Influence games

"My father died on Thursday, March 30, 2017.
He had lung cancer, which was diagnosed too late for him to have any hope of living more than 18 months with the disease. But his cancer was quite unusual. It had a genetic mutation normally found in female patients of Asian descent who had never smoked. However, my father didn't meet any of these criteria (even though he had quit 40 years prior, he had smoked in his youth).
My father had been a farmer since the age of 16. Born just before the Second World War, he lived through all the major upheavals that the agricultural world has experienced: the arrival of the first tractor, the first combine harvester, the introduction of fertilizers and hybrid seeds, and the massive influx of pesticides in the 1960s.
I still have a vivid memory of him preparing his tank for weeding the fields. He complained that the worker he employed didn't know how to mix the ingredients properly. He personally handled all the weeding operations: filling and cleaning the tank, and making multiple passes over the crops with those 15-meter-wide booms. I never saw him wear gloves or a mask. Along with fertilizers, herbicides were what had allowed us to triple or quadruple our yields. So why be wary of them? It was pure bliss… a bliss we breathed in deeply.

Then, in the early 2000s, the first deaths from atypical cancers appeared. A few of my father's friends, some of his close neighbors, died. All of them from cancer. In a region where farmers were virtually unaffected by this disease. At first, my father refused to believe there could be a link between farming methods and cancer. It was not only inconceivable, but also morally unbearable. Were they poisoning themselves? Poisoning the land, the consumers?

And then there was Paul François, a farmer from the Charente region, who became seriously ill after being poisoned by Lasso, a product marketed by Monsanto. It took Paul François five years to have his illness recognized as an occupational disease. And six years after the fact, he finally filed a lawsuit against the American agrochemical giant. In 2011, the trial began, and Paul François won the first round… My father followed the case closely. This story resonated with him and awakened his conscience. He sent me a newspaper article with a short note: “I think this would make a good film.”

Jean-Xavier de Lestrade