Seeds of Profit: Why Fruits and Vegetable Are the New Gold

Sixty years of producing standardized fruit and vegetables and creating industrial hybrids have had a dramatic impact on their nutritional content. In the past 50 years, vegetables have lost 27% of their vitamin C and nearly half of their iron.

Take the tomato. Through multiple hybridizations, scientists are constantly producing redder, smoother, firmer fruit. But in the process, it has lost a quarter of its calcium and more than half of its vitamins. The seeds that produce the fruits and vegetables we consume are now the property of a handful of multinationals, like Bayer, and Dow-Dupont, who own them. These multinationals have their seeds produced predominantly in India, where workers are paid just a handful of rupees while the company has a turnover of more than 2 billion euros. A globalized business where the seed sells for more than gold.

According to FAO, worldwide, 75% of the cultivated varieties have disappeared in the past 100 years. Loss of nutrients, privatization of life, We reveal the industrialists’ great monopoly over our fruit and veg.

Director: Linda Bendali

Legend has it that vegetables were better before so we are going to go back in time and visit the hallowed French Academy of Agriculture where you can find the ghost of vegetables past between two old pamphlets on farming we stumble across a hidden Jam the food composition table from 60 years Ago it shows the exact amount of vitamins and minerals that every fruit and vegetable contained at the time of Writing so we came up with a very simple idea to compare these old statistics with those of Today this information is no longer kept in Old Paper books it is now kept on the internet we discovered a little known fact fruit and vegetables have lost some of their vitamins and Minerals take green beans for example in 1960 they contained 65 mg of calcium for every 100 G in 2017 they contain no more than 48.5 mg that’s a quarter less calcium the same thing for vitamin C 19 mg at the time versus 13.6 today one by one We examined the 70 most

Consumed fruit and vegetables and compiled the results into this table the results show a dramatic deterioration in the space of 60 years all 70 fruit and vegetables have lost an average of 16% of their calcium 27% of their vitamin C and almost less than half of their iron

Levels for several years now an American researcher has been warning us about this loss of nutrients so best of luck thank you mer [Applause] I’m here to tell you about an important problem that many people are not aware of nutritional declines in Foods Donald Davis is a biochemist he has worked at

The University of Austin Texas we showed him our comparative table this looks like similar to what we find in US data and UK data so what do you think in the United States Donald Davis analyzed the development of 43 vegetables between 1950 and 1999 I think that most of these declines

Are caused by increases in yield when yields go up there’s less nutrients per weight of the food a lot of agricultural scientists um may not know about how big these effects are this is kind of an embarrassing of they’re they’re always wanting to increase yield if modern breeding was causing increases in flavor

And increases in nutrients I think they would talk about it a lot more the tomato is one of the fruits that has seen the largest drop in nutrients a quarter of its calcium and more than half of its vitamins in order to understand this decline we must Trace fruit and

Vegetables back to their origin before the fruit even grows the seed determines Everything tomato Farmers choose their seeds from these brochures they are published by manufacturers such as zenta V Moran or CLA to attract Farmers they mentioned their size shape color and in particular their Productivity but most importantly are the letters hf1 which signifies a first generation hybrid and that’s how we get a Hybrid for example let’s take a plant that grows large but very pale tomatoes we cross them with a plant whose tomatoes are red but too small by combining these two varieties we create what is called a hybrid a plant that possesses both the genes of a large tomato and a bright red

Tomato for 50 years scientists from all over the world have been developing these hybridizations to create tomatoes that can withstand all sorts of bumps and bruises you’ve heard of crash tests on cars here are crash test Tomatoes during the 1980s these laboratory Tomatoes flooded the Market but there is still one problem that no one has managed to work out tomato spoil very quickly Until the day scientists invent the Eternal Tomato this miraculous tomato has been created in Israel for 70 years this country has revolutionized the farming industry it has managed to grow fruit and vegetables in the middle of the desert we met one of the fathers of the modern tomato at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem the man who made this fruit

Practically Immortal good morning good morning nice nice to see you yes hi you good morning hi rovic uh we go straight to the farm yes at 79 years old professor rabinovic continues to develop future hybrids this is a breeding Greenhouse so each plant is different and I say wow

This planted looks stronger than this one for instance and definitely more than this one we look for these differences in order to develop something which is better than the existing material the best tomatoes are those that are well adapted for commercial production because although the researcher and his assistant May

Well be University lecturers they also work for private corporations their research is currently funded by French Seed Company it’s owned by them I cannot I cannot give it to anybody else this is exclusive exclusive to them you’re the only one that get into this greenhous beside you no one can get

Here they need to develop a tomato for southern European countries here there is a big one look Phil Moro looking uh to have a a winning hybrids in the balcon market which have a fruit size around 300 G Tomatoes say biggest grapefruits that must grow on horizontal Vines this is the cluster

