Activist proven right over timefrom @zephzoid

Transcript

She was the first to criticize what Bill Gates was doing in agriculture and was publicly shunned for it. This is the trailblazing story of global legend Vandana Shiva. She is both a physicist and environmental activist who has spent decades pushing for seed saving and farmer rights in India. In 2006, Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation launched AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, aiming to boost agriculture productivity across the continent. Shiva became one of its sharpest critics almost immediately, and this was controversial at the time because it was at the heights of Bill Gates fame from Microsoft and his philanthropic initiatives. She argued it echoed old colonial better, replacing local seed systems and biodiversity with corporate controlled seas and chemical inputs. She wasn't alone either when AGRA launched African movements and governments at the time largely said they didn't really need it. So in 2014, the New Yorker published a lengthy profile pushing back hard on her claims and questioning her accuracy. She then responded publicly calling the piece misleading and accusing it of serving the biotech industry's interest. But now we have the full picture, and the data's not looking good. An analysis by Tufts of Agra's own numbers after nearly fifteen years found no significant increase in productivity across the countries it served and a 30% increase in the number of people people facing extreme hunger in those same countries. Shiva called it early, and she's now helped establish hundreds of community seed banks across India, but specifically to keep seeds in farmers' hands instead of corporate ones. We can all follow her lead by using Localize to support seed systems in our area and finding farmers near us.