Bibliographie de Vandana SHIVA 2005, Earth Democracy; Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, South End Press, ISBN 0-89608-745-X 2005, Breakfast of Biodiversity: the Political Ecology of Rain Forest Destruction, ISBN 0-935028-96-X 2005, Globalization's New Wars: Seed, Water and Life Forms Women Unlimited, New Delhi, ISBN 81-88965-17-0 2002, Water Wars; Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, South End Press, Cambridge Massachusetts 2002, Vedic Ecology: Practical Wisdom for Surviving the 21st Century, Mandala Publishing Group, Novato, California, ISBN 1-886069-65-4 2001, Water Wars, South End Press, Boston 2001, Patents, Myths and Reality, Penguin India 2000, Tomorrow's Biodiversity, Thames and Hudson, London, ISBN 0-500-28239-0 1999, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, South End Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, ISBN 0-89608-608-9 1997, Biopiracy: the Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, South End Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, I ISBN 1-896357-11-3 1995, Biopolitics (with Ingunn Moser), Zed Books, United Kingdom 1994, Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development Worldwide, Earthscan, London, ISBN 0-86571-264-6

1993, Ecofeminism, Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Fernwood Publications, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, ISBN 1-895686-28-8

1993, Monocultures of the Mind: Biodiversity, Biotechnology and Agriculture, Zed Press, New Delhi

1993, Women, Ecology and Health: Rebuilding Connections (editor), Dag Hammarskjold Foundation and Kali for Women, New Delhi

1992, Biodiversity: Social and Ecological Perspectives (editor); Zed Press, United Kingdom

1992, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Ecological degradation and political conflict in Punjab, Zed Press, New Delhi,

1991, Ecology and the Politics of Survival: Conflicts Over Natural Resources in India, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, California, ISBN 0-8039-9672-1

1988, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India, Zed Press, New Delhi, ISBN 0-86232-823-3

1981, Social Economic and Ecological Impact of Social Forestry in Kolar, Vandana Shiva, H.C. Sharatchandra, J. Banyopadhyay, Indian Institute Of Management, Bangalore

introduction en français à V. Shiva (wikipedia)

Vandana Shiva (Dehradun, Uttaranchal, Inde, 5 novembre 1952 - ) est une physicienne, épistémologue, écrivain, docteur en philosophie des sciences et féministe indienne. Shiva dirige la « Fondation de recherche pour la science, les technologies et les ressources naturelles » (Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy). Elle est une des chefs de file des écologistes de terrain et des altermondialistes au niveau mondial, notamment pour la défense de l'agriculture paysanne et biologique face à la politique d'expansion sans limite des multinationales agro-alimentaires et aux effets pervers du génie génétique. Elle lutte contre le brevetage du vivant et la biopiraterie, c'est-à-dire à l'appropriation par les firmes agro-chimiques transnationales des ressources universelles, notamment les semences.

Dès les années 80, elle a été très active dans le « Narmada Bachao Andolan » (mouvement sauvons le Narmada) qui s'oppose à la construction d'énormes barrages sur la rivière Narmada, barrages bouleversant les écosystèmes et obligeant aux déplacements de millions de paysans pauvres.

Vandana Shiva a fondé l'association « Navdanya », association pour la conservation de la biodiversité et la protection des droits des fermiers. La ferme de Navdanya est une banque de semences modèles, qui a permis à plus de 10 000 fermiers d'Inde, du Pakistan, du Tibet, du Népal et du Bangladesh de redécouvrir l'agriculture « organique » comme on le dit en Inde (principe entre l'agriculture paysanne et l'agriculture biologique).

Parfois qualifiée de « José Bové en sari », elle partage de nombreux combats avec lui et a témoigné plusieurs fois en sa faveur notamment lors du procès de Millau.

Vandana Shiva est récipiendaire du prix Nobel alternatif (1993).

Bibliographie en français [modifier]

La guerre de l'eau - Privatisation, pollution et profit ISBN 2841900975 Ethique et agro-industrie - Main basse sur la vie (1996) ISBN 2738444091 ISBN

273844444X Ecoféminisme (1999) avec Maria Mies ISBN 2738471773 Le terrorisme alimentaire - Comment les multinationales affament le tiers-monde

(2001) avec Marcel Blanc ISBN 2213610800 La vie n'est pas une marchandise - La dérive des droits de propriété intellectuelle

(2003) ISBN 2708236911 La biopiraterie ou le pillage de la nature et de la connaissance ISBN 2847260072

War Against Nature and the People of the South

by Dr. Vandana Shivaexcerpted from the book

Views from the South:The effects of globalization

and the WTO on the Third Worldedited by Sarah Anderson

 

Vandana Shiva is a physicist, founder and president of the Research Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology, and one of India's leading activists. She played a key role in the famous Chipko movement to save the Himalayan forests and now works on behalf of India's farmers, trying to resist the introduction of globalized industrial agriculture and biotechnology into Indian food production. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Forum on Globalization, and was a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize). Her most recent book is Biopiracy The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston South End Press, 1997).

In this paper, Shiva describes how the transformation of peasant agriculture in India to a globally industrialized model has reduced food security, threatened local businesses and biodiversity, driven farmers off their lands, and opened the door for global corporations to take over the nation's food processing. Shiva then examines the forces driving the globalization of agriculture, including the agribusiness giants and two of the WTO agreements these firms have promoted the agreements on agriculture and intellectual property rights.

Supporters of globalization often claim that this process is natural, inevitable, and evolutionary and one that is bringing prosperity and growth, embracing us all and knitting us into a Global Village. Only by participating in global markets, they say, can Third World people get access to jobs and better lives. In reality, globalization is not a natural process of inclusion. It is a planned project of exclusion that siphons the resources and knowledge of the poor of the South into the global marketplace, stripping people of their life-support systems, livelihoods, and lifestyles.

Global trade rules, as enshrined in the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) and in the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs)

agreement, are primarily rules of robbery, camouflaged by arithmetic and legalese. In this economic hijack, the corporations gain, and people and nature loose.

The WTO's overall goal of promoting "market competition" serves two functions. Firstly, it transforms all aspects of life into commodities for sale. Culture, biodiversity, food, water, livelihoods, needs, and rights are all transformed and reduced to markets. Secondly, the destruction of nature, culture, and livelihoods is then justified on the basis of the rules of competition. Policy makers attack ethical and ecological rules that sustain and maintain life, claiming that they are "protectionist" barriers to trade. In reality, the WTO does not reduce protectionism; it merely replaces protections for people and nature with protections for corporations.

The global reach of corporations to take over the resources of the poor of the Third World is made possible not just by reduction and removal of tariffs, one of the goals of the WTO. It is facilitated by the removal of ethical and ecological limits on what can be owned as private property and what can be traded. In this way, globalization is completing the project of colonization that led to the conquest and ownership of land and territory. Biological resources and water, the very basis of life's processes, are being colonized, privatized, and commodified.

Agriculture, which is still the primary livelihood for three-quarters of humanity, and which is as much a cultural activity as an economic one, is also threatened by "trade liberalization," driven both by the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and the IMF, and by the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture. The globalization of food and agriculture systems, in effect, means the corporate takeover of the food chain, the erosion of food rights, the destruction of the cultural diversity of food and the biological diversity of crops, and the displacement of millions from land-based, rural livelihoods. Global free trade in food and agriculture is the biggest refugee creation program in the world, far exceeding the impact of Kosovo. It is equivalent to the ethnic cleansing of the poor, the peasantry, and small farmers of the Third World.

GLOBALIZATION OF INDIA'S AGRICULTURE

Trade and investment liberalization have led to a dramatic transformation of agriculture in India that has had a devastating impact on peasant farmers. These policies have brought about

* a shift in production from food to export crops that has reduced food security

* a flood of imports that have wiped out local businesses and diversity and

* an opening for global corporations to take over the control of food processing.

A SHIFT TO EXPORT CROPS Cotton Seeds of Suicide

Economic globalization is leading to a concentration of the seed industry, the entry of global corporations into agriculture, the increased use of pesticides, and, finally, increased debt, despair, and sometimes suicide among small farmers. Capital-intensive, corporate-controlled agriculture is being spread into regions where peasants are poor

but, until now, have been self-sufficient in food. In the regions where industrial agriculture has been introduced through globalization, higher costs are making it virtually impossible for small farmers to survive.

The new export-oriented policies that are part of agricultural globalization have led to a shift in India from the production of food crops to commodities for exports, such as cotton. Cotton cultivation has expanded even into semiarid areas such as Warangal in Andhra Pradesh, where farmers traditionally grew paddy, pulses, millets, oilseeds, and vegetable crops. Enticed by promises that cotton would be like "white gold," yielding high profits, farmers in Warangal have nearly tripled the amount of land used for cotton production in the past decade, while slashing production of traditional food grains like jawar and bajra.

However, what these farmers have learned is that while cash crops like cotton may fetch higher prices, they also demand a higher level of expenditure. Under corporate pressure, farmers have largely switched from planting open-pollinated seeds, which can be saved by farmers, to hybrids that need to be purchased every year at a high cost. Because hybrids are very vulnerable to pest attacks, pesticide use has also increased. Expenditures on pesticide in the district went up from $2.5 million for the entire decade of the 1 980s to $50 million in t997-a 2,000 percent increase. For poor peasants, this cost could be borne only through debts.

Because trade liberalization had also led to budget cutbacks on extension and withdrawal of low-interest credit from cooperatives and public sector banks, peasants have had to take high-interest loans from the same companies that sell them hybrid seeds and pesticides. Thus, the corporations have become money lenders, extension agents, seed suppliers, and pesticide salesmen rolled into one. As a result, peasants have become buried under the weight of unpayable debt. This financial stress is blamed for an epidemic of suicides in Warangal district. More than 500 farmers took their own lives in 1998, and the suicides have continued in 1999.

