Marie-Monique Robin, “The World According to Monsanto / Le Monde selon Monsanto” (2008)
At issue in this informative documentary directed by the investigative journalist Marie-Monique Robin is Monsanto’s astounding record of environmental and food safety thuggery across the world and its collusion with and manipulation of governments, scientists and scientific research, not to mention the extraordinary extra-legal (and plain illegal) tactics and practices used, to dominate global agriculture. Robin opts for a hard-hitting approach with voice-over narration, interviews with US government officials, scientists, farmers, lawyers, activists and people affected by Monsanto’s activities and occasional animation and diagrams to detail the long history of Monsanto’s destructive practices in the pursuit of profit and domination of agriculture and food supply. Robin herself makes frequent appearances in the film.
Various examples of products made and promoted by Monsanto provide the meat, potatoes and structure of the documentary. Robin speaks to various people about the effects of Monsanto products such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), Roundup herbicide, transgenic crops and recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH): the results can be horrific and include cancers affecting the prostate gland and women’s breasts and ovaries among other things. Robin goes into great detail investigating each and every case study of a Monsanto product and some of the information she uncovers is astounding: Monsanto-produced Agent Orange (a brand-name for dioxin) was used as a defoliant in Vietnam to flush out Viet Cong fighters. The methods the company uses to get its way and to deceive governments and the public verge on the criminal: one interviewee describes the lax procedures Monsanto researchers used to determine that Agent Orange was safe for people to use; another interviewee tells of how a whistle-blower at Monsanto who questioned the veracity of Agent Orange studies and the results achieved ended up being bullied and harassed by Monsanto management.
The promotion and spread of GMO or transgenic crops and how their increased use promises more profits to Monsanto through intellectual property law in US get special attention. False advertising and claims of working with farmers to ensure fair treatment when the contrary is true are par for the course; the only difficulty Monsanto seems to have is in how low the company can go scraping the bottom of the ethics barrel. US farmers growing conventional soy crops are visited by the so-called “gene” police from Monsanto who check that the farmers aren’t growing crops with Monsanto-invented genes in a way that intimidates and frightens the farmers. In addition Monsanto buys up seed companies so as to be able to control the gene pools of non-transgenic crops (and perhaps convert them to transgenic crops). In India where transgenic cotton is grown, government officials admit that farmers cannot NOT grow transgenic BT cotton due to seed dispersal; at the same time, farmers must buy transgenic seed from Monsanto at huge prices, forcing them to borrow money from money-lenders at exorbitant rates. Many farmers fall so deeply into debt that they commit suicide.
Ranging across so many Monsanto outrages against farmers and communities, Robin does miss a few issues: the destructive effect Monsanto’s products and GMO crops must have on soil quality, water and ecosystems, and ultimately on the water cycle itself with troubling consequences for the oceans that receive water contaminated with GMO herbicides or crop waste containing genetically modified bacteria; the possibility that GMO crops may permanently cripple people’s health and immune systems when eaten; and the reduced genetic diversity that GMO crops brings to food crops, making global food supplies vulnerable to even small climatic changes and potentially threatening food insecurity and food shortages across the world. One particular issue that’s probably beyond Robin to cover is Monsanto’s political clout with the US politicians themselves: though she documents the revolving door between Monsanto and the US Food and Drug Administration staff, she doesn’t address the possibility that Monsanto may be a significant lobbyist on Capitol Hill and contribute money to politicians during election periods. There’s some investigation into the potential transgenic crops may have for altering land ownership patterns that favour large landowners and agribusinesses at the expense of small farms and the rural-to-urban flight that may cause with consequences for the future of cities in many countries, already bursting at the seams with slums and the social problems that often accompany them, not to mention the loss of agricultural knowledge and practices and the destruction of rural communities.
Robin makes no claim to impartiality, piling on one Monsanto offence on top of another relentlessly, to the point where it all seems too unreal. Except of course, this is one very real nightmare that’s gone on far too long and which tragically many people like those Indian farmers who have taken their lives in despair have never been able to wake up from.