Which the flower are organized usually the cluster has three dimensions the fruit grow in every possible Direction uh people like today what we call a fishbone cluster from pecking point of view if you have three dimension it’s very difficult to Peck in a box when you have a two Di mention you

Can put one on top of the other and it’s much easier to create this hybrid they have to cross two plants by placing pollen from one plant onto the flower of another here the Way exract Poland you need to come to the open flower this is what we call artificial

Be actually you know what it is it’s a electric toothbrush let we just remove the brush and put a hook on top of it you can see at the bottom you can see yellow yellow dust and in two days I will come with the pollen and I will make the

Pollination uh how many Crossing you make for to have one ibrid at the end to make a commercial hybrid probably 400 400 like that 400 every year sometimes it’s coming only from the third area so you can go to a huge numbers that is how after thousands of cross-pollinations in the early 1990s

Haim rabinovich and his colleagues invented the Eternal tomato this innovation has transformed the World Market why you begin to work on the long sh life because because of this waste of 40% of the of the yield uh before this mutation uh the limit was 2 three days

Four days at the most when we exported tomatoes to Europe and we exported a lot of tomato we used to fly it by airplanes because if it has to go by boat from Israel to Mar the Tomato will be mushy nobody nobody will touch it to extend

Its shelf life the professor had to defy the loss of nature the purpose of this tomato is to disseminate the seed for Next Generation so the moment the seeds are ripe it will fall off the bush bump into the ground explode and all these juice will

Will run all over as far away from the mother plant as possible in order to conquer more territory we don’t want it it’s undesired trait for human beings and here we have a mutation that seemingly can provide a solution here is the israelian researchers idea they have cross-pollinated a plant with regular

Tomatoes that decay within 3 days with a plant carrying a natural genetic defect that prevents the ripening of the fruit they have thus ended up with a longlasting hybrid tomato that once picked will Decay much slower we let our own homegrown experiment on one side we have a hybrid fruit with a perfect

Appearance on the other side an heirloom tomato that has not undergone any hybridization with its speckled yellow skin and other small Imperfections now all we have to do is wait after 3 days the two Tomatoes still look completely fine but after a week the heirloom tomato is no longer fit for sale because of these little black marks within 2 weeks it even starts to go moldy and what about the

Hybrid unaffected in 2 weeks it has not changed at all except for one thing the stem comes Off it was only after day 25 that the hybrid became unsellable now with mold and softer skin without hybridization it would have looked like this its shelf life has therefore gone from 3 days to almost 3 weeks but just like any deal for Eternal youth there is a price to

Pay you can taste them tasteless the genes for uh inhibition ripening inhibition carry with them some negative traits uh for instance flavor The Taste deteriorates we less trilon but I don’t know because we never never measured it only later in the ’90s and the early 2000s we started looking into the

Quality traits I offered a project like that to many seed companies I even gave it a name I called it Ace tomato why Ace vitamin a c and e and I said it will be much healthier tomato we don’t have it in our supermarkets this variety the industries they don’t care

These manufacturers that Haim rabinovic refers to are big names in the seed industry such as the business hazera which has earned Millions thanks to the long life tomato in 2003 this Israeli company was bought out by liag a multinational corporation with a turnover of over $2.5 billion after acquiring hazera the

Company became the world’s second biggest producer of tomato seeds hazera test out their new varieties in the nef desert out in the middle of nowhere yaron gas is global head of the Tomato Department y Rosenfeld is head of the Communications Department for you and then you put the

Those two this is our protocol for sanitation The 120 varieties in this demonstration Greenhouse are advertised right down to their Stem I’m going to show you for example a tomatoes that we call it lamia this is a very famous tomato in Turkey today it’s the green part of the tomatoes it’s like a mustache you know there is a special gin for this mustache uh yes yes so you see very very nice

Color very firm tomato it’s coming from the long shelf life family also um you mean it has a long sh jeans but is the percentage of all your variety that has long shelf I didn’t calculate but I assume today around the 50/50 long shf life has a problem for

The Taste long shelf life in in for for a long time we saw that it was influenced to reduce the taste of the tomato and now we are going back and try to increase the taste again of the tomato and yarong giras wants to prove

It to us in his opinion the long life Jean doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of flavor you like tomato yeah not everybody like tomatoes you know yes I like but it’s hard to find a good tomato right now nowadays okay taste okay like a little bit uh we said we

Said not all the Tomato need to have taste because if you add olive oil and salt you don’t need taste mhm I tell you I I I I know what is tomato tomato this is okay yeah okay yeah there is the worst but for the market and for what they

Want this is okay I’m going to show you some tomatoes that you said Wow I want you to taste this special Maggie and to tell me if there you feel the Different What do you think different a different taste it’s not good as I want it to be yeah because it’s starting the the cultivation just start yes you see you are the same people we will come back to The Taste but what about the nutrients very little

