Soyalism | DW Documentary

pork is already the most consumed meat in the world and fueled by the global demand for inexpensive meat the industry continues to grow in the United States the waste produced by industrial pig farms is a major problem [Music] China is the world's biggest pork producer as Chinese consumers become more affluent demand continues to grow there's just not any empty frontiers anymore on the planet if the Chinese try to eat like Americans what will happen to the Amazon rainforest to feed the pigs as cheaply as possible soy is being grown on a massive scale especially in Brazil we make the food that goes on the global populations table soy cultivation is helping to drive the deforestation of the Amazon grown as a monoculture Tsai is impacting the whole world [Music] China's population has now topped 1.4 billion rising affluence has led to changes in people's diets in the past rice vegetables and noodles dominated while meat was rare but today pork has become increasingly popular China consumes more than 50 million tons of pork per year that's more than half of the world's production [Music] oh this is the beginning of the slaughterhouse chain we slaughter about 600 pigs per hour the equipment is imported from a Dutch company this factory was built in the 1950s and in 1998 we shifted to large-scale production the impact of China's pork boom is being felt around the world Chinese companies are snapping up huge industrial pig farms like one in the US state of North Carolina the pigs in North Carolina were owned by traditional family farmers raising about two million pigs they're about twenty-two thousand of them they all got replaced by this factory system and initially Smithfield Foods and Murphy were the owners of that they were American corporations but now they've been bought out by a group called the WH group the old sunway corporation out of China it's a multinational corporation headquartered in China you know very wealthy you know they made I understand their profits for the first quarter of this year just their net profit first quarter this year was two hundred million dollars and you look at all the cesspools and you say to yourself hey they got the money to fix this what's holding everything up well what's holding everything up is the fact that they don't want to spend that money to fix the problem they'd rather externalize the cost of their waste treatment on the people of North Carolina this will film our whole trip as as we go through swine country it'll pick up everything we see all along the way and then if we spot some illegal discharges then we'll do some special filming of that one [Music] that means wine [Music] massive farms with huge manure lagoons extending as far as the eye can see as a result of these industrial scale farms many local residents feel under siege we're not anti farmer or anti business in North Carolina we're just about doing it correctly and not polluting the citizens of North Carolina's waterways concentrated animal farms are in rural communities where the community does not have a voice to put up a fight to restrict these facilities from coming in here [Music] and when they come in here they they preach about having jobs to help the community but even then the jobs are what a community member would want there working in a slaughterhouse or working on hog farm is not easy work and it's you very rarely see the owners of these facilities living on-site LC herring lives near one of these farms called Capo's concentrated animal feeding operations so we don't open up the windows on this side this is a bathroom window the room next door that was my brother's bedroom and it blended this way is the kitchen window so we don't open these windows that are on this side facing this way feel the K folds are back here to the stuff of my mother's house right back here straight back but you can't see them from here but you can see them from the mail route Road when it's P spring that means it's wrong so that means we are inhaling this stuff when everything is in life you know the hallways to urine the antibiotics the ammonia everything that's been you know in the lagoon it's being released into our atmosphere so we can open our windows we don't open the doors you know you pretty much prisoner and I won't home and when you do try to go out when he's spraying you have to hold your breath because it'll take your breath away don't make your eyes start watering you make you stop coughing gagging you feel like you want to throw up it makes you angry you know you get depressed because no one is listening and it just doesn't seem to me how someone could believe that they have a right to blow animal waste on another here with me Smithfield Foods the largest pork producer in the US is now owned by a Chinese company during the 90s we saw 90% of all our hog farms disappear in the United States the cash market dwindled from 100% of the market to less than 5% of the market the majority of animals now are raised under contracts and so you saw this traditional profitable industry for raising hogs get wiped out and replace with this new way of raising animals that was industrialized and centrally controlled it was really a corporate takeover and it happened in a very short period of time most hog production today in the United States is produced in this industrial model it's called vertical integration [Music] the way it works is that a company will own the nursery where the hogs are born it'll own the feed mill that produces the feed