In the regions where high costs of industrial agriculture introduced through globalization are already pushing farmers to suicide, Monsanto has tried to introduce genetically engineered cotton seeds. While the argument used to promote these crops in the Third World is that they will increase yields, trials have shown a decrease in yields and an increase in the use of pesticides. In protest, farmers in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have uprooted the genetically engineered cotton, and the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology has filed a case in the Supreme Court to stop the introduction of these genetically engineered crops in Indian agriculture. The case is based on the belief that genetic engineering would introduce new ecological and economic risks that Third World peasants cannot afford.

Shrimp Factories

The shift from a "food first" to an "export first" policy is justified on grounds of food security, because export earnings are supposed to pay for food imports. In fact, export-oriented agriculture has reduced food security by encouraging a shift from small-scale, sustainable production to large-scale, non-sustainable industrial production. It also brings changes in ownership over natural resources and means of production, from small autonomous producer/owners to large corporate and commercial interests.

Peasants are displaced from farming, while commercial interests take over land for industrial-scale production of export commodities such as shrimp, flowers, vegetables, and meat. These enterprises often have negative environmental impacts, creating further hardship for local communities.

The transformation of shrimp farming in India is a prime example of the social and environmental costs of industrial agriculture. While small-scale, indigenous shrimp farming has been sustainable over centuries, shrimp exports require the establishment of factory farms for shrimp production. Each acre of a shrimp farm needs 200 "shadow acres" for absorbing the ecological costs of factory farming of shrimp. "Shadow acres" are the units required to supply resources to and absorb the waste from a particular economic activity.

Shrimp farming is so damaging because it requires enormous quantities of fish to be caught at sea for shrimp feed, most of which is converted to waste that is poured into the sea, polluting the water and damaging mangroves. Shrimp farming also destroys coastal agriculture because the shrimp factories require the pumping of seawater into the ponds for shrimp production. This causes salinization, reducing drinking water supplies and destroying trees and crops near the factories.

These costs undermine the claims that shrimp exports are a major source of economic growth. For each dollar earned by corporations through exports of shrimp to consumers in the United States, Europe, and Japan, an estimated $10 worth of damage is done to India's natural resources and local economic income. This includes the destruction of mangroves, water, agriculture, and fisheries.

Shrimp factories have met with stiff resistance in India. In December 1996, local communities and environmental groups won a case in the Indian Supreme Court to ban industrial shrimp farming. However, the shrimp industry received a stay order, and continues to operate. On May 29, 1999, four fishermen were killed when they protested against the commercial shrimp operators called the "shrimp mafia" in the Chilka lake in Orissa.

This tragedy illustrates how the inequalities aggravated or generated by export-oriented agriculture can also lead to violations of human rights and subversion of law and order. Trade can only be increased by taking resources away from people's subsistence and survival. When people attempt to defend their human right to work and live, commercial interests that gain from exports often work with the state apparatus to crush people's movements. Many people lose what little they have. In the most extreme cases, such as that of the Orissa fishermen, they pay for exports with their lives.

Other Export Crops Costs Exceed Earnings

Like shrimp exports, flower, meat, and vegetable exports have costs that often far exceed the earnings generated. Large scale meat exports, for example, have an external "shadow" cost that is ten times higher than export earnings. This is due to the former ecological contribution of livestock in small-scale agriculture, now on the wane.

Particularly in developing countries, livestock are not just meat on legs. Animals are the primary source of fertilizer in the form of organic manure. They also generate energy

for farm operations, by plowing, and by helping with agro-processing; for example, with edible oil extraction via animal-driven "ghanis." Livestock in India help produce $17 million worth of milk, and $1.5 billion worth of food grain; they also provide $17 million worth of energy. If the animals are slaughtered, all of these benefits are lost. In the case of one export-oriented slaughterhouse alone, meat exports earned $45 million, whereas the estimated contribution of the slaughtered animals to the economy if they had been allowed to live was $230 million.

In the case of flowers, countries must import plant material, pesticides, greenhouse equipment and pay for consultants. India spent Rs. 13.7 billion in foreign exchange to import inputs for floriculture and earned only Rs. 0.3 billion from flower sales, thus having a net drain of Rs. 10 billion on scarce foreign change.

If the resources used for floriculture had been allocated for food production, India would have produced four times more food than it could buy on global markets using earnings from flower sales. In terms of national food security, export-oriented agriculture therefore destroys more than it creates.

Under the pressure of so-called "liberalization" policies, food prices have doubled and the poor have had to cut their consumption in half. Prices have increased because food has been exported, creating domestic scarcity, at the same time that food subsidies have been withdrawn. As a housewife in Bombay stated "we are eating half of what we used to after food prices doubled in the last year. Even dal is a luxury now. After milk prices increased, I stopped buying milk as well."

Export-oriented agriculture is also creating an agricultural apartheid, with the Third World being asked to stop growing food staples and instead grow luxury products for the rich North. Production of food staples is now concentrated in the United States, and in the hands of a few multinational seed companies and grain trading companies.

B. IMPORTS: DIVERSITY DESTROYED

As countries are forced to destroy their agricultural systems to grow and export commodities, both cultural diversity and biological diversity disappear. Diverse cereals, oilseeds, and legumes are displaced by soybeans from the United States. While exports destroy local food systems by diverting resources and changing ownership patterns, imports also destroy food systems by hijacking markets.

In August 1999, there was a case of mustard oil adulteration that was restricted to the city of Delhi, but affected all local brands of oil. In response, the government banned mustard oil, the main cooking oil in North India, and removed all restrictions on edible oil imports. Soybean and soy oil imports were liberalized or deregulated. Within one growing season, millions of oilseed-producing farmers growing mustard, groundnut, sesame, and niger had lost the market for their diverse oil seed crops. Liberalized imports of soybeans have destroyed the entire edible oil production and processing in India. Millions of small mills have closed down. Prices of oilseeds have collapsed and farmers cannot even recover what they have spent on cultivation. Sesame, linseed, and mustard have started to disappear from the fields as cheap, subsidized imports of soybeans are dumped on the Indian market. These imports totaled three million tons in

one year (a 60 percent rise compared to earlier years) and cost nearly $1 billion, thus worsening the country's balance of payments situation.

U.S. soybeans are cheap not because of cheap production but because of subsidies. The price of soybeans is $155 a ton, and this low price is possible because the U.S. government pays $193 a ton to U.S. soybean farmers, who would not otherwise be able to stay in production given the low commodity prices. This government support is not really a farmer subsidy; it is an indirect corporate subsidy. As heavily subsidized soybeans flooded India's domestic market, prices crashed by more than two thirds. The local oil processing industry, from the small-scale "ghanis" to larger mills, started to close down. Domestic oilseed production declined, and domestic edible oil prices crashed. Groundnut prices went down by 3 percent from Rs. 48 per kilogram to Rs. 37 per kilogram. Meanwhile, some farmers protesting against the collapse of their markets were shot and killed.

***

p114

C. TRIPs AND BIOPIRACY

... the WTO threatens Third World food and agriculture through the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) agreement, which was introduced during the Uruguay Round of GATT. This agreement sets enforceable global rules on patents, copyrights, and trademarks. TRIPs rules extend to living resources, so that genes, cells, seeds plants, and animals can now be patented and "owned" as intellectual property. As a result, developing countries are being forced to reorganize their production and consumption patterns to allow monopolies by a handful of so-called "Life Sciences" corporations that are in reality peddlers of death

History of Intellectual Property Rights

To understand the flaws of TRIPs, it is important to know that this agreement is essentially the globalization of western patent laws that historically have been used as instruments of conquest. The word "patents" derives from "letters patent"-the open letters granted by European sovereigns to conquer foreign lands or to obtain import monopolies. Christopher Columbus derived his right to the conquest of the Americas through the letter patent granted to him by Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand.

In the United States, patent laws were originally a patchwork of state laws that did not offer protection for the patentee outside the state in which it had been granted. This changed in 1787, when members of the Constitutional Convention institutionalized a national statute. The politicians were convinced that a single federal patent law would serve the fledgling nation and its inventors far more effectively than the existing state patents. One outcome was that broad patents were granted in the United States for steamboats-in spite of the steam engine having been invented and patented by James Watt in Scotland fifteen years before.

The United States has continued to ignore the pre-existence and use of inventions in other countries when granting patents. Thus, paradoxically, a legal system aimed at

preventing "intellectual piracy" is itself based on legitimizing piracy. This system is codified in Section 102 of the U.S. Patent Act of 1952, which denies patents for inventions that are in use in the United States but allows patents for inventions in use in other countries unless they have been described in a publication. If, for example, someone in Europe were operating a machine and you, in good faith, independently and without knowledge of its existence, developed your own invention that was essentially the same machine, that fact would not prevent you from obtaining a patent in the United States.

In addition, the United States has created unilateral instruments such as clause Special 301 in its Trade Act to force other countries to follow its patent laws. Thus, a country that depended on borrowed knowledge for its own development of industrial power has acted to block such transfer of knowledge and technology to other countries.

Introduction of TRIPs

During the Uruguay Round of the GATT, the United States introduced its flawed patent system into the WTO, and thus imposed it on the rest of the world. U.S. corporations have admitted that they drafted and lobbied on behalf of TRIPs. As a Monsanto spokesman said, "The industries and traders of world commerce have played simultaneously the role of patients, the diagnosticians, and prescribing physicians."

TRIPs not only made intellectual property rights (IPR) laws global geographically, but also removed ethical boundaries by including life forms and biodiversity into patentable subject matter. Living organisms and life forms that are self-creating were thus redefined as machines and artifacts made and invented by the patentee. Intellectual property rights and patents then give the patent holder a monopolistic right to prevent others from making, using, or selling seeds. Seed saving by farmers has now been redefined from a sacred duty to a criminal offence of stealing "property." Article 27.3 (b) of the TRIPs agreement, which relates to patents on living resources, was basically pushed by the "Life Science" companies to establish themselves as Lords of Life.

