Human Wrongs Watch
By Prof. Vandana Shiva*
23 June 2015, TRANSCEND Media Service – Science” is derived from the word score — “to know”. Each of us should know what we are eating, how it was produced and what impact it will have on our health.
The knowledge we need for growing food is the knowledge of biodiversity and living seed, of living soil and the soil food web, of interaction between different species in the agro-ecosystem and of different seasons.
Farmers have been the experts in these fields, as have ecological scientists who study the evolution of micro-organisms, plants and animals, the ecological web and the soil food web.
In industrial agriculture, the knowledge of living systems is totally missing, since industrial agriculture was externally driven by using war chemicals as inputs.
Soil was defined as an empty container for holding synthetic fertilisers and plants were defined as machines running on external inputs.
This meant substituting the ecological functions and services that nature and farmers can provide through renewal of soil fertility, pest and weed control, and seed improvement.
But it also implied ignorance of the destruction of the functions by the toxic chemicals applied to agriculture.
