From Degenerative Industrial Agriculture to Regenerative Organic Agriculture

The following is a transcript of an interview between Dr. Vandana Shiva and Dr. Andre Leu, given during the People’s Food Summit, 2023. You can listen to the interview on Spotify, or search for Regeneration International wherever you get your podcasts.

00:15
Andre
Hello, everybody. I’d like to introduce you to a dear friend, Dr. Vandana Shiva. And Dr. Vandana Shiva needs no introduction. Everybody will know who she is and the incredible work that she does all around the planet. Today we want to talk about the whole issue of food production on a global scale, and start talking about why this is so disrupted. Who are the people who have such an influence that we’ve got over a Billion people who are food insecure and another billion who get empty calories without enough proper nutrition, vitamins, and minerals. And we can identify the cause of this.

01:11
Andre
It’s not that we don’t have enough food. It’s that we have an unfair, and the word I will use is highly corrupted, food production and distribution system. Vandana, I’d just like you to explain to people about this because you’ve been doing so much good work talking about this around the world.

01:34
Vandana
Wonderful to join you, Andre, and join the People’s Food Summit. For centuries, people have grown food, eaten good food, and been healthy. And 60,000 years in Australia, where you’re from , is how long the Aboriginal farmers were farming. And because they farmed so beautifully, they left no destructive trait. They left a creative trait of mobile diversity. And that was used by the colonizers as proof that they’re not civilized, because being civilized in colonial times, as being civilized today, is destroying. The power of destruction is defined as civilization rather than the power of sustaining and regeneration. 60,000 years is not a short time. In China, there were books written about farmers of 40 centuries.

02:37
Vandana
But as Albert Howard wrote so beautifully in his book Agriculture Testament, that in the farms of Asia, of India, you see farming as it should be, as perennial as the forests and the prairie and the ocean. And those laws of how nature works is what he articulated in terms of how Indian farmers and peasants have worked. The law of diversity. Nature does not practice monocultures and uniformity and fascism. And the law of return:. Nature does not build systems through extraction and taking and taking, but always circular economies giving back. And the work we are doing in regeneration is really going deep into those sciences of regeneration which are forgotten because the Earth was defined as empty, Terra nalius, the entire legal jurisprudence that came out of colonizing Australia was, it’s an empty land because these Aboriginal people aren’t people.

03:40
Vandana
They’re like the fauna and flora, which I’m very happy to be like a fauna in flora, because we are a family. And this estrangement from the rest of creation is a big part of it. Then they went on to say, the soil is empty: till. Chemicals are put. And the best scientists were objecting. Albert Howard was objecting. Liebig, who is the father of modern organic chemistry, wrote a little book whose English translation I’ve written a forward to. And this is in the law of recycling. He says, I thought it would be enough to just announce and spread the truth, as is customary in science, that nature works in cycles and recycling is what you should see. I finally came to understand this wasn’t right and the altars of lies must be destroyed if we wish to give truth a fair chance.

04:39
Vandana
Founder of modern organic Chemistry Having to tell the people who hijacked the science and reduced it to nitrogen fertilizers. First guano and everything else. Then they destroyed it. And then to the labs of Hitler. And to know the same processes that allowed explosives and ammunition to then be turned into making fertilizer. And if you want to understand the violence of this system, I think it’s good to look at people like Haber. The. Haber–Bosch process is the basis of synthetic fertilizer. Haber’s wife committed suicide, and in her suicide note, she wrote that she was also a chemist. And she says, I cannot tolerate the kind of violent turn Haber has taken to make chemicals for killing. So what went wrong really is I. G. Farben, Rockfeller, Standard Oil got together and with the finance and fossil fuels and chemistry, made the entire inputs to what became industrial agriculture.

It’s really based on the science of killing and the tools of killing.

And that’s why it’s not an accident that insects are disappearing and birds are disappearing. Rachel Carson tried to wake us up to this on the silent spring. And yet we are still not connecting any extinction crisis to the crisis of chemicals in industrial farming, chemicals that we designed to kill. But with it came the mindset that we are enemies of nature. And nature has to be destroyed in order to get food. Interestingly, it’s now flipped, as you will have seen. They now are talking about destroying food in order to save the climate.

