Monsanto, Monsanto, Monsanto

This weekend I attended a Friday Night Docs screening of The World According to Monsanto with my friend D. I'd seen it before, but it was a first screening for him. I've written about the documentary here before; it covers a lot of the same ground that Vanity Fair did in its own Monsanto exposé back in May. It's about as must-see as any documentary gets for a) anyone who eats, and b) anyone who's not entirely familiar with the issues concerning genetically modified organisms.

It's all over the internet and response to it seems to range from mild shock to outrage.

Farming in the news

Grist had a decent short article this past week on the United States' urgent need for more farmers. Farmers make up 1.6 percent of the US population right now, and onlyy 5.8 percent of those farmers are under the age of 35. Richard Heinberg addressed the same issue around a year and a half ago in one of his Museletters taken from a lecture he delivered to the E.F. Schumacher Society. The situation is no doubt pretty much the same in Canada, and with food shortages becoming more and more of a concern, and as the need for less oil-reliant agriculture continues to grow as we run out of fossil fuels, we can expect to hear about this a lot more.

The USDA has recently decided to eliminate a program used by everyone from environmental groups to industry and trade groups to trace the use and risk of pesticides. Scaled back in 2007, the collection and analysis of data on food crop pesticide usage in the US was regarded as the only ''reliable, plublicly searchable database of its kind'', according to an article in The Daily Green, which also points out that this comes at a time when herbicide use in Monsanto's near-monopoly of Roundup Ready crops has been increasing.

Vanity Fair's Monsanto article

Smack dab on the heels of the DVD release of award-winning French journalist and documentary filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin's Le Monde selon Monsanto (aka The World According to Monsanto), first aired on the French-German TV network ARTE, Vanity Fair's May issue features a scathing and comprehensive article exposing agribusiness bully Monsanto. It contains everything from personal accounts of their harrassment of farmers to story after story of Monsanto's lengthy history of hiding facts from the public about the toxicity of its products. It needs to be read by anybody not actively avoiding and condemning their products. Now the world's largest seed producer, Monsanto is sytematically snapping up the rest of the competition, company by company.

(The Robin documentary is a must-see, by the way. It's widely available across the internet (e.g. Google video, on different environmental/organic websites, et al.), either in streaming format or for download. It's also available for sale on ARTE's website.)