Under the nightmare of genetic modification and nuclear power, we are all lab mice in a modified nuclear world
Text by Chen Ju-wei
Genetic modification and nuclear power, the two great technological advances of the twentieth century, why have they become a nightmare that terrifies everyone in this century?
In 2012, French director Jean-Paul Jaud made a 115-minute documentary, Tous Cobayes? (All Guinea Pigs?), using two world-shaking events, French scientist Seralini's research and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, as its story threads to explore the shadow cast over daily life by nuclear power plants and genetically modified food.
The film draws its first hour of narrative from the course of Seralini's two-year "long-term toxicity study of Roundup herbicide and Roundup-resistant GM maize", exposing the health effects of heavily pesticide-sprayed GM crops on farmers, dock workers and truck drivers, documenting anti-GM protests launched around the world, and further raising concerns about the ubiquity of GM soy and corn processed products in everyday diets.
In the second hour, the lens turns to the Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011, laying bare the indifference and incompetence of Tokyo Electric Power Company and the bureaucratic system in handling the accident. Farmland in Fukushima Prefecture can no longer be cultivated, and the long-time resident farmers, with nowhere to go, have no choice but to resign themselves to continued exposure to high doses of radiation. In addition, Greenpeace personnel easily entered loosely guarded French nuclear power plants, making the French director worry that if a plant in his own country, with its extremely high density of nuclear power plants, suffered an accident on the scale of Fukushima, any proud wine, cuisine, cheese and more would instantly be reduced to nothing. Interspersed with the shocking images of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and the Chernobyl accident, the film once again awakens public reflection on the enormous destructiveness and irreparable generational harm hidden within seemingly safe nuclear technology.
In the film, Seralini points out three important connections between the two: irreversibility, omnipresent contamination and bioaccumulation.
In 1996, commercial cultivation of GM crops began, and children who consume large amounts of GM soy and corn are becoming subjects of global GM clinical experiments, like the white mice in Seralini's experimental cages; GM will from then on coexist with humanity. Land where nuclear disasters have occurred, nuclear waste that will remain with nowhere to go for thousands of years, or the problem of radioactive contamination of food, is this really the legacy we want to leave to the next generation? There is no greater generational injustice than this!
Faced with the safety controversies over genetic modification and nuclear power, everyone asks: how should we protect the next generation?
National Screening Application Program
After months of negotiation, the Non-GMO School Lunch action team obtained a two-year public screening license from the French side. The film is mainly in French and Japanese, and we have added Chinese and English subtitles. It will officially launch in Taiwan, China starting July 2015! (Film trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uznZEMeV7uA)
◎Dates: July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2017
◎Who it's for: groups, companies, communities and schools that want to learn about the GM issue...
◎Screening application: please fill out the screening application form. After we receive your application, we will reply to confirm it before accepting.
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Event contact: [email protected] / Non-GMO School Lunch action team