for the Hogs it owns the trucking lines that transport the Hogs it even owns the slaughterhouse where the pigs are killed and turned into a variety of product this was a business it used to be a pillar of rural America and then it got taken over by Smithfield that you know this is a company that had spent decades devouring independent firms in the United States and acquiring a kind of market share that never should have been allowed to fall under the umbrella of one firm it is not a good idea to allow one firm to control 30 percent of the entire market in the pork industry or food industry once that happened though it became a very attractive target for any kind of overseas company that could afford to buy it just a huge sector of productive capacity in rural America I mean we're talking about thousands of large-scale farms there's a lot of money being made raising pigs in the United States the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is one of the biggest in the world agricultural commodities are also traded here well down here this is this is now the financial room here we're standing in so over here we have bond option trading we have tea bonds here our agricultural sector has been diminished over here which we still do the options on soybeans wheat in corn we also do livestock China for years and years has been trying to eat like a westerner which we consume about 3400 calories per day China is now approaching 2,900 calories so they've really caught up with where we are in caloric intake China has the largest hog herd in the name in the world accounting for about 47 percent of all pork productions but again when we look at meat consumption or caloric consumption going forward it's got to happen in countries like Bangladesh Nigeria Pakistan India these are they're gonna be the big drivers of calories over the next 10 to 20 years heretofore they don't have the GDP rates to expand their meat consumption much like China didn't become a big meet consumer until the 2001-2002 period when its GDP levels started to rally dramatically China's hunger for pork is driving Chinese companies to scour the world in search of new production facilities and expertise I think having a secured pork market is very important in China and that's part of the reason why young we are now it's known as WH group why they looked to acquire Smithfield's you know America's largest pork producer one I think they wanted access to supply but to from what I've heard from Smithfield's executives is that they wanted to learn how the American pork operations worked how we were able to produce so much pork on so very little land and that means that this American industrialized style of producing pork is being exported to China when it comes to industrial meat production China has caught up with the West its mechanized and operates on a mass scale [Music] in 1961 this was a small slaughterhouse for chickens and other animals beginning in 1992 the government encouraged facilities like this to become more efficient they allowed us to grow and acquire new machinery in order to adopt a more industrial approach from 2003 to 2006 we experienced an annual growth rate of around 30% when you are feeding so many animals in such a small space animals health is compromised antibiotics become used routinely both for illness prevention and to increase weight gain and animals in general if you have a few pigs on a farm their waste is an asset it's something you can spread on your fields it's a fantastic fertilizer you have a complete nutrient cycle but when you have 10,000 or 20,000 hogs in a small facility their waste is a huge liability in 1960 there was less than 10 billion animals killed per year for food today there's over 70 billion and if the trajectory of NIDA fication continues there will be a hundred and twenty billion animals killed for food by 2050 industrial livestock operations effectively command about a third of the world's arable land that includes the majority of the world's coarse grain production the biggest coarse grains in maize and and a huge source of oil seeds principally soybeans on a world scale and so there are these huge flows of grain and oilseed monocultures through when I call islands of concentrated animals SOI cultivation is having a massive impact on industrial farming China's hunger for meat is causing more and more soy to be planted for use as animal feed China as a country consumes twice as much meat as the United States but each person is only consuming half as much as Americans so more the Chinese able to fully emulate the American diet right it's hard to say where that meat would come from already China is is increasing its imports of pork it's increasing its imports of soybeans that are fed to the livestock whether it's the pork the chicken the beef or the or the farmed fish they're incorporating a lot more soybean in their diet so the Chinese government well aware of the the dangers of famine having lived through the Chinese famine where official records say some 36 million people died they wanted to make sure that they could secure their food supply at homes if the Chinese try to eat like Americans what will happen to the Amazon rainforest where where will we find the land to grow that much soy to grow that much green there's just not any empty frontiers anymore on the planet the situation in Brazil is a case in point in 2019 deforestation soared president jarba son ro who took office early that year is keen to promote the country's agricultural industry and