Every winter, China’s cities are plunged into chaos, as all at once, a tidal wave of humanity attempts to return home by train. It is the Chinese New Year. The wave is made up of millions of migrant factory workers. The homes they seek are the rural villages and families they left behind to seek work in the booming coastal cities. It is an epic spectacle that tells us much about China, a country discarding traditional ways as it hurtles towards modernity and global economic dominance.
Sixteen years ago, the Zhangs abandoned their young children to find work in the city, consoled by the hope that their wages would lift their children into a better life. But in a bitter irony, the Zhangs’ hopes for the future are undone by their very absence. Qin, the child they left behind, has grown into adolescence crippled by a sense of abandonment. In an act of teenage rebellion, she drops out of school. She too will become a migrant worker. The decision is a heartbreaking blow for the parents.
Last Train Home follows the Zhangs’ attempts to change their daughter’s course and repair their ruptured family. Intimate and candid, the film paints a human portrait of the dramatic changes sweeping China.
The poor may always have been with us, but attitudes towards them have changed. Beginning in the Neolithic Age, Ben Lewis’s film takes us through the changing world of poverty. You go to sleep, you dream, you become poor through the ages. And when you awake, what can you say about poverty now? There are still very poor people, to be sure, but the new poverty has more to do with inequality…
POOR US: An animated history
SPAIN: Who are the new poor?
Paco Pascual used to run one of Spain’s top refurbishment firms, a large family business he and his brothers made successful by winnning lucrative government contracts. But 50,000 small businesses have gone bust in Spain in the last year. And Paco’s is one of them: “My company is like a shark that is eating me” he says. The world used to be viewed in terms of the developed and the developing world. Has the global financial crisis changed this? Is it time to move on from a ‘them and us’ mentality?
GREECE: Is anyone safe from Poverty?
As the European dream fades, the economic crisis brings new poverty to the people of Athens. How will they survive as their society crumbles? A man’s life is destroyed by the crisis: “I don’t exist anymore” he says. But a small gift makes all the difference to him and his family…
USA/Kenya: Why are crops the best performing investments?
On one side of the world American star investor Jim Rogers arrives at his elegant offices and explains how large investments and movements of money affect prices. On the other side of the world market vendors in Kenya feel the effects.
Prices on global exchanges for maize and wheat have tripled in the last 5 years. Maize has been the best-performing investment since the financial crisis began. Global returns rose in the last 5 years by: 55% for oil; 144% for gold; 146% for maize. How can so much money be made from food speculation and a billion people still go hungry in the world?
GERMANY: Sleep well with Deutsche Bank?
Berlin’s Deutsche Bank building is impressive. On ground level, the cash machine is well protected and warm and on this night the rich have to step over the sleeping poor to draw money. It is a hassle.
UK: I’ve come about your car…
What would you do if someone knocked on your door and said they’d come to take away your car? Brian is a debt collector who repossesses cars from people with bad debts. But he’s also had money problems himself, so he knows how it feels from both sides. Britain has £1.5 trillion worth of personal debt. The film looks at what this means for people who have debts they can no longer afford.
UK: Imagine you’d never been on holiday
Poor families might not be starving in the UK, but in a culture where most people have more than you, being poor is isolating and shaming, “People look down on you for being poor.” This personal film looks at the huge difference just having a holiday can make to a family living in poverty. “They don’t want money, they just want their dignity back.”
STEALING AFRICA: How much profit is fair?
Rüschlikon is a village in Switzerland with a very low tax rate and very wealthy residents. But it receives more tax revenue than it can use. This is largely thanks to one resident – Ivan Glasenberg, CEO of Glencore, whose copper mines in Zambia are not generating a large bounty tax revenue for the Zambians. Zambia has the 3rd largest copper reserves in the world, but 60% of the population live on less than $1 a day and 80% are unemployed. Based on original research into public documents, the film describes the tax system employed by multinational companies in Africa.
