abdulhakeem
24-04-06, 07:46 PM
A film by Erwin Wagenhofer
View Trailer (http://www.we-feed-the-world.at/en/trailer.htm)
Most successfull Austrian documentary ever!!!
160,000 admissions in Austria until January 2006
"Given the current state of agriculture in the world, it could feed 12 billion people with no problem. Or to put it another way: any child who dies of starvation today is in fact murdered."
Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (Switzerland)
"The consumer no longer has any idea how things work and how things are done. People are getting more and more unworldly, more brutal and harder. Trade is only interested in the price; flavour is not a consideration."
Hannes Schulz, poultry farmer (Austria)
Every day in Vienna the amount of unsold bread sent back to be disposed of is enough to supply Austria's second-largest city, Graz. Around 350,000 hectares of agricultural land, above all in Latin America, are dedicated to the cultivation of soybeans to feed Austria's livestock while one quarter of the local population starves. Every European eats ten kilograms a year of artificially irrigated greenhouse vegetables from southern Spain, with water shortages the result.
In WE FEED THE WORLD, Austrian filmmaker Erwin Wagenhofer traces the origins of the food we eat. His journey takes him to France, Spain, Romania, Switzerland, Brazil and back to Austria.
Leading us through the film is an interview with Jean Ziegler, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
WE FEED THE WORLD is a film about food and globalisation, fishermen and farmers, long-distance lorry drivers and high-powered corporate executives, the flow of goods and cash flow–a film about scarcity amid plenty. With its unforgettable images, the film provides insight into the production of our food and answers the question what world hunger has to do with us .
Interviewed are not only fishermen, farmers, agronomists, biologists and the UN's Jean Ziegler, but also the director of production at Pioneer, the world's largest seed company, as well as Peter Brabeck, Chairman and CEO of Nestlé International, the largest food company in the world.
FACTS
Genetic Engineering
"We have to get used to the idea that there are no longer any
GM-free foods."
Karl Otrok, Director of production, Pioneer Romania
Austria is considered to be largely free from genetic engineering: up to now, no transgenic organisms have been released into the environment, and Austrian supermarkets stock practically no products that are labelled as containing genetically modified constituents. However, genetic engineering has sneaked into Austrian agriculture through the back door in the form of animal feedstuffs.
Domestic production of feedstuff is insufficient to cover the protein requirements of the Austrian livestock industry. Austria imports around 550,000 tonnes of soya annually, of which according to Greenpeace around 60% is genetically modified. Although the law has required these feedstuffs to be labelled as such since 2004, there is no obligation to label secondary products such as meat, eggs or milk produced from animals which have consumed these feedstuffs.
Hardly any tests have been carried out to establish what effect this might have on animal or human organisms. What is obvious however is that wide-scale cultivation of genetically modified soya in countries such as Argentina is having huge negative impacts: use of crop sprays has risen drastically, forests are being felled and the nutritional situation of the inhabitants has by and large deteriorated dramatically.
Worldwide, genetically modified plants are being grown on more than 60 million hectares, 99% of them in Canada, Argentina, China and the USA. They consist mainly of soya (58%), maize (23%), cotton (12%) and rape (7%).
Within the EU there is a growing movement of consumers – including farmers – who are against the release into the environment of transgenic organisms and GM foods. In response to this, the EU announced a moratorium – in the face of strong opposition from the World Trade Organisation – on the import of genetically modified seed, effective until 2004. Since then EU law has required all foods containing GM constituents to be labelled. And since then genetic engineering has been increasingly infiltrating agriculture in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in admission states such as Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia.
Superfluity and Starvation
"Every five seconds a child under ten dies of starvation. A child that dies of starvation is in effect murdered."
Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food
A quarter of Vienna’s residual waste consists of unconsumed food, most of which is still perfectly fit to eat. At the same time the number of starving people in the world is increasing steadily: 852 million people suffer from malnutrition, most of them in Africa and Latin America. Even in rich industrialised countries around 10 million people do not get enough to eat. More than five million children die of malnutrition every year according to a current report issued by the FAO, the Rome-based UN organisation for food and agriculture.
Yet this problem could be brought under control: on the one hand according to the calculations of the United Nations Development Programme, in theory enough food is produced worldwide to feed the world’s population; on the other, over the past few years 30 countries have for the present succeeded in reducing malnutrition by at least 25%.
