Independent Media Channel News - June 2008

The Global Food Crisis

Making A Killing from Hunger

While other media focus on climate change, government agriculture policies and the alleged lack of land to grow food as reasons for the current global food crisis, activists, researchers and new media journalists are revealing the truth about corporate agriculture profits skyrocketing in part due to hoarding food stores to artificially drive up food prices. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of people who cannot afford to buy food are dying, and few governments are doing anything really urgent or substantial to stop this horrible crisis.

Researcher Devlin Kuyek says, "Right now Cargill is making approximately $471 000 an hour in profits."

While people around the world are suffering from hunger and protesting the rise in global food prices, major grain traders, such as Cargill, are reporting big profits. Making a Killing from Hunger, a report by international NGO, GRAIN, says that  the global food crisis is more than a food shortage or a price blip, it's a structural meltdown, resulting from globalisation and neoliberal policies.

Devlin Kuyek is a researcher on global agribusiness for GRAIN, an international NGO which promotes the sustainable management and use of He is also the author of The Real Board of Directors: The construction of biotechnology policy in Canada, and Good Crop/Bad Crop: Seed Politics and the Future of Food in Canada .
 

 

Addicted in Afghanistan

 

FilmFxZone proudly presents its first documentary from Afghanistan. Jawed Taiman meets and observes families who are addicted to opium in Kabul, Afghanistan. He also observes the patients and workers of a private detox treatment centre, desperately under-funded, struggling to help the many victims of the Afghan opium trade. We are privileged to meet addicted youths, and are offered a rare insight into detox centres working in Afghanistan and into the lives of whole families who are blighted with drugs. 

 

Taiman says the documentary is unique as told by him, an Afghan media maker. And right now he's a one man band in the field, shooting and reporting. Taiman says on Vimeo that "At the moment i am a one man crew because places that i go, not many people are welling to go."

 

Trailer edited by Jason Brooks.




 


Mandala Trance Animation from Mark Gould on Vimeo.