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Title: Agribusiness & Hunger in the 3rd World 02 Educational Video View count: 2311 Rating: 5.0 (12 ratings) Description: Agribusiness & Hunger in the 3rd World 02 Educational Video. This video is an excerpt from Alternative Views #306 at archive.org. Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States. The program shows how peasant farmers are forced off their land in Third World countries to make way for large landowners and multinational agribusiness. By using the land for export crops, people go hungry because the country can no longer provide food for all its people. Additionally, the dispossessed landowners are either forced to work on the big farms at low wages or to go to the cities where they cannot find satisfactory work and are forced to live in squalid conditions. The documentary shows the brutality and venality with which the established powers operate. Producer: Frank Morrow; Production Company: Alternative Information Network; keywords: hunger; documentary; agribusiness; Third World. Multinational corporations now grow more food in Asia, Africa, and Latin America than ever before. But much of the food is exported while over 500 million people go hungry. Many people believe that hunger is caused by drought, war, or overpopulation. But in the vast Sahel region in West Africa, there is another reason: peanuts! A hundred years ago, French colonialists who controlled most of the Sahel forced farmers there to grow peanuts for the French vegetable oil industry. Peanut farming and processing by multinational corporations expanded rapidly after the Second World War. By the 1960s, peanuts were king of the Sahel. Over have the cultivated land of Senegal, 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares), is now devoted to growing peanuts for export to Europe. Peanuts also deplete the soil. Peanut harvesting uproots the plants since the nuts grow underground. The disrupted soil is gradually carried off by dry season winds. The small peanut farmers are too poor to replenish the soil with fertilizer, so they grow peanuts until the soil is exhausted and then they move on, leaving barren land behind. Today, a terrible drought. The food storage bins in the villages are nearly empty. Malnutrition and famine are spreading. The vast estates in southern Brazil grow soybeans which are processed locally into oil by large American companies such as Cargill, and then exported to Europe and Japan. We can make a difference in overcoming hunger in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We can demand that U.S. government and business policies in the Third World give priority to feeding local people first. We can support movements by peasants to own their own land and grow their own food. In these ways, our brothers and sisters in the Third World will have enough to eat, and will have a future for themselves and their children. These farm laborers in northwest Mexico don't work for a foreign agribusiness. They own the land they work on. Five thousand landless peasants fought for and took over 50,000 acres of idle farmland here. Peasant leaders recognized that they could not go back to each family farming their own small plot of land. They saw that modern farm technology makes for efficient food production. So they work their land as one large cooperative farm, each member owning a share of the business. They have started a small industry for building their own houses. They have their own schools and their own credit union. Shows clearly that the main cause of world hunger is not weather or war but rather the policies of western multinational corporations in Asia, Africa and Latin America (e.g., Dole, Del Monte, Cargill, Gulf and Western and Bud Antle). Sweeps through the Philippines, Brazil, Senegal, and the Dominican Republic providing devastating statistics and pictures of the scope of world hunger. In each case, the film traces the roots of the problem to the massive displacement of farmers from the land to city slums and the use of farmland to produce food for export instead of local consumption. Shows how the "Green Revolution" was presented to the U.S. public in the l960's as a way to end world hunger but -- because of the profit motive -- has led to greater hunger than ever. Spokesmen for the food corporations give their side of the story in several interviews. Relates world hunger to the growing revolutionary ferment throughout the world. Offers solutions based on the principle of "feed local people first" and on the need for peasants to own their own land. Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States. Tags: hunger, poverty, agriculture, agribusiness, third, world, starvation, starving, malnourishment, politics, famine, political, greed, Author: rosaryfilms |
