Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply.

• Author: Sapon-Shevin, Dalia
• Position: Review

Vandana Shiva's Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, 2000. 146 pp. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, $12.60 (paper)

In Stolen Harvest, Vandana Shiva personalizes an already intimate topic--the food which becomes our very selves. Shiva's first book on genetic engineering, Biopiracy, used a more academic style of critical analysis of the biotechnology industry. A renowned thinker in the areas of opposition to globalization, defense of traditional culture, eco-feminism, and genetic engineering, she confronts and details a multitude of food-related issues with her trademark passion and down-to-earth style.

Stolen Harvest as a whole reads best as a collection of poignant yet separate case studies. Although the stories are powerful and well-researched, the work lacks cohesion. For those who have looked into the issues surrounding biotechnology, agricultural policy and global food supply extensively, this book may best serve as a refresher course. Those new to the subject, however, will find the book a well- told and galvanizing wake up call. While Biopiracy was more theoretical, in this work Shiva takes us right into the homes and fields of the poor people of India.

The picture that Shiva paints is a bleak one. As corporate agribusiness becomes more and more centralized, it becomes sharply apparent that genetic engineering is the technology of absolute control. Not only does the industry refuse to label genetically engineered produce in the United Sates, it punishes severely those who label their products as GE free.

Centralized control of agribusiness has always spelled trouble for American farmers. Genetic engineering is only the most recent incarnation of corporate control over agriculture. With the rise of biotechnology, we are seeing the virtual return of tenant farming at its most basic, most insidious level. In America in the 1930's, an ecological disaster was propagated by profit-driven agricultural practices. Landowners forced the farmers to grow soil-depleting cotton year after year, despite farmers' warnings that to stop crop rotation would be devastating to the soil. The "dust bowl," traditionally touted as a "natural" disaster, was in fact heavily impacted by the practices of the landowners.

In the farm crisis of the 1980's, agribusinesses effectively maintained their monopoly over farmers by selling seed, fertilizer and pesticides at inflated prices which drove farmers deeper and deeper into debt. Thousands of...