The chemical companies of the world have bought up seed and biotechnology companies and reorganized themselves as Life Science corporations, claiming patents on genes, seeds, plants and animals. Ciba Geigy and Sandoz have combined to form Novartis; Hoechst has joined with Rhone Poulenc to form Aventis; Zeneca has merged with Astia; Dupont has bought up Pioneer HiBred; and Monsanto now owns Cargill seeds, DeKalb, Calgene, Agracetus, Delta and Pine Land, Holden, and Asgrow. Eighty percent of all genetically engineered seeds planted are Monsanto's "intellectual property." And Monsanto owns broad species patents on cotton, mustard, soybean- crops that were not "invented" or "created" by Monsanto but have been evolved over centuries of innovation by farmers of India and East Asia working in close partnership with biodiversity gifted by nature.

There are three perversions inherent in patents on living material:

1. Ethical perversion

This refers to the claim that seeds, plants, sheep, cows, or human cell lines are nothing but "products of the mind" "created" by Monsanto, Novartis, lan Wilmut or PPL.

Living organisms have their intrinsic self-organization, they make themselves, and hence cannot be reduced to the status of "inventions" and "creations" of patent holders. They cannot be "owned" as private property because they are our ecological kin, not just "genetic mines."

2. Criminalization of Saving and Sharing Seeds

The recognition of corporations as "owners" of seed through intellectual property rights converts farmers into "thieves" when they save seed or share it with neighbors. Monsanto hires detectives to chase farmers who might be engaging in such "theft."

3. Encourages Biopiracy "Biopiracy" is the theft of biodiversity and indigenous knowledge through patents. Biopiracy deprives the South in three ways

* It creates a false claim to novelty and invention, even though the knowledge has evolved since ancient times. Thus, biopiracy is intellectual theft, which robs Third World people of their creativity and their intellectual resources.

* It diverts scarce biological resources to monopoly control of corporations, depriving local communities and indigenous practitioners. Thus, biopiracy is resource theft from the poorest two thirds of humanity who depend on biodiversity for their livelihoods and basic needs.

* It creates market monopolies and excludes the original innovators from their rightful share of local, national, and inter-national markets. Instead of preventing this organized economic theft, WTO rules protect the powerful and punish the victims. In a dispute initiated by the United States against India, the WTO forced India to change its patent laws and grant exclusive marketing rights to foreign corporations on the basis of foreign patents. Since many of these patents are based on biopiracy, the WTO is in fact promoting piracy through patents.

Over time, the consequences of TRIPs for the South's biodiversity and southern people's rights to their diversity will be severe. No one will be able to produce or reproduce patented agricultural, medicinal, or animal products freely, thus eroding livelihoods of small producers and preventing the poor from using their own resources and knowledge to meet their basic needs of health and nutrition. Royalties for their use will have to be paid to the patentees and unauthorized production will be penalized, thus increasing the debt burden.

Indian farmers, traditional practitioners, and traders will lose their market share in local, national and global markets. For example, recently the U.S. government granted a patent for the anti-diabetic properties of karela, jamun, and brinjal to two nonresident Indians, Onkar S. Tomer and Kripanath Borah, and their colleague Peter Gloniski. The use of these substances for control of diabetes is everyday knowledge and practice in India. Their medical use is documented in authoritative treatises like the "Wealth of India," the "Compendium of Indian Medicinal Plants" and the "Treatise on Indian Medicinal Plants."

If there were only one or two cases of such false claims to invention on the basis of biopiracy, they could be called an error.

However, biopiracy is an epidemic. Neem, haldi, pepper, harar, bahera, amla, mustard, basmati, ginger, castor, jaramla, amaltas and new karela and jamun have all been patented. The problem is not, as was made out to be in the case of turmeric, an error made by a patent clerk. The problem is deep and systemic. And it calls for a systemic change, not case-by-case challenges.

Some have suggested that biopiracy happens because Indian knowledge is not documented. That is far from true. Indigenous knowledge in India has been systematically documented, and this in fact has made piracy easier. And even the folk knowledge orally held by local communities deserves to be recognized as collective, cumulative innovation. The ignorance of such knowledge in the United States should not be allowed to treat piracy as invention.

The potential costs of biopiracy to the Third World poor are very high since two thirds of the people in the South depend on free access to biodiversity for their livelihoods and needs. Seventy percent of seed in India is saved or shared farmers' seed; 70 percent of healing is based on indigenous medicine using local plants.

If a patent system that is supposed to reward inventiveness and creativity systematically rewards piracy, if a patent system fails to honestly apply criteria of novelty and non-obviousness in the granting of patents related to indigenous knowledge, then the system is flawed, and it needs to change. It cannot be the basis of granting patents or establishing exclusive marketing rights. The problem of biopiracy is a result of Western-style IPR systems, not the absence of such IPR systems in India. Therefore, the implementation of TRIPs, which is based on the U.S.-style patent regimes, should be immediately stopped and its review started.

The survival of the anachronistic Art. 102 of the U.S. Patent Law thus enables the United States to pirate knowledge freely from other countries, patent it, and then fiercely protect this stolen knowledge as "intellectual property." Knowledge flows freely into the United States but is prevented from flowing freely out of the United States. If biopiracy is to stop, then the U.S. patent laws must change, and Article 102 must be redrafted to recognize prior art of other countries. This is especially important given that U.S. patent laws have been globalized through the TRIPs agreement of the WTO.

Upcoming Review of TRIPs

In 1999, Article 27.3 (b) of the TRIPs agreement is scheduled to come up for review. This is the article that most directly impacts indigenous knowledge because it relates to living resources and biodiversity. In the year 2000, countries can also call for an amendment of TRIPs as a whole.

The review and amendment of TRIPs should begin with an examination of the deficiencies and weakness of western-style IPS systems. Instead of being pressured, as India has been, to implement a perverse IPR system through TRIPs, developing countries should lead a campaign in the WTO for review and amendment of the system. In the meantime, these countries should freeze the implementation of TRIPs. While TRIPs implementation is frozen, they should make domestic laws that protect indigenous knowledge as the common property of the people, and as a national heritage.

The implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) enables us to do this. Because CBD is also an international treaty, protecting indigenous knowledge via a Biodiversity Act does not violate international obligations. In fact, removing the inconsistencies between TRIPs and CBD should be an important part of the international campaign for the review and amendment of TRIPs.

Piracy of indigenous knowledge will continue until patent laws directly address this issue, exclude patents on indigenous knowledge and trivial modifications of it, and create sui generis systems for the protection of collective, cumulative innovation.

The protection of diverse knowledge systems requires a diversity of IPR systems, including systems that do not reduce knowledge and innovation to private property for monopolistic profits. Systems of common property in knowledge need to be evolved for preserving the integrity of indigenous knowledge systems on the basis of which our everyday survival is based.

Neither TRIPs nor the U.S. patent law recognize knowledge as a "commons," nor do they recognize the collective, cumulative innovation embodied in indigenous knowledge systems. Thus, if indigenous knowledge is to be protected, then TRIPs and U.S. patent laws must change. Nothing less than an overhaul of western-style IPR systems with their intrinsic weaknesses will stop the epidemic of biopiracy. And if biopiracy is not stopped, the every day survival of ordinary Indians will be threatened, as over time our indigenous knowledge and resources will be used to make patented commodities for global trade. Global corporate profits will grow at the cost of the food rights, health rights, and knowledge rights of one billion Indians, two thirds of whom are too poor to meet their needs through the global market place.

Patents on indigenous knowledge and uses of plants is an "enclosure" of the intellectual and biological commons on which the poor depend. Robbed of their rights and entitlements to freely use nature's capital because that is the only capital they have access to, the poor in the Third World will be pushed to extinction. Like the diverse species on which they depend, they too are a threatened species.

Citizens' Movements

"No patents on life" movements and movements against biopiracy are already strong in the North and South. These citizens initiatives need to be the basis of the TRIPs to exclude life from patents and IPR monopolies. In India, Navdanya (the movement for conservation of native seeds) has catalyzed broad-based alliances for food freedom and seed freedom with farmers' groups, women's groups, and environmental groups. The Bija Satyagraha or Seed Satyagraha is the non-cooperation movement against patents on life, genetic engineering of crops and corporate monopolies in agriculture. The "Jaiv Panchayat" movement or the Living Democracy movement focuses on the protection of all species and for local democratic control on biodiversity and indigenous knowledge.

During Freedom Week, August 9-15, 1999, the Living Democracy movement from more than 500 village communities sent notices to biopirates such as W.R. Grace, which has claimed the use of neem as pesticide as its invention; Monsanto, whose subsidiary Calgene has patents on mustard and castor; and RiceTec, which has a patent on basmati. Notices have also been sent to the WTO for overstepping its jurisdiction

because under traditional legal systems and under the Indian Constitution, the local community (gram sabha) is the highest competent authority on matters related to biodiversity.

Another peoples' organization, Hamara Roti, Hamara Azadi (Our Bread, Our Freedom), brings together environmentalists, women farmers, workers, and students. The coalition is increasing awareness of corporations such as Monsanto and Cargill, which are trying to control Indian agriculture and are destroying millions of livelihoods in food production and food processing destroying the rich biological and cultural diversity of our agricultural and food systems, and destroying the ecologically sustainable consumption patterns. On August 13, 1999, protestors at the Delhi offices of Monsanto and Cargill demanded that the corporations divest from India and stop their ecocide and genocide.

The TRIPs agreement has an impact on biodiversity and thus subverts our democratic rights to our biodiversity and indigenous knowledge. Biodiversity should stay in the hands of local communities. This is a right recognized in our traditions and enshrined in our Constitution. The WTO is destroying our democratic decision-making structures by forcing the government to undo the Panchayati rights of the people in decentralized democratic structures through the implementation of TRIPs. Our campaign for the review of TRIPs will be to designate the gram sabha, or local community, as the competent authority for the defense of biodiversity and the protection of indigenous knowledge as collective and cumulative innovation.

CONCLUSION

The real millennium round for the WTO is the beginning of a new democratic debate about the future of the earth and the future of its people. The centralized, undemocratic rules and structures of the WTO that are establishing global corporate rule based on monopolies and monocultures need to give way to an earth democracy supported by decentralization and diversity. The rights of all species and the rights of all peoples must come before the rights of corporations to make limitless profits through limitless destruction.

