The World According to Monsanto
a documentary by Journalist Marie-Monique Robin
Monsanto started out as an old-fashioned chemical company, in the space-age days of “better living through chemistry.” Among its best-known products were Agent Orange, the deadly defoliant used in the Vietnam War, and PCBs, the nasty compound of highly toxic and polluting chemicals used in industrial coolants until they were banned in the ’70s.
Today, the company is best known for its agricultural products—notably Roundup, a widely used herbicide and insecticide—and for the large-scale proliferation of transgenic (genetically modified) crops, many of which are designed to be “Roundup-ready” in order to survive heavy spraying. As Robin shows, between Monsanto’s corporate power and their aggressive use of patent legislation, farming areas that adopt these practices are soon overtaken, with conventional crops being superseded and replaced by their transgenic cousins.
Monsanto has also succeeded in having its GMOs approved by the U.S. and other governments without any scientific testing. The film explains how, and takes the viewer around the world and through the last 80 years of history, showing Monsanto’s efforts at global domination and the effect they’ve had on small-scale farmers.
“I’ve been a reporter for 25 years,” Robin says when asked about the roots of the film. “I’m very interested in agriculture, in particular because I’m a farmer’s daughter. So it’s a subject I know quite well, and I’ve made films about agriculture just about everywhere in the world. About five years ago, I proposed three films to Arte, the German-French TV channel, about the issue of biodiversity.”
The three docs, about transgenic food, the history of wheat and the Argentinian soy-farming industry, ended up having an unexpected common thread. “Each time, Monsanto was involved,” Robin recalls. “So one day, I said to Arte, ‘Everywhere I go in the world, they talk to me about Monsanto. It would be interesting to make a portrait of this company.’”
“A great number of the company’s declassified documents are available online, because there have been a lot of lawsuits, so at some point they all became public—the reports and studies that the whistleblowers exposed,” Robin explains.
“So I dove in, and started finding out how they had hidden data, lied, manipulated—it’s incredible.
A couple of particular scoops are Clinton-era Food and Drug Administration officials who candidly, if at times reluctantly, admit that they gave official approval to GMOs under political pressure. “James Maryanski from the FDA, who’s never spoken about this in his life, spoke to me. And obviously he didn’t know what he was getting into—I think he just expected some French woman who didn’t know much about anything, and who would be easy to convince that there were no problems with GMOs. But I had all the declassified documents in hand. And in the interview, you can see him get quite unsettled.”
Monsanto’s argument to the FDA was based on the “principle of substantial equivalence,” the notion that GMOs are no different in content than conventional foods. “What I show in the film and the book,” says Robin, “is the scientific invalidity” of this principle.
“There was nothing scientific about it, absolutely nothing. It was a matter of approving GMOs very rapidly, which Monsanto was behind—with Michael Taylor acting as a lawyer for the FDA, who later became the vice president of Monsanto.” (The film details the revolving door between the U.S. government and Monsanto’s executive board, Donald Rumsfeld being the most high-profile example).
“And all the international regulations followed from this FDA decision, which means that the GMOs in your fields are Monsanto GMOs, 70 per cent of which are resistant to Roundup [and therefore] contain insecticide. They’ve never been tested. We’ve never tested the impact on food safety!” she exclaims. “In the United States, there’s been an explosion in food allergies in the last 10 years. One hypothesis is that it’s because of GMOs. But we don’t know, because there’s no way of tracing it!”
what we, as consumers and citizens, can do to make a change. “There are plenty of things you can do, but you have to act fast,” she answers without hesitation. “The first thing you have to do, as Canadian consumers, is what we Europeans have already done… which is labelling of [foods containing] GMOs.
“Twenty-two studies since the existence of GMOs show that 80 per cent of consumers want to have them labelled, so if consumers got what they wanted, and could choose like us, that would be the end of GMOs.”
The film’s less than glamorous subject, unabashed political stance, peculiar structure and demanding load of information could well scare the average viewer away. But it’s a film that should be seen as widely as possible, particularly by people who don’t think much about this kind of thing—drag them out if you have to.
eco-activist Vandana Shiva asserts: “The second Green Revolution has nothing to do with food security … it is about returns to Monsanto’s profits… patenting is the real aim. If you look at Monsanto’s research agenda, they are testing something like twenty crops at this point with BT (Bacillus thuringiensis) genes. There’s nothing that they are leaving untouched – the mustard, the okra, the rice, the brinjal (eggplant), the rice, the cauliflower – once they have established the norm that seed can be owned as their property, royalties can be collected, and we will depend on them for every seed we grow, for every crop we grow. If they control seed, they control food… it’s strategic, it’s more powerful than bombs, more powerful than guns, and it’s the best way to control the populations of the world.”
– from http://www.montrealmirror.com/