chemical companies were now preparing to move into biotechnology and at that point they had no product on the market it was still a strategy and they laid out the patents because if money is what matters then a patent becomes a way to make money through royalties because a patent is a claim to invention which allows the pat means you can prevent farmers from saving sea you can prevent farmers from exchanging seeds you can prevent farmers from having their own seed which is the kind of laws being pushed under what is called think we could all do without and be better off india whenever you want to say a policymaker has the wrong point of view they see all the suffer from the washington syndrome of the washington syndrome is of course not just that the world bank and i m f are there but because corporate rule globally is implemented via washington and that's what happened with the intellectual property issue there was no term called intellectual property it was patents copyrights design all distinctive protections and then it was on mixed up into one intellectual property and a representative of one center james and the out in one nine hundred ninety five said we've achieved something unprecedented took it to our government we then imposed it to the rest of the governments we were the patient the physicians and the diagnostician all in one now how were they the patients they were patients because farmers w saving seeds and monsanto was falling ill because they weren't able to make profits as long as and they offered a solution that should now be an intellectual property crime and that's the day i decided i was going to fight w two going to fight patents and see and find for the freedom of life and freedom of farmers and freedom of all people one student grabbed me on the streets and said i'm here because of your book bio piracy which is where we started to say once corporations have a monopoly on life these will be the kind of things that will happen you all have started through your movement five to two salmon on one side corn on the other i love it is the only place where the fish have and there's no way that that support can lose in the long run a few hiccups we shouldn't worry pick ups is part of it all along that people have to fight against slavery how long did our countries have to fight growing older i'm growing old and we're still having fun prison and unfortunately they've engender very toxic relationships the most serious toxic relationship is by hijacking our democracies not one g m will would be in the market if people's consensus was the basis of making decisions about agriculture food and in fact the first thing that corporations like monsanto must do is destroy democracy corrupt governments by decisions so you had your strange monsanto protection act pop out in a budget law and that too in the defense expenditure part i guess the new there should be in the defense expenditure part because they're now working so closely with blackwater so ninety eight from commercializing it's bt cotton of course in the four years between ninety eight and two thousand and two they found the politicians to bribe in the bureaucrats to bribe and they finally got an approval but there is no approval for any g m o food in india in spite of all of the incentives pressure plan two thousand and ten and actually they started the trials in two thousand and seven and we started a movement and you know in our movement we both do resistance we say no to the g m owns but we say a last last oh yes to a lot of things right here in this church in another room during seattle the government to have public debates and the environment minister of that time has public debates in seven cities of india which meant that he got to listen to the farmers he got to listen to the women he got to listen to the local scientists who know much more about what's going on and in some places scientists say there is no paris in the bridge or in the nature of granger and this was very interesting a sort of course and meter but i knew why she was coming luckily you had a storm in the other washington and she couldn't fly the day she wanted to fly and we got the decision day so by the time and your vice president is actually visiting us now trying just called us as they always do going to strengthen your intellectual property rights are going to strengthen your intellectual property rights and very often our government sort of chickens in but and the patent office basically ruling on the basis of clauses we've been able to put in to our patent act in spite of all the pressures of the w two you we have two very strong clauses one is an article three d which says a new use of a known substance is not an invention basically there are only two ways to create a genetically engineered organism either shoot with a gene gun and if you want to see this is a film on call bullshit which a filmmaker from sweden maine in my debates with me contributed to the food infect with the plant cancer that's all you can do doesn't change the yield they use comes from the original plant which you have now infected now the act of shooting is not an act of creating  that's what i say the illusion of capital a spade tree arche you destroy and say you create years when this debate started they were going to grow food on the moon in the not just killing the pollinators they're killing the sowing organisms we were doing a study on on soils and then i just thought why and why not look at what bt is doing all the beneficial organisms gone and while the beneficial organisms are being killed pathogens are growing very important studies done now by dr hoover who's the one who started to figure out why so many cars were having ground up resistant seats so the story we were given more food and less chemicals do we have less chemicals no thirteen times more pesticide use in the  of central india these are primary study all we do is google talk to the best decide sales people how much are you selling today compared to when bt wasn't being used these are figures of sales and figures of use weeds on seventy million acres of this country seventy million half the farms of the united states are overtaken by we that can't be controlled