Free trade is not leading to freedom. It is leading to slavery. Diverse life forms are being enslaved through patents on life, farmers are being enslaved into high-tech slavery, and countries are being enslaved into debt and dependence and destruction of their domestic economies.

We want a new millennium based on economic democracy, not economic totalitarianism. The future is possible for humans and other species only if the principles of competition, organized greed, commodification of all life, monocultures and monopolies, and centralized global corporate control of our daily lives enshrined in the WTO are replaced by the principles of protection of people and nature, the obligation of giving and sharing diversity, and the decentralization and self-organization enshrined in our diverse cultures and national constitutions.

The WTO rules violate principles of human rights and ecological survival. They violate rules of justice and sustainability. They are rules of warfare against the people and the

planet. t Changing these rules is the most important democratic and human rights struggle of our times. It is a matter of survival.

November 12, 2002

In Praise Of Cowdung By Vandana Shiva

In India we worship cow dung as Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. Gobur-dhan puja is literally the worship of gobur (cowdung) dhan (wealth).

Cow dung is worshipped because it is the source of renewal of soil fertility and hence the sustainability of human society. The cow has been made sacred in India because it is a keystone species for agro-ecosystems -- it is key to the sustainability of agriculture.

When Monsanto and biotech industry spokesmen parading as “farmers” presented me with cow dung at the WSSD in Johannesburg, I accepted their "award" as a tribute to organic farming and sustainable agriculture.

The small farmers convergence at the W.S.S.D. with farmers from across Africa rejected GMO’s, and chemicals and committed themselves to organic farming, and defense of farmers rights. They are freely choosing seeds they can save and technologies that are sustainable. Farmers organizations in India and in Africa are saying “no” to GMO’s on the basis of their freedom to choose to be organic which means being free of genetic contamination that results from GM crops. Genetic contamination robs farmers of their freedom to be GM free. Patients and intellectual property rights on seed rob farmers of their freedom to save, exchange, develop seed. Farmers are treated as “thieves” and “criminals” for exercising farmers rights. The worst example is that of Parcy Schmeiser whose canola fields were contaminated by Monsanto’s GM canola and he was sued for “theft” of genes. That is why those of us who farm organically and want to maintain our freedom to farm and uphold farmers rights are resisting the irresponsible corporations which are trying to own life on earth, including seed, contaminate our crops and food and have total control over farming and farmers.

GM seeds and chemicals are a threat to farmers survival, a threat to consumer health and a threat to the environment. Farmers in Punjab and Andhra Pradesh are committing suicides because the costly seeds and chemicals from corporations like Monsanto/Mahyco have pushed them into deep, unpayable debt.

The claims of Monsanto and its apologists like Swaminathan Iyer (who called me a “Green Killer” in the Times of India on 22nd Sept 2002, because I practise and promote organic farming) that GM can feed the world is totally false. Monsanto’s Bt cotton has failed across India in its first year of commercial planting. In Khargone in Madhya Pradesh Bt is a 100% failure and farmers are demanding compensation. In Maharastra, the Bt crop has failed on 30,000 hec and farmers are asking for Rs. 500 crore compensation. In Gujarat, in Bhavnagar, Surendranagar and Rajkot Bt cotton has been destroyed by a heavy infestation of bollworm, the pest for whose control the toxin producing Bt. gene has been engineered into cotton. The genetically engineered Bt cotton is not a miracle, it is a fraud on farmers.

In Rajasthan, the hybrid corn which Monsanto claims will give 20 – 50 quintals per acre is giving 1.5 to 1.7 quintals per acre while demanding intensive water and chemical use, aggravating the draught and famine.

The pseudo scientific claims of irresponsible biotech corporations like Monsanto are killing our farmers, our agriculture, our biodiversity.

Organic agriculture is increasing farm productivity by 2 to 3 times, increasing farmers incomes, and protecting public health and the environment. That is why the Time Magazine identified Navdanya as a pioneer for the new century and stated that “In India atleast, Navdanya sets an eco-friendly standard that agribusiness must show it can out perform. The challenge for genetic engineers is to create seeds adapted to particular locales that enable farmers to reduce, not increase, the use of chemicals” (Time, Aug 26, 2002, “Seeds of self Reliance, p 36)

Monsanto and its lobbyists profit by selling and promoting poisonous, toxic seeds and corporate control. Movements like Navdanya celebrate biodiversity, farmers freedom and cow dung. The corporations and corporate spokespeople are getting desperate because people are seeing through their lies and deceptions. With organic farming growing worldwide, and the failures and non-sustainability of genetic engineering and chemical engineering becoming evident, the chemical corporate lobby is getting desperate. I view their personal assaults on me as a symptom of the desperation caused by the failure of non-sustainable industrial, corporate agriculture in removing hunger or improving farmers livelihoods. Sustainable systems are growing because they offer real solutions to the hunger and poverty crisis. And cow dung, biomass and biodiversity are at the heart of sustainability and the non-violent organic alternative to genetic engineering and chemicals.

Ecologically the cow has been central to Indian civilization. Both materially an conceptually the world of Indian agriculture has built its sustainability on maintaining the integrity of the cow, considering her inviolable and sacred, seeing her as the mother of the prosperity of food systems. The integration of livestock with farming has been the secret of sustainable agriculture. Livestock perform a critical function in the food chain by converting organic matter into a form that can be easily used by plants. According to K.M. Munshi, India's first agriculture minister after independence, "The mother cow and the Nandi are not worshipped in vain. They are the primeval agents who enrich the soil - nature's great land transformers - who supply organic matter which, after treatment, becomes nutrient matter of the greatest importance. In India, tradition, religious sentiment and economic needs have tried to maintain a cattle population large enough to maintain the cycle, only if we know it ”

A century ago, Sir Alfred Howard, the father of modern sustainable farming wrote in his classic, An Agricultural Testament, that, 'In the agriculture of Asia we find ourselves confronted with a system of peasant farming which, in the essentials, soon became stabilized. What is happening today in the small fields of India and China took place many centuries ago. The agricultural practices of the Orient have passed the supreme test - they are almost as permanent as those of the primeval forest, of the prairie, or of the ocean.

Howard identified the principles of sustainable agriculture as those of renewability as seen in the primeval forest. The agricultural Testament is a record of practices that had maintained the soil fertility of India over centuries. Historical records indicate that the alluvial soils of the Gangetic plains have produced fair crops year after year, without falling in fertility. According to Howard, this has been possible because a perfect balance had been reached between the manurial requirements of crops harvested and natural processes which recuperate fertility. The conservation of soil fertility has been achieved through a combination of mixed and rotational cropping with leguminous crops, a balance between livestock and crops, shallow and light ploughing, and organic manuring.

That is why we organize the Howard Memorial Lectures on 2nd October as a remembrance of India as the source of non-violent, sustainable agriculture. This year's lecture was given by Fukuoka, the Japanese agriculture thinker and chaired by Dr.

Tewolde Egziabher, the Ethiopian Environment Minister who has led the Biosafety negotiations in the United Nations.

Howard saw in India's peasants a knowledge of farming far more advanced than that of the west. He recognized the secret of India's sustainable land use as lying in the return of organic matter and humus to the soil. A balance between livestock and crops was always kept in order to maintain the food cycle and return organic matter to the soil. The method of mixed cropping is part of the adaptation of nature's ways in which cereal crops like millet, wheat, barley and maize are mixed with pulses, providing nutrition to give better results than monocultures; Howard notes that, “Here we have another instance where the peasants of the East have anticipated and acted upon the solution of one of the problems which western science is only now beginning to recognize.” Biodiversity conservation and organic agriculture is increasing food output by 200-300%. Biodiversity intensification rather than chemical intensification is the way forward for Indian agriculture. Organic farming is necessary to increase food production and strengthen food security, conserve natural resources -- soil, water, biodiversity, improve farmers incomes and well being, protect rural livelihoods, prevent indebtedness, and stop debt linked farm suicides. It creates freedom from debt, domination and disease.

Corporations are creating poverty by diverting the hard earned income of peasants and farmers to the seed/pesticide industry. The new seeds besides being costly are also ecologically vulnerable to pests and diseases leading to more crop failures and higher use of chemicals. These are killer technologies which are undesirable and unnecessary.

The corporate hijack of agriculture is based on pseudo science and false claims. The violent technologies of genetic engineering and toxic pesticides, and the dishonest, deceitful promotion of these poverty creating capital intensive and non-sustainable technologies is leading to the death of our farmers and the destruction of our ecological security and food security. These are primitive, crude and obsolete technologies that are efficient in destruction, not production.

The agriculture technologies of the future have to work for people, not corporations, they have to work with nature, not against nature. If farmers and farming have to have a future, it has to be organic. Neither the planet nor the poor can afford the waste, inefficiency, deceit, pollution and violence of chemicals and genetic engineering.

Sur le mouvement CHIPKO

Lessons from the mountains

A WISE person once said that forestry is not about trees. It is about people. No one has realised this more than the women of the Uttarakhand region. Everyone by now knows about the Chipko Movement. But not many know about the women of the Uttarakhand region who have made it their lifetime mission to leave undestroyed forests for their children and grandchildren. One has known old women and men who, towards the end of their lives, would plant trees which would bear fruits only many years later. When questioned these old people are known to have replied, "I won't be here to taste the fruits of this tree. But my grandchildren and their children would taste its fruits." The women of Uttarakhand would understand this sentiment for this has been their way of looking at the forests and the lives they support.

