Documentary thumps corporate ag
By Julie Brown-Micko

Is there anyone unaware of the unsavory facts of modern food production? Corporate agriculture has been muscling aside the family farm for decades. Huge multinationals plunder limited resources such as arable land and water, abuse immigrant workers, and maximize profits at the expense of small farmers and fishermen. It’s all true, but sometimes our eyes glaze over as we reach for our daily loaf of bread.

Director Eric Wagenhofer brings it all back into focus. In the opening scenes of We Feed the World (the title is the slogan of global hybrid-seed company Pioneer) the camera moves from lush, undulating fields of wheat to diesel-belching trucks hauling tons of two-day old bread to the incinerator. The bounty of the field has become a mountain of food that no one will eat. Jean Ziegler, the United Nations special rapporteur on the Right to Food, shares stomach-turning fact that Switzerland imports four-fifths of its grain from India while 200 million Indians suffer from malnutrition.

Traveling primarily in Europe, Wagenhofer illustrates the same bleak tale of greed, poverty, and waste in fisheries, livestock and vegetable farming. Viewers get front-line news from the battles waged by small fishermen, immigrant laborers, Romanian farmers (some of whom still use hand tools to sow and reap the fields), and the executives of a chicken processing plant. Aside from a few poignant moments, like a migrant worker playing a tune on an instrument fashioned from plastic jugs, none of it is pretty.

Clearly, Erwin Wagenhofer has an axe to grind. The issues of sustainability, starvation and the drive for endless growth are worthy of exploration. But the film’s occasionally monotonous—and often didactic—tone will only appeal to the converted. It suffers from preachiness and, finally, an enervating sense of doom regarding the brutal, mechanized march of food production. There are no gimmicks, no in-your-face tricks, no animated graphics. Just the painful facts.

Could there be another side to the story? Wagenhofer doesn’t say. One might argue that the food supply has never been safer or more abundant and that problems such as disease and crop failure have plummeted. Perhaps there’s an upside to genetically modified food. Is there any good news?

It would seem not. Jean Ziegler’s U.N. report says that world agricultural resources could easily feed 12 billion, and any child who dies from starvation today has been murdered. Meanwhile, the CEO of Nestle, Peter Brabeck, happily looks at footage of a “highly robotized” Japanese factory with “almost no people” and praises a world in which all foodstuffs have a monetary value. Ziegler and Brabeck both point to a future that is similarly chilling.

We Feed the World is not a Saturday afternoon romp. It’s more of a trip to Sunday school. If you like a fire and brimstone sermon, it’s worth it.