06:34
Vandana
But it’s always through these dualism and polarizations when the Earth works in cooperation and symbiosis and the beautiful symbiosis between the mycorrhizing, the organic soil and the plant, and the beautiful symbiosis between the sunshine. You have woken us all so much to this growing life that we have to shift to growing life from spreading death. And the reason we have to do regeneration is because war has entered every farm, in every field, every forest. The reasons the forests are burning in Canada is because they’re spraying glyphosate. And the Indigenous people have a huge campaign called Stop the spraying. Because if you spray a desiccant which dries the forest, of course there’ll be fires. And the oceans, the rivers, our bodies, because food is what connects the world. Food is what gives us life.

07:35
Vandana
And when poisons enter at that end and the war mentality enters the food system, then all the systems of destruction begin and all the systems of silencing the voices of truth and science. Rachel Carson, she was attacked for saying pesticides killed. The founder of Modern organic Chemistry, who taught us about nitrogen, is having to say, I have to destroy the altars of Lies. Because the science he had created was being destroyed. And because today media is vague and because billionaires have got into food, have got into agriculture. Mr. Bill Gates talks about one agriculture for the world, and that one agriculture of the world will be producing raw materials for lab food, which he also has patents on. And the Bayer of the world are totally in sync with him. Let me just share with you what Bayer said.

08:41
Vandana
Bob writer of Bayer says in order for plant based companies — (plant based is just another word for — in their vocabulary, another word for lab food, because everything is plant based. Everything begins with the green leaf, begins with the photosensitive. So plant based in their language is factories to produce food). And Bayer is saying, in order to get this at scale and in large enough quantity, they’ll have to turn to us. They will require efficient sources of amino acids and carbohydrates. Food has disappeared. Food is raw material for the lab, speed stock, as you know. And this will bring them around to grow crops. The last thing we want to do to around crops that can be tilled and cultivated by machine. All the things that are wrong with industrial agriculture.

09:36
Vandana
What’s wrong with industrial agriculture is a, it’s based on fossil chemicals and a war mentality. Two, it’s based on fossil run machinery. Three, it’s based on rows of monocultures. Four, it’s in the hands of the poison cartel. And they, with the billionaires now, will not tolerate the real science. They will not tolerate truth, and they will attack every journalist, every scientist, every farmer, as has been done in so many countries. And that’s why our common work of solidarity, our common work of truth, our common work of caring for the Earth and stopping this war is so much more important. In our times, it was always important. We’ve had a century of this war, but now it is going to determine the future of humanity.

10:29
Andre
What you’re saying there is very important. And I just want to go back to when you talked about Australia and 60,000 actually, we actually have very good data now of Aboriginal food systems of 65,000 years ago and what they were eating, how they were preparing it. And I think from me, myself and others, I’m actually going. I’m writing a book on their agricultural systems and I’m going to call it 65,000 years of regenerative agriculture and show these complex systems of food forests, of how they manage grazing. They actually use fire at particular times of the year to regenerate pastures, and then their livestock, which are kangaroos and emus, would follow them. They didn’t need fences, they could manage them and they had sustainable harvesting systems. These particular pastures weren’t monocultures, they were incredibly biodiverse.

11:38
Andre
And in these pastures they had yams and all these other plants, herbs, medicines, these phenomenal biodiversity. Then the same with the forests that they managed, and they built these incredibly diverse perennial systems, which the colonists, being used to simple monocultures, couldn’t understand. And they called it wilderness. It was never a wilderness. This was a managed ecosystem. I think it’s actually one of the almost racist terms now, where you don’t realize how First nations people actually created these incredibly complex ecosystems and we write them off. But I suppose what I’m trying to say here is that here’s evidence that we get the right system. We can have 65,000 years of food production without running down the system. In fact, we increase the biodiversity over that time.

12:54
Vandana
And you know, with my work india, found the violence of industrial agriculture, which is a war agriculture. It can destroy fragile ecosystems in two and three years. It destroyed Punjab by one of the most robust areas, with lots of water, good plains, in ten years. But the more fragile arid and semi arid areas in two, three years, it’s finished. And here we have 65,000 years. And I think we need to really start putting this timescale for the work of good farming, that we are here to farm for the next 65,000 years. And our little bit of work is to make sure that the paths to the 65 years is not closed by the greedy, the billionaires, the warmongers.

