I should find this film and arrange a display in my kids school. The remarks from the below e-mail leaves very little to comment. I want to point out one thing though "The company does not have a heart!".
This is a good point. This is a chioce we all make sometimes in our lives. It is a very very simple decision actually; - Do you follow the money? - Do you follow a more ethical path? Do you work to provide a value in your profession, whatever it could be? Or are you there for the money? When you are young, choices are more open. You are a bit more independent (no family kids etc.) and you have less professional binds (just starting your career). This is the most critical stage. The decisions at this stage can make you either set you free or make you slave later in your life. 10 years later with family and kids, starting over may not be a personal choice anymore. There are people to support, or dependent to you.... However if you have played carefully you will have options and alternatives coming to you. How about if you are running a for profit organization aka Company? You have staff waiting to be paid and even maybe share holders squezing you. Choices you will have to face are quite critical and stressfull. By sharing the vision with your staff you may come up with an ethical an human organization. But believe me some organizations has only one value, and as long as it is within the legal limits, they will seek that, which is money. If you have one of those competing with you, life will be very interesting. They will try to bend the rules and reduce costs while delivering very often low quality solutions, wasting resources and polluting at the same time. Of course your clients are important. But typical buyer looks at the price tag. If you have dealt with Purchasing managers, you will understand what I mean. And of course governments do need to regulate on benefit of people not the big (or small) corporates. Purchasing departments will buy the cheapest whereever it is made. They will make the manufacturer sign papers promising to use good manufacturing practices. While knowing that they will not. Because at those margins everything is a luxury. They will not provide decent working environments or working hours. They will not invest in systems like water treatment. The products will make it to the western world. The thrash will stay in the 3rd world..... Which may be carried miles away in form acid rain to the other countries.... Anyway, as I said, I will try to find this movie should be interesting to watch. Regards Burak -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Keith Addison Sent: Monday, April 24, 2006 8:39 PM To: biofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: [Biofuel] Eating (up) the World (Compliments of Ken Hargesheimer.) http://www2.dw-world.de/southasia/germany/1.178686.1.html DW-WORLD.DE - Eating (up) the World 13.04.2006 Eating (up) the World Scene from Erwin Wagenhofer's documentary 'We feed the world' (Austria, 2006) "We feed the world - Essen global" is the most successful documentary in Austrian history. Its subject is the global food industry, but the film is an appeal to Austrian, European and western audiences in general to rethink just what havoc they might be wreaking by their very choice of the menu. "We must change the way we live" is the basic message of this merciless take on the modern food industry. Director Erwin Wagenhofer wanted to know where the Europeans got their foodstuffs from - and got some pretty disturbing answers. He followed the trail of the tomatoes from the Naschmarkt market in Vienna back to gigantic greenhouses in Spain, and chicken breast cutlets on the shelves of supermarkets back to industrial feeding farms. This was followed by a further question: why was it that mountains of surplus foodstuff were being disposed of year after year in Europe, while so many people were dying of hunger in other parts of the world. "A child that dies of hunger today, has been murdered" In the film, UN hunger expert Jean Ziegler makes the rather startling statement: "World agriculture is capable of feeding 12 billion people with ease, which means that a child that dies of hunger today, has been murdered." A whole series of interlocutors, of many nations and professions, air their opinion in the film, but none so often and so repeatedly as Jean Ziegler. Otherwise Wagenhofer takes his camera to Brazil, where thousands of hectares of primary rainforest have been sacrificed for the purpose of growing soya for cattle feed in Austria. Biologist Vincent José Puhl has a rather pithy way of putting it: "European cattle are eating up the Amazon rainforest." "A company does not have a heart" The 'Pioneer' company is the world's biggest producer of crop seeds - and Karl Otrok is Pioneer's production chief in Romania. Standing in the middle of Pioneer's fields Otrok has no difficulty - or trepidation - in confessing: "You know, we've ruined the West and now we've come to Romania and we're going to ruin the whole agriculture here. After all, a company is just a company. And a company does not have a heart." In France, Wagenhofer speaks to a French fisherman, Philippe Cleuziou, who takes a dubious look at his day's catch and says: "It's like this. I wouldn't eat that stuff. It's not meant for eating, it's meant for selling. That's the way we put it." Nestlé chief Peter Brabeck paces his luxurious office and speaks coolly and objectively about water being just another commodity - like any other foodstuff - that should be bought and sold on the open market. Elsewhere in the film one sees poor Brazilian peasants worrying about water pollution because the water makes their children fall sick. "We must change the way we live" Wagenhofer's film is also about political awareness, in that sense: "If you go to a supermarket in Europe, you can buy Argentine grapes in the middle of winter - and at a laughable price: roughly, a kilo of grapes for around 4 kilos of kerosene. Question is: is that what we want?" As Wagenhofer pointed out in an exclusive interview with DW-WORLD.DE, the possibility of influencing much larger processes of commerce and politics simply by deciding - consciously - to eat certain things and not to eat others: this possibility has been indicated in the title itself. "If we intend to find a rational and realistic mode of coexistence, then we must change the way we live. That's why the film is called 'We feed the world' and not 'They feed the world'." It's quite possible that people who've seen the film will think twice before entering a supermarket the next time. 'We feed the world' has had an able predecessor in Morgan Spurlock's 'Super Size Me', which created a furore in America by highlighting the fattening effects of fast food. Both films are an appeal to think about the kind of food we eat. But 'We feed the world' goes a step further: it shows that the individual consumer's choice and decision is not without its working in the larger commercial-industrial context - the rest being a matter of will. Irène Bluche (asc) Official website of 'We feed the world' (English version) http://www.we-feed-the-world.at/en/index.htm _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/ _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
