The University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC) has invited Vandana Shiva to speak on October 7th. According to a speaker booking website, her asking price for a lecture is a cool 100k. Let’s give UMKC the benefit of the doubt, and assume they got a deal. It is hard to imagine a price for this world famous charlatan that gives good value.
It is a safe bet that most of us have never heard of Vandana Shiva, and this is, on balance, a good thing. Shiva has earned a measure of fame and a great deal of fortune railing against the use of modern technology in agriculture.
She burst upon the scene by arguing that genetically modified cotton was causing hundreds of thousands of suicides amongst Indian farmers…. A 2011 study published in India found no correlation between genetically modified cotton seeds and farmer suicide, a conclusion which will surprise no one whose livelihood doesn’t depend on believing the opposite, at one hundred thousand dollars per Zoom call.
Agriculture owes a great debt to those who have worked so hard and so long to counter the arguments of Shiva and others against genetic engineering.