One woman whom future generations in Uttarakhand are not likely to forget is Gaura Devi who has mobilised the women of this region to protect their natural heritage. Gaura Devi was not educated in the conventional sense of the term. She had not attended any school. Born in 1925 in a tribal Marchha family of Laata village in Neeti valley of Chamoli district, she was only trained in her family's traditional wool trade. In keeping with the tradition of those days, she was married off at a young age. She went to a family which had some land and was also in the wool trade. Unfortunately at the young age of 22, Gaura Devi became a widow with a two-and-a-half year old child to bring up. She took over the family's wool trade and brought up her son Chandra Singh alone. In time, she handed over the family responsibility to her son but did not sit back to rest. She was aware of the poverty of the region and how it affected women and how her own experiences of survival had taught her a lot. She was actively involved in the panchayat and other community endeavours. Hence, it was not surprising that the women of Reni approached her in the wake of the Chipko Movement in 1972, to be the president of the Mahila Mangal Dal. It was the first of its kind to be established. Its responsibilities were ensuring cleanliness in the village and the protection of community forests. Gaura Devi was in her late forties and her son was not doing very well. But she had no hesitation in accepting their offer.

The awareness generated by the Chipko Movement had already spread in all the areas of the region. Gaura Devi took up several campaigns to spread awareness in the nearby villages. Not only did the women but everyone in that region realised what the forests meant to them. Gaura Devi always referred to the forests as their gods. So the people of Reni were quick to react when the government authorised the felling of the trees in the belt and gave the job to contractors. They held demonstrations of protest. But little did they know that the date for the felling had already been fixed. It was fixed for March 25, 1974. That day, a group of forest officials along with some labourers started moving towards the forests. A young girl saw them and she went running back to report to Gaura Devi. That day there were no men in the village. All of them had gone to Chamoli. Undaunted, Gaura Devi and 27 women of Reni village began to march towards the forests. Soon they reached the group of men and their labourers who were cooking their food. Initially they tried to reason with them and told the labourers to leave after they ate their food. The officials who were already a bit drunk began to hurl obscenities at Gaura Devi and her group of women and told the labourers to go ahead and cut the trees. They were then told in no uncertain terms that if they attempted any such thing the women would cling to the trees. One of the officials who was drunk brandished a gun. The

women stood in a row, each one of them looking as if the mountain goddess Nanda Devi had taken one of her fierce forms. They then chased the labourers for nearly two kilometres and broke the cement bridge leading to the forests. A group of them sat guarding the rest of the men and kept vigil throughout the night.

The men of the village who had gone to Chamoli had heard from some people about the proposed plan to fell trees in their area. They were sure that on their return they would find an entire belt of destroyed forest. But the women of Reni proved them wrong. Reni had not surrendered because its women had not and it was a victory.

The next day, the leader of the Chipko Movement came to Reni. Gaura Devi told them what had happened. She also told them not to report on the officials of the Forest Department and complain about their obnoxious behaviour and about the gun that was brandished at them. She did not want them to lose their jobs.

Not many in Reni would forget that day's drama and Gaura Devi's part in that. Gaura Devi led more protests and rallied together more women. Being illiterate, she was not invited and asked about her views on preservation of forests by policy-makers. Nor were the women of Reni helped in ways which would help them to continue their work of creating awareness. The only way they were helped in the name of sustainable development was being given training to prepare soyabean, sweetmeats, potato chips and preservation of fruit, which, of course, the men who are part of the movement did not have to learn. This training took them nowhere for they had no practical knowledge of business or the market. With no help from the block office or from any other agency in the area, all this training did not benefit them in any way. In fact, nobody would have known about Gaura Devi but for a book brought out by the Himalayan Action Research Centre and the Society for Participatory Research in Asia.

In July 1991, at the age of 66, Gaura Devi died quietly in the mountain village of Reni. Her story will be told to many generations of mountain children by the women and men of that village. Maybe then the policy-makers will realise that the women of Reni are meant for better things than making potato chips and preserving fruit.

C.S. LAKSHMI

visit the 30th Anniversary page

Gaura Devi, 1925-1991During the activist phase of Chipko in the 1970s, the courage and vigilance of Uttarakhandi women saved many forests and earned them a hallowed place in the history of the global environmental movement. Most prominent amongst these women was Lata village's own Gaura Devi who led the first all-women action to save their community forest in March 1974. As a widow with no formal education, Gaura Devi would nevertheless assume leadership of the village Mahila Mangal Dal and work tireless on behalf of her community long beyond those fateful few days when the axemen were chased away. Her example would be repeated by countless women who would come to form the backbone of the Chipko movement.

Gaura Devi's story was recently detailed in the wonderful little booklet, "Emancipated Women-Folk of Uttarakhand", brought out by the Himalayan Action Research Centre, Dehradun. An abridged version was recounted by C.S. Lakshmi in her Hindu article, Lessons from the Mountains: The Story of Gaura Devi. Here is a short excerpt:

"A WISE person once said that forestry is not about trees. It is about people. No one has realised this more than the women of the Uttarakhand region. Everyone by now knows about the Chipko Movement. But not many know about the women of the Uttarakhand region who have made it their lifetime mission to leave undestroyed forests for their children and grandchildren... One woman whom future generations in Uttarakhand are not likely to forget is Gaura Devi who has mobilised the women of this region to protect their natural heritage."

The Reni forest action has also been detailed by many scholars. Here is a short account drawn from C. Küchli's The Forests of Hope - Stories of Regeneration and P. Routledge's Terrains of Resistance: Nonviolent Social Movements and Contestation of Place in India:

"It was in 1974 that women began to play an active role in the Chipko Movement. In that year, at a site above the village of Reni overlooking the Alaknanda River near the Tibetan border, the Forest Department granted a concession to fell 2,500 trees. Chandi Prashad Bhatt subsequently informed the contractor that Chipko activists in concert with village representatives organized by local leader Govind Singh Rawat would intercede to block the felling. But on the day that a crew arrived to begin cutting trees, Bhatt and his fellow DGSM activists found themselves busy in Gopeshwar with a visit from high-level forestry officials, while the men from Reni were occupied in the district capital of Chamoli, where it seemed that the army had finally got round to paying compensation for land which it had held since the conflict with China.

Were the authorities trying to manipulate events? If so, they had failed to reckon with the women of Reni. On their way to the approach road leading to the forest, the crew was seen by a small girl, who rushed to tell Gaura Devi, the head of the village Mahila Mangal Dal. Gaura Devi quickly mobilized 27 women and girls in the village, and together they went to the forest and confronted the lumbermen. Standing in front of the trees that had been marked for felling, Gaura Devi addressed the men: "Brothers! This forest is the source of our livelihood. If you destroy it, the mountain will come tumbling down onto our village." She then placed herself in front of a gun brandished by one of the men. "This forest nurtures us like a mother; you will only be able to use your axes on it if you shoot me first." Initially met with abuse and threats, the women refused to move out of the way of the lumbermen. Composed of mountain farmers from Himachal Pradesh who understood only too well what Gaura Devi was talking about, the lumbermen quickly lost heart. After a three day stand off, they finally withdrew without having accomplished their task.

The Reni action was important for the Chipko movement in two ways. First, it was the first occasion where women participated in a major way and in the absence of men and DGSM workers. As Gaura Devi recounted: "It was not a question of planned organization of the women for the movement, rather it happened spontaneously. Our men were out of the village so we had to come forward and protect the trees. We have no quarrel with anybody, but only wanted to make the people understand that our existence is tied with the forests".

Second, the government could no longer treat the Chipko movement as merely the reaction of local industry deprived of raw materials. From this action, Chipko was to emerge as a peasant movement in defense of traditional forest rights, continuing a century-long tradition of resistance to state encroachment."

More about ChipkoMuch has been written about the world famous Chipko that brought universal attention to the Uttarakhand Himalayas during the 1970s and 1980s. As a diverse movement with diverse experiences, strategies, and motivations, Chipko itself inspired environmentalists both nationally and globally and contributed substantially to the emerging philosophies of

ecofeminism and deep ecology and fields of community-based conservation and sustainable mountain development. A bibliography of some of the most readily available materials with links provided for online resources has been included below:

Narratives

Berreman, G. (1985). Chipko: Nonviolent direct action to save the Himalayas. South Asian Bulletin, 5(2), 8-13.

Guha, R. (2000). The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Expanded ed.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Küchli, C. (1997). India: Resolving conflicts to protect Siva's locks, The Forests of Hope - Stories of Regeneration. London: Earthscan.

Mishra, A., & Tripathi, S. (1978). Chipko movement: Uttarakhand women's bid to save forest wealth. New Delhi: People's Action/Gandhi Book House.

Routledge, P. (1993). The Chipko Movement, Terrains of Resistance: Nonviolent Social Movements and Contestation of Place in India. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.

Shiva, V., & Bandyopadhyay, J. (1986). Chipko: India's civilisational response to the forest crisis. New Delhi: INTACH.

Weber, T. (1987). Hugging the trees: the story of the Chipko movement. New Delhi: Viking.

Focus on Chandi Prasad Bhatt & Sunderlal Bahuguna

Goldsmith, K. (1997, March/April). A Gentle Warrior: Sunderlal Bahuguna. Resurgence, 181.

Guha, R. (2002, June 2). A Gandhian in Garhwal. The Hindu.

Shepard, M. (1987). “Hug the Trees!” Chandi Prasad Bhatt and the Chipko Movement, Gandhi Today: A Report on Mahatma Gandhi’s Successors. Washington, D.C.: Seven Locks Press.

Focus on the Women of Chipko

Joshi, G. (1982, September). The Chipko movement and women. PUCL Bulletin.

Kunwar, C. (Ed.). (1997). Emancipated Women-Folk of Uttarakhand. Dehradun: Himalayan Action Research Centre.

Lakshmi, C.S. (2000, May 21). Lessons from the Mountains: The Story of Gaura Devi. The Hindu.

Lakshmi, C.S. (2003, September 7). Emerging Voices. The Hindu.

Lane, C. (199?). Women as the Backbone of Chipko. ES.

Rawat, R. (1996). Women of Uttarakhand: On the Frontier of the Environmental Struggle. Ursus, 7(1), 8-13.

Mehta, M. (1991, September/October). The Invisible Female: The Women of the UP Hills. Himal, 13-15.

Sharma, K. (1987). Women in struggle: the role and participation of women in the Chipko movement in Uttarakhand region of Uttar Pradesh. New Delhi: Centre for Women's Development Studies.

