Quote:

---

Q: What changes have you seen in social movements over the last several decades?

---

Quote:

---

A: Well, all the new social movements that have emerged — even in the South, even movements that are terribly local — have been able to sustain themselves and build strength through global solidarity. And that’s partly because beginning with the eighties, the worst problems we face do not get created from within our societies. They get created because of World Bank lending, IMF lending, World Trade Organization rules, global corporate crimes — and to deal with these global risks you need global solidarity. And movements have been extremely ingenious in creating new strategies, new styles of actions, new combinations of intellectual work and research and grassroots actions. My own institutions that I founded — one in 1982 [the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology], the other in 1987 [Navdanya] — are both children of globalization, of responding to globalization, and both of them work very much at the local level and at the national level, through advocacy and influencing parliament, and at the international level, through global solidarity. They also combine, I believe, the highest quality intellectual work with the deepest engagement in society. And I think those are totally new trends.

---

Quote:

---

When tens of thousands filled the streets of Seattle to protest a summit of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999, many news reports focused on the spectacle of the moment — the tear gas in the air, the smashed storefront windows, the clashes between police and black-garbed anarchists. Drowned out were the issues that had sparked the mass demonstrations. On the streets, protesters were denouncing the WTO’s role in overturning a range of local laws (from regulations protecting sea turtles to bans on hormone-laden beef) and its “undemocratic” means of making decisions that affected billions of people. The activists shouted; few heard.
Seattle was the birth of a “new democracy movement,” Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva wrote at the time. Shiva was present in Seattle, making her case in public against the genetic engineering of crops, the patenting of seeds, and other attempts by corporations to establish “control over every dimension of our lives — our food, our health, our environment, our work, and our future.” She praised the demonstrations in the streets, and argued that they represented history in the making. Citizens around the world, in poor as well as rich nations, would no longer “be bullied and excluded from decisions in which they have a rightful share,” she said.
If Shiva and other critics were largely ignored by the mainstream media in Seattle, they have doggedly persisted in making their case against “corporate-controlled globalization” in the years since. The author of the books Stolen Harvest and Water Wars and the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”), Shiva has become one of the most quoted spokespeople of a protest movement that prides itself on its leaderless, democratic structure — and one of its few voices from the “global South,” the so-called “Third World” where the poorest people on earth reside.
Shiva was born in northern Indian city of Dehradun, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Trained as a physicist, she eventually left the academic world for life as an activist, and in the two decades since then has worked primarily on issues of biodiversity, the earth’s variety of plant and animal life. In her native India, the fifty-three-year-old activist is best known for founding the New Delhi-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology and the national movement known as Navdanya, both of which work on behalf of agricultural diversity and farmers’ rights. One of Navdanya’s more recent initiatives is Diverse Women for Diversity, an international campaign on behalf of biodiversity, cultural diversity, and food security.
When trade ministers met in Cancún, Mexico, for another WTO ministerial this September, Shiva and thousands of other protesters were there to greet them. Once again, violence dominated the headlines — this time, the suicide of a South Korean farmer, Kyung-hae Lee, who killed himself at the police barricades in an act of political protest (the agricultural policies of the WTO, Lee had claimed, were “killing” small farmers like himself). INTHEFRAY.COM Editor Victor Tan Chen caught up with Shiva in Cancún for a chat about the current state of the world’s social movements, the recent struggles against corporate power, and the meaning of one man’s ultimate sacrifice.

---