soy is a lynchpin soy monocultures have come to dominate places like santarém in the brazilian state of Para maria arruda lives next to a soy plantation right there behind our homes there's a soybean plantation watch your head [Music] this is all plantation we're surrounded by soybean it's all around us we're right in the middle all this land used to be a family farm now it's been turned into a soy monoculture and because it's all grown for export none of it remains in Brazil a truck full of soy has tipped over on a road in the state of mato grosso workers are gathering up the valuable soybeans by hand this used to be rainforest now it's soy fields stretching right out to the horizon a local farmer shows us around before we started cultivating this was all forest it was cheap land the only thing here was forests and trees it looked the way it does on the other side of the road we used to clear the land simply as a way to survive this region's economy is almost entirely based on soil this is our vocation it's all we know how to do we grow the food that ends up on the global populations table soy bean is an imported crop that we have adapted to conditions here we realized that it grows very well here and that we have the right conditions for it with the help of gene technology we slowly improved the soybeans today we have varieties specifically developed for our region [Music] we pay a visit to an agricultural trade fair in lucas de rio verde in the state of mato grosso soybeans have made a number of farmers rich here including Ottaviano pavetta [Music] they are epic in agriculture along the river and the zoo I had a small farm in Rio Grande de su I had 15 hectares I drove here with a small truck to help my uncle who was moving here I was young and very enthusiastic and I thought I could make a good future for myself here I was lucky and many different things came together I was in the right place in the right time exactly when the world began asking for more protein and food I had a dream an unusual dream almost a fantasy fortunately reality has proved even better than my dreams my company has 270 thousand hectares under cultivation I've publicly listed the company and sold 70% of its stock now I'm a shareholder an advisor Essaouira aqui no brasil en todo emissary su a Lokomotiva both in Brazil and in the entire southern hemisphere saw as the spearhead of a new model of capital production called agribusiness soy is a standardized grain which has become a commodity it's the same all over the world it's easy to grow on a very large scale here in Brazil some of our soy farms cover 240,000 hectares the global market is controlled by only five companies bunga Monsanto ADM Cargill and dreyfus they speculate with the prices speculate with stocks and manipulate the market they've managed to transform soy into the main ingredient in animal feed pig feed cow feed and chicken feed that means that soy is now a very important raw material in human nutrition the world has become one giant pigsty corporations use soy as if it were the only food we have in the world we have the same seeds the same agrochemicals the same trading companies the same price setting mechanisms the same players it's a very homogeneous production system even though it's very diverse in its integration into radically different ecosystems in social settings it's a production system that generates its own homogeneity in order to be able to attend this global market in this region the producers mainly come from other countries but some of them come from mato grosso and perón our local people have also started planting it maybe they've realized that it's good business but most of the people who plant soy come from abroad they also use a lot of machinery and those machines take our jobs hardly any people work in those fields there's no more work for local people the plantations hire a few to drive tractors but apart from that they do all the work themselves this building houses the santarem farm workers union local people are benefitting very little from the soybean boom small hold farmers can't compete with the industrial farming operations which can produce more efficiently what have you got there soybeans no there's no soy here our products aren't worth anything only the big farms can make money small ones can you can try to plant corn but then where are you going to sell it in the end there's no profit to be had in it the markets only for big growers if you want to plant soy you need big machines tractors we can't afford that kind of equipment soy is not made for small holders it's that simple they have a lot of different ways to fight pests and then all those pests end up in our fields so when we plant beans now we end up with nothing they use pesticides and the insects end up in our fields we can't do anything about it we used to plant beans and would fill two entire sacks of them it's true now we've stopped planting them the pests from the land that belongs to the rich people come here and destroy our seeds in the United States in China can't they just destroy their own forests to plant soybeans why do they have to come to Brazil and exploit our resources Africa has plenty of forests why don't they go there maybe they don't work hard enough or they have more nerve the soy boom has in fact reached Africa Mozambique is nearly 10,000 kilometers from Brazil but Brazilian companies are moving in trying to secure vast tracts of land for soybean farming the agribusiness project is being promoted by the