PARK AVENUE: How much inequality is too much?
740 Park Ave, New York City, is home to some of the wealthiest Americans. Across the Harlem River, 10 minutes to the north, is the other Park Avenue in South Bronx, where more than half the population needs food stamps and children are 20 times more likely to be killed. In the last 30 years, inequality has rocketed in the US — the American Dream only applies to those with money to lobby politicians for friendly bills on Capitol Hill.
Brazil: a new way to fight homelessness.
There are 450,000 empty properties São Paulo. A new movement is reclaiming them for families. It’s a battle that pitches people’s rights to homes against the rights of home owners. If they are lucky enough to have homes, the poor of São Paulo live in cramped conditions, miles from amenities and work. But there are plenty of places to live in the centre of town and hundreds of families have taken over empty and abandoned buildings and founded new communities. But it’s an action that puts them against the police and the law, as they break in and settle down. “The fight will not be done for you. It will be done by you”.
LAND RUSH: How do you feed the world?
75% of Mali’s population are farmers, but rich, land-hungry nations like China and Saudi Arabia are leasing Mali’s land in order to turn large areas into agribusiness farms. Many Malian peasants do not welcome these efforts, seeing them as yet another manifestation of imperialism. As Mali experiences a military coup, the developers are scared off – but can Mali’s farmers combat food shortages and escape poverty on their own terms?
WELCOME TO THE WORLD: Is it worse to be born poor than to die poor?
130 million babies are born each year, and not one of them decides where they’ll be born or how they’ll live. In Cambodia, you’re likely to be born to a family living on less than $1/day. In Sierra Leone chances of surviving the first year are half those of the worldwide average.
Brian Hill takes a worldwide trip to meet the newest generation – In the US Starr’s new baby could well be one more of 1.6 million homeless children now living in the streets.
EDUCATION EDUCATION: What does an education get you?
In ancient times in China, education was the only way out of poverty — in recent times it has been the best way. China’s economic boom and talk of the merits of hard work have created an expectation that to study is to escape poverty. But these days China’s higher education system only leads to jobs for a few, educating a new generation to unemployment and despair.
MOLDOVA: love or money?
Would you leave your family behind to find work? Unemployment in some of Moldavia’s rural areas is as high as 80 percent. Anyone who can leave to work usually does. More than 1 million people have left to find to work abroad, often illegally and in lowly paid jobs.
Mothers and fathers can spend years away from their children – but the money they send home can buy them a much better life. It’s a hard choice to make.
SOLAR MAMAS: Are women better at getting out of poverty than men?
Rafea is the second wife of a Bedouin husband. She is selected to attend the Barefoot College in India that takes uneducated middle-aged women from poor communities and trains them to become solar engineers. The college’s 6-month programme brings together women from all over the world. Learning about electrical components and soldering without being able to read, write or understand English is the easy part. Witness Rafea’s heroic efforts to pull herself and her family out of poverty.
UGANDA: Who really benefits?
A family has been supporting a child in Uganda via a charity for three years. The father and small daughter travel from UK to Uganda to see if charity makes any difference: to them or to the child they are supporting.
RUSSIA: If you live in poverty, can you afford to dream?
An estimated five million people are homeless in Russia; one million of them are children.
This film takes an unflinching and yet poignant look at the lives of a group of children living on a rubbish dump outside of Moscow, showing the hardships they face and the dreams they hold on to.
This Debate is part of a global event hosted by the BBC and 50 other broadcasters around the world. The debate explores the causes of and cures for the enduring problem of severe poverty which still affects many people in the world.
It was recorded in front of a live audience in Johannesburg earlier this year. On the panel are Tony Blair, former UK Prime Minister; Oby Ezekwesili from the Open Society Foundation, Africa and a former Nigerian government minister; Moeltesi Mbeki, South African author and Chair of SA Institute of International Affairs; and Vandana Shiva, Indian activist, environmentalist and scientist. Chaired by Zeinab Badawi.
