Victims of pollution due to the spread of herbicides, the villagers are organising themselves in fighting against the destruction of their environment and to save their children’s lives.

The law of the strongest

Peasants driven off their land, soil pollution, deforestation, poisoning… what measure can weigh the social and environmental damage against profits generated by monocultures of GM soya? The film directors have given us the keys to understanding how a particularly destructive model of agricultural development has been imposed on Paraguay which counts itself as one of the world leaders in soya exports.  And that, via the unequal confrontation between on the one hand the big landowners producing soya arm in arm literally with agri-businesses and financial speculators, and on the other the poor peasants trying to defend their means of work and their way of life.  Faced with aggressive speeches from those supporters of the law of the strongest –who are strengthened in their convictions by scientific arguments that defend the interests of the market leaders in seed technology and chemical plant products– is  the force of despair from a traditional rural society for which GM soya is a curse.   In this universal struggle of ‘earthen pot’ against ‘the iron pot’ it is the logic of profit which wins, with the arrest of smallholders peasants for “illegal occupation of land” that often was theirs.

How will this struggle unfold?

http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/039922-000/les-semences-de-la-colere#details-description

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x13fx4r_les-semences-de-la-colere-1-2_webcam 

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x13foao_les-semences-de-la-colere-2-2_webcam

One can find over 200 articles or comments about GM crops as well as numerous information, interviews and reports in ARTE Future: http://future.arte.tv/fr/sujet/avons-nous-besoin-des-ogm

Commentaries about the film

It’d been good having subtitles in Spanish because it talks about Paraguay. We sense our unease belonging to the human race when we view the enormity of our stupidity. Would it be necessary to give up meat consumption of a grand scale production in order to think things over? For it’s always the strongest who are without scruples that win!  There are a pile of problems but this one is at the top of the list. What is unbearable is the speculation in legumes (in this case soya) where the human dimension is lacking. The world of hyper-production with maximum profit is destroying all the models based on self-sufficiency that human beings have taken centuries to refine. The modern model comprises a system of production-consumption that is neither good for living nor for the environment. It’s a madness leading to the extermination of the means of sharing and of a reasonable management of earth resources. All governments seem to be complicit in the means to gain wealth for the oligarchy (i.e. insurance companies, pension funds…) without stimulating a true and lasting vision for the future. What is the most unbearable is the passiveness of the researchers in the topic on which they only present the distorted speech of a so-called “scientific progress” shorn of all reality regarding social and environmental issues.

When will the politicians work mostly for the good of the general public? When will they stop playing this masquerade that is called “globalisation” but which is in reality nothing more than “feudalism”? If only Europe were to impose regulations whose main criteria were both social and environmental! If only she played proper politics!  

The main misfortune is that as long as this time bomb hasn’t gone off under the noses of Western consumers, nothing will stop and the collateral damage will have caused untold misery both human and environmental. Whether that be in Paraguay, France or anywhere in the world, the profits of the affluent will have the upper hand; and so it’s because from our childhood we are doomed to become “addicted” consumers, condemned to become consumers that are “hooked”, completely dependent to serve like soldiers in the interests of a speculative international war that dictates the world order and defines as well our rate of nutritional comfort and whose useless wastage is a part!  All this is at the detriment of human relations. Our rhythms of life will make us fall down after the small peasant farmers of these ‘factory’ countries.

I would have preferred to have a clean conscience having been born in those countries rather than in ours in which I increasingly understand why we are, with our American-style of life, marked out as the devils of the planet by other “not understood” cultures.

So there you have it; the only solution can be to prevent food speculation!   

See http://farmlandgrab.org/post/view/22459