prosavana program Brazilian farmers are going to Africa because mozambique's government is leasing land at a very cheap price to create new plantations Muslim beak is giving Brazilian farmers a 6 million hectare area three times bigger than sare cheap estate and almost for free it's going to be a lease that will allow for the cultivation of soy cotton and corn mainly for the Chinese market machinist we accompany human rights activists Jeremias Wong Sonia on a visit to the Nacala region a lot of land here is slated to go to the Brazilians how you doing good and you find my friend thank you just rain yes it rained a lot we might have a good harvest this year and the next one we don't have enough land here we already have conflicts among ourselves if investors come the conflict will become worse the land belongs to the people of Mozambique we're not against development but we believe that the community should be consulted despite what our government says we don't eat soybeans we eat our local crops we gave the government some advice before implementing the project they need to involve local farmers what happened instead is that meetings were not public not at the district or at the national level [Music] we've been threatened and intimidated any farmers are facing criminal charges for a new difficult for an intimate a dish so you believe that prosavana is not helping farmers no prosavana is not good for us prosavana is a joint program involving Mozambique Japan and Brazil it's official goal is to promote development in the Nacala region [Music] when civic organizations investigated the situation we realized that prosavana was an umbrella project designed to paved a way for big investors and agribusiness giants anyone who was interested in taking control of water land and natural resources in the Nacala corridor of mozambique local farmers were displaced and five million people in the region have been affected and requested a populist sound given a necessary geoguessr condition come you know this has what is this your land is this the land you want to occupy this is just a declaration you do not have a certificate for land use this is only a statement about where you live it specifies where your community lives and operates but this certificate does not give you rights to use the land that's why you have to be careful someone else could have laid claim to a land use certificate the community needs to fight to get the proper documentation if we don't deal with this situation it might soon be too late in 2016 opponents of the prosavana program organized a major protest they succeeded in convincing the government to suspend it for a long time mozambique's government implemented its policies without any outside input now they finally been challenged by an opposition movement by farm workers who said that this is not the way to promote agricultural development they show that it is possible to resist to protest and to say no you are the ones who are sustaining this country 90% of the food that we eat in Mozambique is produced by small farmers not by big companies or by projects from Brazil or who knows where we have to be very careful with these big projects they come here and promise all kinds of things but when these projects end what do they do they leave they move somewhere else to pursue other goals whatever the market demands despite some small successes in places like Mozambique around the world meat consumption continues to soar and with it the soy industry in Brazil new plantations are concentrated in the Amazon region president balsa narrows policies opposing an additional threat to this fragile ecosystem this is a map of the Amazon region everything in red is land that's been deforested it makes up 19% of the rainforest this area which begins in redonda is known as the arc of deforestation 62% of this area is soybean monoculture another 6% are mixed crops but even that includes a lot of soybean well by summing sergeant taking rain forests and plowing that into a soybean monoculture turns up an awful lot of carbon that has been stored in the soil stored in the in the forest so that that those vast monocultures emit a lot of greenhouse gases just in turning it over the first time but then every time you're plowing you have the emissions from the agricultural machinery itself and then you have the emissions of crushing the soybeans processing it and shipping them back to China it's an enormous Lee energy intensive process in the context of climate change how do we reduce agricultural footprint and landscapes and enhance carbon sequestration the clearance of tropical rainforests for either pasture or large-scale monocultures has has an enormous climate implication in terms of the release of carbon from those ecosystems and in the case of industrial monocultures to make them to make those nutrient poor soils productive for farming requires very considerable fertilizer what's happening here in brazil is a crime an agricultural crime to plant soy in this tropical humid region you have to bring fertilizer here from China nitrogen and phosphate from who knows where the soil here does not have enough of those elements this is a mistake it's throwing nature out of balance and it's destroying biodiversity in this area here in the southern Amazon in mato grosso you can drive 200 kilometres without seeing any other crop plants all you see is soy and there are no people either because soy displaces people too you know they're my Jim teaspoons of it so sorry [Music] we'll the