‘Bitter Seeds’ documentary reveals tragic toll of GMOs in India
The film follows a plucky 18-year-old girl named Manjusha, whose
father was one of the quarter-million farmers who have committed suicide
in India in the last 16 years. As Grist and others
have reported, the motivations for these suicides follow a familiar
pattern: Farmers become trapped in a cycle of debt trying to make a
living growing Monsanto’s genetically engineered Bt cotton. They always
live close to the edge, but one season’s ruined crop can dash hopes of
ever paying back their loans, much less enabling their families to get
ahead. Manjusha’s father, like many other suicide victims, killed
himself by drinking the pesticide he spreads on his crops.
Why is Monsanto seen as responsible for these farmers’ desperation?
The company began selling Bt cotton in India in 2004, after a U.S.
challenge at the WTO forced India to adopt seed patenting, effectively
allowing Monsanto to monopolize the market. Bt cotton seeds were — and
still are — advertised heavily to illiterate Indian farmers, who have
bought the company’s promises of high yields and the material wealth
they bring. What the farmers didn’t know until it was too late is those
seeds require an expensive regimen of pesticides, and must be fertilized
and watered according to precise timetables. And since these farmers
lack irrigation systems, and must instead depend on
not-always-predictable rainfall, it’s incredibly difficult to control
the success or failure of any year’s crops. As farmers bought the Bt
cotton in droves, the conventional seed they’d been using — which needed
only cow dung as fertilizer — disappeared in as little as one season.
Now, in communities like Manjusha’s, it’s virtually impossible to buy
anything but Monsanto’s seed.
Manjusha, the film’s protagonist, goes looking for answers after her father commits suicide.
To pay for seeds, pesticides, and fertilizer, farmers must take out
loans, but most banks refuse to deal with them, so instead they turn to
moneylenders, who charge exorbitant interest rates. Many farmers have
nothing to offer as collateral besides their land. If a crop fails and
they can’t pay back the loans, they lose everything.
The film offers a glimmer of hope in Manjusha, an aspiring journalist
in a world where farmers’ daughters aren’t exactly encouraged to pursue
independent careers. Scenes of her first earnest attempts at reporting
are intimate and touching (“I had other questions to ask, but I
forgot”), and her commitment to telling the story of her family’s and
her community’s struggle always shines through her nervousness. This
appealing heroine makes a story of global manipulation more personal,
and thus more devastating.
Piece by piece, Bitter Seeds lays out the bleak situation in
India, using interviews with all players, from condescending seed sales
reps and callous Monsanto execs, to activist Vandana Shiva, to farmers, their families, and village old-timers who remember when life as an Indian cotton farmer was not so bitter.
Proponents hail GMO crops as a triumph of science over
nature that could provide a solution to world hunger. But this film
reveals a society of farmers whose way of life, and very lives, are
threatened. If GMOs have any benefits, it would be hard to convince me
that they outweigh the human costs portrayed in Bitter Seeds.
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