Much of the cheap meat and dairy produce sold in supermarkets across Europe is arriving as a result of serious human rights abuses and environmental damage in one of Latin America’s most impoverished countries, a powerful new investigation produced by the Ecologist Film Unit – the production company jointly owned by Ecostorm and The Ecologist magazine – has found.
The film, launched in conjunction with Friends of the Earth and Food and Water Watch, discovered that in Paraguay vast plantations of soy, principally grown for use in intensively-farmed animal feed, are responsible for a catalogue of social and ecological problems, including the forced eviction of rural communities, landlessness, poverty, excessive use of pesticides, deforestation and rising food insecurity.
The ten minute film, Killing Fields: the battle to feed factory farms – documents the experiences of some of those caught up in Paraguay’s growing conflict over soy farming and reveals, for the first time, how intensive animal farming across the EU, including the UK, is fuelling the problem.
Campaigners are using the film to highlight the ‘unsustainable’ nature of modern food production, and to spearhead efforts to raise awareness of the largely hidden cost of the factory farming systems supplying much of Europe’s cheap meat and dairy produce.
The moves come as international concern over global food insecurity grows, and amid fresh warnings that millions of the world’s poorest people face acute hunger in the coming months and years because of the twin threats of climate change – impacting farming in large parts of the developing world – and the ongoing credit crunch which has seen global food aid budgets slashed.
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