John Betz and Taggart Siegel made a revolutionary documentary about the current state of the world’s seed market. It’s now screened in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Boerengroep managed to have it screened on the 12th of June at MovieW Wageningen!
Practical info:
Screening: Monday 12th of June, 20:00 – 23:00
Location: MovieW, Wilhelminaweg 3A, 6703 CC Wageningen
Entrance: €5
Note that there are limited seats available! You can reserve a place via the MovieW website: http://www.moview.nl/film/seed-the-untold-story
Be on time, full = full!
After the documentary there will be an Q&A with researchers and experts in Seed production at Wageningen University: Edith Lammerts van Bueren (Department of Plant Sciences) and Steven Groot (Wageningen Seed Centre).
Together with the audience they will reflect on what the documentary shows us.
If you are interested in seeds, please also join our excursion to De Bolster on the 10th of June!
The documentary:
A diverse variety of seeds are important to all of us. Yet in our modern world, these precious gifts of nature are in danger. In less than a century of industrial agriculture, our once abundant seed diversity—painstakingly created by ancient farmers and gardeners over countless millennia—has been drastically winnowed down to a handful of mass-produced varieties. Under the spell of industrial “progress” and a lust for profit, our quaint family farmsteads have given way to mechanized agribusinesses sowing genetically identical crops on a monstrous scale. Recent news headlines suggest that Irish history may already be repeating in our globalized food system. Articles in the New York Times and other mainstream sources report the impending collapse of the world’s supplies of bananas, oranges, coffee and coconuts—all due to a shortsighted over-reliance on a single, fragile variety. Without seed diversity, crop diseases rise and our food system will fall.
As the renowned naturalist and author Gary Paul Nabhan puts it, “Many of our seeds today are as endangered as a panda or polar bear.” ‘SEED: The Untold Story’ presents the farmers, scientists, lawyers, and indigenous seed keepers who work passionately to revive a culture connected to seeds and protect our 12,000 year-old food legacy.