LIDF

Photo: zacgoldsmith.com

Coming up is our first DocSpot screening which features Pig Business. Kate Vlckova talks to Zac Goldsmith about raising people’s awareness on the subject of food-processing and animal welfare as well as his fascination with the film.

Kate Vlckova: Pig Business is a shocking, but, at the same time, revealing film. It certainly provokes discussion and makes one think about where meat in our supermarkets comes from, how it is processed and how much pollution factory farming meat production affects our environment.  How can we use films like Pig Business to engage the public in discussion? It must be extremely difficult coming across indifference, corporate greed and comfortable mass consumption?

KV: We have seen celebrity chefs launching nationwide media campaigns drawing the public’s attention to animal welfare. To what extent would you say this film is different?

ZG: I love it that celebrity chefs are raising the issue of animal welfare and mobilising lots of people, and that’s part of the story. What this film does very effectively is show that when we talk about cheap food it’s not actually cheap. We pay for it in a number of different ways. If a company is producing food but exhausting and polluting the environment the taxpayer pays for that. The food is then paid for again over the counter. So the only reason it’s cheap is because we pay twice for it. That’s not the case with more localised, organic agriculture so there is a kind of indirect subsidy there. The film raises this issue and I think that is what makes it different. There is another thing that makes the film different. It shows there is unfairness in the system. Take Britain, we have relatively high animal welfare standards and what we’re saying to our farmers is ‘you have to adhere to these standards but we’re still going to buy junk from the world’s markets’. The fact is that we are really just hampering our own farmers. Either we have to say ‘we’re not going to have high standards in this country’, which I don’t think anyone wants, or we have to say ‘we’re going to keep the standards that we have here but we’re going to impose the same standards on products we buy from abroad.’  That is what I’d like to see happen.

KV: Supposing the Conservative Party comes to power, do you have an agenda on how to put what you’ve just talked about into practice? The EU works as a single market and it is difficult to stop all cheap imports from countries where welfare standards are not adhered to. What can we do?

ZG: There are things that we can do immediately and there are things that may take a bit longer. We can, for example, require honest labels on food produce. The labelling regime in this country is mad. Products look like they had been produced in Britain, but in fact they may have been produced in other countries. The result is that consumers are given a false choice and they are being misled. An honest labelling campaign is something we [the Conservatives] are doing and something we would put into practice if we won the next election. We also need to start to make better use of public money. We spend about £2 billion a year on food for schools and hospitals and instead of buying the cheapest junk on the world’s markets we could invest the money in sustainable local producers. We would be pouring money into the rural economy, we would be cutting out our use of oil because food would be travelling shorter distances, and we would be giving children and patients much better quality food. That can be done even within existing rules.

There are two other things that we have to do but we are not there yet. First, we must recognise that there is an imbalance of power. Supermarkets control so much of the market and companies like Smithfield absolutely dominate. In my view, the consumer and the small farmer have no bargaining power, which is why the government needs to step in and say: ‘we’re going to balance the market’. That requires strength, which at the moment is lacking.

KV: The Ecologist magazine has set up its own film unit and it intends to make documentaries about some of your journalistic work. Would you let us know why it was set up and how you intend to use the unit most effectively?

ZG: At the moment we are teaming up with lots of different people but we will make use of films that are being made by others. So, for example, if this film (Pig Business) is turned into a 5 or 10-minute film suitable for the Internet we’d put it up on our site and we’d promote it as heavily as we could. I think there are lots of young people out there with good ideas but have no real way of breaking into this world, so we want to encourage competitions and get people to make films for us. For example, what is progress? What is cheap food? Is cheap food really cheap? These are the kinds of issues which need to be addressed. We want to create some very exciting competitions which will hopefully draw in lots of talent, and out of that we hope to be able to find good, reliable long-term partners. There is a huge amount of work that can be done on the Internet. I am sure you will remember ‘The Meatrix’, an extraordinary cartoon made by an American NGO looking at the story of food production. It was downloaded and viewed by 20 to 30 million people. I think there are other people out there with the same skills who can put these incredibly important issues into a format the mass market can understand.

KV: What are your views on animal welfare in intensive farming is the situation as hopeless as it seems?

