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The Seeds of Vandana Shiva

The Seeds of Vandana Shiva - Seed Freedom

A Documentary Film

The Remarkable Life Story of Eco-activist Vandana Shiva

How did the willful daughter of a Himalayan forest conservator become the world’s most powerful opponent of Monsanto? The Seeds of Vandana Shiva, a feature-length documentary, presents the remarkable life story of the Gandhian eco-activist and agro-ecologist, Vandana Shiva. A classic David versus Goliath tale, the film shows how Vandana, a brilliant scientist, became Monsanto’s worst nightmare and a rock star of the international organic food movement.

Vandana Shiva is a modern-day revolutionary, and for forty years has been fighting a heroic battle on behalf of humanity and the ecologically besieged natural systems that support us. But she is opposed by powerful multinational corporations invested in continuing their degenerative but lucrative agricultural practices. By profiling one of the greatest activists of modern times, the film looks at the epic struggle over who controls the world’s food systems, and asks the question, who will prevail?

Hers is the remarkable and unlikely story of a girl who trekked from highland cabin to cabin alongside her father, tended a garden alongside her mother, and passionately pursued an education that freed her from the caste and gender constraints of traditional Indian society that culminated in a degree in Nuclear Physics, and then a Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Quantum Theory.

But those achievements were merely a prelude to her awakening as a fully-committed activist.

Vandana Shiva brought her scientific expertise and Gandhian principles of non-violent resistance to the struggles of poor Indian villagers whose livelihoods were being crushed by corporate capitalism. She has become a formidable opponent to those corporations whose drive for privatization and profit are destroying the environment and changing the climate. Their predations in the name of a ‘green revolution’ with its promises of wealth and freedom and ‘feeding the world’ through patented and chemically-dependent GMO seeds are reducing traditional farmers and entire communities to inescapable servitude. In India, the fruits of the Green Revolution are an epidemic of rural suicides.

The Seeds of Vandana Shiva focuses on the people, circumstances and seminal events in Vandana’s life—what shaped her thinking and defined her purpose. It also shows how the battle against multinational agribusiness has become an international struggle between two visions for feeding the world: The first, a multinational corporate model of chemically dependent monoculture that rewards a capitalist imperative of profit and growth. And the other, ‘Earth Democracy, that honors ecology, biodiversity, sustainability and community—what Dr. Shiva demonstrates is the only way forward for the future of food.

 

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