JOLIET -- Vandana Shiva is giving new meaning to the old metaphor, "You reap what you sow."
Shiva, a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, urged more than 225 people to consider the food and ecological crisis as one in the same during her speech at the University of St. Francis.
"We have mastered the art of wasting the planet," she said. "Land and water are being misused, polluted and disintegrated by non-sustainable agriculture. We need to reclaim the ethics of the gift of food."
Examining a crisis
Shiva, a leader in the International Forum on Globalization (IFG) along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin, has spent more than 20 years examining agriculture and the environment and advocating on behalf farmers and the hungry around the world.
Less than 50 percent of crops harvested around the world are for human consumption, Shiva said. Of that food, 50 percent is wasted, which results in just over 12 percent of all the food produced on the planet actually being consumed.
"Couldn't we make sure that no one was hungry if that food wasn't wasted?" she asked.
Saving, sharing seeds
Shiva, who won of the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award) in 1993, is the founder and director of Navdanya, India's network of seed keepers and organic producers.
Shiva said she has dedicated her life to saving and sharing seeds and nonviolent farming.
"For every seed sold or planted anywhere, there's a royalty collected," she said. "If a farmer saves seeds or shares seeds, he's a thief. I think it's our duty to pass them on and share them with a neighbor who needs seeds."
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Vandana Shiva: End Needless Waste of Food
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Activist's message at USF: End needless waste of food
By Submitted Reports
heraldnewsonline.com, October 31, 2009
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