The People's Summit Marquee Series Presents:
Vandana Shiva
Friday, June 16, 1995
8 p.m.
Saint Mary's University
McNally Auditorium (off Robie Street)
Topic: Free Trade vs. People's Economies
Opening Story and Welcome
by Jean Knockwood
Micmac Storyteller
Singing by
Cheryl Gaudet
Introductions by
Dr. Krishna Patel
Biography
Vandana Shiva is a physicist and philosopher of science deeply
engaged in the ecological, social and economic struggles of subsistence
workers in India. She has stood beside people in their struggles against
destructive forestry practices, large-scale dams and multinational
dominated agribusiness. Her recent work, as director of the Research
Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy in
Dehradun - India, has concentrated largely on the protection of farmers
rights to their own seed stock, and to exposing the threats to the
world's farmers by the potent combination of global liberalisation of
trade and patent protection of agricultural processes and products. She
has been a global advocate for the legal and commercial rights of
traditional farmers ( a majority of them women) who have over the
centuries developed plant and animal breeds for their resistance to pests
and climatic extremes, their superior flavour and nutitional value, and
their appropriatness to local farming and cultural requirements.
Dr. Shiva has been one of the most important figures in the
development of eco-feminist thinking. She shows in often heart -
rendering detail the ways in which this barrier has marginalised the
vital continuation of women to production and economic wellbeing.
One of Dr. Shiva's central areas of research and action has been to
expose the modern trend to control reproduction. She approaches the
topics from two focal points. One being, the move to control the right to
use seeds freely for the reproduction of crops. This is mirrored in the
second focal point, human reproduction. Shiva presents a surprising
consistent parallel between the conversion of reproduction to production
in the agricultural sphere and the human family. Women's role in
generating human life, and nurturing it through to a new generation of
healthy reproduction is being shackled by modern bio-medical technologies.
The women's body becomes the somewhat expendible means of production of
life increasingly tailored to meet specific standards and to support a
large and powerful economic sector.
The area that Dr. Shiva will be exploring during the P7 is the choice
the world now faces between a community-based, life supporting,
decentralized economy and a self-declared "global economy" which
subjugates subsistence and environmental integrity to corporate
interests. Her publications include: Staying Alive, Women, Ecology and
Development, and Monocultures of the Mind.