Title : The world according to Monsanto
Genre: Documental
Duration: 110 minutes
Year: 2008
Country: France
Direction, production and script: Marie-Monique Robin
Photography: Étienne Carton de Grammont, Bernard Cazedepats, Arnaud Mansir, Guillaume Martin y Frédéric Vassort
Assembly: Kathy O'Shea
Coproduction: Rachel Wexler
Music: Olivier Auriol
Assembly: Françoise Boulèque
Greg Sanderson and Nick Fraser
Sound: Jerome Boiteau, Anne Bourcier y Marc Duployer
Interveening: Marie-Monique Robin, David Carpenter, Robert Bellé, Jeremy Rifkin, Shiv Chopra, Steven Druker, Arpad Pusztai, Stanley Ewen, Robert Shapiro, Ian Pryne, Ignacio Chapela, Elena Álvarez Buylla, Roberto Galeano, George Bush y Dan Quayle
A flawless documentary, that hardly reaps rewards or awards for its audacity and poignancy. Of exquisite invoicing technique (it undertakes a hard theme, whilst managing to keep the viewer in tension throughout its structure), The World According to Monsanto stems from the basic principle of every documentary project: revelation.
Nothing we have heard about the nature of the agricultural products we eat resembles not even by surprise what this documentary exposes. A United States company that specializes in toxic chemicals (herbicides) made a killing in the Vietnam war with a defoliant poison called Agent Orange, which finished wreaking havoc to both the native Vietnamese population and American soldiers still with their skins exposed to the noxious agent.
After the war, Monsanto designed weapons for peace: herbicides rich in glyphosate and dioxins that killed all living plant species of the agricultural land, except the seeds planted (like this U.S. farmers could work less and lay off half their workers), bovine growth hormone (so that the U.S. calves took the form of Japanese sumo wrestlers and the farmers would invoice many more kilos of meat per animal) and seeds resistant to the effects of the sweeping herbicides ... A real kit to build a Monsanto farm in the American Midwest as if it were a farm from Famobil, and wait for the maximum expected dividends at the expense of minimum effort ... Not quite so; a significant percentage of the profits was allocated by contract to the provisioned company.
In the '80s, Monsanto was already a leader in the industry and decided to export its particular agricultural revolution worldwide, planting its flag in 46 countries of great agricultural tradition; another example of commercial imperialism that America has accustomed us to. The question is: Does this system really work that well? Does it make poor farmers rich? Do the new products offer the guarantees of the old ones? Don’t the cultivated lands resent the constant chemical bombardment? An expensive advertisement of brimming fields in bright sunshine, green everywhere, birds chirping and smiling children, is responsible for providing for a better world as stated by Monsanto.
“It’s ok”
The problems begin when Monsanto produces so many chemical things that it does not know how and where to dispose of its waste. Technicians seek landfills around the country and locate a very depressed region in Southern Alabama, Anniston, occupied by an African-American population living in shacks, without resources or employment or future.
To shorten their suffering in this ideal world, Monsanto brings these people of Anniston a gift of a giant landfill where waste is buried under layers of grass beds ... If they could or knew how to play golf, the residents of Anniston would have the largest course in the world. In a few years, the people of Anniston begin to die. Their blood dioxin concentration exceeds 30 times that of the normal population.
"It’s ok", states a representative of the company "Scientists have also detected dioxins in the blood of penguins and polar bears and they all live happily ..." But the doctors warn, with statistics in hand, that the risk of developing cancer or having heart and liver problems in Anniston is 300 times higher than in the rest of the United States population. Given the data, Monsanto stops to give explanations and decides to seize power. Lawyers, publicists and experts in human resources of the company access positions of responsibility of the FDA, the Supreme Court and the government itself. A Monsanto pin hangs from the lapel of the most influential politicians of the country along the shield of the nation. In an insulting tragic way, all complaints are filed, any investigation hindered and any friction between technicians or representatives of the company is punishable by dismissal and a sectarian mobbing, closer to the Italian omertà than the Anglo-Saxon professionalism.
To make matters worse, farmers confess that they are trapped by contracts obliging them to plant specific seeds, environmental technicians cry out as they verify the havoc the herbicides cause in the environment and the doctors set up compromising analysis.
Monsanto decided to turn the screw and invents (and patents) GM seeds "which will make the United States into the leading producer of biotechnology in the world" from the mouth of George Bush (father). Biologists put fault with the speed with which these seeds go from the laboratory to the export bags, skipping any regulatory process. Scientists at Monsanto dispute with false studies which emphasize that the seeds are, quote, "quite safe and bio-equivalent to the natural seeds”. In the documentary, European scientists demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the studies put forward by Monsanto and put their hands on their heads.
Foreign lawyers protest against the monopoly which the company holds worldwide. Then Marie-Monique Robin and her team ASTRE decide to travel the world colonized by Monsanto starting in a neighbouring country: Mexico. Biodiversity makes Mexico the country with more natural varieties of maize which the pollen of GM crops swept by the north wind, ends up polluting and generating unrecognizable mutant plants.
Worse in India, where Monsanto's GM cotton is done with large expanses of crops ruining many small farmers, whose only escape is suicide (and the reincarnation into a free farmer or other animal)...
So far, little future in Europe...
Monsanto tiptoes in Europe, he knows that Europeans are not so easy to convince (or trick) and that in France there is a television director who is making their lives difficult with her documentary. Marie-Monique Robin calls on the phone the director of the multinational if he wants to offer the companies point of view in her documentary. The business man declines and the filmmaker says good-bye telling him that the documentary has also become a bestselling book ... Both GM and Monsanto products have a bleak future in the European Union, at least within the law, but as Europeans we have the satisfaction of having fulfilled with our duty to report in a concise manner, rich in detail and of public interest.
More, every Wednesday at the end of the month at the Cau de la Vergonya of Barcelona, with documentaries committed to respecting nature and the environment. More information on www.eco-union.org http://cineforumbcn.wordpress.com and on the blog.