Shiva, V. (1989). Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. London: Zed Books.

Critical Analysis

Aryal, M. (1994, January/February). Axing Chipko. Himal, 8-23.

Bandyopadhyay, J. (1999). Chipko Movement: of Floated Myths and Flouted Realities. Economic and Political Weekly, April 10-16.

Bandyopadhyay, J. (1993). Chipko's triumphs extend beyond the forest. Down to Earth, 1(23).

Chakraborty, S. (1999). A critique of social movements in India : experiences of Chipko, Uttarakhand, and Fishworkers' movement. New Delhi: Indian Social Institute.

James, G. A. (2000). Ethical and Religious Dimensions of Chipko Resistance. In C. K. Chapple & M. E. Tucker (Eds.), Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions.

Karan, P. (1994). Environmental Movements in India. Geological Review, 84(1), 32-41.

Mawdsley, E. (1998). After Chipko: From Environment to Region in Uttaranchal. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 25(4), 36-54.

Mitra, A. (1993). Chipko: an unfinished mission. Down to Earth, 1(23).

Rangan, H. (2000). of Myths and Movements: Rewriting Chipko into Himalayan History. London: Verso.

Tremblay, P.A. (1995). Le sens de la tradition: réflexion sur le mouvement Chipko. In J. Dufour, J. L. Klein, M. U. Proulx, A. Rada-Donath (Eds.) L’Éthique du développement: entre l’éphémère et le durable, Chicoutimi: UQAC-GRIR.

Legacy of Chipko

PANOS. (2003). Voices from the Mountain: Oral Testimonies from Uttaranchal and Himachal Pradesh, India. London: Panos Institute.

Dogra, B. (2000). Linking Environmental Protection to People's Livelihood. Frontier, 33(15), 6.

Dogra, B. (2002, June 5). Whither the Chipko years? The fading gains of Himalayan conservation. Inter Press Service.

Dogra, B. (2003, July). Women at the wheel. Humanscape.

Kapoor, A. (2000, February). Hill women succeed where government fails. Humanscape.

Negi, B. (2001, August 8). Chipko once again. The Hindustan Times.

Nelson, B. (1993, Summer). Chipko Revisited. Whole Earth Review, 116-123.

link http://bostonglobalaction.net/UK/nandadevi/chipko.html

“Hug the Trees!” Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Gaura Devi, and the Chipko Movement

By Mark ShepardExcerpted and adapted from the book Gandhi Today: A Report on Mahatma Gandhi’s Successors, Simple Productions, Arcata, California, 1987, reprinted by Seven Locks Press, Washington, D.C., 1987; and printed in an earlier version in Coevolution Quarterly (later named Whole Earth Review), Fall 1981

For more resources, visit Mark Shepard’s Gandhi Page at www.markshep.com/nonviolence

Copyright © 1981, 1987, 1998 Mark Shepard. May be freely copied and shared for any noncommercial purpose as long as no text is altered or omitted.

Chandi Prasad Bhatt, 1978. Photo by Mark Shepard.

Gaura Devi, 1978. Photo by Anupam Mishra.

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.

—Gandhi

At the time of my India visit, I knew next to nothing about the rapid destruction of forests in Third World countries, or about its costs in terms of firewood shortage, soil erosion, weather shifts, and famine. Still, I was at once intrigued at hearing about the Chipko Movement—mountain villagers stopping lumber companies from clear-cutting mountain slopes by issuing a call to “hug the trees.”So, one Fall morning in 1978—along with a Gandhian friend, a young

engineer—I found myself on the bus out of Rishikesh, following the river Ganges toward its source.

Before long we had left the crowded plains behind and were climbing into the Himalayas. Thick forest covered the mountain slopes, interrupted only occasionally by terraced fields reaching dramatically up the mountainsides. Our bus bumped along a winding road halfway between the river below and the peaks above, as it followed the river’s meanders around the sides of mountains.

This was the Uttarakhand—the name given to the Himalayas of Uttar Pradesh state, lying against India’s border with Chinese-ruled Tibet. A major source of timber and water power, this was a region of vast natural riches—in contrast to the poverty of the people living there.

Yet even the forest riches of the Uttarakhand might have their limits. After an hour or two of the ride, the forests within sight of the road were becoming noticeably thinner. Still later we could see deep gashes running up the sides of the mountains.

“Landslides,” my friend explained.At some points the bus came upon debris piled up at the edges of the

road; and several times the bus had to drive over debris not yet cleared away. The slopes were increasingly bare.

It was completely dark when we spotted the lights of the small town of Gopeshwar, birthplace of the Chipko Movement. There we would hear that movement’s story from one of its founders, Chandi Prasad Bhatt.

* * *Chandi Prasad was raised in Gopeshwar—a very small village, during

his youth. Farmland was scarce in the overpopulated mountains, and so were jobs. Like most men of the mountain villages, Chandi Prasad was eventually forced to work in the plains, becoming a ticket clerk in Rishikesh for the bus company.

Chandi Prasad felt deeply concerned over the plight of the mountain people as a whole, and he often walked through the mountains to talk to the villagers about their problems. Among the most important, of course, were the shortages in farmland and jobs. But added to these were oppressive government policies concerning the forests.

The villagers depended on the forests for firewood, fodder for their cattle, and wood for their houses and farm tools. But the government restricted huge areas of forest from their use, and then auctioned off the trees to lumber companies and industries from the plains—a practice inherited with little change from the British colonialists. Because of these restrictions and an ever-growing population, the mountain women found themselves walking hours each day just to gather firewood and fodder.

In 1956, Chandi Prasad found hope when he heard a speech by the Gandhian leader Jayaprakash Narayan, who was on a tour of the area. Chandi Prasad and other young people launched themselves into the Gandhian campaigns, organizing villages for economic development and fighting liquor abuse throughout the Uttarakhand.

Then, in 1962, a brief border war between India and China brought drastic change to the Uttarakhand. Though the region had not itself been involved in the conflict, the Indian government wanted to secure more tightly all its territory bordering China. For the Uttarakhand, this entailed a program of rapid economic development.

Road-building began throughout the region. Lumbering operations escalated as the roads brought remote forests into easier reach. Towns grew as workers arrived from the plains.

The mountain people didn’t benefit much from this development, though they were meant to. Construction work was assigned to contractors from the plains, who brought with them skilled and semiskilled laborers. The mountain people themselves were hired only for jobs such as hauling rocks, and were paid next to nothing. Meanwhile, the increase in population and lumbering made it even harder for the mountain women to find their firewood and fodder.

Chandi Prasad and other Gandhian workers decided to tackle the problem of job discrimination. They organized a labor cooperative, with 30 full-time members and 700 part-time, which bid for and won several contracts to build sections of road. On these jobs, the co-op was able to pay double the wages paid by outside contractors to their own workers.

But the co-op soon found hurdles placed in its way. For instance, its completed jobs were undervalued by government assessors, causing the co-op to lose money. It seemed the co-op’s practices and success had offended some people. The co-op was faced with the choice of either losing more money or greasing the palms of government officials. Instead, it decided to stop building roads.

The workers formed a new organization, the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh (“Dasholi Society for Village Self-Rule;” Dasholi is the administrative area around Gopeshwar). The aim of the Sangh was to start small industries using the resources of the forests. Its first project was a small workshop making farm tools for local use.

After a while, the workers decided to bid for trees from the local forests. Large lots of trees were sold by the state Forest Department through the “contractor system,” which awarded the trees to the highest bidder, with the purchase price going to the state government. Sometimes the Forest Department sold selected trees, marked for felling; at other times, it sold the rights to a marked area, which was then clear-cut. Normally the contracts went to large businesses from the plains, which took the trees to the plains for sale and for factory use.

With money borrowed from the community, the Sangh over time bid for and won four small contracts, selling some of the wood locally and the rest in the plains. Within a few years the number of full-time workers in the Sangh had increased from 30 to over 200.

But the big contractors seemed determined to halt the competition. They began to overbid on the contracts, while making up their losses by

illegally cutting extra trees. Again the workers were forced to turn elsewhere.

The workers had better luck with a plan to buy and market herbs collected by mountain gatherers—herbs that were normally sold to plains traders, who made exaggerated profits on resale. The Sangh was able to pay much higher prices to the gatherers, and even drove up the prices paid by other traders.

Encouraged by this success, the Sangh next built a small processing plant to make resin and turpentine from pine sap—one of eight such processing plants being set up in the region with help from the federal government. But again the Sangh ran into discrimination, when the state Forest Department refused to allot adequate supplies of pine sap to the eight plants, or to allow the plants to buy the sap at the same price paid by a partly government-owned producer in the plains.

In 1970, the workers encountered another consequence of official forest policy—this one more grim than any they had faced before.

During that year’s monsoon rain, the Alakhnanda River rose 60 feet, flooding hundreds of square miles. The waters swept away hundreds of homes—including one entire village—as well as 30 passenger-laden buses and five major bridges. Almost 200 people died. When the waters reached the plains, over 100 miles downstream, they dropped silt that clogged nearly 100 miles of canal, halting irrigation and power production in the northern part of the state for six months before the residue could be cleared.

Workers from the Sangh mounted a relief operation for mountain villages marooned by the flood. During the operation, the workers tried to discover what had caused the flood, by talking to the villagers and making their own observations.

It became clear that this disaster was not strictly natural.The chief cause, the Sangh workers decided, was the commercial

lumbering that had expanded so dramatically after the war with China. When mountain slopes were cleared of trees, rains washed away the topsoil, leaving the soil and rocks underneath to crumble and fall, in landslides. Much of the soil from the mountain slopes was deposited in the rivers below, raising the water level and forming temporary dams that could burst under pressure. At the same time, the bare slopes allowed much more rain to run off directly into the river. The end result was floods.

Forest Department officials allotted trees without regard to these effects, which they didn’t seem aware of. On top of that, contractors regularly bribed the forest rangers to let them take trees beyond their allotment. The Forest Department had a program of replanting cleared slopes, but it was inadequate; so bare slopes usually remained bare.