Since 1948 the right to food sufficient to ensure a person’s health and well-being has been recognised as a basic human right, a right that has been confirmed repeatedly by the United Nations. Thus there are sufficient declarations of intent, resources and knowledge to combat hunger. On an international and domestic level the problem lies in the lack of political will. Economic interests are placed before social and ecological necessity, agreements such as those of the World Trade Organisation are put into practice more rapidly than those which support sustainable development.
Yet there is no essential contradiction between the combating of hunger and economic necessity. The current FAO report states that the necessary investment would yield far more than it would cost. This is only logical, given that hunger makes people sick and unproductive, forcing them to consume natural resources in their immediate environment without regard to sustainability.
However, a serious anti-hunger policy would only benefit national economies, and not the globally and nationally influential international corporations.
Industrialisation and Agriculture
"All the market’s interested in is the price.
Taste is not really a consideration."
Hannes Schulz, poultry breeder
</B>
The industrialisation of agriculture in Europe which started on a large scale after the end of the Second World War and has spread massively ever since has not only led to considerable changes in the landscape but has above all completely upset the balance of nature in many places: wetlands have been drained, tracts of land razed and levelled so that they can be worked with huge machines, gigantic irrigation systems have been created, more and more environmental toxins applied for fertilisation and pest control, new breeds and strains developed of which a small number now replace the wide variety that used to flourish. The consequences: loss of diversity in habitats and species, the dwindling of ground water supplies and the contamination of soils, rivers and living organisms. Industrialised agriculture is responsible for almost 10% of the greenhouse gas emissions produced in the EU.
The driving force behind this development for the past 50 years has been the agricultural policies of the EU. The agriculture budget amounts to around half of the total EU budget - around 47 billion euros a year. Initially subsidies were linked to yield levels – the more farmers produced, the more financial support they received from the EU – while in the past few years farmers have received payments according to the area of land they cultivated or the numbers of livestock they held. Both systems exclusively reward increases in production, intensification and the trend towards ever larger farms. What falls by the wayside are not only the environment and health safeguards but also the diversity and quality of our food.
An ever-diminishing number of agribusiness concerns are cultivating ever larger areas. Between 1975 and 1995 more than 1.4 million farms went out of business in Europe. The most badly affected countries are Italy, Spain, Portugal and France - in these four countries the number of people employed in agriculture shrank by at least a third between 1987 and 1997.
Between 1990 and 1995 the number of farms going out of business as a result of overly aged farmers many of whom had reached retirement or were given a grant-in-aid for giving up their economic activity, rose with increasing rapidity. During this period, when Europe had twelve nation members, over a million farmers went out of business – which amounts to more than 550 farms closing down every day! This trend has continued since 1995.
Since 2003 subsidies have been contingent on the fulfilment of conditions in respect of environmental protection, food safety, health of livestock and plants as well as treatment of animals – albeit to a far too small degree in the concerted opinion of environmental and consumer protection organisations.
Subsidised Injustice
"If you go to the market in Senegal you can buy European produce for a third of the local prices. So the Senegalese peasant farmer no longer has any chance of earning a living."
Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food
In 2004 the OECD states subsidised their agriculture to the tune of 226 billion euros. However, within the OECD there are considerable differences: at the lower end of the scale are Australia and New Zealand, who subsidise their farmers at less than 5%, while at the upper end are Iceland, Norway and Switzerland who subsidise at more than 70%. At 34%, the EU lies at slightly above the average of 30%.
A large part of these subsidies are export subsidies: they help to sell on the world market superfluous agricultural products which cannot be sold on domestic markets. This artificial price reduction depresses world market prices, thus making agriculture in many other parts of the world unprofitable. Even the conservative calculations of the World Bank assume that agricultural subsidies in the rich nations deprive farmers in poor countries of a market of at least 30 billion dollars. At the same time, the World Bank states that – as absurd as this sounds at first – if the subsidies were to be abolished this would benefit the agricultural sector to the tune of 250 billion dollars, albeit with a more just distribution: countries with low and medium incomes would profit the most at around 150 billion dollars.
While in rich countries like those of the OECD only around 5% of the working population are employed in agriculture and it only contributes 2% to the gross domestic product, in developing countries it amounts to an average of 36% of GDP and employs around 70% of the working population. The current FAO report entitled “The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets” emphasises that around 2.5 billion people in the developing countries are directly dependent on agriculture and thus most at risk from fluctuating and declining food prices.
