Three weeks of filming in China and just over three weeks of blogging….The last stop for the “Meat World: China” documentary team is Guangdong province in the far south of the country. It’s here that industry and animal agriculture meet, in often pungent ways. The region, where the Pearl River flows the South China Sea, is one of China’s main manufacturing zones. (It’s also not far from Hong Kong, which has long been a center of financial services.) The Pearl River is also a locus of large-scale pig production. The waterway contains visual and olfactory evidence.
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How did the world’sbag habit get so outsized? Just about a year and a half ago, the Chinese government decided to end, or seriously discourage, the use of thin plastic bags. You know the kind. You hardly get your purchase home and they’ve split or the handle’s come off. Most end up in landfills or city streets or tree branches or parks or roadsides or even the stomachs of cows (a common occurrence in India). China’s bag ban applied to those specimens .025 millimeters thin, or thinner. Now, according to the Worldwatch Institute, the government estimates that at least 40 billion of the bags that would have been used during the course of a year, weren’t. Before the ban, people across China used an estimated three billion thin plastic bags a day, just over two for each person. In the U.S., the plastic bags consumed each year total is 100 billion. That’s more than 300 bags for every person in the U.S., so slightly less than a bag a person a day. China’s setting a pace of reduction in their use that it would be excellent for other countries to follow. Or better yet, exceed. But no rest for campaigners, or the government. A survey by Global Village – Beijing, a leading Chinese environmental NGO, found that 80 percent of shops in rural areas of China continue to offer, free, the thin plastic bags. So, alas, does my local health food store – and there are many takers.

Photo: Greenpacks.org

As I read about U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s multi-country trip through Africa this month, I couldn’t help but wonder how the diligent Clinton would prepare. Would she (or her aides), for example, read Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai’s latest book, The Challenge for Africa, published earlier this year? In it, Maathai, a Brighter Green colleague, examines a series of bottlenecks that have hampered Africa’s development for decades and how Africa can overcome them. Well, we still don’t know for sure what was on the Secretary’s summer reading list, but in much of what she’s been saying to African leaders, civil society groups and the media, the main themes of Challenge are there: good governance, leadership, the importance of gender equality, the role of resources in fueling conflict, the need to address climate change and deforestation, and the scourge of violence against women.

Wangari herself has been a feature of Clinton’s Africa tour, too. She appeared with Hillary at a civil society “townterview” (a blend of town hall and interview) in Nairobi hosted by CNN and Kenya Television News. Read More

The shoot begins. In director Jian Yi’s treatment for “What’s For Dinner?”, three main locations and a number of characters and themes are woven together into a record of a day in the life of China’producing and eating food. The film’s exploring answers to these questions: Do we (Chinese) really want to eat like they (Westerners) do? Where were we, where are we now, and where are we heading in terms of how and what we eat? How much have we done already to destroy the environment and ourselves, and do we want this to continue? First location: Beijing, China’s capital, home to more than 17 million people. (In a word, big).
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Brighter Green Associate Sangamithra Iyer writes from India, where she is investigating the intensification of the livestock sector (as well as visiting family) this summer. She’ll be uploading more blogs and photos in the next week or so, so come back for those. In the meantime, here’s a quick rundown of what she’s been seeing, experiencing and reading. “Traveling in South India [the states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu] still has been very veg-oriented,” Sangu writes, “with vegetarian restaurants for eating (on banana leaves) and makeshift rest stops for coconut water—just a guy and a machete and coconuts.” However, she’s seen evidence of the shift toward greater consumption of meat and dairy that’s taking place in much of India. “We are finding Suguna Chicken stands (basically small live markets) in all the small towns and cities we are driving through.” Suguna, which began as a small business 25 years ago, is now a multi-million dollar hatchery and feed enterprise with 15,000 contract chicken “growers” producing eight million birds a week across India.

Sangu flew north to Delhi and right from the airport went to a Nutrich “hygienic chicken” slaughterhouse and processing plant. “The live bird transport, stunning and de-feathering had already happened when we got there,” she writes, “but we saw the whole place and the processing area,” including about 100 workers, most of whom that work directly from the birds come from Nepal. Local women do much of the cutting of the fat. Read More