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“Agroecology does not mean going back to the Stone Age; on the contrary, it is based on high-level scientific concepts,” says one of the interviewees in Crops of the Future – How agroecology can feed the world, the last film by the French researcher Marie-Monique Robin, who visited the country in late November and presented the film together with her last book (which carries the same name) before an audience of more than 500 people.

In contrast to the denunciation tone of her previous films—such as The World According to Monsanto (2008) and Our Daily Poison (2010)—Crops of the Future shows different agroecological experiences (in America, Asia, and Europe) which serve as examples that the industrialization process in agriculture—which is based on monoculture, the use of pesticides, and transgenic seeds (which have high social, ecologic, and health costs—could be reverted.

For instance, the movie shows the milpa method used by some farmers in Oaxaca, Mexico, which is based on sowing corn with beans (a leguminous plant that captures the air’s nitrogen and feeds the corn) and squash (whose leaves allow to keep the ground’s moisture). They complement each other.

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It is a very productive system. There is a study carried out by University of California, Berkeley—United States—, that states that when comparing the two different growing methods, the production of one hectare in a milpa is similar to that obtained in 1.7 hectares in which the crops are divided,” says Robin. Said argument denies one of the statements usually heard from the people concerned with this business: monoculture’s performance is superior to the one obtained with an agroecological method.

In short, agroecology is a system which seeks to complement vegetation and animals, and the ground is the key. “All farmers who practice agroecology said that when they had a problem with a plant (with weeds, parasites, or plagues) they did not treat the plant, but the soil, because it meant that it had some deficiency,” explains Robin, and she stresses that contrary to what is usually believed, “agroecology is much more complicated than the agribusiness system, and the results are great because they allow the farms’ autonomy. It is also more complicated than organic agriculture, because organic monocultures are possible, and that is not agroecology, because it is not just a matter of not using agrochemicals, it is much more than that. It is a knowhow, and experts and scientists to support the producers when finding a better way to use the ground are necessary.”

Rosario, a global example of urban agriculture

As well as presenting her last book and documentary, Robin visited Rosario, because an urban agriculture program is in development there, and she is thinking of including it in her next movie: “What is happening in this town is very interesting; there is a public department created by the city council to produce healthy food in the city’s gardens, and I see that as an example of what has to be done if we want to face all the challenges the agribusiness model presents, without mentioning the planned oil and gas shortages problem, because to make transgenic soy, many chemical products made with oil and gas are used; it is a very fragile system, highly dependent on other countries,” said the documentary maker during the presentation.

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In this regard, she explained that the next documentary she is working on will deal with, among other things, urban agriculture projects and how to relocate food production. To this end she chose Rosario and Toronto (in Canada), where there is a similar experience that emerged for different reasons to the Argentinean case. “Behind this there is a challenging to the development project of unlimited growth in which GDP (gross domestic product) means consuming more, something that uses up the resources which are almost finished… We have been to San Francisco to interview an expert who said that last year we consumed a planet and a half, and that if we continued in this path, in 2030 we will need five planets, which we will not have. What does this mean? A lot of violence, a lot of poverty, a lot of war, and 2030 is in 17 years time, it is tomorrow, it is urgent.”

Because of this, she repeated that to develop a system that relocated food production, either in the country or the city, a stronger public policy is necessary. And in search for answers, during her stay in the country, she interviewed Rosario’s mayor, Monica Fein, and the province’s governor, Antonio Bonfatti: “With the mayor we didn’t talk about transgenic soy, but about climatic change,” said Robin, and she added that “the governor, who is also a physician, recognized that the soy model causes diseases, he said before the camera that it is a matter of public health, and he recognized that monoculture, in the medium or long term, risks Argentina’s food sovereignty.”

Soy’s trap and the un-wanted future

It is calculated that in 2012, 170 million hectares of transgenic crops were sowed globally; half of them were soy, 32% corn, 14% cotton, and 5% canola. In smaller areas, transgenic varieties of alfalfa, papaya, pumpkin, poplar, carnation, and sugar beet were also sowed. As regards the new features, the main were tolerance to glyphosate herbicide (soy, corn, cotton, canola, alfalfa, and sugar beet), resistance to insects (corn, cotton, and poplar), and the combination of both characteristics (corn and cotton) according to data from ArgenBio, the Argentinean council for biotechnological information and research.

“People say we won’t be able t o feed ourselves without agrochemicals, but they forget that we are not feeding ourselves with them either; there are a million people in the world who suffer from starvation, and that is a huge failure of the agribusiness model, on which billions and billions of dollars were invested, and today one every six people does not eat enough,” claims Robin and she stresses that, to a local level, she is concerned with the agribusiness system, which she considers “is a disaster” for Argentina.

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The use of transgenics was approved in the country in 1996 for soy resistant to glyphosate. Since then, the area sown with genetically modified (GM) crops has not ceased to grow, and already for 2012, according to information from ArgenBio, Argentina was third in the world, with almost 24 million hectares (13 percent of global surface) of GM varieties of soy, corn, and cotton.

“I understand that soy was introduced without knowing that transgenics were bad; with all the manipulation behind, it was very difficult to know that… but today we cannot say that we do not know that transgenics are a failure. Monsanto always said that thanks to transgenics we would use less pesticides, but that is a lie; already in 2005, the use of pesticides was 10 times higher, and today, a lot more; they don’t know how to get rid of resistant weeds, and soils are ruined,” states Robin, and she stresses: “Before, the money was needed, but now we have to think in the medium and long term; what is at stake today is Argentina’s food sovereignty…if we, European consumers, continue in this path of not wanting to eat meat fed with transgenics, what will you do with all the soy? Soil recovery is possible, but it will be difficult.”

A technician for change

During the Rosario presentation, which took place in the Centro Cultural Parque España, Robin gave the floor to different participants who were in the audience. This way, some representatives from the Malvinas camp, in Córdoba—who have been fighting the setting-up of a Monsanto plant in that city for months—could express themselves, and the documentary maker publicly supported them. People responsible for Rosario’s urban agriculture program also told their experience, and everybody was very surprised with the story of a soy producer who, a few years ago, decided to join an agroecological group called Pampa Orgánica and to turn his fields to a new production model that, as Robin says, recovers tradition but working with scientists.

“He is not the son-of-a-bitch soy producer who does not want to change; I know many who want to, but to do so they need a lot of help… A producer cannot make a drastic change because in the transition he goes bankrupt, because the fields are pretty bad; you need from five to seven years of transition to have life in the field again; I have seen that in my experience,” he said before the audience, asking for help to achieve change: “The problem is that there is no support in research, after ten years of asking for help, we only have some technicians from INTA who are beginning to conduct research, but many of its own accord.”