1y ago

‘The big story of the 21st century’: is this the most shocking documentary of the year?

www.theguardian.com

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1y ago

‘The big story of the 21st century’: is this the most shocking documentary of the year?

www.theguardian.com /film/article/2024/jun/12/the-grab-documentary-review

14 comments

For viewers in the developed west, “there’s plenty of stuff that we can do as individuals,” said Cowperthwaite: eat less meat, reduce food waste, buy less.
Disappointing the directors don't fully reject consumption of animals, but not surprising since we can't even covince people to wear a mask when they're sick.
- Foregoing meat completely is one way to eat less meat.
  Anyway, your argument is a perfect example of "don't let perfect be the enemy of good." It will be much easier to convince people to become vegetarian or vegan in the future if they first get used to not eating meat with every meal/every day.
  
  I don't mean to equate anything here, but do you think that would have been an effective strategy for social change in other movements?
  Like: "What if we just did a little slavery? It'll be much easier to convince slave owners to give up slavery if they got used to having just a few slaves."
  Do you think that would have been an effective strategy instead of calling for complete abolition?
  Once again, I'm not trying to draw a comparison here, you could substitute any past social movement, but the logical structure should hold regardless.
- The directors also arrive at the exact wrong advice. You cannot fight International resource extraction by making consumer choices as an individual. To address the problem identified by the film, you have to understand the material basis for why it's happening and then fight that. And I guarantee it is more powerful than consumer choices.
  In fact, consumer choice recommendations are a preferred PR strategy handed down by companies and governments (the latter is usually an expression of the former) that do this kind of extraction. It is a false catharsis that reassigns blame from the actual culprits and then resolves the blame by having you do something that they can gladly ignore.
  I agree that would be good to see some advocacy for veganism. That has the potential to become a larger social movement even though it is often, incorrectly, framed as just another consumer choice.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Such a huge business deal did not go unnoticed; news coverage and an eventual congressional hearing questioned the sale with a mix of good, old-fashioned American xenophobia and reasonable concern for the nation’s food supply.
These seemingly unrelated developments form The Grab, a riveting new documentary which outlines, with startling clarity, the move by national governments, financial investors and private security forces to snap up food and water resources.
The Grab has the feeling of a revelation, though the reveal is not a conspiracy; the pattern is less a plan than a series of reactions, from a variety of actors, to the fact that every single human needs food and water, and there is not enough arable land on Earth for the projected increase of 2 billion people by 2050.
The film connects their confusion to the despair of Zambian farmers displaced, via a complicated and westernized deeds system, by mercenary militias to make way for commercial farmland controlled by outside actors from various countries – China, Gulf states, the US.
The emails, from 2012, reveal a clear plan to obtain, by whatever means necessary, land in Africa to fulfill competing national interests; the CIR team eventually pieces together that one of Prince’s backers was Sheikh Tahnoon, a member of the Emirati royal family, as well as China.
While the first two-thirds of The Grab unmask the pattern, the final third unravels the fear and overwhelming pressure to submit to it with efforts to push back: a bipartisan movement in Arizona to curb unlimited water usage, legal wins in Zambia to restore land and pay restitution.
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14 comments