• Women Entrepreneur

A Ph.D. in physics at the University of Western Ontario, Shiva found herself in the midst of the Chipko movement in the 1970s. The movement, whose main participants were women, adopted the tactic of hugging trees to prevent their felling.

In 1982, Shiva created the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource. In 1984, when Punjab and Bhopal was rocked by violence due to the Green Revolution, she felt compelled to address the issue.

“There was always an argument that it will be impossible not to use chemicals and genetically modified seeds in farming. I did not want to spend a lifetime in debating this, so I started Navdanya to practice sustainable agriculture. Soon, we also ended up in the direct marketing space,” says Shiva. It was started with the recognition that India was losing its seed diversity, its plant genetic resources, and farmers their ability to farm without chemicals. Navdanya was converted into a trust in 1991.

The organization works at three levels: Saving biodiversity, for which it has set up 53 seed banks through out the country; practicing non-violent farming, which one does by growing different crops together; and direct marketing, where consumers buy produce straight from the farmers.

Shiva also runs a training school for farmers in Dehradun, where farmers are taught the nuances of organic farming. With its help, growers of organic cotton in Vidarbha, Maharashtra, are now earning 10 times more than those growing Bt cotton.

Empowering women also figures highly for Navdanya. “In the food sector, empowering women means reclaiming areas that have been lost. Women used to be the seed keepers, so when we set up seed banks and food processing, we placed them in the women’s hands. Economically, it has to do with women earning a livelihood for themselves,” Shiva said.

A strong critic of patents, Shiva feels that they have deterred the growth of entrepreneurship in the country. “A patent presents an exclusive right,” she says. “It prevents anyone else from developing or creating around the patented product. For seeds, the very community from whom the knowledge is taken is prevented from developing it. I fought the neem case; if we had not contested, we would not have had neem as an option for pest control. Patents stifle creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation.”

Shiva’s advice to budding entrepreneurs is to be wary of globalization: “In the frenzy globalization, it was assumed that the entrepreneur can only be linked with the global market. But the global market has collapsed, and there is much pain in the export-oriented sectors of India.”

Shiva says the key lesson here is that we cannot have our economic umbilical cord tied to an unstable global market. “You need a deep connection between decentralized production in India and decentralized consumption in the country, especially in the basic needs sector. About 1.2 billion people—no matter how poor they are—make up a very large market,” she says.

In the future, Shiva feels entrepreneurship in India would be conservation-oriented one, rather than a wasteful one. It would be involved with building robust local economies and not focus only on exports. “We are trying to build a network of embedded entrepreneurs,” says Shiva, “where a farmer is not just a grower of food but is also an entrepreneur.” According to her, three criteria for a strong, thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem are diversity, decentralization and fairness.

With food prices remaining high in developing countries, the United Nations estimates that the number of hungry people around the world could increase by 100 million in 2009 and pass the one billion mark. For Shiva biodiversity intensification that works with nature’s nutrient and water cycles, and not against them is the key.

©Entrepreneur December 2009

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chipko movement, entrepreneur, farmer, farming, green, green revolution, seed, Vandana Shiva