13:55
Vandana
And it breaks my heart to see the climate treaty, which we framed with the biodiversity treaty, and they were two sides of the same coin, because the biosphere is what manages the atmosphere and the climate. And this is the living Earth Gaia thesis. To put the two separately, and now to try and say the only way we can save the climate is by destroying what remains of biodiverse ecological agriculture and turning it into even bigger monocultures of feedstock for lab food, I think that is the latest attack. And together, the regenerative organic movement, the Indigenous people who are regenerators, we all need to now join hands for the 65,000 year vision.

14:55
Andre
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think this is really important. And when we start looking at Indigenous cultures and how they maintain the planet, and it was colonialism that destroyed know, I think Sir Albert Howard is a classic case on how incredibly diverse and resilient and productive Indian farming was. And when colonialism came along and said, no, you’re not growing food, you’re growing Indigo, you’re growing cotton, and destroyed these systems, created the famines and destroyed it. We say the same with Ethiopia. Historically, you look at Ethiopia, one of the most incredibly complex, rich civilizations, all the historical evidence from ancient Egypt, when they talk about Ethiopia as this land of abundance, and then colonialism comes along, and Ethiopia is still not recovering, and Australia is probably the last continent to really be colonized.

16:08
Andre
And I’m going back to the first accounts of what the soil was like. The one chemist is actually a colleague of von Liebig, who analyzed the soil in the 1830s in Australia. The lowest level he found was 5% organic matter. Some was 50, the average was 30%. And then you talk about the semi arid, like you said, in three years, it was over, it was gone, the biodiversity was gone, the pastures were gone. And the traditional owners now, because their food systems were destroyed, were now refugees in their own country because of this. And where we are today is a direct result of this colonialism. And what we’re really seeing now is the new colonialism by the poison cartels.

17:10
Vandana
Old colonialism only looked at territory. They wanted the land, but the new colonialism wants the life of every living organism. And that’s why the whole issue of patent exceed and genetic engineering becomes so important for them. T. rying to modify soil organisms. You don’t even know 99% of them. You don’t know what the impact of your one engineered organism will be to the 99% that you don’t know. You’re supposed to go through biosafety, and you’re running away from biosafety by creating even more confusion, trying to call the new genetic engineering, which is the old genetic engineering of gene editing CRISPR, totally driven by Mr. Gates, like the old genetic engineering was driven by the ideology of the Rockefellers. They’re now trying to say, oh, this is totally nature, so it should not be labeled, it should not be researched for biosafety .

18:16
Vandana
It should not be regulated. But it’s novel, and therefore we can own it. This is totally a threat to ontology. You can’t say the same thing is natural, and then say, no, it’s not. And again, it comes back to debates. Altar of Lies. This whole edifice is based on an altar of lies. And just because the lies are told by big money power and big destructive power, they think they’ll get away with it. Lies are lies, no matter how powerful the person speaking them, and no matter how much the resonance they create through paid media to attack anyone who speaks the truth. But the tiniest voice of the tiniest mycorrhiza, the tiniest voice of an indigenous peasant, the tiniest voice of a small farmer, is still truth.

19:19
Vandana
And I think the old contest between industrial and ecological, industrial and regenerative organic. Industrial being the fossil system, the fossil chemical system, the war system that continued colonization of the earth and colonization of our mind. It is now reaching such disparate levels. GMOs have failed because complex systems cannot be engineered. You still want to continue to tell the lie that you are engineering organisms to take patents on them. The new gene editing being used to do deregulation of all the biosafety means the end of health and the end of seed freedom. Farmers, they won’t know if the seed is regenerative or is it not. Because nothing will tell them. So taking away the right to know is a big violation.

20:23
Vandana
And interestingly, the governments that talk a lot about free speech do not allow the free speech and the right to know of their own citizens when it comes to the food question. Because when it comes to the food and agriculture question, sadly, most governments are totally captive to the poison cartel. And that’s why I want to congratulate the Mexicans, who, through the movement of defensive corn and saying no to GMO corn, have created an entire system of governance where the governments, the president, stands with the people and with the corn, and they have resisted the worst, abusive power of the United States. And we need to stand wherever the voice of truth is defending biodiversity, defending farmers freedom and seed freedom and food freedom, and defending the democracy of life, because this is what farming has become.

