Across Italy an invisible army of migrant workers harvests tomatoes destined for our dinner plates. Paid poverty wages and living in squalor, medical charities have described conditions as ‘hell’. Andrew Wasley reports from Basilicata, southern Italy In the parched countryside outside the town of Venosa, in Basilicata, southern Italy, along a rough track fifteen minutes’ […]
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How food speculation fuels tortilla crisis
A surge in financial speculation on maize is causing vastly inflated prices for corn tortillas – a sacred staple in Mexico – and threatening the health and livelihoods of the country’s poor.As part of a special report examining food speculation the Ecologist Film Unit travelled to Mexico to investigate. The Ecologist Film Unit (EFU) is jointly […]
US fracking boom linked to pollution and social strife
The gas stored in the Marcellus Shale formation is the subject of desperate drilling to secure US domestic energy supplies. But the process involved – hydraulic fracturing – is the focus of a bitter dispute over environmental damage and community rights. Jim Wickens reports It is a timeless patchwork of small dairy farms and endless […]
Clydesdale Bank under fire over finance for Nocton ‘super dairy’
Campaigners claim the bank has refused to state what environmental assessments were carried out before supplying a mortgage – part of a £13-million land deal – to company behind controversial Nocton proposal. Andrew Wasley reports A leading high street bank has come under fire for part-financing the controversial Nocton ‘super dairy’ project which will – […]
Sour milk: undercover inside the US ‘super dairy’ industry
With planning permission for Britain’s biggest dairy at Nocton about to be re-submitted later this month, Jim Wickens travelled to California to examine intensive milk production US-style and found factory farms, conflict, intimidation, pesticides, pollution and small-scale farmers driven out of business… ‘You better get out of here or your gonna get your ass kicked […]
‘Super dairy’ may only meet ‘minimum welfare standards’
Advocates of Britain’s biggest dairy farm, at Nocton, have sold the concept on the basis of its outstanding animal welfare and environmental credentials. But new evidence suggests this may not be possible without public funding. Andrew Wasley reports The company behind the so-called Nocton ‘super-dairy’ has admitted that without taxpayers’ money the controversial mega-farm may […]
Revealed: the biofuel sold as “ethical and green”
UK-based investment companies are marketing a controversial biofuel crop as “highly ethical and green” despite it being linked to conflicts over land, food security and growing hunger in developing countries, an investigation by The Ecologist magazine and The Independent has revealed. The brokers have been criticised by environmental and anti-poverty campaigners for selling investments in jatropha because of increasing […]
Soya trade leads to poisoning and violence
Cheap meat has become a way of life in much of Europe, but the full price is being paid across Latin America as vast soya plantations and their attendant chemicals lead to poisonings and violence. Andrew Wasley reports Much of the cheap meat and dairy produce sold in supermarkets across Europe is arriving as a […]
Sick as a pig: factory farming link to new MRSA strain
An Ecostorm-produced documentary, commissioned by the Soil Association and Compassion in World Farming, exposes the rise of a new strain of MRSA in pigs, and its link to the overuse of antibiotics on intensive farms. ‘Sick as a pig’ was filmed in the Netherlands, one of the countries most seriously affected by this farm-animal MRSA. […]
Fishy business: the real cost of cheap farmed salmon
In its latest film the Ecologist Film Unit (EFU), a collaboration between Ecostorm and the Ecologist magazine, travels to Peru to investigate a host of unreported environmental and social costs – including pollution and health problems, overfishing, and impacts on ecosystems and wildlife – arising from the production of fishmeal and fish oil, principal ingredients […]
Ecologist Film Unit 