The long Road from the Field to the Table
"These trucks are all full of soya. They pick up their loads in the north of Mato Grosso. From there the soya is transported 2,500 kilometres to port. And from there the soya is exported."
Vincent José Puhl, , biologist (Brazil)
The crazy logic of long-distance transportation of foodstuffs has become common knowledge above all through the focus on live animal transports across the continent as also from seemingly curious examples such as German potatoes being transported to Poland to be washed before being transported back again to be sold in Germany. Analysis carried out by the ÖAMTC Academy in 1997 revealed that even a classic Viennese breakfast with all the ingredients – bread rolls, ham, cheese, milk, sugar, eggs, yoghurt and breakfast drinks – sourced in Austria is the result of at least 5,000 kilometres on the road. If you give yourself the additional treat of a kiwi fruit from New Zealand, you can add a further 1,250 kilometres to that total – and that’s after 20,000 kilometres on a freighter. In 2002 transport stream analysis of the Austrian foodstuff value creation chain revealed that the road from field to table is becoming ever longer. In the last 30 years the transport output of the chain as a whole has risen by 125%.
Hidden behind this development, where food products that have travelled thousands of kilometres are often cheaper than regional products, are cheap labour and state subsidies of both production and transport. All of that impacts negatively on people – beginning with the often exploitative conditions in the places of production and in freight transport, including huge negative impacts on people who live on the transit routes, to health risks for the consumers of foodstuffs which can often only be made fit for these long journeys with the aid of chemicals.
The environment also suffers: from the direct impact of pollutants on the one hand and high energy use and its concomitant contribution to climate change on the other. For example, a kilo of strawberries flown in from Israel costs almost five litres of petroleum oil before it reaches the supermarket shelf as compared with a kilo of strawberries from an Austrian farm which uses only 0.2 litres.
But it’s not only our food that comes from all over the world. The days when feedstuffs for Austrian livestock came exclusively from Austrian fields, meadows and Alpine pastures are long gone: in Central and South America around 350,000 hectares of soya are grown for the Austrian livestock industry – that’s the same area of land cultivated in Austria for bread cereals.
http://www.we-feed-the-world.at/en/index.htm
View Trailer (http://www.we-feed-the-world.at/en/trailer.htm)
Most successfull Austrian documentary ever!!!
160,000 admissions in Austria until January 2006
"Given the current state of agriculture in the world, it could feed 12 billion people with no problem. Or to put it another way: any child who dies of starvation today is in fact murdered."
Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (Switzerland)
"The consumer no longer has any idea how things work and how things are done. People are getting more and more unworldly, more brutal and harder. Trade is only interested in the price; flavour is not a consideration."
Hannes Schulz, poultry farmer (Austria)
Every day in Vienna the amount of unsold bread sent back to be disposed of is enough to supply Austria's second-largest city, Graz. Around 350,000 hectares of agricultural land, above all in Latin America, are dedicated to the cultivation of soybeans to feed Austria's livestock while one quarter of the local population starves. Every European eats ten kilograms a year of artificially irrigated greenhouse vegetables from southern Spain, with water shortages the result.
In WE FEED THE WORLD, Austrian filmmaker Erwin Wagenhofer traces the origins of the food we eat. His journey takes him to France, Spain, Romania, Switzerland, Brazil and back to Austria.
Leading us through the film is an interview with Jean Ziegler, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
WE FEED THE WORLD is a film about food and globalisation, fishermen and farmers, long-distance lorry drivers and high-powered corporate executives, the flow of goods and cash flow–a film about scarcity amid plenty. With its unforgettable images, the film provides insight into the production of our food and answers the question what world hunger has to do with us .
Interviewed are not only fishermen, farmers, agronomists, biologists and the UN's Jean Ziegler, but also the director of production at Pioneer, the world's largest seed company, as well as Peter Brabeck, Chairman and CEO of Nestlé International, the largest food company in the world.
FACTS
Genetic Engineering
"We have to get used to the idea that there are no longer any
GM-free foods."
Karl Otrok, Director of production, Pioneer Romania
Austria is considered to be largely free from genetic engineering: up to now, no transgenic organisms have been released into the environment, and Austrian supermarkets stock practically no products that are labelled as containing genetically modified constituents. However, genetic engineering has sneaked into Austrian agriculture through the back door in the form of animal feedstuffs.