21:30
Vandana
It has become the issue of freedom for life. It’s about freedom. It’s about truth, freedom, life.

21:38
Andre
You’re exactly right there. And I think what we’re seeing is two things. We’ve got this incredible attack on small farmers, regenerative farmers, First nations, traditional owners of ecosystems, or managers of ecosystems. We’re also saying that they’re controlling the media. They are censoring our voices in the mainstream media, in social media. If we say too much, we get cut out. They also limit our reach. But despite that, we are reaching. For instance, this event last year, we got over half a million people viewing it live. And then we promoted various videos like yours in particular. We got another 300,000 views for your video last time, and we got extra. So we actually reached 1.2 million people. So despite the fact they’re trying to censor us, we are getting through.

22:50
Andre
And the other thing I just want to say, because you’re like me, we’re all over the world. We meet with people, and what we’re seeing, the word I use is a regeneration revolution. We’re actually seeing these farmers and community groups and consumer groups and other people who are concerned about food systems and the environment coming together to promote and build these new systems.

23:22
Vandana
When we think of the world as a pyramid of power, where the top controls everything below that supports it, then you feel disempowered. You feel: oh they have so much power. But first, their power depends on us. In the top of a pyramid wouldn’t be able to be there if the bottom of the pyramid wasn’t holding it up. So the bottom of the pyramid has to be far more active of taking power away and not supporting the top of the pyramid. But I think the real vision we need to carry for our 65,000 year vision is the uncentered and decentered democracy of the mycorrhiza. There’s no part of the mycorrhiza that is calling the shots in nature. There’s nothing like a master molecule. There’s nothing like a dominant species. There is no privileged species in nature.

24:29
Vandana
In fact, the tiny microbes have bigger power in the world, even though we’ve underestimated them. And if anyone thinks it’s not true, just think of your COVID days. One little virus held the whole world through the control that others were taking to it. But the mycorrhizal fungi is such a beautiful teacher of decentralized democracy. And I think we are like that microorizal fungia. We are so uncentered. We move. But wherever we are giving, we are spreading, we are nourishing, and that is where the future movement will grow. We should not be anxious. We should not be anxious that we are not centralized. We should celebrate that we are decentralized, that wherever we are is the center of life of that place. And as we shift our mindset, not only because the crisis is getting deeper, and more people are being rubbished.

25:36
Vandana
There’s no place for you. There’s no home for you. BlackRock will own your home. No, there’s no education for you. BlackRock will own your education. Because as I wrote in the book, Oneness Vs The 1%, with my son, after the Paris summit where were together, I realized Bill Gates was running the show. And then went deeper into where the economy had changed. And then we found every giant corporation actually was now owned by the financial asset companies. And where do the finances come from? The same extractive economy and rent economy of the billionaires. So the big money is now controlling all the ways of making money. Now will BlackRock, which wants to go bigger. –. It was a nothing body in 2008 when the financial crisis took place and Wall street collapsed.

26:26
Vandana
The collapse of Wall street led to these guys emerging, and they’re totally self governed. No one controls them. They’re owned by the people whose money is in it. This has never been the case. And they really are desperate to create new ways of making money, whereas we are in the enterprise of growing life. And when life grows on its own terms, in its self organized, autopoietic ways, sadly, there’s no space for them. The mycorrhizal fungi will work on its own. They will try and engineer it for sure, but with consequences they have no idea of. And that’s why our turning to the ways of nature, our turning to the power of regeneration, which is built into living systems, our turning to our duty to care, which is what regeneration is about. Because we don’t create regeneration. Regeneration is life.

27:28
Vandana
What we do is facilitate it and stop the destruction. Our human work is to stop the harm. So stop the harm. Get rid of the pesticides, get rid of synthetic fertilizers, get rid of the GMOs, get rid of the patterns. Shift to the small farms, where the ability to care is real. We had a prime minister who was an agricultural economist, but also a farmer. And he said in his book called Agricultural Economics, his name was Chaudhry Charan Singh. And he said, if I had 100 acres, I would not give it to one man who would farm the 100 acres. I would give it to 40 small farmers. Because the small peasant can do what the large peasant farmer can’t. The small peasant can give care.