and now agent orange is being recommended because roundup isn't good enough agent orange was created for violence against them so when you say no g m o was you are saying we will not allow this land this country to be turned into a wa you know of course there has and we know this political control and concentration through monopolies but there are costs that are often not talked about i find it fascinating that one of the most serious costs that we've arrangements and today the stage is restrained sixty indian companies have licensing arrangements with monsanto and cannot sell anything that they cannot sell a non g they cannot sell their own seeds these were companies that did see business but the licensing arrangements just like of in your country you have contracts between farmers and month santo in india the contracts are between companies and month central and that is how they destroy the market and that is how in just a little over a decade they've managed to take over ninety five always have to say no it's because they the alternative has been destroyed and that's why we are building an alternative which has created one hundred ten community seed banks around the country is now creating seed banks for the last five years in the area three times five times because it's so ill adapted that it fails and farmers have to buy again and again do they have the money to buy no so how do they finance this out as monsanto's profits keep is usually from private creditors because from the banks it's impossible to take too often the creditors are the same cup businesses that sell the  of suicides driven by these kinds of seed monopolies majority of them in the cotton belt of india this year has hate to one two hundred eighty four thousand six hundred ninety four more than a quarter million farmers now there's an article in nature said all this talk of supply weeds yes we agree this super weeds super pests year's super bowl but suicide's no we don't agree and then they do this national farmers talk about the percentage of such a small percentage dying let me read the figures from the area which is the capital of bt cotton and the capital of suicides the suicides in two  supreme court of india set up a technical expert committee which is that submitted its report first they say for ten years or more till we get a proper safety systems in place c and iron deficiency so it's fodder for your animals india is the biggest dairy industry of the world but it's based on one and two animals but you and the biggest corporations have been created their own the women who look after the animals those green when we were having the discussions around the convention on biological diversity i remember to particular convention meeting and monsanto was always pushing the g m more passion and trying to block bio safety president bush walked out of real because we managed to get bio safety clauses in and i was appointed by the un to be in the framework committee to define the framework of a protocol that became the weeds from stealing the sunshine now it's because for them the weeds are stealing the sunshine they steal the nutrition from people because when they spray they're killing the food and after they've created deficiencies this is no now we make a vitamin a rise which will in solve the problem of blindness rather than say stop spring and let the greens g i've done studies two hundred fifty species of greens grow voluntarily in the farms of india which are a base of food and they go with women's knowledge so so far we've managed to stop the golden rice but you know every once in a while i'm recently the agriculture minister of u k so those who are fighting golden rice are killing people and every once in a while you get th you know he came to conquer india and he found all these people eating bananas especially the same ages and he says the why speak believe this amazing fruit and he introduced banana to the west so moosa said begin to now a very saying this project is going to prevent indian women from dying in childbirth because of anemia it comes from the city mr gates monsanto but we also have a problem with mr gates at some point you you know one africa when we know the damages the green revolution did in india now the industry's got together with a new vision for africa which is the old vision of colonization take over africa try saying it is creating new rights so it's very interesting they create new rights like intellectual property rights and see and they treat the what intellectual property right technically translated is a property in the product of the mind which in effect is seeing all the corn evolution of the peoples of mexico and and this is not just a scientific debate of course science has a role but it's also a debate about creativity where does creativity come from it's a debate about thinking differently and a change in worldview and it's a it's a contest at one level there are the power of money and the power brute force will be stronger than the creative energies and creative potential of all of us in different places now if i have worked so long on these issues it's because i we've learned how to deal with these new dictatorships so we have to bring all the creative energies that every movement of independence has mobilized every creative energy that every freedom movement and democratic movement  also all the seed struggles the kind of laws being brought and without seed freedom we can't have food freedom but over the years i will to realize that while all of us all the time after all we eat three times a day and three times a day we must make a difference to the food system by our everyday choices but sometimes it's good to connect and it's good to turn our energies like  anniversary and there are two lessons for me from dan the that are so important first the defining of real freedom real freedom is defined by people not by corporations so if free trade is about taking away the right to know what you're eating it's unfree tr practiced in india against the sword laws we've practiced it against the seed laws and to date we have prevented any law being put forward in india that would make it illegal for farmers to enjoy seed freedom and we need to do