Vandana Shiva trained in quantum physics before becoming a champion of saved seeds
Before she became known as the Gandhi of grain, Vandana Shiva wrote a doctoral thesis on hidden variables in quantum theory. She later founded Navdanya, set up dozens of Indian seed banks and fought patents on neem and basmati, while critics have challenged her positions on golden rice and a disastrous Sri Lankan fertiliser ban.
Shiva was born in Dehradun on 5 November 1952; her father conserved forests and her mother farmed. She took a physics degree at Panjab University in 1972, then went to Canada for a master's in philosophy of science at Guelph and a doctorate at the University of Western Ontario in 1978, examining hidden-variable theories beyond the reach of Bell's theorem. Back in India she moved into research on science, technology and environmental policy in Bangalore.
Her turn to agriculture came in 1984, after violence in Punjab and the Bhopal gas leak at Union Carbide's pesticide plant. She had already founded a research foundation in 1982, which gave rise in 1991 to Navdanya, meaning Nine Seeds, a movement to protect native seed and encourage organic, diverse farming over monocultures. It established more than 40 seed banks. She calls the patenting of life biopiracy: her group was among three organisations that won a decade-long fight in the European Patent Office over neem in 2005, and a campaign against RiceTec left the American firm without most of its basmati claims.
Her thinking ties ecology to gender. A 1990 report for the Food and Agriculture Organization argued that most farmers in India are women, and in 1993 she co-wrote Ecofeminism with Maria Mies. That year she also received the Right Livelihood Award. Reviewers have called some of her ideas essentialist.
Several of her stances have drawn strong pushback. She labels golden rice, engineered to produce a vitamin A precursor, a hoax, while two economists estimated in 2013 that its absence cost India over 1.4 million lives in a decade. Her link between genetically modified seed and farmer suicides was disputed by IFPRI analyses. In 2021 she praised Sri Lanka's sudden ban on synthetic fertilisers; rice yields fell by a third and the policy was reversed seven months later.
Source: Vandana Shiva
