Bitter Seeds

Directed by Micha X. Peled. 2012.  88 minutes.
In with English subtitles

Study areas: Modern India, Geology, Geography, Human Rights, Contemporary Issues, Farming, Suicide

The subject of Bitter Seeds, the third and the final film in Micha X. Peled’s (aptly named) Globalization Trilogy, is the continuing saga of debt-ridden Indian farmers committing suicide by consuming pesticide, a story that is heartbreaking, to the uninitiated, but familiar to the point of banal to readers of Indian newspapers.  Focusing on Vidarbha, the cotton-growing region of the Indian state of Maharashtra, Peled follows a yearlong cycle of cultivation through the experience of one farmer’s family – the purchase and sowing of seeds, caring for the plants, picking the cotton and the eventual transport of the cotton to the local market on a bullock-cart – with extraordinary attention to detail, and the result is a compassionate and realistic account of ‘industrial agriculture’ in the era of globalization. 

Beginning with the tagline “every 30 minutes a farmer in India kills himself,” Peled layers the film as he presents the story of Ramkrishna Kopulwar’s family through the eyes (and sometimes the lens) of a young female student, Manjusha Amberwar, whose father committed suicide a few years earlier.  For Manjusha, an aspiring journalist, the probe into the cause is all too personal, and it is her voice and her insistent search for the causes that lends the film a complex nuanced perspective.  The rural agricultural society is still overwhelmingly marked by gender inequality, and while the women do a significant portion of the work related to farming, the suicides are men, who are the debtors and the owners of tiny plots of land that are often lost to predatory moneylenders.  The positioning of Manjusha as a young woman driving the investigation is therefore a noticeable element in the film.  While the Kopulwar family emerges as the representative of the overall picture of despair, the film ends with Manjusha entering college as a student of journalism, thus offering a glimpse of possible progressive futures.

At the center of a cluster of causes that driving the farmers to acts desperation is an American corporation, Monsanto, whose seeds are the only option for cotton farmers in Vidarbha to buy and sow.  India’s economic liberalization between 1989 and 1991 that was fueled by a loan from the IMF saved the Indian government from bankruptcy, but at the cost of opening up India’s market to pervasive foreign products, more often than not decimating domestic enterprise, production, and, as the film shows, pre-existing farming practices.  Following the aggressive introduction of the genetically modified seeds by Monsanto into the Indian farming markets, supply of local seeds disappeared, and the government stopped supplying the farmers with a non-industrial version.  Bt cotton seeds are the only seeds available to Ramkrishna Kopulwar, and he has to mortgage his land with a private moneylender to buy the seeds.  Bt seeds also need more pesticide, which adds to Kopulwar’s production costs .  Finally, when he gathers his meager crop, he sells it at the local farming market at a price that will not allow him to pay back the loan to the moneylender.  Next year, with his land still held as collateral, he must continue paying the monthly interest to the moneylender at an exorbitant rate.  And things will only get harder the following year, the downward spiral continuing until Kopulwar gives up his land to become a landless laborer or commits suicide, leaving his landless and destitute family behind.  Like innumerable farmers of the region, Kopulwar and his family are teetering on the brink of extinction.    

While Ramkrishna Kopulwar and Manjusha are the face of the crisis on the ground, Peled introduces agents, sellers, and distributors of Bt seeds to present a Kafkaesque view of the nexus of global capitalist enterprise to local agriculture.  Sellers on the ground, along with community activists and village government officials, have no access to the bigger picture of corporate operations, the latter armed with specialists and rendered invincible by governmental support.  Peled also interviews Dr. Vandana Shiva, the scientist who has dedicated her career to environmental activism and the development of sustainable methods of agriculture.  Dr. Shiva deftly summarizes the pervasive process of globalization from top whereby governments enter into explicit or informal agreements with multinational corporations and recede into the background, in the name of deregulation.  The citizens, left alone to grapple with the consequences of profiteering, are literally consumers without rights who cannot turn to the state for protection or redress.

Bitter Seeds is distrubuted in the U.S. by Bullfrog Films.

Last Updated: January 28, 2016