this every year around that time one center is going to give itself the world food prize because it is a sponsor of the prize it's giving make every community recognize how rich and abundant their community is because one of the big ideas that we have to make bigger is small farms produce small incomes away because money's being drained out but also local systems are the only way to create real food democracy the long distance chains of wal mart are wasting fifty percent of the food and the bringing us the kind of food that we need to eat all of the g m corn and soy is only ten percent in the human directly and most of it is going as biofuel and the rest is going as animal feed commodities do not feed people growing not commodities create starvation growing more food is what we need and we need millions of gardens and i hope in this area as part of your fight against g m it was you will adopt the positive movement that we are spreading of seeds of freedom for gardens of hope that every place should be a god every place we can find a school a community center a farm where ever and as we realize that food doesn't come from these giant corporations we can create the food systems we course demand everything we shoot from the governments and the corporations but more importantly we must dedicate ourselves to the creative acts that are in our hands so that we can be the change we want to see farms more democratic and resilient food communities will not only grew more food they will most importantly  alliance for inviting me today i almost didn't make it but i'm very glad i did i want to start off talking about a little anecdote because i'm going to talk about resistance and transformation and i talk about construction and protest civil disobedience transforming the food system through alliances for change it was a professor once and i worked with boston university and we had this crazy program that went around the world and we seniors thirty seniors and three professors and we stopped one time philippines and we went to the international rice research institute which is one of the  supposedly saved a billion people from hunger which we're finding out isn't true but that's another story so we were at the it's called international rice research institute and since these were my students they were the researchers there with all kinds of very uncomfortable and difficult questions and we ended up down in the seed vault in the refrigerator she would shoot refrigerator imagine how much it cost to run in the philippines in the tropics full of thousands of varieties of rice but the centers for international agricultural research had basically pirated from all across asia and now held in the seed bank in the interests of humanity and so my students of course began to ask them and their professors the scientists there well you know you've got all the se here but in fact while the philippines used to grow something like two thousand pariah days of rice now there are only four and all the rest are sitting here in the in the seed bank you know how is that sustainable and then questions like well you know all these seeds it's not just the genetic information that's important what about all the knowledge about how to grow these seeds and ecosystems and the poly cultures and different management practices that this these different seeds are appropriate to and the different and climates and on and on and what about all that knowledge where is that and of course the scientists found all these very difficult to answer so when the students left i stayed on sort of out of deference because i wanted to bring my students back they were going to following year because i thought was so instructive and the guy and i started talking it turned out that this man had been in on the ground floor of the seed bank and this has been his career we're losing these seeds why because you have to plant the seeds out you can't just let them sit in a refrigerator you've got to plant them out you've got to harvest them again and put fresh seeds back in and just so next tell the story because i think it really encapsulates the challenge which we face today because seeds in fact were the first building blocks of today's corporate food regime i think of a corporate food regime as all of the institutions and all of the rules which govern our food system there have been three regimes through history in the corporate food regime now think of the world bank as one of the institutions the i m f is one institutions think of the the farm bill as part of the rules which govern our food system think of all the monopolies from monsanto to walmart at the the institutions which govern the corporate food regime and the way this food regime was painstakingly built beginning with seeds beginning with the bio piracy the stealing of the seeds from the peasantry around the world stashing them in gene banks and then making commercial hybrids now for a the seeds were in the public realm they're not in the public room anymore but that was the first step in creating a food system this corporate food regime that we have today in which we have a billion stuffed in a billion starved around the world we produce over want to have times no food to feed every man woman and child on the planet yet we have a billion hungry people most of those hungry people are farmers could seventy percent of the time we people are farmers most of those farmers are women and they produce half of the food in the world and yet they're going hungry so there's clearly something wrong with this system this system has brought about the great agra food monopoly we have on our police that ro earth now like huge dinosaurs like we've never seen before like monsanto and wal mart tesco car for who basically control our food system from farm from from the seed all the way to the fork they brought us a tremendous crisis series of crises so first we had we had the food crises we had the fuel crises we have the climate crisis the financial crises and these are all int related and they're all driven by what i think dan was alluding to which is a crisis of couple accumulation if you look over the world for the last just fifteen years i looked and saw in forbes