SYNOPSIS:
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.
MOVIE REVIEW:
Back in 2005, Austrian helmer Erwin Wagenhofer already issued a grave warning about the pitfalls of the globalised food industry. Unfortunately, his documentary never got to be seen by many outside the film festival circuit. Then three years later, the American filmmaker Robert Kenner made “Food, Inc”, an expose on America’s corporate controlled food industry that grew on word-of-mouth and eventually received a limited release in many countries including Singapore.
No doubt thanks to Kenner’s “Food, Inc”, Wagenhofer’s “We Feed the World” is getting a home video release. The theme is similar- large corporations are monopolizing the global food business, driving local peasant farmers, fishermen and livestock growers out of business. Here, Wagenhofer takes aim at Nestle, the world’s largest world production company, and saves the most damning part of his account for the last- an interview with Peter Brabeck, the CEO of Nestle, who flatly rejects that organic produce is better than the hybrids that his company uses.
More appropriately viewed as a series of shorts than a cohesive feature, “We Feed the World” takes its aim at different aspects of the food industry- from industrial fishing in Brittany, France, to greenhouse production in Spain, to the use of hybrid seeds in Romania, to the production of soya in Brazil, and finally to chicken rearing in Austria. Though certainly ambitious in its breadth, Wagenhofer admittedly spreads himself a little too thin covering so much in just under 90 mins.
A lot of what Wagenhofer presents is in a touch-and-go manner, highlighting the problems and their causes in a rather superficial manner. So despite growing aware that the EU supports industrial fishing despite the fact that it produces worse catch than local fishermen, or that vegetables grown by hybrid seeds are less tasty and cannot be used to grow a second crop, we are not led to understand much about the source of the problems and how they precipitated to the state they are today.
Indeed, unlike “Food, Inc”, Wagenhofer doesn’t probe deeper into why things are the way they are or possible solutions how to make things better- and no, it doesn’t help by blaming large corporations alone or hoping that solutions will come from abolishing them. There was and continues to be raison d’être for their existence and a failure to address this, or articulate it, only leads to further ignorance that led to this current predicament.
Nevertheless, in spite of his flawed approach, Wagenhofer does bring to light prescient issues that need to be seen and heard. Particularly disturbing is the way corporations are rearing their chickens- collecting the eggs, placing them in an incubator, and watching them grow to full term within just 8 weeks. Kenner’s “Food Inc” does paint a similarly disturbing picture, but Wagenhofer’s extraordinary amount of access into one such plant is truly an eye-opener.
There’s no doubt that Wagenhofer has assembled an interesting melange of stories about the food industry in his movie, but one wishes that he had done more with the material than simply present it for audiences to be shocked and even outraged by this imbalance of excesses and deficiencies going on in different parts of the world. If anything, at least we have learnt that we should not take what we have for granted, for according to the UN, every second, at least someone somewhere in the world is dying from starvation and its immediate consequence. That’s something for everyone to chew on.
SPECIAL FEATURES :
This Code 3 DVD contains no extra features.
AUDIO/VISUAL:
The Dolby 2.0 audio isn’t very clear in parts especially during the interview segments on the road. So is the footage rather grainy at some points in the film- but that’s probably part and parcel of documentaries. The English subtitles are hardsubbed, so don’t worry if you can’t find the English subtitle option on the menu.
MOVIE RATING:
DVD
RATING :
Review
by Gabriel Chong
Posted on 22 February 2010
|
