Vandana Shiva
Seed as a commons — argued in the fields, the courts and the World Trade Organization at the same time.
The record
- Standing
- active practice
- Based
- Navdanya · India
- Founded
- The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in 1982; Navdanya in 1991; and Navdanya International, in Italy, in 2011.
- The name
- Navdanya means nine seeds — a symbol of biological and cultural diversity — and also the new gift, which is the right to save and share seed.
- The fight
- Farmers’ rights to save, breed and exchange seed freely, against the TRIPS agreement of the World Trade Organization, seed patents, and the collection of royalties.
- Recognition
- Right Livelihood Award, 1993.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
Shiva’s argument is that a seed is not a product, and that treating it as one — patentable, licensed, royalty-bearing — converts a four-thousand-year commons into a subscription.
Navdanya is the practical answer rather than the rhetorical one: a network of community seed banks conserving native varieties, an organic farming and fair trade programme, and a training farm. Seed that is being grown and exchanged is harder to enclose than seed that is only being argued about.
Her positions on genetic engineering and on agricultural science more broadly are strongly contested, and this record does not settle that argument. What is not contested is the influence of the seed-sovereignty framing itself, which now shapes farmers’ rights law well beyond India.
Where to read them
Sources for this record
Corrections
This record was assembled from the sources above, and nothing in it was inferred to fill a gap. If it is about you and it is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write and it changes.