Gel what we’re look at more and more is that to have a good color m a good firmness and a good taste and and the the nutrient in tomato are still it’s a small player in the market for cooking in Italy for cooking is the hybridization of tomatoes one of the

Reasons for the loss of Nutrients in the south of France in belgar durz Jean Luke Bor is one of the last Artisan seat sellers in the Country using his own Tomatoes he produces nonone hybrid seeds these are heirloom Seeds fore in his Greenhouse Jean Luke BR only grows Farmers varieties 100% natural farming do these Farmers varieties contain more nutrients than hybrids we are going to analyze them on one side we have Jean Luke’s Tomatoes on the other a hybrid with a similar appearance bought from the Supermarket the very same day we sent them to an accredited laboratory to measure their nutrient Levels 3 weeks later the results arrive the hybrid tomato contains a significantly lower level of the five nutrients analyzed it contains 63% less calcium 29% less magnesium and 72% less vitamin C the levels of lopine and polyphenols two antioxidants that help fight cardiovascular diseases are two times

Lower in the hybrid than in the farmers’s variety tomato we then showed these analyses to Donald Davis a specialist in nutrient loss congratulations okay how is the Taste is it taste different of course yeah the a room one was very very good I ate it like a

Candi but the IID was a tast less yes of course is consistent with the idea that there is a relationship between taste and nutrient content this was published by professor play at the University of Florida and he made the observation in this paper that many of the flavor

Components of tomatoes are derived from Human nutrients when you eat a tomato that has good flavor that means that it probably also had good amounts of the nutrients that were used to make that flavor it’s a consequence of hybridization it’s consistent with all of the other evidence bre ERS select for

Yield is but they are also looking for other economic traits and in the process of making that change they also caused a change in the chemistry of the Tomato you take out hybrid varieties are less nutritious so what does l owner of hazera and the world’s second largest Tomato Seed producer think of This no no je Kristoff gash is one of the company’s board Members AB for the The hybrids offer another great Advantage for SE suppliers their seeds are single use if you plant the seed of a hybrid plant the jeans mix and when the plant grows it’s the luck of the draw the tomatoes could be small striped or misshapen this is why farmers must buy more seeds every Year a profitable Market given that the manufacturer sell these tomato seeds at a very high price like liag in Israel charge a lot can charge how much is one kilo of seeds of this kind of tomato uh this kind of tomato today can reach uh the 400,000 Euro what for kilogram of

Seeds what 400,000 or more yes you can buy a house with this I’ve heard that the tomato seeds the more capital gain of all the seeds yes the margin our margin is the highest that that we can get in tomato why because it’s expensive expensive

Seeds and there is a lot of Demands so it’s a yeah it’s a good business for us if it’s not we are not here the small yellow tomato the most expensive Variety in the greenhouse costs $450,000 for every kilo of seeds even so for a basic tomato it is $67,000 double

The price of gold this is a hand really to hand work they need a lot of Labor to to make a seeds and when you produce the the seeds the like we told you today in 22 different countries today all over the world and uh like which kind of country

Like like Israel like in Thailand like in Chile with in Spain in India in many places seeds sold for the price of gold and produced by hand in countries with cheap labor welcome to the era of seed glob Ization the Tomato Trail has led us to India it was this report with a young girl on the front cover that prompted us to take the flight soiled seeds commissioned in 2015 by ICN a Dutch NGO in the seed sector 16% of workers that produce vegetable seeds are

Children under the age of 14 years these seeds are produced in the state of kataka in remote Villages that are amongst the poorest in the whole Country here the climate is mild for vegetables every year 160,000 kilos of tomato seeds are produced to then be exported the five biggest multinational seed companies can be found here on this plane BASF dupon Bay Monsanto senta and liag we are going to travel across it together with the Hindu god garish and

One of the researchers from this NGO that works against child labor in India working before the age of 14 is illegal gra rash roams the area to count the children in the Field along with our translator we approached the children these young girls have been hollowing out watermelons for hours in order to remove the seeds it is 86° fah in the shade these girls have been recruited by a farmer who works for an Indian Seed Company according to Ravi in kataka the Tomato

Hybrid industry is one of the largest employers of child labor it’s the end of the season the fields are almost deserted but a little further we notice some figures through the screens of this greenhouse this Farm is a subcontractor of the Swiss multinational senta around 10 workers prune the tomato

Plants a girl who is smaller than the others stares at us the young girl on the left quietly tells her to bend down For uhhuh company change Is this young lady 17 years old our translator finds this hard to believe I don’t think she is 17 looking at her probably she is much younger than 17 which is very much apprehended and know she has been trying to hide her in kataka 800 Farms have a contract with

