Bitter Seeds

The final installment of Micha X. Peled's “Globalization Trilogy” (the first two were 2001's Store Wars and 2005's China Blue [VL-1/07])—detailing the negative impact of modern industrialization—Bitter Seeds focuses on an alarming trend within India's agriculture: farmers are committing suicide at a rate of one every 30 minutes. According to the film, the reason for this is because the World Trade Organization (at the insistence of the U.S. government) has forced India to allow the sale of genetically modified seeds for some major crops—seeds that require additional fertilizers and insecticides. Financially strapped farmers, barely able to afford these extra costs, find themselves hopelessly in debt and unable to support their families. The central figures here are a cotton farmer named Ram Krishna, who is struggling to keep his land, and his neighbor's teenage daughter Manjusha, a journalism student interviewing family members and other rural villagers about the local suicide crisis. Peled's indictment of the suppliers of genetically modified seeds as the sole cause of the misery is, quite frankly, much too broad. While the added seed costs certainly don't help the situation, poverty among the farmers was clearly entrenched long before. What Bitter Seeds does provide, however, is an eye-opening view of the rickety nature of India's agricultural sector, which—coupled with the lack of basic infrastructure in India's non-urban regions—raises doubts about the country's much-ballyhooed economic potential. A strong optional purchase. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)