Future of Food - video screening and panel discussion
I attended this presentation, and would highly recommend either catching a screening local to you, or getting hold of the DVD. I understand that Byron Child have the screening rights to the DVD in Australia, and also copies for sale, and can be reached via their website www.byronchild.com. For US readers you can go directly to their website www.thefutureoffood.com
byronchild magazine and Bay FM Community Radio presents the Australian screening of
The Future of Food
The Future of Food, a brilliant must-see documentary by Deborah Koons Garcia, is a chilling investigation into the Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and foods that have quietly filled the grocery store shelves, and the multinational corporations that are seeking to control the world’s food system.
byronchild magazine and Bay FM presents the Northern Rivers premiere of
The Future of Food, followed by a panel discussion.
When: March 29th, 7 pm sharp, doors open at 6:15
Where: Byron Community and Cultural Centre
A Bay FM fundraiser, the screening is followed by a panel discussion, facilitated by Nyck Jeans. Panellists are: Catriona Macmillan, co-founder of OTACnet; Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture; Jude Fanton, director of Seed Savers and Danielle Leonard, manager of Regenesis Farm.
“… biotech companies have gone into government seed banks and patented both GMO and non-GMO plants worldwide, including plants that have evolved in nature, or have been naturally hybridised, and belong to the commons. If this trend continues, impoverished countries will have to pay to use the plants that originated in their countries.”
- From the book, Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies About the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You’re Eating, by Jeffrey M. Smith
In 1990 the corporate farming giant Monsanto, successfully challenged Percy Shmeiser, an independent farmer, when their patented, genetically modified canola seed was found to have germinated in his fields.
Though Shmeiser lost the case, it thrust into the public arena the debate about the ethical and environmental significance of genetic modification of food crops, seed patenting, and the activities of effects of industrial farming methods.
The Future of Food reveals
· How agriculture becomes industry
· How the fertilisers, chemical pesticides and mono-cropping practices of the ‘green revolution’ grew out of WWll chemical weapons research,
· And how traditional farming methods have become bowed, cowed, threatened and ultimately uneconomical under the onslaught of methods employed by the industrial farming giants.
Director Deborah Koons-Garcia leads carefully from one point to the next, showing how the chemical companies succeeded first in patenting their own GMO seeds, and then patenting a huge number of crop seeds, a strategy which allowed them to move stealthily toward the end-game without ever requiring the people’s vote, or passing their activities before Congress.
“Her 90-minute documentary feels more educational than polemic - though it expresses a strong point of view against letting new life forms loose on the land without long-term testing of the health effects and real government controls, especially labelling of foods.” San Francisco Chronicle
By inserting genetic material from one organism into the permanent genetic code of another, biotechnologists have engineered potatoes with bacteria genes, tomatoes with flounder genes, corn with pesticide genes, and ‘suicide seeds’ created with ‘terminator’ technology that produce sterile and useless seed at harvest. In the millions of open acres they are sown in around the world, these genetically engineered plants release pollen into the environment where -- unlike their genetically engineered pharmaceutical counterparts created and contained in labs -- they can and have reproduced and infected organic and conventional crops resulting in immeasurable global bio-pollution.
The implications for our health, for bio-diversity that underwrites it, and diversification of global wealth are profoundly affected by such cavalier behaviour.
Deborah Koons Garcia, is an award-winning, graduate film-maker with a long career as a documentary film-maker and lives in California, USA. She won the prestigious Cine Golden Eagle and a Gold Medal from the John Muir Medical Film Festival, among other awards, for her documentary All About Babies, narrated by Jane Alexander. Read more about The Future of Food at her site: www.lilyfilms.com
Deborah is the widow of the late Jerry Garcia, lead singer of the cult band, the Grateful Dead.
byronchild magazine and Bay FM presents the Northern Rivers premiere of The Future of Food combined with a discussion panel about the positive future of food for Byron Shire, and the life-affirming global efforts that are happening to reclaim our food.
When: March 29th, 7 p.m.sharp, doors open 6:15 pm
Where: Byron Community and Cultural Centre
A Bay FM fundraiser, the screening is followed by a panel discussion, facilitated by Nyck Jeans. Panellists are: Catriona Macmillan, co-founder of OTACnet; Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture; Jude Fanton, director of Seed Savers and Danielle Leonard, manager of Regenesis Farm.
Tickets on sale at BayFM and at the door $15, or $12 for BayFM and byronchild subscribers
For further information call (02) 6684 4353
Posted by mitra at March 15, 2006 9:09 AM
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