Senta it’s the largest foreign Contracting party naturally we asked the Swiss multinational its thoughts on child labor in response an empty rhetoric of principles senta conforms to all labor laws senta’s Equitable work policy promotes decent working conditions and also tackles the problem of child labor Why are children hired by Farmers that work for these big seed companies Dr davuluri ventes Valu author of the report soiled seeds is one of the main experts on child labor in India for 15 years this independent research worker has been investigating the production sector of hybrid seeds the hybridization activity is very

Very delicate it requires a lot of uh uh skills the children are preferred because they can do this repetitive activities very uh faster than adults uh and also uh they are more obedient can say two children can do the work of three adults that is the kind of calculation Farmers

Have according to this researcher Farmers cut wages for one simple reason the low prices set by the multinationals the farmers are struggling actually to have a uh good profit margin if they have to uh uh hire labor and pay good remuneration to to the workers the the margin will be very

Nominal or sometimes there won’t be any margin for the farmers davuluri Vates Wu’s battle has begun to pay off the proportion of children working in the seed industry under the age of 14 has been reduced from 16 to 10% but another part of the population is still being exploited traveling through kataka we

Made another discovery in the Tomato Seed fields we only saw women we found out why during our visit to chaman GA do God’s Farm tomato for who in India Lima operates under the name hm claws the French seed company is in contract with 600 farmers in the region Crossing

Running bent over under the blazing sun these women remove the pollen from flowers with tweezers for 8 hours a day their heads buried in pollen and fertilizers for just $280 a day it is not much and what’s more it is illegal in India employers must comply

With the minimum wage it is 330 rupees in the agricultural industry the equivalent of $480 a day these women therefore earn 40% less than the legal minimum wage Fore these Farmers say they are forced to break the law because they need another $30 per kilo yet in Europe liag sells a kilo of seeds for an average of $67,000 are the local imagr managers aware of these illegal practices the following day we decided to take a little visit to the Indian

Branch of hm claws with a hidden camera we got off to a bad start they stopped us before we even got close to the Building Company you are looking for SE company yes yes what the for first what for first for first we make a documentary about the seeds in uh Kaka

Europe means which country particularly France oh okay one minute apparently being French like liag has its benefits we are invited to enter the staff office okay to speak directly with the supervisor okay the man is on the phone with hat offers because we have very stct information instruction from head office not to

Allow any people they are banned from speaking to us but do not underestimate the famous Indian Hospitality have L we go inside the storage facility where the seeds produced by the Indian farmers are dried before being exported like Terat oh thank you the site managers admit they are fully aware that the farmers do not abide by the minimum wage of $480 a Day what is the salary for one worker 200 rupes okay for 8 hours okay because some Farmers say they have no more shocking information according to this executive The Firm even violates this law with its own employees organ how much are paid in hm clo Farm 28 days according to the supervisor the

Business has a knack for hiding the price of seeds in Europe from the farmers what the name of a tomato it is very secret we put numbers numbers production people we should not know why suppose you come to know that this product is very popular and is

Produced by this name so what is liag doing to combat these illicit practices seeds We for To prob Foree noway it’s almost impossible to find seeds that have not been hybridized or cloned by the industry corn vegetables rice wheat sunflowers the same modern and uniform plants are being imposed all over the world As a result 2/3 of all seeds sold in the world now belong to four multinationals Baya Monsanto do dupon senta and liag this privatization of nature is destroying biodiversity in 2009 a man launched a global appeal to the United Nations at the time Olivier the scoter was a United Nations special repur on

The right to food 75% of agrobiodiversity has been lost um as a result of the pressure towards the adoption of uniform improved vary we are meeting him at his home in br russels despite his calm Demeanor the former un special reporter is frustrated that his warnings are falling on deaf Ears for fragile plants is not such a bad thing for the large seed companies because out of these four multinationals that dominate the world seed Market three are pesticides manufacturers B Monsanto and senta seeds are a perfect trojan horse for these chemical products as a result 3 million tons of pesticides are sold

Annually Worldwide Dev today across the world citizens and Farmers alike are revolting against this programmed disappearance they demand free seeds seeds that do not belong to the Giants of the agrochemical Industry in France a number of people are organizing the resistance In the southwest of the country and the depth of a valley you will find The Hideout of Kokopelli Ananda guier runs this nonprofit organization they are trying to protect traditional and forgotten vegetable varieties their collection includes 2,400 vegetables that are rare such as this be colored cucumber punaa or orange Swiss Chards to help with the preservation of these varieties copelli has launched the scheme seats Without Frontiers mod by conserving these endangered seeds we are taking back the choice to plant or eat non-standardized fruit and vegetables which are the best produce for both our planet and our health but perhaps most importantly we will Liberate the vibrant common good of humanity