28:21
Vandana
And what care is about is being able to watch every plant in detail, to watch every patch of the soil and the eyes and the heart on the land is what the small farm has. So while they have been desperate to destroy the small farmer ever since they brought chemicals into farming. Our 65,000 year agenda is to protect life in its diversity and self organization, to protect the cultures that protect life, which is the indigenous cultures, and the small farmer. And if you have to be a small farmer, growing 200 things on your farm, half of them wild and uncultivated, you didn’t grow them, but if you’re not killing them, they’re growing. If you’re not spraying roundup, they will happily give you lots of food.

29:07
Vandana
Half the food of the world could be uncultivated edibles if we just let it grow, and it will increase the biodiversity. And when we do that, we end hunger when we allow this biodiversity to grow. And as our book Health per acre shows, biodiversity is where food comes from. Biodiversity is not just more nutrition per acre, but for now, we are realizing our gut microbiome needs biodiversity. Can’t cheat the gut. You can cheat the supermarket shelf, but you cannot cheat the gut. And therefore, when you have this level of diversity, then you will have to decentralize distribution, because the global market needs monocultures. And that’s why we’ve reduced from 10,000 species of plants we ate to about four or five commodities that can bring profits to the agribusiness. No, we need to shift from 10,000 to 20,000 and just increase our diversity of edibles.

30:10
Vandana
That means a much more indigenous knowledge in our food systems and more distribution. First, food for the soil. Anyone who says the soil doesn’t need food doesn’t realize food begins in the soil. Second, food for the family, the small farmer has to be fed. Half the hungry of the world are farmers today. That is so unfair. Then food for the local community. Let local distribution thrive, neighbor to neighbor. Local markets everywhere. Farmers markets everywhere. And let the global system get a few leftovers, it’s fine. We used to send spices to Europe way back, and we are happy to continue to do that. But we will not destroy our ability to produce food for the soil, food for the community, food for humanity, just for churning out larger and larger commodities that have an appetite that is so limitless that they must invade every forest.

31:12
Vandana
And let’s just go back to the climate thing. When I wrote Soil Not Oil, I assessed about 45% because IPCC was not doing an agriculture disaggregation. I said, when food gets transported, food gets industrially manufactured. And I just took those categories and said, let’s say half of it for food came to 45%, but it’s 50%. 14% from the fossil production, both fossil fuel use and fossil chemical use. 20% from destruction of forests. Why are we growing soya bean in the Amazon? 20% from food miles, ultra processing that is making us all sick, packaging that is polluting the planet. And then, because you’ve created a system of uniformity, you’ve created a system of waste, another 4%. Well, we can get rid of all of this.

32:04
Vandana
We can bring it totally to zero, while enhancing the capacity of the biosphere through regeneration, to pull down the excess. As you have shown repeatedly, as we have talked repeatedly, and I think this is our work in the people’s regenerative movement, our work is to understand the lies, pull down the altar of lies, sow the seeds of diversity and regeneration, and heal the people, heal the community, heal the soil, heal the earth, because it is the same work. It is not different pieces of work.

32:44
Andre
Your metaphor mentioning, actually, more than the metaphor, mentioning the mycorrhiza and the microbiome, I think is critical. And one of the really important things there is Changing the way we see nature. I think one of the most unfortunate things about the misinterpretation of Darwin is this Concept of survival of the fittest. It’s a jungle out there, and you fight, and it’s the fittest that survives. But when you look at nature, that’s not true. If that’s the case, you look at a forest, it’d only be one species of tree. That’s the fittest. But over time, the opposite happens. You get more and more species, more diversity. And there’s a word for that: synergy. And it starts with the mycorrhiza, because the mycorrhizal fungi cannot photosynthesize, it cannot make its sugars and foods.

33:43
Andre
So it lives in harmony, in coexistence, with plants that can photosynthesize, and the plants make glucose and organic molecules that feed the mycorrhiza. In return, the mycorrhiza then will go and get the plant, go deep down, get the plant water if it’s a drought, or get them phosphorus or nitrogen. And from the mycorrhiza’s point of view, the more nutrients it gives its host plant, the more it grows, the more organic molecules, more glucose it gets, the more it grows. And then the other thing we understand now is not one mycorrhiza with one host plant. All these mycorrhiza are interconnected, like an Internet, and they communicate, they speak. So if one plant is attacked by an insect, it will communicate it through the mycorrhiza to other plants and say: “start protecting yourself”.

