Bad Seeds

By Denise Caruso, AlterNet. Posted August 23, 2004.

In less skillful hands, a film about genetically modified (GM) food could have been tough sledding for regular folks to sit through. Making visual sense of the science alone would be a daunting task. But The Future of Food is an engaging and lucid presentation of not only the science of genetic engineering, but of the people and the politics behind what looks to be a pitched battle to control the global food supply.

Deborah Koons Garcia, a long-time documentary filmmaker (and wife of the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia), spent the past three years writing, directing and producing Food for her Mill Valley, CA-based Lily Films. The idea for the film came after her award-winning educational series "All About Babies," an in-depth examination of the first two years of a child's life. She's had a lifelong concern about how food is grown, and "I always wanted to make a big film about agriculture that was as thorough as 'Babies,'" said Garcia.

She has said that her goal in making the film was to produce a cross between Silent Spring – Rachel Carson's historic shot-heard-'round-the-world about the dangers of chemical pesticides – and The Battle of Algiers, the 1965 film by Gillo Pontecorvo that became a training film for the Black Panthers as well as those who opposed the Vietnam War.

And it's true, The Future of Food makes no secret of its desire to see GM seed and food removed from the food supply. But its rendition of the science of genetic modification (and its potential risks) is clear and accurate. And the many startling facts that it presents about both the agriculture industry and the U.S. government, which continues to prop it up with taxpayer subsidies, make the film very difficult for a reasonable person to dismiss as mere anti-GM propaganda.

Fear of a Modified Planet

In farming, a monoculture is the result of cultivating a single plant variety over a large area of land. Monocultures make a single strain of plant – one particular variety of soybean, for example, out of the hundreds that may exist – particularly vulnerable to being wiped out by a single pest, microbial infection or some other environmental stressor, like an unseasonable heat wave or cold snap.

In fact, according to the film, a monoculture caused the 1845 potato blight and subsequent famine in Ireland that killed a million people. When the same blight hit Peru, where potatoes originated and many different strains are still grown, its effect was far less devastating.

One of the hazards that has already come to pass with GM crops is that seeds from modified, "transgenic" plants are contaminating fields planted with traditional, non-GM crops. History provides ample evidence that this type of contamination and other unintentional plantings of GM seed may gradually create dangerous, invasive species-type monocultures on many of the most fertile, diverse and productive crop lands in the world.

"A single genotype that's preferential crowds out diversity, and that is a threat to food security," says one of the scientists interviewed in the film. "Without access to genetic resources, we will have challenges we cannot solve."

And while this is a frightening enough proposition, it becomes clear in The Future of Food that there are other, equally insidious "monocultures" involved in this story.

The second, more figurative monoculture is developing as a result of consolidation in the food supply chain. Today only four clusters of seed companies provide seed to farmers around the world. In the last decade, this consolidation has started to happen in the retail sector too. Within the next 10 years, one expert estimates, all retail food will come from six American firms. This level of corporate control means we'll have virtually no choice about what's on our store shelves.

As another scientist in the film says, "Whoever controls the seed, controls the food."

The third and possibly most frightening monoculture is the political one that Garcia details. It has already contaminated most of what could pass as public discourse, and it's co-evolved between government regulators and industry – industry, in the case of GM food, meaning primarily the Monsanto Company.

Denise Caruso is the former technology columnist for The New York Times and serves on the board of the Independent Media Institute, the parent organization of AlterNet. Her book, Redefining Risk in the Post-Genome World, will be published by Doubleday in 2005.

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