Another cause contributing to floods was road building, which often resulted in landslides when proper construction methods were neglected.

The mountain people themselves were not blameless. They had bared many slopes while gathering firewood and fodder and while grazing their livestock, either not realizing or not caring much about the effects of their actions. Of course, they were forced to meet their survival needs from areas limited by the government—which became harder to do

as the population grew. Besides that, the government policies made the villagers feel the forests did not belong to them—that the government merely allowed them to live there—which discouraged any sense of responsibility the villagers might have for preserving the forests.

The Sangh workers prepared a report of their findings and submitted it to the government. It brought no response. But the workers themselves had learned a lesson they would not forget: The same forest policy that denied them fair use of forest resources was gradually destroying their mountain home.

* * *In October 1971, the Sangh workers held a demonstration in

Gopeshwar to protest the policies of the Forest Department. They demanded that the department abolish the contractor system and instead award contracts to local cooperatives—to generate jobs for the mountain people while halting the contractors’ illegal felling practices. They also demanded an end to discrimination in the supply of pine sap, and enough access to the forests so that the mountain people could meet their needs.

Over the next year, the Sangh workers pressed their demands through a press campaign and talks with high officials. None of this seemed to bear fruit. In late 1972, more rallies and marches were held, but these too failed to bring results. The thoughts of the Sangh workers turned toward direct action.

Meanwhile, the Sangh received a fresh blow: The Forest Department turned down the Sangh’s annual request for ash trees for its farm tools workshop. The department then allotted some of the same ash trees to the Simon Company, a sporting goods manufacturer from the plains. Tennis rackets took priority over plows!

In March 1973, two Simon Company agents arrived in Gopeshwar to supervise the cutting of the trees. Told there was no hotel, they applied for lodging at the guest rooms of—the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh.

When the agents told the Sangh workers who they were and what their business was in town, the workers were stunned. But they quickly remembered their traditional hospitality and helped the visitors settle into their rooms. Then they rushed off to tell Chandi Prasad Bhatt.

The news hit Chandi Prasad hard. He declared, “Let them know we will not allow the felling of a single tree. When their men raise their axes, we will embrace the trees to protect them.”

A few days later, a public meeting was held in the courtyard of the Sangh compound to discuss the situation. A number of ideas were advanced: barring entrance to the forest, stopping the truck from hauling away trees by lying in front of it, cutting the trees ahead of time, or even burning them.

Finally, Chandi Prasad said, “Our aim is not to destroy the trees but to preserve them. When the men go to cut them, why don’t we cling to the trees, and dare them to let their axes fall on our backs?” (Chipko means “hug,” or “cling to.”) As he described it, he locked his hands together in a posture of embrace.

The people were at first stunned by the novelty of the idea. Then they began to shout their agreement: Yes, they would hug the trees! They drew up a resolution announcing their plan, to be sent to government officials. The Simon Company agents, who had been allowed into the meeting, watched in consternation.

Several weeks later, the Sangh workers learned that the trees were marked and were about to be felled. On the appointed day, Sangh workers and others marched in procession out of Gopeshwar toward Mandal forest, where the marked trees stood. Accompanied by the beat of drums, they sang traditional songs voicing their concern for their natural home. When they reached Mandal village, just below the forest, a rally of about 100 people was held.

The lumbermen were already in the forest waiting for their employers. The Simon Company agents had collected their final permit from officials in Gopeshwar and were on their way to the forest. But when they reached Mandal village, they were so unnerved to see the animated crowd, they abandoned their plans and withdrew without the trees!

Following this, Forest Department officials tried to bargain with the Sangh workers: The Sangh could have one ash tree if it allowed the Simon Company its full quota. The Sangh refused.

The officials raised the offer to two ash trees; then three; then five. Finally, the offer reached ten trees—the Sangh’s original request.

But the Sangh workers were unwilling to allow the Simon Company its quota at any price. The issue was no longer only whether the Sangh would get trees for its farm tools workshop. At issue now was an entire government forest policy more concerned about outside businesses than about the people who lived among the forests. The allotment of trees to the Simon Company was a glaring symbol of that policy’s injustice.

Finally, the government gave in. The Simon Company’s permit was canceled, and the trees were assigned to the Sangh instead.

Soon after, the government also announced it was ending the discrimination in pine sap supplies. But that same month, the Sangh workers learned that the Simon Company had been allotted a new set of ash trees, in the Phata forest, in another part of the district.

Chandi Prasad and another worker rushed to the Phata area to tell the villagers about the Simon Company’s plans and about the new Chipko Movement. The villagers formed an action committee and set up a continuous watch over the approach to the forest. Simon Company agents had already reached the area, and they watched these preparations. After a few days, they once again retreated from the scene.

But the company wasn’t ready to give up the trees, and its permit was good for six months.

In December, more Simon Company employees arrived in Phata with a new strategy. They visited all the villages in the area, threatening the villagers with harsh treatment by the law if they tried to stop the tree-felling. They also claimed that the Chipko leaders were only interested in bribes from the company.

The Simon Company agents were invited to present their viewpoint at a rally called by Chipko leaders. With Chandi Prasad sitting by, the

agents tried to intimidate the mountain people with threats and insults. But it was no use. The villagers declared they would protect the trees.

As the rally ended, word spread that the government was showing a movie that night in a nearby town. A movie is a special treat for the mountain people; so, that evening, many of the villagers and Chipko workers went into town to see it. But when they arrived, they found out the film van hadn’t come, and the movie had been canceled. They were then stuck in town for the night, since the mountain buses didn’t run so late.

When they returned next morning, they were alarmed to hear that men with axes and saws had been seen heading toward the forest.

The Chipko leaders quickly organized a procession, which marched toward the forest to the beat of drums. When the villagers reached the forest, they found that the lumbermen had run away—but had left behind five felled ash trees.

The villagers were dismayed to see the fallen trees. But they soon resolved that the Simon Company would not remove the trees from the forest. A round-the-clock vigil was set up.

A few days later, Simon Company employees tried once more to remove the trees, but retreated when they came upon the Chipko people.

After a week’s vigilance by the villagers, the Simon Company’s permit expired. The company had failed to obtain a single tree.

* * *Though the Chipko workers were elated by this victory, there was a

much greater challenge to come.A few months earlier, the Sangh workers had had a fresh reminder

of the lessons of the Alakhnanda flood. Disastrous flooding had struck the Mandakini, another major river of the region.

Experts and policymakers in the plains were starting to notice that floods from the Himalayas were becoming steadily worse, and some even saw the connection between human actions and these “natural” disasters. But this awareness failed to reach the people managing the forests. The Forest Department knew only how to allot trees according to principles unchanged for a century—principles that protected the forests from the mountain people, not from the administrators.

The Chipko people knew this, but still they were shocked by what came next. Just months after the Mandakini flood, the Forest Department announced an auction of almost 2,500 trees in the Reni forest—a forest overlooking the Alakhnanda River. The lessons of that river’s previous flood had been completely ignored.

Chandi Prasad quickly set out for the villages in the Reni area.In one village, a gathering he spoke to faced the mountain where the

forest was to be cut, its peak already ravaged by tree-felling and landslides. Chandi Prasad reminded the villagers of the flood of 1970. He asked if there wouldn’t be more landslides and worse floods once the remaining forests on the mountain were cut down.

The villagers nodded agreement. But one of them rose and said they themselves had just marked those trees for the Forest Department.

Chandi Prasad was dismayed. “In that case,” he told them, “you might as well have cut the trees yourselves.”

The villagers protested: The government had paid them to do it. How could they refuse?

Chandi Prasad said, “And if the government paid you to cut down the trees, would you do that too?”

There was a silence. Then one of the villagers said, “No, we would not cut down the trees. But how can we stop others?”

To their amazement, Chandi Prasad explained that they could save the forest by hugging the trees. After more talk, the villagers agreed.

And so did villagers in other places Chandi Prasad visited. After he left the area, two of his colleagues living there continued to spread the message of Chipko.

The auction was scheduled for the beginning of January in Dehra Dun, a city in the plains. Chandi Prasad went to Dehra Dun shortly before the auction. First he contacted Forest Department officials. He told them about the danger of landslides and floods from cutting the forest, and he pleaded with them to cancel the auction. The officials ignored him.

Chandi Prasad next appealed to the contractors’ agents gathering in the city. He warned them that the winning contractor would have to face the resistance of the Chipko Movement. The agents refused to take him seriously. They had heard about the Chipko Movement—but it was one thing to protect a few ash trees, and another to save a whole forest!

The only people who gave Chandi Prasad a sympathetic hearing were a group of students, who proposed to disrupt the auction. But Chandi Prasad couldn’t approve such methods. So the students instead printed leaflets and posted them around the auction hall. On the morning of the auction, Chandi Prasad stood at the door of the auction hall and pointed to a posted leaflet as the contractors’ agents entered the hall. But their response was the same as before.

At the end of the auction, Chandi Prasad told an employee of the winning contractor that his company would face the Chipko Movement at Reni. Then he returned to Gopeshwar.

Over the next few months, gatherings and rallies were held throughout the Reni area to prepare the people for what was to come.

In mid-March, the first group of contractors’ laborers arrived in a town close by the Reni forest to wait for a final permit to enter the area. The villagers and Chipko workers waited tensely for the confrontation.

A week later, government officials made a surprise announcement: Compensation for land taken over for military purposes after the China war would be paid out in Chamoli, a town some distance from Reni. The morning after the announcement, the Reni men rushed to Chamoli to collect their money. After all, they had been pressing for payment for fourteen years! Meanwhile, Chandi Prasad—who had not heard about the announcement—was being held up in Gopeshwar by a visit from a high-level Forest Department official, who had developed a sudden interest in the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh.

That morning, the contractors’ men, along with forest officials and a company agent, climbed onto a rented bus and were driven from the town toward Reni forest. Shutters were drawn over the bus windows so no one

could see in—though the departure of the village men had left most of the valley deserted. The bus stopped short of the village of Reni, and the men took a roundabout path to avoid the village.

