UNITED STATES, September 14, 2005: The heroes and villains in “The Future of Food,” Deborah Koons Garcia’s sober, far-reaching attack against genetically modified foods, are clearly identified. The good guys, acknowledged in the film’s cursory final segment, are organic farmers along with a growing network of farmers’ markets around the United States that constitute a grass-roots resistance to the Goliath of agribusiness and the genetically engineered products it favors, begins this New York Times review. The bad guys in this film are large corporations, especially the Monsanto Company, a pioneer in the development of genetically engineered agricultural products. In recent years, Monsanto has patented seeds that yield crops whose chemical structures have been modified to ward off pests. The film poses many ethical and scientific questions such as: What are the long-term effects on humans of consuming genetically engineered food, which is still largely unlabeled in the United States? And, can the crossbreeding of wild and genetically modified plants be controlled? The overall attitude of Ms. Garcia might be summed up with the slogan “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”
Much of the film is devoted to Monsanto’s prosecution of Canadian farmers on whose property the company discovered traces of its patented Roundup Ready canola seed, which is genetically engineered to kill pests. Though the seed had drifted accidentally onto the farmers’ land, courts ruled that they had violated Monsanto’s patent and were liable for damages. In the mid-1990’s, Monsanto, the DuPont company and others bought the seed industry. Monsanto alone spent $8 billion investing in the notion that, as the film puts it, “whoever controls the seeds controls the food.” The movie points out the hand-in-hand relationship of multinational corporations and big government. One of the film’s revelations is its identification of the connections between Monsanto and top government officials who have been board members, consultants and executives for its subsidiaries.