Bitter Seeds (2011)

Directed by: Micha X. Peled | 87 minutes | documentary

Israeli director Micha X. Peled has completed his trilogy on globalization with ‘Bitter Seeds’, making another highly relevant documentary. In his ‘Globalization Trilogy’ he previously made ‘Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town’ and ‘China Blue’. For ‘Bitter Seeds’ he traveled to India, which, despite growing industrialization, still has the largest farming population in the world.

The country is currently experiencing a severe crisis for the farming population; Over the past decade, there has been a wave of suicide among farmers who have been driven to despair by their miserable living and working conditions. The film shows us these and other statistics in the first few minutes, but then tells this story in a personal way, starring two Indians whose lives have been severely affected by the unjust circumstances. We follow the two people in Telung Taki, a small farming community in India, where the majority of the population earns their livelihood by growing cotton. Their parents already did, and a lot of their children will too.

Ram Krishna is a cotton farmer himself and can barely survive on his piece of land. With two daughters, he is not immediately assured of a good future; what little money he has left at the end of a crop must be saved up to pay for two dowries. Manjusha is the 18-year-old daughter of a cotton farmer who committed suicide because he saw no way out of his accumulated debts. Manjusha is determined to become a journalist – the village’s first ever – and find a way to tell her own story and commemorate her father’s passing.

The story is told through Ram Krishna’s first-hand experience, paralleled by Manjusha’s quest for truth: an original narrative perspective, with the occasional touch of metajournalism as Manjusha is explained how best to tell a complex story like this. . In a nutshell, the story boils down to this: Monsanto, a large multinational corporation from the United States, has flooded the Indian market with genetically engineered cottonseed, falsely promising greater harvests for smallholder farmers. On a very large scale, with sufficient irrigation and the right pesticides, this seed does indeed yield more crops, but for farmers who depend on rain and have no money for sufficient pesticides, it almost defaults to bankruptcy. In the meantime, there are no longer any regular seeds for sale in India and the farmers are forced to buy the much more expensive ‘BT seeds’. They don’t get a loan from the bank, which drives them into the arms of illegal moneylenders who lend at usurious rates. Ram Krishna experiences this firsthand and is forced to use his land as collateral. After sowing, misfortune after misfortune awaits him; too little rain and aggressive scale insects result in a smaller harvest than hoped. In addition, farmers who purchase Monsanto’s seed are required to pay annual royalties for the technology they develop.

Parallel to this story is another, deeper story: that of the women in this conservative community. Undervalued from birth, their entire adolescence is spent looking for a suitable husband to have. A love marriage would leave a stain on the family, and a career as a career woman seems utterly elusive to most. And yet: there is Manjusha, who is the first woman in the village to ever go to journalism school. All in all, this is a film about oppression, about injustice. Just as the small farmers are taking action against the large multinationals, the women are also moving cautiously upwards. There is hope.