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Documentary About GMS And Farmers' Suicides Screened At MIT


04/22/2013

Documentary about Genetically Modified seeds and farmers' suicides screened at MIT

Highlights cycle of debt caused by higher input costs and lock-in by seed companies

A screening of the documentary, Bitter Seeds, was held on Thu April 18 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with about 70 people in attendance. The documentary, set in the central-Indian region of Vidarbha, a cotton-growing area, has witnessed an alarming, but distressingly steady, spate of suicides by its farmers. It is estimated that there were upwards of 200,000 suicides between 1990 and 2000. More recently, there were reports of 7 farmer deaths in the first fortnight of 2013.

Bitter Seeds explores the future of how we grow things, weighing in on the worldwide debate over the changes created by industrial agriculture. Companies like the U.S.-based Monsanto claim that their genetically modified (GM) seeds offer the most effective solution to feeding the world's growing population, but on the ground, many small-scale farmers are losing their land. Nowhere is the situation more desperate than in India, where it is estimated that every 30 minutes one farmer in India, deep in debt and unable to provide for his family, commits suicide.

Bitter Seeds is the final film in director Micha X. Peled's Globalization Trilogy, following Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town and China Blue. The films won 18 international awards, aired on over 30 television channels and screened in more than 100 film festivals.

The screening was followed by a Q&A session as part of which Peled explained how, following the story of consumerism in his first film on Walmart (especially of apparels), he was led to China as a manufacturing hub for his second film, and then to India as the center of the raw material for those apparel, cotton. Asked whether more diversified cropping practices and less reliance on the mono-cropping could have altered the tragic consequences among farmers, Peled said: “The farmers in the Vidarbha region always planted multiple crops. However, what significantly changed from the past, especially with the arrival of Monsanto in 2002 into the Indian seed-market, was the dominance of bio-technologically engineered seeds (Bt Cotton).”

Pavan Vaidyanathan, a post-doctoral researcher at MIT, who was at the screening, said: “Bitter Seeds is an extremely well-made and sensitive movie. I found it extremely engaging. By focusing on the story of a single farmer family, Peled has succeeded in putting a human face to this sad situation and created an incredibly sensitive and nuanced portrayal of the problem. In the words of the late Roger Ebert: two thumbs firmly up!”

The screening was sponsored by the Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia and the Association for India's Development (MIT and Boston chapters). 



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Photo Credit: Umang Kumar










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