34:44
Andre
Or if one plant hasn’t got water or nutrients, another plant will actually take those nutrients out and feed it through the mycorrhiza to other plants. So what we see here, it’s synergy and it’s cooperation and working together, that’s the strength of these systems. And that really, I suppose what I’ll say is the underpowering strength of regeneration, why systems regenerate.

35:21
Vandana
And what nature teaches us is life begins in the small, and regeneration of life begins in small communities. So do not underestimate your fact. It is the only power that can make change. Giant organizations can create the next wave of destruction, oppression, control. It cannot trigger the next wave of self organized complexity, which begins in small. We are at a very exciting moment because centralized, controlling destructive power is totally peaking. And on the other hand, the opportunities and possibilities of decentralized, cooperative, symbiotic power in nature and of people and nature together. It’s just amazing. As you described, the plant and the Mycorrhiza depend on each other, but the more they help each other, the more they have for themselves. And the extractive system assumes you to take by force.

36:44
Vandana
The ecological system realizes that it’s in giving you will receive, of course you’ll receive more. The more you give, you’ll have more. The more the Mycorrhiza gives nutrients to the plant. The plant will grow and will give more food to the mycorrhiza. And these cycles of living systems thrive on giving and care. Extractive systems are based on short term violence and short term taking without giving. In the process, they destroy the very basis of what supports the system. And current industrial system is destroying the basis of food production in the soil, in the seed, in the biodiversity, in the mycorrhizing. And that’s why it’s destroying the future of food. Future of food will not come from a system that is creating a dead planet.

37:39
Vandana
The future of food will come from a system that is regenerating the power of the planet to regenerate systems with our love and care joining hands. So in this 65,000 year venture, we send greetings to everyone who’s at the people’s food summit, and just do your bit, find your space. And it could be a little garden in your backyard, could be a little pot in your balcony, it could be your farmers who feed you. But make the links, be the microrising, make the links.

38:23
Andre
I just want to finish up now and just talk about the wider scope of what’s happening in regeneration and for a lot of people. I just want to inform you that when we formed Regeneration International, there was five of us who started the discussion, and that was Vanana, the late Ronnie Cummings, Dr. Hans Heron, Steve Rye from Mercola Health, and myself. And we started this concept and realized the importance of regeneration as a meme, because most people know that things aren’t right with the planet. We want to do more than sustain it. We don’t want to sustain the status quo. We need to improve it. And that’s what regeneration is. We regenerating this degenerated system, and consequently, as a simple meme, it has spread. Very few people had heard of regeneration before.

39:32
Andre
we started the concept of Regeneration International and getting it out, we started the global movement. And I think when we talk about when you use the example of synergy of mycorrhizae, regeneration International has gone from just five of us having this concept. We now have over 500 partners. We use the word partners and not members. We like to see people as our equals on every continent, over 70 countries, and it’s the same again. It’s like this web of like minded groups working together to actually make a difference in world. And we are making a difference. Vandana, you especially.

40:31
Vandana
We’re all together. And the success of the regeneration movement is with five of us, starting now, the poison cartel is so desperate to try and hijack it, and we will not let them. Bayer has just signed an MOU with my government on regeneration. Regeneration needs love and care and belonging and being rooted. The poison cartel has none of those qualities. So regeneration, the integrity of regeneration, we will also defend. And this pretend regeneration, where the poison cartel parades it’s poisons as the regeneration, we will not allow it. Just as over the last century, every time the poison cartel spread, there were voices from Albert Howard, all of the voices Rachel Carson.

41:24
Vandana
Today, those of us who started regeneration and all the movements that are part of this, we will continue to practice the true regeneration, think the true regeneration and pull down the altar of lies, of the poison cartels Baked regeneration.

41:42
Andre
Exactly. And I suppose the easiest way to distinguish what they’re doing from what we’re doing is that the opposite of regeneration is degeneration. And poisons, pesticides, fertilizers, extraction, destroying, damaging the genome, the basis of life — t. That is all degenerative and we need to continue to call them out as degenerators.

42:11
Vandana
Thank you so much, Andre.