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Fragile Harvest

Fragile Harvest

How safe is the future of the world's food? FRAGILE HARVEST explores a growing crisis in world agriculture. Plantbreeding has created today's crops, high yielding but vulnerable to disease and insects. To keep crops healthy, breeders tap all the genetic diversity of the world's food plants. But that rich resource is quickly being wiped out.

Filmed in Ethiopia, Peru, Turkey, and North America, FRAGILE HARVEST finds 'development' that has driven farmers from the land, increased dependence on agrichemicals, and eliminated indigenous adapted varieties of food crops. This has dramatically reduced the world's genetic pool upon which all our food depends.

The new genetic engineering tools of plantbreeding that could promise solutions to world hunger are increasingly in the hands of multinational chemical companies that have taken over seed companies and are breeding and marketing seeds to suit their agrichemical interests.

The very future of our food depends on how we are able to conserve the world's genetic resources and re-direct the goals of today's plantbreeding.