation, the
W R Grace Company, the exclusive use of a pesticide extract from Neem seeds. The corporation eventually
lost its case.
Read about the Bhopal disaster in which at least 8,000 people died immediately and more than 23,000 died
later from their injuries, and the subsequent avoidance of responsibility for compensation and help for
30,000 victims who continue to suffer.
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