Watsonville Hosts Bilingual Film Fest to Educate on GMOs and Prop 37

Geared to Spanish speak­ing vot­ers and any­one who is inter­ested, “People of the Corn, People of Pajaro: A YES on Prop. 37 Bilingual Film Fest” will fea­ture two doc­u­men­tary films which address the impact of GMOs on farm­ers in Mexico, as well as the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion who con­sumes them with­out know­ing it.

The film festival’s inten­tions are to put the sci­ence of GMOs into acces­si­ble lan­guage, and to bring aware­ness to the agricultural-sociological con­nec­tion between California and Mexico. 

“I feel a real affin­ity and a con­nec­tion with Prop 37 to not just peo­ple who can vote but the farm­ers who are here, as migrant and immi­grant work­ers,” said Dvera Saxton, anthro­pol­o­gist, and Lecturer at the Springfield Community Grange Hall who is in charge of bring­ing edu­ca­tional infor­ma­tion to the mem­bers of the Grange.

“A lot of our work­ers who are here right now are with us because they can’t grow their own in Mexico… A lot of Mexican migrants have been dis­placed from their coun­try not only by the arrival of the GMO seed but the U.S. gov­ern­ment dump­ing tons of GMO corn on the mar­ket,” said Saxton.

The real­ity is that since they were intro­duced in 2001, the monop­oly of GMO seed—especially corn—in Mexico has put small farm­ers, unable to com­pete with the cheap prices of American GMO corn, out of business.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Watsonville Patch.