The Rights Exposure Project

I like Media Storm, in that they are slick and appear to know what they are doing. There have also been a couple of pieces on their website that I rather liked (particularly ‘Love in the First Person‘ and ‘Undesired‘). As such I always look forward to viewing a new batch of material produced by them. So, barely into 2011 a few new pieces appear.

‘How Will We Feed Them?‘ was produced for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a UN agency. It focusses on a family in Madagascar who were assisted by an IFAD funded organisation, the Rural Income Promotion Programme. All well and good. We are given (very brief) context on the country and the situation of the family. We hear from the family (though the narration tends to dominate). However, I have two problems with the piece. One, is that Media Storm appear to have flown in Brad Horn to shoot it (he is even the narrator). No local talent available? As such the piece feels like a CNN product, and the barriers between the camera and subjects never really breaks down. Not that I advocate always using local professionals, but just to put it out there.

My second quibble is the content of the piece. The people of Madagascar are immediately defined as ‘poor’ – all of them? OK, I accept the need to simplify, but the central proposition of the film seems flawed – that a growing world population combined with a migration trend from rural to urban areas means ‘we’ will not be able to feed ourselves (the line ‘how will we feed them’ makes me think of the rich word suddenly having the poor turn up for dinner and wondering if there is enough to go round?). Surely wrong? Whether the world can feed itself is down to the amount of land given over to food production and the productivity of the land due to fertility and inputs (not to mention cutting down wastage by having better storage and transportation systems). Whether there are more or less people farming is not really the issue, or at least not the only factor (after all in most developed countries only a small proportion of the population are involved in farming yet they have managed to avoid mass starvation). And this comes out in the film – the family featured become better off due to improved inputs – better seeds. Surely, it would have been better to focus on how to make small holders (subsistent farmers) more productive so they can feed themselves, rather than extrapolate this problem up to feeding the whole world? There is a whole debate about the productivity of land holding side, inputs etc. that I am sure they didn’t want to get into. But the idea that the historic tide of people moving from rural to urban areas will be addressed by giving them better seeds seems naive. This is again demonstrated in the film, where the extra cash made by the family (due to the better seeds) is used to educate the daughter – who will then likely want to use that education to get a good job…in the city! Anyway, I digress.

The second new piece is ‘When the Water Ends‘ made for Yale Environment 360.

This is a more compelling piece, putting forward a more complex picture with multiple voices. Personally, I would like to have heard more from the tribes people (rather too many still shots that added little information about their daily existence towards the end of the piece). Again, like the first piece the photographer has been jetted in (Evan Abramson). Media Storm regularly run multi-media workshops, which makes me wonder if they do or could invite photographers from developing countries to take part (providing a grant scheme to cover their costs)? Using US based photographers is surely not the future (especially when you are doing pieces about climate change yet your photographers carbon foot print is bigger than necessary).

The final piece is actually a website – ‘Crisis Guide: Pakistan‘ – made for the Council on Foreign Relations.

This is a rather snazzy product consisting of text, images and video (including interviews). It is full of information, and I spent a good length of time  surfing the site. However, it is not immediately clear who the audience is? If you didn’t know anything about Pakistan it would be a good intro, compiling historic and contemporary stats and facts. But if you know a bit about South Asia it does not add too much that you would not already know – certainly you would expect investors and governments to be briefed on this kind of stuff already. Good format though.

Filed under: Multi-media | Tagged: Africa, agriculture, Asia, Madagascar, Pakistan, South Asia, water | Leave a Comment »