But a little girl spotted the men marching toward the forest and ran to tell Gaura Devi, an elderly leader of the village women. Gaura Devi rushed around the village, calling the other women away from their cooking. Within minutes, about 30 women and children were hurrying toward the forest.

They soon caught up with the men, who had made camp and were preparing lunch. The women pleaded with them not to cut down the forest and explained what it would mean to the village if they did. They asked the men to return to the village after finishing their meal and wait to talk to the village men.

Some of the men seemed ready to respond to the women’s pleas; but others had been drinking. The drunk ones tried to take liberties with the women, or cursed at them for trying to interfere with their work.

One of the drunks came staggering toward the women with a gun. Gaura Devi stood in front of him, bared her breast, and said, “This forest is like our mother. You will have to shoot me before you can cut it down.”

At this, the sober men decided they had best leave. They started back down the path out of the forest, while the women kept up their appeal to the drunken ones. Meanwhile, the women spotted a new batch of laborers moving up the path with bags of rations. Some of the women ran to meet them and pleaded with them to go back. The laborers agreed to leave the ration bags where they were and to leave the forest once they had finished the meal prepared for them. They were soon on their way back.

Finally, the drunken men began to sober up and realized there were very few of them left in the forest. They too started back, with the women helping to carry their tools, some distance behind.

At one spot in the path, there was a concrete slab bridging a gap left by a previous landslide. After passing over the slab, the women used the laborers’ tools to dislodge it and send it crashing down the slope, cutting off access to the forest.

All night the women sat by the severed end of the path, holding vigil over the forest above and the men huddling by their ration bags below.

The next morning the village men and Chipko workers arrived by bus. They had already learned about the government’s deceit and then about the women’s surprise victory. Chandi Prasad assured the frightened company men and forest officials that the villagers meant them no harm but only wanted to protect their forest.

The women told the village men their story; but, at this point, they didn’t mention the drunkenness of some of the men, or about the gun. After all, they didn’t want the offenders to lose their jobs.

* * *Over the next month, rallies were held at the site, and a constant

watch was kept over the forest. Meanwhile, the mountain women’s story caught the attention of the Indian public and created an outcry for the

protection of the Reni forest. The government responded to all this with official protests to the Chipko workers and public denunciations of the movement.

But finally Chandi Prasad was called to the state capital to meet with the chief minister. The chief minister agreed to set up a committee of experts to investigate the situation. When this was announced, the contractor withdrew his men from Reni to wait for the committee’s decision.

The committee took over two years to finish its report—but its findings were even better than the Chipko workers had at first hoped they might be. The committee said that the Reni forest was a “sensitive area,” and that no trees should be cut—not only in the Reni forest but also in a larger section of the Alakhnanda watershed that included Reni.

On the basis of the report, the government put a ten-year ban on all tree-felling in an area of over 450 square miles.

The victory at Reni was followed by other successes. In 1977, the Chipko workers learned that forests were being auctioned in an area next to the one protected by the government ban. They asked the Forest Department to send representatives along with Chipko workers to inspect the region. They also warned the department that a Chipko campaign would be launched if the department failed to take account of what it found there.

Following the investigation, another 100 square miles were added to the protected area.

In 1978, Forest Department officials reversed the order of events: They informed Chandi Prasad that they wanted to auction trees in two forests in other parts of the district. They asked him to inspect the forests and tell them if their plans were all right. At the time of my visit, it looked likely that this would lead to protection for another 40 square miles of forest.

Since 1975, the Chipko workers have been not only protecting forest slopes, but restoring bare ones as well. By 1981, over a million trees had been planted through their efforts. Besides the local and immediate benefits, this reforestation has been helping to determine what trees and planting techniques might work best in the region as a whole.

The Chipko workers have also tried to develop methods of forest farming, both to conserve the forests and to create employment. In all these efforts, they have paid special attention to involving the mountain villagers themselves in the care of the trees.

* * *At the time of my visit, the Chipko Movement had sprouted

“branches” in most of the districts of the Uttarakhand, and it seemed likely to spread to other regions as well. Conditions like those in the Uttarakhand were found throughout the Himalayas, both in India and in neighboring countries.

“We hope that movements like ours will slow the deterioration of the mountains and let people know the need to change cutting policies,” Chandi Prasad told me. But he believed it would take a massive

reforestation effort—funded and coordinated by the national government over decades—to save the Indian Himalayas as a home and source of forest resources.

Such an effort was vital not only to the mountain people but also to those in the plains. India had a critical shortage of trees nationwide and relied on the Himalayan forests as a permanent source of wood and wood products. Also, floods in the plains, fed by waters from the Himalayas, were becoming more and more severe. (Shortly before my arrival in India, Bihar and surrounding areas were hit by the worst flood in India’s recorded history—thousands of people killed, a million homes destroyed, and millions of acres of farmland covered with sand. The waters came from the Himalayas.)

These issues were vital—yet, as Chandi Prasad stressed to me, Chipko was more than an ecology movement.

“The main goal of our movement,” he said, “is not saving trees, but the judicious use of trees.”

In a general sense, the Chipko Movement stood for the basic right of a community to control and benefit from the resources of its own home. Although three decades had passed since India had been a colony, the Uttarakhand was still treated as one.

So the Chipko Movement continued to press for a complete remaking of forest policy. Besides the protection of sensitive mountain slopes, it demanded that the resources of the mountain forests benefit the mountain people, by providing jobs and supplying survival needs. What’s more, it insisted that the mountain people be given an active role in managing their own forests.

Not that the movement wanted to reserve all benefits of the forests for the mountain people. “We respect the needs of people in the plains for the products of our forests,” Chandi Prasad said. But the Chipko people believed that even those needs could be better met if the forests were managed by those who lived among the forests and cared for them.

Outside control of the Uttarakhand’s resources had led to their irresponsible use and gradual destruction. In the end, the issues of ecology and community right to resources were closely intertwined.

There was yet one more element to the Chipko Movement that Chandi Prasad wanted to point out: a concern over the basic direction of modern society, over its relentless drive toward progress at any price.

“Our movement goes beyond the erosion of the land, to the erosion of human values,” he said.

“The center of all this is humankind. If we are not in a good relationship with the environment, the environment will be destroyed, and we will lose our ground. But if you halt the erosion of humankind, humankind will halt the erosion of the soil.”

* * *

Update

In the Himalayan home of the Chipko Movement, the struggle for indigenous rights and environmental responsibility has evolved into the equally impressive Nanda Devi movement. For more info, visit www.nandadevi.org.

More on the Chipko MovementHugging the Trees: The Story of the Chipko Movement, by Thomas

Weber, Viking Penguin, New Delhi, 1988.The Chipko Movement, by Anupam Mishra and Satyendra Tripathi,

People’s Action/Gandhi Peace Foundation, New Delhi, 1978.Hugging the Himalayas: The Chipko Experience, edited by S. S. Kunwar,

Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal, Gopeshwar, Uttar Pradesh, India, 1982. A collection of pieces by various writers.

Gandhi Today: A Report on Mahatma Gandhi’s Successors, Simple Productions, Arcata, California, 1987 (reprinted by Seven Locks Press, Washington, D.C., 1987). The source of this article.

Contact Info

Envelopes should be addressed in all capital letters.

Chandi Prasad Bhatt Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal Gopeshwar Chamoli Dt. Uttar Pradesh INDIA

Though my research focused on the Chipko Movement as it grew up around Gopeshwar, there is another important branch founded and led by long-time Gandhian activist Sunderlal Bahuguna:

Sunderlal Bahuguna Navajeevan Ashram P.O. Silyara Tehri-Garhwal Uttar Pradesh 249 155 INDIA

http://uttarakhand.prayaga.org/chipko.html

.

View of Chamoli Girl pounding coarse grain

The forested hills

Historical BackgroundThe Uttarakhand region of Uttar Pradesh, India consists of Kumaon and Garhwal that are also the major ethnocultural groups of that area. The two lands persisted as independent feudal kingdoms until they fell to Gurkha expansionism in 1795 and 1803 respectively. For twelve years, the cruel overlords pillaged the land of resources. Deforestation began in earnest as the conquerors plundered the best trees of the lower foothills. Villagers also abandoned their terraced fields to escape like their Nepali brethren from the ravages of the Gurkha forces. Following the Anglo-Gurkha war of 1816, these areas were ceded and incorporated into British India. This change did not bode well for the forests. Though depredations against the forests had occurred before, organized commercial logging to feed Britain's industrial revolution would severely impact the Uttarakhand Himalayas. Large tracts of forested land were granted for agricultural usage. The needs of the British colonial state also resulted in systemic timber harvesting. Extensive railroad construction felled the slow-growing but luxuriant deodar or Himalayan cedar trees.

By the turn of this century, colonial commercial interests were replacing old growth forests with chir-pine plantations for resin extraction purposes. Later, the colonial government felled these same trees by the hundreds of thousands during both The Chipko movement of India's Himalayan foothills has gained enormous fame throughout the world's environmentalist circles for its successful efforts against deforestation. Chipko, which means literally "to embrace", has spread to many other parts of India and has drawn worldwide attention for its ingenious methods of civil disobedience including clinging to trees.

Women have played a prominent if not pivotal role in the struggle. Dependent on fuel wood for household needs, women throughout the subcontinent have seen wood collection become increasingly difficult over the last several decades. The lengthier forage time has stressed many village women to the point of physical exhaustion and incurred enormous hardship in their already difficult lives. The retreat of India's forest

cover has been particularly acute in the Himalayan region where it is also necessary for stemming landslides, waterborne soil erosion, and flooding. As such, hill women have borne the brunt of this modern assault on their natural resources and livelihoods. Environmental degradation and the longstanding outmigration of hill men in search of employment to the plains have combined to dramatically alter Himalayan society, pushing women into new roles by undermining the social and ecological structure that once ordered their lives. The combination of such pressures and the timely organizing talents of Gandhian activists inspired such women to assert their rights and challenge the