GM and dioxins: The World According to Monsanto. A shocking documentary tonight on Arte Thema

Documentary by Marie-Monique Robin
(France, 2007, 1h48mn)

Co-production: ARTE France, Image et Compagnie, Thalie Productions, National Film Board of Canada, WDR

“I have never seen a company that has such a decisive influence and at such a high level over government regulatory authorities as Monsanto with its GMOs. " (essayist Jeremy Rifkin)

Monsanto, an American multinational founded in 1901 in Saint-Louis, Missouri, and initially specialized in the chemical industry, has become in a little over a century the world leader in biotechnology, in particular in the organism market. genetically modified (GMO). It holds the patents for 90% of the transgenic corn, soybeans, rapeseed, or cotton grown in the world. Through successive takeovers, it is becoming the first seed company on the planet and ultimately, it is the entire food chain that it could control. But it was first with Round Up, its “total” herbicide (long labeled “biodegradable”) that, from 1974, it began to conquer the world. We also owe him products as varied as the terrible Agent Orange, massively dumped on Vietnam by the American army, PCBs (pyralene in France, banned in the early 80s), aspartame or growth hormones. (prohibited in Europe and Canada). Monsanto, warns Marie-Monique Robin, is one of the “most controversial companies of the industrial age”.

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“Food, health, hope”: on its site, the Saint-Louis firm promises sustainable agriculture, with superior yields, respectful of the environment. A seasoned investigative journalist, crowned with the Albert-Londres Prize in 1995, the director decided to judge by piece, including by exploring the past of the company. Her first stop takes her to Anniston, Alabama, where 40% of the population, mostly black, suffers from cancer. In 2002, Monsanto was ordered by justice to pay it 700 million dollars for having concealed the dangerousness of PCBs for decades ...

guinea Pigs

Relentlessly, from Anniston to Paraguay via India, Great Britain or Mexico, Marie-Monique Robin collects facts as alarming as irrefutable and dismantles the point of Monsanto's speech. It shows that, in the case of GMOs, US and European regulations have been directly influenced, without valid scientific validation, by allies of the firm placed in key positions within an all but independent administration. It exposes the amazing methods used by the multinational to discredit its opponents, but also intimidate farmers at home.

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It finally gives a glimpse of the disaster in germ in Monsanto's hegemonic aims on the seeds of the world, of which the Indian and Paraguayan peasants are now suffering the consequences. “We shouldn't use citizens as guinea pigs. For having expressed his concerns about GMOs on a BBC set, biologist Arpad Pusztaï was fired overnight.

A few years later, the world according to Monsanto gives a global scale to this warning.

"The world according to Monsanto, from dioxins to GMOs, a multinational that wants you well" a film by Marie-Monique Robin.

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