Arte documentary: The future of feeding cities

© 2013 ARTE G.E.I.E.

Here is an Arte documentary on how to feed cities (i.e. most of the world and the rest of the world as well!). For anybody who can view this French/German channel (I think you can get it on Netflix), and who is interested in how on earth we can continue to feed our cities, this would be a very insightful documentary - I think! It's showing again on Tuesday 15th October at 9.45am or pm (I'm not too sure which it is).

The blurb is as follows, according to my quick translation from French/German into English:

"Do we want large scale production of our food, based on the concept of efficiency only, to take place in enormous industrial zones surrounding our cities? Agronomist Peter Smeets whose vision is to create "agro-parks" around our cities, with the first to potentially be created in the environs of Bangalore, thinks so and claims that most people don't care about how their food is produced, as long as it is good and cheap. He adds that they only become interested once something goes wrong." (cf. the horsemeat scandal, but even that seems to have been forgotten about already!)

"On the other hand, those practicing urban agriculture, e.g. in Berlin on the old Tempelhof airport grounds, believe that focusing on our connection with nature, creating a communal spirit and forming common ideas on alternative mechanisms of food provision are more important in the first instance. A similar view is taken by Roman Gaus in Basel who already supplies five local restaurants with the freshest produce from his factory rooftop fish farms and vegetable gardens. He supports an IKEA-model of urban agriculture." (Not quite sure what that means!)

"Yet another view is taken by Felix zu Löwenstein, author of Food Crash: we will feed ourselves sustainably (and organically) or not at all. He probably supports Peter Smeets's view that urban agriculture will simply not provide enough food to feed literaly every body in our cities. He bemoans the loss of agricultural land in both the developed and developing world, and claims that we do not have an efficiency problem, but rather a problem with the distribution of food and access to resources, incuding land, water finance and knowledge, as the real challenges we face on the road to sustainable production. He believes that industrialised countries in particular need to turn around their attitude towards food and their approach to food production.

"Is there really no alternative to accepting peoples' consumption behaviour and trying to meet the growing demand for food by becoming evermore efficient? Or is this approach leading us down a dead-end road?"

I might need to think about finally subscribing to Netflix...