In We Feed The World, our daily bread literally goes down the tube, just a fraction of the excess and waste created by multinational corporations with a foothold on the global production of food. CALEB STARRENBURG uncovers some of this documentary’s sobering truths, screening at this year’s World Cinema Showcase in March and April.


THERE IS A telling statistic cited early into We Feed The World. It explains the amount of unsold bread destroyed each day in Vienna is enough to feed Austria’s second largest city. This quotation sets the tone for Austrian filmmaker Erwin Wagerhof’s unsettling investigation into the excesses and absurdities of the globalised food industry.

The documentary – mostly a series of talking head interviews – travels Europe and further a field, examining how traditional agriculturalists and fishermen are being driven out of business by massive multinational corporations. The doco reveals the profit driven motives of these corporations is resulting in gratuitous waste and a lessening in the quality of our food.

An employee for Pioneer – a seed technology company – discloses with surprising candor his belief genetically modified produce is inferior to the naturally grown variety.

The film also touches on trade injustice between the North and South – or developed and developing nations. Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, explains in no uncertain terms “Free trade has nothing to do with freedom. That’s an enormous lie. When Nestlé, for example, takes on an African farmers’ syndicate, that’s like Mike Tyson going into the ring against an undernourished Bengali.”

Nestlé – amongst the world's largest food production companies – is singled out for particular scorn in the film. In a revealing interview, Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck describes as “extreme” the position of NGOs who insist access to clean water is a human right. After bragging how many jobs his corporation is creating, he gazes at footage of a roboticised Nestlé factory in Japan, marveling at how few people it employs.

This film is visually striking, although Wagenhofer's affection for drawn out montages of agricultural production often slows the documentary’s pace to crawl; but a lengthy sequence detailing the wokrings of a chicken processing plant in Austrian is perversely fascinating.

We Feed The World, unlike the flashy-graphics mass appeal of recent climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, might occasionally feel like a sermon to the converted. It does, however, make its case convincingly – if somewhat bleakly. As Austrian poultry farmer Hannes Schulz puts it: “The consumer no longer has any idea how things work and how things are done. People are getting more and more unworldly, more brutal and harder. Trade is only interested in the price; flavour is not a consideration.”