Blog
Uttarakhand with Dr. Vandana Shiva
Portraying India
In the late twentieth century, industrial farming was reshaping food systems globally by promoting patented hybrid seeds and chemical inputs. These practices affected soil health, farmer autonomy, and traditional farming, raising questions about who controls what farmers grow and what we eat. In India, the shift was visible in the 1960s with the Green Revolution, beginning in Punjab, with the introduction of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and new crops into India’s fields as a response to food shortages. What followed was increased productivity, but at the expense of monoculture, rising costs, and dependence on external resources.
Dr. Vandana Shiva emerged as one of the strongest voices against this model, arguing that food security lies in biodiversity. Through Navdanya Organization, she built community seed banks, trained farmers in ecological methods, and reframed food as a cultural and political right. Her work challenges the very idea of who controls the future of agriculture.
Vandana Shiva grew up in the Himalayan foothills of Dehradun with her father, a forest conservator, and her mother, who worked in education but chose to be a farmer, believing it was the most meaningful work one could do. She studied physics at Panjab University and worked under a national science talent scholarship, including a research assignment at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai. A question about radiation risk, raised by her sister, pushed her to reconsider what she later called the “one-eyed” nature of scientific training. She shifted to the philosophy of science, completing a PhD on quantum theory at the University of Western Ontario in 1979.
Before leaving for Canada, she visited her childhood forest and found oak trees replaced by apple orchards and the stream water level just up to the ankles. Meanwhile, learning that women in the Alaknanda Valley were resisting deforestation through the Chipko movement shaped her future direction. “While I was doing my PhD, I used my scholarship money to come back every summer and winter to volunteer with Chipko. Growing up as the daughter of a forest officer, I saw the forest as beauty and peace. Working with the women, I realized it was also life, livelihood, and knowledge.”
Challenging Industrial Agriculture
Vandana Shiva returned to India in 1982 and founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in New Delhi. She began documenting mining damage in Doon Valley and studying the Chipko movement in depth. Two years later, she initiated Navdanya in Dehradun, a national seed conservation movement that has since helped establish more than 150 community seed banks in 22 Indian states. In 1995, she established the Navdanya Biodiversity Conservation Farm to practice agroecology and organic farming. As part of this project, Earth University / Bija Vidyapeeth (School of the Seed) was established, an international college for sustainable living in collaboration with Schumacher College of England.
Vandana Shiva’s movements are built on Swaraj (self-governance) for the seeds, food, water, and land. Her writing, spanning about 25 books, reports, and public lectures, centres around the resilience of nature, gendered labour, and the theft of indigenous knowledge through biopiracy. She has worked with communities affected by industrial farming and has collaborated with researchers and civil society groups studying ecological farming models. She has been part of advisory panels for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. She has participated in WTO ministerial meetings as part of civil society delegations, focusing on trade regulations.
The deeper Vandana Shiva went into seed and soil politics, she witnessed a pattern: wherever ecological systems were being damaged, women were also losing power. In the Himalayan villages where she worked during the Chipko movement, it was women who knew which wild plants healed or fed, which seeds survived drought, and how to read the soil without a laboratory. Yet they were absent from every agricultural policy table. Her work did not begin with the idea of “ecofeminism,” but it evolved from watching how the shift to chemical farming erased women’s knowledge and pushed them out of decision-making. The more seed diversity collapsed, the more women lost control over the crops to grow due to a lack of familiarity with the new crops. For her, biodiversity cannot be focused on just ecological wealth but the ground on which women’s economic and cultural autonomy stands.
“We are the soil, as humans are made from humus; we are nothing without living soil. Soil has been neglected, cementified, and industrial agriculture is killing the life of the soil. While it’s emitting 40% of greenhouse gas emissions from nitrogen oxides from chemical fertilizers, carbon dioxide, methane from factory farms and food waste. We get rid of all these emissions by doing ecological agriculture, returning organic matter, producing healthier food, protecting our small farmers, and preserving biodiversity. We have everything to gain by returning to the soil. We solve the food insecurity, unemployment, and the climate problem. By arriving at the cycle of return, we give gratitude to the Earth, to our ancestors and to the future.”
Over four decades, Vandana Shiva has worked at the intersection of law, policy, and grassroots organizing to challenge how food and agriculture are governed. She led landmark legal and policy campaigns that overturned biopiracy patents on neem, turmeric, and basmati rice, doing expert research during the drafting of India’s Biological Diversity Act (2002), Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act (2001), and Forest Rights Act (2006). She has served on the boards of the International Forum on Globalization, the World Future Council, and Slow Food International, and represented “Nature” at the People’s Tribunal on the World Bank and IMF in Berlin in 1988.
Today, she is a powerful and unstoppable voice in global forums, from UN climate and biodiversity conferences to the World Social Forum, having written more than 300 papers on agriculture, biodiversity, and ecofeminism. She is the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize), Global 500 Award (UN), Sydney Peace Prize, Fukuoka Prize, MIDORI Prize for Biodiversity, and the rest follow. Whether adopted or contested, her ideas remain part of every major conversation on what food systems must become.
Recommendations for Further Exploration
To Listen
In Conversation with Dr. Vandana Shiva – Sustainable Food Trust
Diverse Expressions of a Living Earth – For The Wild
Terra Viva with Vandana Shiva – Upstream
Earth Democracy and Ecological Civilization – Earth Charter