The Future Of Food, an 88 minute long documentary, released in 2004, and directed by Deborah Koons Garcia, wife of the late founder of the 1960s rock band, The Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, is a film that rehashes many of the same points made in the earlier films, yet also goes a bit more deeply, penetrating into the web of how Monsanto, and other agribusiness giants weave a web of control and oligopoly that reverberates up and down the food chain, and puts the squeeze on the small, family farmer, even waging a war on them. The film shows how a Canadian farmer named Percy Schmeiser stood up to Monsanto and was ruined by a corrupt Canadian judiciary (although, if one follows the link provided, it seems that Schmeiser actually got the upper hand in 2008!).
The film also details how these corporate thugs, mostly in the petrochemical and insecticide and herbicide industries, have cornered the market in the seed industry, and how ridiculous patent laws have allowed the first company with the idea to patent natural plants to do so, and how they have tried to standardize patent laws worldwide so that an American or French company could somehow dictate the agricultural and food policies of developing and Third World nations, in a sort of corporate colonialism that is bound to engender not only health, but political, problems in the future. The destruction of native cultures is just part of the problem, for the larger issue is the absurdity of patenting life itself, and stating that Crop X belongs to a foreign company, thus allowing foreign interests to lay economic and legal rights to products they had no part in cultivating, while also allowing these unevolved and monoculture crops great range and susceptibility to droughts and pests they cannot fight off, for even Monsanto's Round Up Ready soy beans are showing their limitations as a food source, whereas Mexico's natal and diverse forms of corn, which occasionally remix with wild and progenitor breeds prove hardier and more resistant than the genetically modified corn from north of the border.
The film also brings to light what is called the Terminator Gene that has been developed in certain crops, which was designed so that limits on crops could more easily maintain crop process. The utter folly of this, were these strains to become dominant, is that famine would be rampant, and the very development of such a gene, alone, should be enough to convince any legislative body of the folly of allowing corporate empty suits to have any say in the vital national security issue of feeding the masses. All in all, The Future Of Food is likely the best and most information rich of these documentaries in conveying the scope and depth of the issues surrounding America's insane agricultural process.
The film also details how these corporate thugs, mostly in the petrochemical and insecticide and herbicide industries, have cornered the market in the seed industry, and how ridiculous patent laws have allowed the first company with the idea to patent natural plants to do so, and how they have tried to standardize patent laws worldwide so that an American or French company could somehow dictate the agricultural and food policies of developing and Third World nations, in a sort of corporate colonialism that is bound to engender not only health, but political, problems in the future. The destruction of native cultures is just part of the problem, for the larger issue is the absurdity of patenting life itself, and stating that Crop X belongs to a foreign company, thus allowing foreign interests to lay economic and legal rights to products they had no part in cultivating, while also allowing these unevolved and monoculture crops great range and susceptibility to droughts and pests they cannot fight off, for even Monsanto's Round Up Ready soy beans are showing their limitations as a food source, whereas Mexico's natal and diverse forms of corn, which occasionally remix with wild and progenitor breeds prove hardier and more resistant than the genetically modified corn from north of the border.
The film also brings to light what is called the Terminator Gene that has been developed in certain crops, which was designed so that limits on crops could more easily maintain crop process. The utter folly of this, were these strains to become dominant, is that famine would be rampant, and the very development of such a gene, alone, should be enough to convince any legislative body of the folly of allowing corporate empty suits to have any say in the vital national security issue of feeding the masses. All in all, The Future Of Food is likely the best and most information rich of these documentaries in conveying the scope and depth of the issues surrounding America's insane agricultural process.