At a @C40Cities event, environmental activist Vandana Shiva told Brut India why blaming Punjab's crop burning for city pollution might not be fair to farmers.
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00:00All the mountains of garbage which I never saw in my country as I was growing up, even
00:14till 20 years ago, huge mountains of garbage of aluminium and plastic are all packaging
00:19from that junk food.
00:20I think it's time to start making the polluters pay, those who pollute our bodies and those
00:26who pollute the environment outside.
00:45The crop burning issue is a diversion.
00:49It's a diversion and it's not explaining why farmers of Punjab burn their crops.
00:55In India we knew straw is a very important link between ourselves, our crops and the
01:01earth and our animals.
01:03Straw is used for recycling as organic matter but the chemical agriculture made short dwarf
01:10varieties to take up more chemicals so we could emit more greenhouse gases as synthetic
01:15fertilizers emissions.
01:17But more than that we've made the straw useless and now the farmers were told then to burn
01:23the crop but it's wrong to say it's crop burning that's the reason because they burn
01:27the crop in Punjab in November.
01:30The peak pollution of Delhi happens in December so it's time to not turn our eye away from
01:36fossil fuels, away from the chemicals from fossil fuels and criminalize the farmers more.
01:42In fact Monsanto is trying to use the crop burning to impose the end of the rice cultivation
01:49which was introduced as the green revolution in India and to introduce hybrid corn.
01:55That's not what India needs, that's not what Punjab needs.
01:58Punjab needs organic farming and biodiversity.
02:02The cities of India are polluted for two reasons.
02:06First we have pushed everything into the cities, everyone's driving long distance.
02:12Our local work has been shut down.
02:15We used to have in the front we worked, in the back we lived.
02:19All of that was shut down by new urban laws that criminalize your place of work and your
02:24place of living to be the same, something that's celebrated as mixed cities.
02:28But the real estate lobby is a toxic lobby, it's a cement lobby.
02:33It is not just mining our rivers for sand.
02:36It is not just mining our tribal areas for iron ore.
02:39It is mining old good buildings for making profits and tearing down of old buildings
02:44has released a huge amount of toxics in the atmosphere of Delhi.
02:49Never seen obesity in India, but India is now the capital of diabetes.
02:54Cancer is spreading.
02:56Junk diet is a diet designed to give you disease.
03:01On the other hand, all the mountains of garbage which I never saw in my country as I was growing
03:06up even till 20 years ago, huge mountains of garbage of aluminum and plastic are all
03:12packaging from that junk food.
03:13I think it's time to start making the polluters pay, those who pollute our bodies and those
03:19who pollute the environment outside.
03:21They are being rewarded by tax free holidays, they are being rewarded by free trade agreements
03:26that give them the rights to destroy our food culture, our food democracy and ecology.