Domestic production of feedstuff is insufficient to cover the protein requirements of the Austrian livestock industry. Austria imports around 550,000 tonnes of soya annually, of which according to Greenpeace around 60% is genetically modified. Although the law has required these feedstuffs to be labelled as such since 2004, there is no obligation to label secondary products such as meat, eggs or milk produced from animals which have consumed these feedstuffs.
Hardly any tests have been carried out to establish what effect this might have on animal or human organisms. What is obvious however is that wide-scale cultivation of genetically modified soya in countries such as Argentina is having huge negative impacts: use of crop sprays has risen drastically, forests are being felled and the nutritional situation of the inhabitants has by and large deteriorated dramatically.
Worldwide, genetically modified plants are being grown on more than 60 million hectares, 99% of them in Canada, Argentina, China and the USA. They consist mainly of soya (58%), maize (23%), cotton (12%) and rape (7%).
Within the EU there is a growing movement of consumers – including farmers – who are against the release into the environment of transgenic organisms and GM foods. In response to this, the EU announced a moratorium – in the face of strong opposition from the World Trade Organisation – on the import of genetically modified seed, effective until 2004. Since then EU law has required all foods containing GM constituents to be labelled. And since then genetic engineering has been increasingly infiltrating agriculture in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in admission states such as Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia.
Superfluity and Starvation
"Every five seconds a child under ten dies of starvation. A child that dies of starvation is in effect murdered."
Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food
A quarter of Vienna’s residual waste consists of unconsumed food, most of which is still perfectly fit to eat. At the same time the number of starving people in the world is increasing steadily: 852 million people suffer from malnutrition, most of them in Africa and Latin America. Even in rich industrialised countries around 10 million people do not get enough to eat. More than five million children die of malnutrition every year according to a current report issued by the FAO, the Rome-based UN organisation for food and agriculture.
Yet this problem could be brought under control: on the one hand according to the calculations of the United Nations Development Programme, in theory enough food is produced worldwide to feed the world’s population; on the other, over the past few years 30 countries have for the present succeeded in reducing malnutrition by at least 25%.
Since 1948 the right to food sufficient to ensure a person’s health and well-being has been recognised as a basic human right, a right that has been confirmed repeatedly by the United Nations. Thus there are sufficient declarations of intent, resources and knowledge to combat hunger. On an international and domestic level the problem lies in the lack of political will. Economic interests are placed before social and ecological necessity, agreements such as those of the World Trade Organisation are put into practice more rapidly than those which support sustainable development.
Yet there is no essential contradiction between the combating of hunger and economic necessity. The current FAO report states that the necessary investment would yield far more than it would cost. This is only logical, given that hunger makes people sick and unproductive, forcing them to consume natural resources in their immediate environment without regard to sustainability.
However, a serious anti-hunger policy would only benefit national economies, and not the globally and nationally influential international corporations.
Industrialisation and Agriculture
"All the market’s interested in is the price.
Taste is not really a consideration."
Hannes Schulz, poultry breeder
</B>
The industrialisation of agriculture in Europe which started on a large scale after the end of the Second World War and has spread massively ever since has not only led to considerable changes in the landscape but has above all completely upset the balance of nature in many places: wetlands have been drained, tracts of land razed and levelled so that they can be worked with huge machines, gigantic irrigation systems have been created, more and more environmental toxins applied for fertilisation and pest control, new breeds and strains developed of which a small number now replace the wide variety that used to flourish. The consequences: loss of diversity in habitats and species, the dwindling of ground water supplies and the contamination of soils, rivers and living organisms. Industrialised agriculture is responsible for almost 10% of the greenhouse gas emissions produced in the EU.
The driving force behind this development for the past 50 years has been the agricultural policies of the EU. The agriculture budget amounts to around half of the total EU budget - around 47 billion euros a year. Initially subsidies were linked to yield levels – the more farmers produced, the more financial support they received from the EU – while in the past few years farmers have received payments according to the area of land they cultivated or the numbers of livestock they held. Both systems exclusively reward increases in production, intensification and the trend towards ever larger farms. What falls by the wayside are not only the environment and health safeguards but also the diversity and quality of our food.
An ever-diminishing number of agribusiness concerns are cultivating ever larger areas. Between 1975 and 1995 more than 1.4 million farms went out of business in Europe. The most badly affected countries are Italy, Spain, Portugal and France - in these four countries the number of people employed in agriculture shrank by at least a third between 1987 and 1997.
