The Seeds of Vandana Shiva
Alternately insightful and off-its-rocker, wrestling with grand themes of colonialism, corporate greed and the roots of knowledge, Camilla and James Becket’s The Seeds of Vandana Shiva is ultimately interested in the complex question “can you be right about something even if you don’t know what you are talking about?” It’s not at all clear that’s the question the Becket’s know they are asking or even that it’s an issue at all, but it is at the heart of not just their film but the complexities of Vandana Shiva’s life and work, and the massive pushback she faces as she stares down global corporate forces.
An intellectual and activist, Shiva is a self-professed cross discipline didact trapsing across the fields of philosophy, physics and biology in a search for the connective tissue of all life. In the process she has run directly into the primary, extinction level crises facing mankind in the near future – climate change and food scarcity – and run them back to at least one primary root cause: corporate controlled, genetically modified food.
Across 20 years of activism, Shiva has opened a new front against global food control and particularly against agri-giant Monsanto which has won a number of high profile patent cases affirming that it owns its genetically engineered seed and whatever is grown from its seed (intentionally or not) while simultaneously using its corporate might and monopoly pricing power to force more and more of the worlds farmers to use said product. “It’s the East India Company, again,” a tribal elder tells Shiva as she tries to wake rural India to the danger creeping up on them and they are right. What government colonialism wasn’t able to achieve through centuries of war and plunder, corporate colonialism might just take with a few dollars, she warns.
It’s a piercing insight that others have made but not always with the perspicacity of Shiva, focusing as she does on agriculture companies that may not have the profile of Big Tech or Big Oil but are in many ways more fundamental to the changes currently happening on the planet, especially around soil erosion.
It’s also obscured by some of her other claims around what genetically modified food can and would do to the populace and its place in global climate change, which range from the interesting to the outlandish. Claims that she refutes less through pointed peer review and analysis and more by general explanation of her holistic study of the world and the way all of its structures are interwoven in a manner not all can perceive, as if she were the second coming of Carlos Castaneda. It’s an interesting point of view and picture of a strong-minded figure in the scientific and political world, one who for good or bad insists on taking on her opponents on her own terms.
The Seeds of Vandana Shiva does not take a particularly critical view to its subject’s claims, casting much of it as big agriculture opposition research designed to discredit a strident opponent and critique of their businesses. (Which it certainly is but that doesn’t make it false.). However, the Beckets are open enough in their coverage of her own claims and basis of belief – maybe because they believe, maybe not – to allow the viewer a deep view of Shiva and what she stands for and then make up their own minds. Many documentaries have never done so much.
7 out of 10
Directed by Camilla Denton Becket and James Becket