Do you wonder how we measure poverty?
Do you know how we do it, but have a hard time putting it into simple words?
Food prices
The spikes in food prices do not affect everyone equally. The most affected are those without means to cope with these shocks. This 4 minute video explains how impacts differ across different segments of the population. It also provides policy directions to protect the most vulnerable from falling into poverty due to food price increases.
Charles Ferguson, Documentary Filmmaker, Inside Job and No End in Sight, believes that the crisis was no accident. His latest documentary, Inside Job, makes the powerful case that an out-of-control finance industry took advantage of a deregulated atmosphere and purposely sought to get rich at the expense of others. Through extensive interviews with financial insiders and government officials, Ferguson crossed the globe to find proof that the financial industry intentionally engaged in unethical behavior. His gripping account of the global recession is sure to evoke feelings of disgust, anger, and concern that this all may happen again unless our regulatory system is changed. Ferguson’s previous film, No End in Sight, was nominated for an Oscar, and Inside Job brought home the grand prize at this year’s awards ceremony.
The first of a four-part investigation into a world of greed and recklessness that led to financial collapse.
In the first episode of Meltdown, we hear about four men who brought down the global economy: a billionaire mortgage-seller who fooled millions; a high-rolling banker with a fatal weakness; a ferocious Wall Street predator; and the power behind the throne. The crash of September 2008 brought the largest bankruptcies in world history, pushing more than 30 million people into unemployment and bringing many countries to the edge of insolvency. Wall Street turned back the clock to 1929.
But how did it all go so wrong?
Lack of government regulation; easy lending in the US housing market meant anyone could qualify for a home loan with no government regulations in place. Also, London was competing with New York as the banking capital of the world. Gordon Brown, the British finance minister at the time, introduced ‘light touch regulation’ – giving bankers a free hand in the marketplace.
All this, and with key players making the wrong financial decisions, saw the world’s biggest financial collapse.
The aphorism “The poor are always with us” dates back to the New Testament, but while the phrase is still sadly apt in the 21st century, few seem to be able to explain why poverty is so widespread. Activist filmmaker Philippe Diaz examines the history and impact of economic inequality in the third world in the documentary The End of Poverty?, and makes the compelling argument that it’s not an accident or simple bad luck that has created a growing underclass around the world.
Diaz traces the growth of global poverty back to colonization in the 15th century, and features interviews with a number of economists, sociologists, and historians who explain how poverty is the clear consequence of free-market economic policies that allow powerful nations to exploit poorer countries for their assets and keep money in the hands of the wealthy rather than distributing it more equitably to the people who have helped them gain their fortunes.
Diaz also explores how wealthy nations (especially the United States) seize a disproportionate share of the world’s natural resources, and how this imbalance is having a dire impact on the environment as well as the economy. The End of Poverty? was an official selection at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.
GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL
Based on Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name, Guns, Germs and Steel traces humanity’s journey over the last 13,000 years — from the dawn of farming at the end of the last Ice Age to the realities of life in the twenty-first century. Inspired by a question put to him on the island of Papua New Guinea more than thirty years ago, Diamond embarks on a world-wide quest to understand the roots of global inequality.
Why were Europeans the ones to conquer so much of our planet? Why didn’t the Chinese, or the Inca, become masters of the globe instead? Why did cities first evolve in the Middle East? Why did farming never emerge in Australia? And why are the tropics now the capital of global poverty? As he peeled back the layers of history to uncover fundamental, environmental factors shaping the destiny of humanity, Diamond found both his theories and his own endurance tested.
Filmed across four continents and combined ambitious dramatic reconstruction with moving documentary footage and computer animation. Includes contributions from Diamond himself and a wealth of international historians, archeologists and scientists. Guns, Germs, and Steel is a thrilling ride through the elemental forces which have shaped our world — and which continue to shape our future.
the hague asia knowledge 