Between 1990 and 1995 the number of farms going out of business as a result of overly aged farmers many of whom had reached retirement or were given a grant-in-aid for giving up their economic activity, rose with increasing rapidity. During this period, when Europe had twelve nation members, over a million farmers went out of business – which amounts to more than 550 farms closing down every day! This trend has continued since 1995.
Since 2003 subsidies have been contingent on the fulfilment of conditions in respect of environmental protection, food safety, health of livestock and plants as well as treatment of animals – albeit to a far too small degree in the concerted opinion of environmental and consumer protection organisations.
Subsidised Injustice
"If you go to the market in Senegal you can buy European produce for a third of the local prices. So the Senegalese peasant farmer no longer has any chance of earning a living."
Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food
In 2004 the OECD states subsidised their agriculture to the tune of 226 billion euros. However, within the OECD there are considerable differences: at the lower end of the scale are Australia and New Zealand, who subsidise their farmers at less than 5%, while at the upper end are Iceland, Norway and Switzerland who subsidise at more than 70%. At 34%, the EU lies at slightly above the average of 30%.
A large part of these subsidies are export subsidies: they help to sell on the world market superfluous agricultural products which cannot be sold on domestic markets. This artificial price reduction depresses world market prices, thus making agriculture in many other parts of the world unprofitable. Even the conservative calculations of the World Bank assume that agricultural subsidies in the rich nations deprive farmers in poor countries of a market of at least 30 billion dollars. At the same time, the World Bank states that – as absurd as this sounds at first – if the subsidies were to be abolished this would benefit the agricultural sector to the tune of 250 billion dollars, albeit with a more just distribution: countries with low and medium incomes would profit the most at around 150 billion dollars.
While in rich countries like those of the OECD only around 5% of the working population are employed in agriculture and it only contributes 2% to the gross domestic product, in developing countries it amounts to an average of 36% of GDP and employs around 70% of the working population. The current FAO report entitled “The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets” emphasises that around 2.5 billion people in the developing countries are directly dependent on agriculture and thus most at risk from fluctuating and declining food prices.
The long Road from the Field to the Table
"These trucks are all full of soya. They pick up their loads in the north of Mato Grosso. From there the soya is transported 2,500 kilometres to port. And from there the soya is exported."
Vincent José Puhl, , biologist (Brazil)
The crazy logic of long-distance transportation of foodstuffs has become common knowledge above all through the focus on live animal transports across the continent as also from seemingly curious examples such as German potatoes being transported to Poland to be washed before being transported back again to be sold in Germany. Analysis carried out by the ÖAMTC Academy in 1997 revealed that even a classic Viennese breakfast with all the ingredients – bread rolls, ham, cheese, milk, sugar, eggs, yoghurt and breakfast drinks – sourced in Austria is the result of at least 5,000 kilometres on the road. If you give yourself the additional treat of a kiwi fruit from New Zealand, you can add a further 1,250 kilometres to that total – and that’s after 20,000 kilometres on a freighter. In 2002 transport stream analysis of the Austrian foodstuff value creation chain revealed that the road from field to table is becoming ever longer. In the last 30 years the transport output of the chain as a whole has risen by 125%.
Hidden behind this development, where food products that have travelled thousands of kilometres are often cheaper than regional products, are cheap labour and state subsidies of both production and transport. All of that impacts negatively on people – beginning with the often exploitative conditions in the places of production and in freight transport, including huge negative impacts on people who live on the transit routes, to health risks for the consumers of foodstuffs which can often only be made fit for these long journeys with the aid of chemicals.
The environment also suffers: from the direct impact of pollutants on the one hand and high energy use and its concomitant contribution to climate change on the other. For example, a kilo of strawberries flown in from Israel costs almost five litres of petroleum oil before it reaches the supermarket shelf as compared with a kilo of strawberries from an Austrian farm which uses only 0.2 litres.
But it’s not only our food that comes from all over the world. The days when feedstuffs for Austrian livestock came exclusively from Austrian fields, meadows and Alpine pastures are long gone: in Central and South America around 350,000 hectares of soya are grown for the Austrian livestock industry – that’s the same area of land cultivated in Austria for bread cereals.
http://www.we-feed-the-world.at/en/index.htm