Vandana Shiva: Bill Gates and Silicon Valley Behind Push for ‘Farming Without Farmers, Food Without Farms’

“Human beings cannot have a relationship with nature, land and one another, it seems increasingly, without the intercedence of this corporate power,” comedian and political commentator Russell Brand told scholar and environmental activist Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., on the latest episode of his “Stay Free” podcast.

Brand asked Shiva, a food sovereignty and environmental activist, to explain how this corporate takeover of nature happened.

Shiva said the privatization of land and resources under colonialism was the first step in transforming nature into “either a mine or a dump.”

Today, she said, privatization has become so entrenched that mega-corporation Cargill can own every chicken, chicken production facility, and every input needed to raise chickens, and then dump all of its waste into public rivers.

The situation we face today could not have happened, she said, without the criminalization of farmers — for which she held media organizations like The Guardian responsible because they attack farmers instead of the corporations.

“If the drivers are the corporations,” she said, “you have to have the guts to bite the corporations. You don’t target the victims. The farmers are victims of this system.”

Brand asked Shiva why the global uprising of farmers — from Sri Lanka and India to Germany, England and the Netherlands — against the globalization of agriculture had come to be cast as a right-wing idea by the press.

Shiva said Mussolini himself defined fascism as “the convergence of economic and political power.” “Food fascism,” she said, “is the recent control over our food systems by giant corporations and the billionaires.”

Under colonialism, the British controlled the land, she said, but they didn’t control the food. The advent of agricultural industrialization, the green revolution and globalization made it possible for corporations to take control of food.

The call for “food sovereignty,” she said, “came as the call as opposite to the food dictatorship and food fascism.”

Now, she said, those people want to complete the separation of people from the land that began with colonialism.

Today, they want “farming without farmers.”

Being able to plant a seed, input love, knowledge and sun and produce food, “is the only truly independent production system and it’s that freedom they want to attack,” Shiva said, because they are threatened by it.

So they discredit farmers by calling them “fascists” and “right wing.”

“And anybody who facilitates that is essentially doing the work of these globalists,” she said, “they’re the fascists.”