Vandana Shiva On the Real Cause of World Hunger

Vandana Shiva articulates how the shift towards a high-cost, chemically-intensive agriculture has paradoxically led to increased hunger among agricultural communities, with a focus on the role of monocultures and international trade in depleting local nutritional resources. She advocates for a sustainable model of local food production and biodiversity to combat hunger, critiquing the use of food as a geopolitical tool and emphasizing the importance of redefining food systems around sustainability and rights to food. “…food production must once again be an issue of sustainability, taking care of the earth and the human right to food must be an inalienable right.” - Dr. Vandana Shiva Trained as a physicist, Vandana Shiva is an organic farmer, social activist and renowned environmentalist. She warns that global hunger is a product of “intensive chemical farming” which turns biodiverse land into monocultures that are too costly for farmers to sustain and produces too little nutritional crops for local consumption. In this 2009 interview, Vandana Shiva talks about third world countries like her native India where agricultural communities are surrounded by fertile farmland and highly favorable growing conditions yet struggle with high rates of childhood hunger. Much of the food grown by indigenous farmers are exported to richer countries.