ZG: It’s difficult, as we’ve got these enormous businesses with incredible power. We see that they provide money for politicians all around the world and they are very good at influencing policy. Our politics has been contaminated. The regulatory system is very weak and easily manipulated. That really is a core problem that we have to deal with, but the good news is that people are waking up. There are lots of incredible campaigns, some of them are grassroots, others are more systemic campaigns, and they create a change in food policy. The consumer is becoming more and more aware of where we are, what’s wrong with where we are and where we need to go. I think it will happen. We are going to move in the right direction but the question is how long is it going to take?

KV: Perhaps catastrophic pandemics, possibly swine flu, could wake people up?

ZG: I think it’s a series of problems, including perhaps swine flu, that will force us to rethink the modern global food economy. Right now people don’t take the issue of food security very seriously, but I think that will change. If climate predictions are accurate, if even the most conservative ones are accurate, we are going to have real problems. The world’s breadbaskets are all shrinking and serious water problems affect many countries. All these issues are combining with a rising population and the possibility that we are going to run out of oil at some point – which is obviously the key for getting food from one side of the world to the other. All this adds to our problem with food security.

Food security will become the defining issue in relation to food policies and after that we are going to have to do some serious re-thinking. One of the things we will have to do is to work out how to support our domestic, small scale, diverse family farmers who, at the moment, are going out of business. On top of this young people are not interested in getting into farming because they see no future in it and that has to change.

KV: It is very disappointing that the corporate takeover of the meat industry is accelerating. Take North Carolina, for example, where 27,000 independent family pig farmers became 2,200 pig factories. Our current situation seems insolvable when people are demanding more food in a more comfortable way.

ZG: I agree with that but there is a shift at the same time. The trends at the moment are all heading in the wrong direction, but there is something happening.  There is a resurgence of local food campaigns; school farms are being built; farmers’ markets are becoming more popular; the local food sector is growing, not just here but in other countries as well.

And something bigger than that is happening and this is where the debate is changing. For example, a few months ago a report was released by UNEP (United Nations of Environment Programme), UNESCO and the World Bank. They now accept that the small diverse traditional farm is more productive in terms of the land use than big intensive industrial monocultures. They are less productive in terms of labour because they require more people but that’s not a bad thing given there are so many people without jobs. For 50 years they have been pushing the opposite, so this suggests real U-turn.

KV: Can I just briefly touch on the subject of Smithfield expanding in the UK market? What can be done to avoid it? Can such a situation be avoided at all? In the film, we have seen Smithfield also taking their operations to Central & Eastern Europe, in particular to Poland and Romania.

ZG: The key is to protect the standards we have here and increase them. We need to become much tougher. We should be able to say that if imports don’t meet our standards we won’t accept them. That technically is not legal under the EU law but my view is that if the law makes common sense a crime then it is the law that should change not common sense. I hope the Conservative party, once we have won the election, will be strong enough to do that. It’s not a manifesto commitment but I will do what I can to ensure that it becomes a commitment. If we want our families to survive, if we want animal welfare standards to be maintained, and most people do, then that’s what we have to do.

KV: What do you think is the most effective model to satisfy both global economic and environmental demands?

ZG: I think small farming in a localised economy is the answer. It’s more productive per unit of land; it’s good in terms of creating jobs and livelihoods and in terms of protecting the environment. It is clear that there is a difference between sustainable agriculture and non-sustainable agriculture. The model that we embrace has to be one that does not exhaust its own base. It can’t exhaust the soils, it can’t exhaust knowledge and it can’t exhaust water. If it does then it is the wrong agricultural model.

KV: Which country in Europe, or internationally, in your opinion, pursues high standards of meat production and how can we learn from them?

ZG: There are pockets of wonderful examples all around Europe, many wonderful producers. In terms of international standards, none of the countries, I think, are where we need to be. I think, Britain is not in a bad shape, but we need to go much further. The reality is our own standards are already being undermined by imports and that’s where we have to start. But I think there is a lot to be said for British agriculture, we have great farmers and our produce is often very good quality. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t improve our standards – we should – that’s what people want but we can’t do that unless we address the unfairness of the system allowing local farmers to be out competed by cheap imports of much lower standard.