GMOs—the Movie

“I had been to Haiti about a month before the [January 2010] earth­quake, work­ing as an assis­tant on a film, mainly shoot­ing footage in Cité Soleil in Port-au-Prince—really rough slums,” Seifert told Organic Connections. “When the earth­quake hap­pened it was dev­as­tat­ing, since I had just been there. The place felt like a dis­as­ter zone before the earth­quake; after­wards I just couldn’t imag­ine how hor­rific it was and how painful it must have been.”

It wasn’t long after the earth­quake that Seifert read a short online arti­cle that caught his atten­tion. In the wake of the earth­quake, biotech­nol­ogy giant Monsanto had offered aid to Haiti in the form of 475 tons of GMO seeds. In response, 10,000 Haitian peas­ants marched in the streets and stated that if Monsanto did give the seeds to them, the peas­ants would burn them.

“This arti­cle really cap­tured my imag­i­na­tion,” Seifert said. “At the time I didn’t know that much about GMOs. I knew they existed and knew a lit­tle bit about what they were, but I didn’t actu­ally under­stand them and didn’t know how ubiq­ui­tous they were in the food we’re eat­ing. So the ques­tion was, why would poor hun­gry farm­ers burn seeds? So I wrote an e-mail to the Peasant Movement of Papaye, Haiti, say­ing that I loved what they were doing and wanted to come down and find out why they were doing this. I started a cor­re­spon­dence with Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, who actu­ally lives in Brooklyn but has been the leader of the Peasant Movement of Papaye for 20 years or so.

At that point, Seifert decided he was going to make a film, and his trip to Haiti would be the begin­ning and would inform the rest of the film. “We worked it out to go down there, and spent 10 days mainly on a lit­tle organic farm and train­ing cen­ter in Papaye with Chavannes Jean-Baptiste. I just really wanted to sit with them and hear why they would burn seeds and refuse this gift from Monsanto. What they told me is that their food sov­er­eignty and their food cul­ture would be at risk if they let Monsanto in. If they didn’t save their own indige­nous seeds for the native plants and develop those fur­ther, then they would become beholden to Monsanto and have to buy their seeds year after year. Their pub­lic demon­stra­tion was really infor­ma­tive and awak­ened me in a whole new way to the issue.”

When Seifert returned home, he decided to make an exper­i­ment. He took his cam­era around Los Angeles to find out how aware Americans, in fact, were of GMOs—and a small sam­pling can be found in the footage posted on his website.

“You come back to the United States and you see either quiet empty streets or just busi­ness going on as usual—while every­one is stuff­ing genet­i­cally mod­i­fied food into their mouths,” Seifert con­tin­ued. “I have been dis­cov­er­ing that there is almost no pub­lic aware­ness of GMOs. Of course there is the very small per­cent­age of peo­ple in this coun­try who shop at farm­ers’ mar­kets and read Michael Pollan, and those on the front­line of food and sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture, but that really is a small hand­ful of individuals.

“And even inter­view­ing peo­ple who do go to farm­ers’ mar­kets, there’s still at least 80 per­cent of those who say, ‘What GMO? What’s that? Oh, it’s genet­i­cally mod­i­fied food, yeah. I try to avoid fast food.’ And although most fast food is derived from genet­i­cally mod­i­fied prod­ucts, that seems to be the total under­stand­ing of what genet­i­cally mod­i­fied means. They don’t have the true under­stand­ing of what it is and the fact that it’s in almost every­thing we eat; you can go to a nicer restau­rant and you’re still eat­ing genet­i­cally mod­i­fied food or food that’s derived from genet­i­cally mod­i­fied product.”

Click any image above to see a larger version.

Seifert felt it was impor­tant to show the upside of the fight against GMOs, so a con­sid­er­able amount of time in the pro­duc­tion of his film has been devoted to it. Positive cov­er­age became the focus of a cross-country trip he recently made as part of pro­duc­tion. “We ended up inter­view­ing quite a few peo­ple who are doing great work in this,” said Seifert. “We went to Seed Savers Exchange, an heir­loom seed sav­ing project in Decorah, Iowa, and inter­viewed co-founder Diane Whealy. If you’re talk­ing about GMOs, the pos­i­tive energy and the pos­i­tive focus needs to be on bio­di­ver­sity and devel­op­ing those seed col­lec­tions. Biodiversity is at risk from genet­i­cally mod­i­fied organ­isms and from indus­trial agri­cul­ture, so Seed Savers Exchange for me was a really impor­tant place to go.”

On this same trip, Seifert inter­viewed lead­ing GMO activist and author Jeffrey Smith; Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who has put forth three anti-GMO bills; Tim and Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association; and sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture pio­neer Fred Kirschenmann of the Leopold Center and Stone Barns Center in New York.

The future for Seifert’s film is not yet cast in stone, but one thing Seifert would like to cover is a cru­cial seed­bank in Norway. “A big trip for me that I’ve been plan­ning is to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway,” Seifert said. “It was started by Cary Fowler and has been called the ‘dooms­day vault,’ which he really doesn’t like because he sees it as a very pos­i­tive thing; there would essen­tially be back­ups to the seeds of the world. Visually it’s an extremely inter­est­ing place, way up in the north, icy cold to keep the tem­per­a­ture down to pre­serve the seeds longer.

“For the film, the seed vault will serve to point up why a place like that needs to exist. What’s at stake is more pre­cious than gold or dia­monds. These seeds are the rea­son we are alive, and their bio­di­ver­sity is the rea­son we are alive. This is what we should all be valu­ing, not gold and dia­monds, which com­par­a­tively are essen­tially meaningless.”

We will be track­ing and report­ing on Seifert’s progress and are look­ing for­ward to an eye-opening documentary!

To learn more, visit http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1315201716/gmo-film-project-untitled.