rich biodiversity of the region be replaced by soy monoculture [Music] we're importing 20 million tonnes of additives each year nitrogen fertilizers pesticides Brazil has become the world's largest consumer of pesticides Brazil consumes 20% of the world's pesticide production it's absurd we consume an average of five liters of pesticide per person in rural areas it's an average of 15 litres per hectare there's no University Department of Agriculture anywhere in the world that says you need 15 litres of pesticides to grow one hectare of soybeans easily through seven today soy plantations in Brazil already cover an area the size of Germany yields are high in part thanks to heavy use of pesticides these are the beans we've just harvested do you eat them eat no I prefer not to we spray them with various products we have to wait a while before eating them it's very bitter do you want to try one animal feed destined for China's pork chicken and beef industry the trade war with the US has also encouraged China to buy its soy from Brazil [Music] it makes no sense to take these soybeans from mato grosso put them on a truck and drive 3000 kilometers to a port then travel another 20,000 kilometers onboard a ship to reach another port in China and then travel another 2,000 kilometers by train until they reach a factory farm where the soy is used to feed chickens soy is rich in protein and cheap the ideal animal feed for industrial livestock farming around the world as a result of globalization Brazil is destroying its rainforest to grow soybeans this soy ends up on the other side of the world in Chinese pig farms and European ones China has announced plans to cut meat consumption in half by 2030 not long ago a swine fever outbreak killed vast numbers of pigs in China but in the long term production is likely to rise again [Music] China's rising middle class is unlikely to lose its taste for meat ha they have a microchip in their ears called an ear tag we monitored that are constantly using a computer or an iPad are they humble or industrial farming is growing ever more efficient thanks to soybean feed and the use of high-tech industrialized meat production leads to rock-bottom prices the narrative that the world must double its food production by 2050 as we moved from seven billion people today to nine to ten billion people central to that is rising livestock production and consumption as this inevitable force in world agriculture and that is something that I think needs to be fundamentally destabilized that it's not inevitable that human beings will continue consuming more and more animal flesh per person we don't need to be doubling food production we need to be producing food in very different ways and thinking about diets as a very fundamental part of how reconfiguring agricultural society there's bread some people are hoping to reverse this trend back in the u.s. we meet Jude Becker an organic farmer in Iowa he puts a premium on quality over quantity for me it's obvious that we need to eat less meat and and people criticize me because this is Iowa and we have a lot of meat production here though so oh dude you can't say that you can't say to eat less meat but I do why why why who was being hurt by this if it's healthy to eat less meat then wouldn't the farmers and I will be better to produce a special kind of high quality meat and to have less animals but get paid more and I think that everybody would be better off financially and better off healthy health-wise at the end of the day but people are afraid because large integrated companies would would lose money so you can't say these things in public at North Carolina some Pig farmers are also trying to make the switch to organic but they can't match the rock-bottom prices of the major producers price is the top criterion for most consumers says organic farmer Calvin Knapp shrub we want to run into the grocery store you know the super Walmart and we want to grab something we look down the aisle and it says you know certified organic you know and that's maybe 50 to 60 percent more than something that was grown over here why I don't want that I can't afford it but you know what you still got the almighty dollar stuck in your pocket because you just saved yourself 50% because you bought something that who knows what they were doing to it or who knows how they were growing it SOI monoculture and industrialized livestock farming how long can this system of cheap meat production be sustained let me say it this way as our population begins to grow and it's growing one day there won't be no meat because the human beings I have to eat the grain like they did back many years ago when they did have so much meat after a while it's going to cost it's already you can feed more people with soybeans corn than you can with meat if you want to feed the starving world cut out feeding all these cows and stuff like that and feed the people why they can get to fill their bellies that somebody wants to make money but they talk about we want to feed the world if you want to feed the world you can feed more world with grains and you can't with meat [Music] you

Channel: DW Documentary

Views: 719,300

Rating: 4.7627697 out of 5

Keywords: Documentary, Documentaries, documentaries, DW documentary, full documentary, DW, documentary 2020, agribusiness, USA, pig farming, China, soybean farming, mass livestock farming, environmental Pollution

Id: ksrc7eI3IMY

Length: 42min 26sec (2546 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 21 2020