Vandana Shiva: Let's take our sovereignty back

 

 

In this third interview with Berenice Galli, Vandana Shiva updates the system's basic themes, she proposes an alternative to the current system. 

The issues she addresses are not just about India. They are closely linked to the dramatic problems we have in Italy, in particular those concerning small agricultural producers. Here are some excerpts from the interview:

“Farmers in India struggle against laws that destroy their sovereignty. Small producers will only be able to survive if their sovereignty is defended. When sovereignty is taken away from them, small producers will disappear just as with species diversity, which disappears if their sovereignty is not respected.

When the laws are tailor-made for multinationals so that they get bigger and bigger markets, more and more control over land use, more and more control over deciding and designing agricultural systems, we suffer from the enormous problems we are witnessing. 

 

But for me, this historical moment has an interesting aspect because not only Indian farmers are revolting, but also Dutch, German, Irish, and Italian farmers. And they do it because the oligarchs, the billionaires have the highest concentration of wealth, they have the financial assets that control the multinationals in their hands. These billionaires have a common project: to exterminate all species and all productive humanity.

The economics of care is a revolutionary process for me because care is the first thing that sustains life, both in society and in nature, but even more important is that, by introducing care into the economy, we regain possession of the economy, and we reconvert it from being an economy of piracy and theft to an economy of regeneration and love”.