about fifteen years ago how many billionaires that we have well we have about five hundred billionaires now many we have now close to two thousand billionaires world economic growth has been flat that means there's been a tremendous concentration of wealth now what are these people  do with their wealth you know if i'm a bank and you put money in me i'm happy for about ten minutes or ten seconds and then i've got to move and reinvest the money as john pointed out because i got to pay you interest i can't just sit on accumulated wealth while neither can these monopolies they've got to reinvest they're forced to reinvest so where was monsanto reinvest they've saturated the markets in the united states they saturated the markets in latin america europe doesn't want to let them in where can they where can a monopoly go where they're going to go to africa and save the world from hunger because it turns out the only part of the world of the global economy which is growing is the what the economists call the base of the pyramid the poor they're growing at about eight percent a year and they're not getting any richer but they're growing because they're more and more poor so that's a market where you can't sell them i p but since most of the poor happen to be farmers you can sell them seeds but to do that first you have to take their seats away and then sell them back in order to rationalize that you have to convince everybody that you're ten thousand years since the new olympic which is you modify the ecosystem and that in fact is where our biodiversity resides with the peasantry you might think the peasantry is disappearing you know as many economy is flat people are going back to the countryside because they have no choice it's not like a nice place to live but what do they do they manage our agro biodiversity in vivo not in vitro where it's static and it rots they manage it in vivo in the fields where it's going it was dynamic and always developing and when you don't lose the diversity and you don't lose the knowledge so i would say that family farms and the type of public programs approaches talking about for research seed research and the world's peasantry are in fact are both work against the corporate food regime but that means we have to form alliances because otherwise we're going to lose the peasantry if we lose the peasants we lose our dynamic i go biodiversity and when jim most crash and they're already it's the peasantry it's the small farmers of the world small farms are the fastest growing sector in farming the united states not terribly viable this market economy isn't working for anybody and we need good public policies as well so how do we get there we've got to form alliances we have to on the one hand construct new food systems integrated food systems for people on the economic principles that i was talking about and we have to resist we have to protest we have to break these laws you know in the farm was taken over the supreme court here and people said oh yeah but you know it's monsanto friendly supreme court they're going to rule against them and of course they did it wasn't a problem of the confirmation  challenge the strongest players in the corporate food regime and monsanto is one of them and i would say that seeds are a bridge they're a bridge which bring together different actors from rural and urban sectors they bring together radical actors who want to change the rules with progressive actors who want to change the practices to form a strong social movement capable of ushering in reforms because reformists don't bring us reforms they're not strong enough never have been roosevelt was reformist he wasn't able to bring the new deal without all of this tremendous power of the social movements were in this which were in the streets during the great depression willing to break laws willing to push for change the strong labor unions we have the time we have to build a broad based social movement that powerful now if we expect to save our agro b diversity on this planet if we expect to roll back the power of the corporate food regime not just reform it but transform it in a way which is sustainable and equitable and works for all of us thank you very much  organic see as an organic farmer there's very little organic seed to be had so the power your pocketbook doesn't go very far and why is that it's because we haven't funded research and development organic seed and these are things which need to be publicly funded agriculture is a public activity through history since since the dawn of civilization agriculture it's always been a public social activity which is has been supported by society so i think that we do have to sort of you know what is a vote with your fork but we also have to realize that there's a lot of things which are simply not on the ballot and for a lot of people around the world there aren't any ballot boxes and always they don't have enough money to be able to vote in that type of that type of an election so that's where i think that our our buying habits are and are being conscious can and a conscientious consumers needs also to be paired with being activ and and doing what it takes to change the rules what are we doing in terms of big activities food first i mean well we support this this initiative in the bios a few lines and it's very important these types of public for talk about these issues and to try to organize resistance we you know we produce information and analysis for the social movements they're the ones working for food justice and food sovereignty around the world and we also try it so we also try to amplify the voices of those who are on the front lines making these transformations and developing the alternatives which hopefully will someday be the norm rather than the perpetual locked alternative and we also work on the ground i mean we have urban farmer field schools in oakland and the east bay if there francisco we have a pollinator restoration project with the farmer farmer movement in central america we work with who we are the solution campaign which is a network of women farmers organizations in africa to roll back the new alliance for a green revolution agra you know to basically denounce and