"We Feed the World"

Erwin Wagenhofer's documentary We Feed the World imbues watchers with powerful central messages: that modern perspectives on food availability, standards, and production are unsustainable, particularly for vulnerable populations. Therefore, cultural and social change are necessary to properly produce and distribute food for the global population. Unfortunately, the most vulnerable populations are the poverty-stricken, local populations that are already struggling to survive.

In many regions, farms need to produce about six times the yield to enjoy the same standards as farms from the previous generation. Close to a billion of the nearly seven billion people on Earth are starving today, even though the food we are currently producing could feed twelve billion people. Every day in Vienna, the amount of unsold bread sent back to be disposed of is enough to feed Austria's second largest city, Graz. Four-fifths of the wheat eaten in Switzerland is imported form India, despite the fact that two hundred millions Indians are starving. Even more shocking, road salt used for de-icing costs more per volume than the wheat farmers are producing.

In Almeria, the world's capital of winter vegetables in Spain, the average European consumes ten kilos of greenhouse vegetables each year. Leading world powers (the European Union and the United States) provide their farmers with enormous subsidies for the production and export of their products, almost a billion dollars a day. The result is the dumping and destruction of agriculture in Southern Europe, where not much more than peasant farming exists. Furthermore, European produce can be bought in African countries for a third of the price of local produce, and the heartier farmers find that they have no choice but to make the trek to Europe and hope to find work, often unavoidably under inhumane conditions.

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. Europe imports ninety percent of its soy for livestock feed, and Amazonian forests continue to be cleared for planting soy, even though the soil must be artificially filled with the proper nutrients to grow soy.

The film can be found on reserve (on a four hour time) at Case-Geyer Library.