Bitter Seeds (2011)

India has more farmers than any country in the world, and they are in a crisis that is unprecedented in human history. Every 30 minutes a farmer in India kills himself in despair. In a ... See full summary »

Director:

Micha X. Peled

Stars:

Manjusha Ambarwar, Ram Krishna, Mahhav Shande

4 wins.

Cast

Credited cast:
Manjusha Ambarwar	...	Herself
Ram Krishna	...	Himself
Mahhav Shande	...	Himself
Vandana Shiva	...	Herself
Gyanendra Shukla	...	Himself
Kishor Tiwari	...	Himself

Storyline

India has more farmers than any country in the world, and they are in a crisis that is unprecedented in human history. Every 30 minutes a farmer in India kills himself in despair. In a village at the center of the suicide epidemic, a farmer and his family struggle to keep his land and a teenage girl makes her first steps to become a journalist and tell the world about the crisis. Bitter Seeds raises questions about the human cost of genetically-modified agriculture and the future of how we grow things. This is the third film in Micha Peled's globalization trilogy, following the award-winning Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town and China Blue.

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Plot Keywords:

india | agriculture | globalization | sustainability | farming | 

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Taglines:

Every 30 minutes a farmer in India kills himself.

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Genres:

Documentary

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Details

Official Sites:

Official Facebook Official site

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

1 September 2011 (USA)

Filming Locations:

India

Company Credits

Production Co:

Teddy Bear Films Inc.

Technical Specs

Runtime:

88 min

Color:

Color

Did You Know?

Connections

Featured in Moyers & Company: Banking on Greed (2012)

User Reviews

Worth watching if you care about the future of farming

An excellent film that shows in real, life-and-death terms, the effects of multi-national companies as they expand their reach for profits. The topic of GMO seeds that filmmaker, Micha Peled focuses on are complex and layered, but he is able to synthesize the issue by focusing the lens on a single representative family as they make their way through one season of cotton farming in Central India. The new trials and vulnerabilities that they face as the necessary seeds get concentrated into new technologies controlled by Monsanto and marketed through layers of local sales agents and distributors, are profound and dire. With these seeds being generally ill-suited for the small-scale local farming that has sufficiently supplied a livelihood for millions, these shifts give way to a catastrophic undoing of centuries of a traditions and stability.