I have called Vandana Shiva,
One of the Worst People in the World, so I was thoroughly
delighted to read Michael Specter’s new article in The New
Yorker, in which he reveals the anti-biotech campaigner as the
evil fraud that she is. She compares biotech crops to rape and
claims that they cause autism. Naturally, progressive TV pundit
Bill Moyers has called Shiva a “rock star in the worldwide battle
against genetically modified seeds.” Sadly, yes.
Here are a few excerpts:
“There are two trends,” she told the crowd that had gathered in
Piazza Santissima Annunziata, in Florence, for the seed fair. “One:
a trend of diversity, democracy, freedom, joy, culture—people
celebrating their lives.” She paused to let silence fill the
square. “And the other: monocultures, deadness. Everyone depressed.
Everyone on Prozac. More and more young people unemployed. We don’t
want that world of death.”
Total claptrap.
Shiva insists that the only acceptable path is to return to the
principles and practices of an earlier era. “Fertilizer should
never have been allowed in agriculture,” she said in a 2011 speech.
“I think it’s time to ban it. It’s a weapon of mass destruction.
Its use is like war, because it came from war.”
Lie. The
Haber-Bosch technique was devised to produce nitrogen
fertilizer and was later diverted during World War I into munitions
manufacture. The New Yorker article correctly
counters:
“Without the nitrogen fertilizer to grow crops used to feed our
recent ancestors so they could reproduce, many of us probably
wouldn’t be here today,” Raoul Adamchack told me. “It would have
been a different planet, smaller, poorer, and far more agrarian.”
Adamchack runs an organic farm in Northern California, and has
served as the president of California Certified Organic
Farmers.
In fact, about half of the nitrogen molecules found in the
tissues of people today were derived from industrially produced
fertilizers.
Next Shiva asserts that biotech crops are somehow responsible
for the rise in autism:
On March 29th, in Winnipeg, Shiva began a speech to a local
food-rights group by revealing alarming new information about the
impact of agricultural biotechnology on human health. “The Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention has said that in two years the
figure of autism has jumped from one in eighty-eight to one in
sixty-eight,” she said, referring to an article in USA
Today. “Then they go on to say obviously this is a trend
showing that something’s wrong, and that whether something in the
environment could be causing the uptick remains the million-dollar
question.“That question’s been answered,” Shiva continued. She mentioned
glyphosate, the Monsanto herbicide that is commonly used with
modified crops. “If you look at the graph of the growth of G.M.O.s,
the growth of application of glyphosate and autism, it’s literally
a one-to-one correspondence. And you could make that graph for
kidney failure, you could make that graph for diabetes, you could
make that graph even for Alzheimer’s.”
Specter correctly notes:
Hundreds of millions of people, in twenty-eight countries, eat
transgenic products every day, and if any of Shiva’s assertions
were true the implications would be catastrophic. But no
relationship between glyphosate and the diseases that Shiva
mentioned has been discovered. Her claims were based on a single
research paper, released last year, in a journal called
Entropy, which charges scientists to publish their
findings. The paper contains no new research. Shiva had committed a
common, but dangerous, fallacy: confusing a correlation with
causation. (It turns out, for example, that the growth in sales of
organic produce in the past decade matches the rise of autism,
almost exactly. For that matter, so does the rise in sales of
high-definition televisions, as well as the number of Americans who
commute to work every day by bicycle.)
When environmentalist
Mark Lynas came to his senses and apologized for his
unscientific opposition to biotech crops, Shiva vengefully
tweeted:
“#MarkLynas saying farmers shd be free to grow #GMOs which can
contaminate #organic farms is like saying #rapists shd have freedom
to rape.”
In The New Yorker article Lynas observes:
“When you call somebody a fraud, that suggests the person knows
she is lying. I don’t think Vandana Shiva necessarily knows that.
But she is blinded by her ideology and her political beliefs. That
is why she is so effective and so dangerous… on a fundamental
level she is a demagogue who opposes the universal values of the
Enlightenment.”
I think that Lynas is being far too gentle. And Shiva’s
opposition to Golden Rice, enhanced by biotech to alleviate tens of
millions of cases on vitamin A deficiency is actually
helping to kill people:
Two economists, one from Berkeley and the other from Munich,
recently examined the impact of that ban. In their study “The
Economic Power of the Golden Rice Opposition,” they calculated that
the absence of Golden Rice in the past decade has caused the loss
of at least 1,424,680 life years in India alone.
As I reported earlier (see beginning link), Shiva is the chief
proponent of the lie that biotech cotton has somehow induced more
than a quarter of million Indian farmers to commit suicide. Spector
thoroughly debunks that claim. (For another excellent refutation of
this claim, see Keith Kloor’s, “The
GMO-Suicide Myth” in the February, 2014 Issues in Science
and Technology.)
Rich westerners apparently love being duped by Shiva. For
example, Spector reports this disheartening reaction of a young
Italian anti-GMO activist:
I asked a twenty-year-old student named Victoria if she had been
aware of Shiva’s work. “For years,” she said. Then, acknowledging
Shiva’s undeniable charisma, she added, “I was just in a room with
her. I have followed her all my life, but you can’t be prepared for
her physical presence.” She hesitated and glanced at the platform
where Shiva was speaking. “Isn’t she just magic?”
For my part, I have been in many rooms with Shiva where I have
seen deluded throngs fawn on her every deceitful word. My reaction:
Revulsion.
The Specter article
is really well worth your time.
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