New Yorker Profiles Vandana Shiva, Anti-GMO Activist

Michael Specter has profiled “the Gandhi of grain,” Vandana Shiva, in a piece
for the New Yorker that describes her as “a hero to anti-[genetically modified
organisms (GMOs)] activists everywhere” while criticizing her inflammatory
methods and unscientific arguments. Specter chronicles many of Shiva’s
recent provocative statements—including a speech calling fertilizer “a
weapon of mass destruction” and a tweet comparing GMOs on organic farms
to rape—and attempts to debunk a few of her positions. In March 2014, Shiva
told a Winnipeg food-rights group that GMOs and their associated herbicides
caused the rise in autism, and Specter argues that she had merely confused
causation with correlation, pointing out that the rise in autism also correlates
with the sale of organic produce, the sale of high-definition televisions and
the number of Americans who commute to work each day by bicycle.

In addition, Shiva has apparently stated that the use of GM cotton in India
has caused “genocide” in one region, claiming that farmers are committing
suicide because they cannot afford to plant the GM cotton. Specter traveled
to India to investigate, and he apparently found that farmers in the region
had improved the health of their families because the amount of pesticides
they use has fallen sharply, and further, the “suicide rate has not risen in a
decade,” according to a University of Manchester study, Specter writes. “In fact,
the suicide rate among Indian farmers is lower than for other Indians and is
comparable to that among French farmers.”

Specter also criticizes India’s ban on GMO crops, the passage of which he
credits largely to Shiva’s activism. He speaks with Deepak Pental, former
vice-chancellor of the University of Delhi, who dislikes the Indian ban and its
effects on the food system. “White rice is the most ridiculous food that human
beings can cultivate,” he told Specter. “It is just a bunch of starch, and we are
filling our bellies with it. But it’s natural. So it passes the Luddite test.” Specter
notes that one common criticism of GM crops is the creation of life unlike
anything found in nature, but farmers have engineered crops outside of labs
by breeding them to take on particular characteristics for millennia, sometimes
to “unnatural” ends. “Corn in its present form wouldn’t exist if humans
hadn’t cultivated the crop,” he writes. “The plant doesn’t grow in the wild and
would not survive if we suddenly stopped eating it.” Specter further takes
issue with a double standard he identifies: many people object to nature’s
boundaries in food, but not in medicine. Synthetic insulin, he suggests, is used
by millions of diabetics despite being “the first genetically modified product,”
and “[p]rotesters don’t march to oppose those advances. In fact, consumers
demand them, and it doesn’t seem to matter where the replacement parts
come from.”