Controlling Our Food – The World According To Monsanto

The world according to Monsanto is a thought-provoking, 109-minute documentary, first shown in 2008 in Europe, and is a must see for anyone concerned about the future of food.

French documentary filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin has thoroughly researched her subject, conducting a three-year investigation in North and South America, Europe and Asia.

Robin briefly explores Monsanto’s long history of producing toxic chemicals, such as PCBs and dioxin-laced Agent Orange, and interviews victims of the company’s chemical operations. But the film devotes more attention to Monsanto’s 20-year old genetically engineered seed empire. Hitherto unpublished documents and candid interviews with scientists, farmers and former U.S. government officials reveal a disturbing pattern of deceit, impunity and corruption. Robin reveals Monsanto’s astonishing influence on the U.S. government’s rubber-stamp regulatory process for GMOs, as well as its attempt to bribe Canadian government regulators to approve its bovine growth hormone product. The film also features interviews of U.S. farmers sued by Monsanto for the newly-minted “crime” of seed-saving, Indian farmers victimized by the company’s expensive Bt cotton seed, and South American farmers marginalized by massive expansion of Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” soybeans.

Is Monsanto the clean, green company it claims to be, committed to solving world hunger? Or do its growing control of the world’s seed supply, its exorbitantly priced seeds and prosecution of farmers for saving them, and its commitment to spreading chemical-intensive agriculture around the world, portend instead a threat to the world’s food security?

These are obviously important questions, and the little-known perspectives provided by Controlling our food: The world according to Monsanto are essential information for anyone who is genuinely seeking answers.