The Social Vision of the Alternative Food Movement - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 530

do not desire to live long and do not wish to see their children survive past infancy. She
implies that life itself is not a “basic and vital need” for these people.
Shiva glorifies traditional agricultural practices and criticizes any effort to intro-
duce modern technological and commercial practices to farmers in India. She fails
to recognize, however, that even after centuries of reliance on traditional farming
techniques and the traditional socioeconomic order, India has never managed to
eradicate devastating famines, some so severe that they led to cannibalism (Habib
1999, 113-116). Till as recently as the mid-1960s India's food situation was grim. Paul
Ehrlich, in his celebrated 1968 book The Population Bomb , declared that there was
“no hope” for food self-sufficiency in India (Ehrlich 1971, 147). Undaunted by such
pessimism, however, a quiet revolution was already underway. Spearheaded by the
American agronomist Norman Borlaug, new high-yielding varieties of seeds, along
with other new technologies such as chemical fertilizers and pesticides and modern
irrigation systems were introduced. These were eagerly embraced by Indian farm-
ers and the result was a dramatic increase in India's food production—a phenom-
enon that came to be known as the Green Revolution. By 1974, not only was India
self-sufficient in wheat, but it had become a net exporter. The specter of large-scale
famine - ever present in India's long history - was finally banished. In spite of this
success in boosting India's food production, however, Vandana Shiva has been
fiercely critical of the Green Revolution, calling it a human and environmental
disaster, without ever acknowledging its role in eradicating famine. It appears that
Shiva does not consider freedom from famine a “basic and vital need” for people in
India.
One of the features of the Third World peasant vision is that these people, being pure,
innocent, and simpleminded, cannot be trusted to make choices by themselves for their
own good. Hence a regime of prohibitions and restrictions needs to be imposed in order
to shield them from the horrors of economic development and new technologies. This
sentiment is evident in Shiva's strident calls for the force of law and the coercive power
of the state to be used to deny Indian farmers access to agricultural biotechnology. Gail
Omvedt, an American-born Indian scholar, takes a different view:
Behind the appeal of the campaign [to ban genetically engineered seeds in India] is
a distorted image of farmers . . . which depicts them romantically but demeaningly as
backward, tradition-loving, innocent and helpless creatures carrying on with their
occupation for love of the land and the soil, and as practitioners of a “way of life”
rather than a toilsome income-earning occupation. . . .
Farmers may love the land they work on. . . . But they are people who are trying
to scratch out a living, who want a better life for their children and for whom farm-
ing is a source of income and not a very good income. They are familiar with hybrid
seeds. . . . They buy them, try them out, and refuse to use them if they do not per-
form. . . . Farmers are economic actors and capable of making choices.
(Omvedt 1998)
At the heart of the alternative food movement's vision of the heroic Third World peasant
lies the simultaneous romanticization and dehumanization of farmers and peasants in