The Corporation (2003)

Vandana Shiva: Self - Physicist & Ecologist

Quotes 

• Vandana Shiva : A corporation is not a person. It doesn't think. People in it think and for them it is legitimate to create terminator technology, so that farmers are not able to save their seeds. Seeds that will destroy themselves through a suicide gene. Seeds that are designed to only produce crop in one season. You really need to have a brutal mind. It's a war against evolution to even think in those terms. But quite clearly profifs are so much higher in their minds.

• Naomi Klein : You take this to its logical conclusion, one would have the image that we are, in fact, the end of the world is nigh. And we are all completely brainwashed and there's no space left. And I don't believe we're there yet. And I think it's really important that we don't overstate the case, and that we admit that there are cracks and fissures in all of these corporate structures. And sometimes when a corporation is concentrating on one particular project they look the other way and all kinds of interesting things happen in the corner.

  Vandana Shiva : It is the case in every period of history where injustice based on falsehoods, based on taking away the right and freedoms of people to live and survive with dignity, that, eventually, when you call a bluff, the tables turn.

  Elaine Bernard : Ultimately capital puts it foot down somewhere. And anywhere it puts its foot down it can be held accountable.

• Vandana Shiva : Over the past decade we have been gaining ground. And when I say "we", I mean ordinary people committed to the welfare of all humanity. All people irrespective of gender and class and race and religion. All species on the planet. We managed to take the biggest government and one of the largest chemical companies to court on the case of Neem and win a case against them. W.R. Grace and the US government's patent on Neem was revoked by a case we brought along with the Greens of the European Parliament and the International Organic Agricultural Movement. We won because we worked together. We have overturned nearly 99% of the basmati patent of Ricetek. Again, because we worked as a worldwide coalition, old women in Texas, scientists in India, activists sitting in Vancouver, a little basmati action group. We stopped the 3rd World being viewed as the pirate and we showed the corporations were the pirate. Look how little it took for Gandhi to work against the salt laws of the British where the British decided the way they would make their armies and police forces bigger is just tax the salt. And all that Gandhi did was walk to the beach, pick up the salt and say, "Nature gives it for free. We need it. We've always made it. We will violate your laws. We will continue to make salt". We've had a similar commitment for the last decade in India. That any law that makes it illegal to save seed is a law not worth following. We will violate it because saving seed is a duty to the earth and to future generations. We thought it would really be symbolic. It is more than symbolic. It is becoming a survival option. Farmers who grow their own seeds, save their own seeds, don't buy pesticides, have three-fold more incomes than farmers who are locked into the chemical treadmill, depending on Monsanto and Cargill. We have managed to created alternatives that work for people.

• Vandana Shiva : Fifteen corporations would like to control the conditions of our life, and millions of people are saying, "Not only do we not need you, we can do it better. We are going to create systems that nourish the earth and nourish human beings". And these are not marginal experiments. They are the mainstay of large numbers of communities across the world. That is where the future lies.