VICE (2013) s04e05 Episode Script

1 This week on "VICE": The global threat caused by the skyrocketing demand for meat.
Our focus is on making the meat as cheap as possible.
That's where we often have environmental catastrophes.
Then the crisis that humanity is facing in our global water supply.
Something's happening.
This drought is worse than anything you've ever seen.
In the history of farming here in the San Joaquin Valley, yes.
Those red spots represent groundwater depletion.
It's happening all over the world.
(theme music playing) (gunshot) Crowd (chanting): Hands up! Don't shoot! Hands up! The World Health Organization recently classified processed meats in the same cancer causing group one carcinogens as tobacco, diesel exhaust, and asbestos.
But some scientists fear that our global addiction to meat, might pose an even greater threat.
(cattle mooing) So this is the very first step of getting the stem cells out of a piece of muscle.
If we just take a very small piece of it, in a couple of days, those stem cells will crawl out.
Once we have sufficient number of cells, we will provide the conditions for them to grow into a tissue.
So, what is it that you're actually doing here in this lab? We are creating hamburgers from stem cells.
Yeung: Dr.
Mark Post, is famous for his work in creating the first synthetic burger.
And how long does that whole process take, to turn these tiny little stem cells into meat? About seven weeks.
So, that's much faster than a cow.
Much, much faster than a cow.
So, this is the new McDonald's? Yes.
Can I try it? No.
Yeung: Mark's first burger cost him more than $325,000 to make.
This will be the first time a burger made with cultured beef has been cooked.
It's close to meat.
There's quite some intense taste.
Yeung: But Mark is hopeful he can produce them cheaper and on a larger scale.
What are your biggest reasons for wanting to make this sort of synthetic meat in the first place? The demand for meat is going to increase, and there's no way with the current livestock production method that you can match that demand.
So that will put a lot of pressure on food security.
If we would all say, "Let's refrain from eating meat five days a week," it would work out fine, but we're not doing that.
Yeung: We're actually doing the polar opposite.
Global meat production has quadrupled since the 1960s, and by 2050 it will increase by half again.
(cattle mooing) One country that's capitalized on that explosive growth is Brazil, which is now behind only the US for title of largest beef producer in the world.
There's a hell of a lot of resources that go into a feedlot like this-- water, energy.
Absolutely everything is done for maximum efficiency, and that means that each one of these cattle gets to eat about 48 pounds every single day.
Pedro Merola, owner of the feedlot, explained to us how it works.
(speaking Portuguese) Yeung: Oh, wow, look at these skinny little runts.
These guys are the cattle that have just arrived? These are the ones that are about to go for slaughter? Wow, look at the difference in size that three months can make.
You've fed these guys pretty damn well.
Yeung: Feeding all these cattle is already a massive operation.
And Pedro is planning on doubling his production just to keep up with global demand.
So, what is this that they're mixing up here? And how much feed do the cows eat every day? 450 tons a day? Wow.
This system is called a "Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation," or CAFO.
This CAFO is designed to make these cattle gain nearly 400 pounds in just 90 days.
These cattle have been cooped up in their pens, but now they've finally reached the end of the road.
They're just being herded towards the final weighing station before heading out to one of several slaughterhouses across the country.
So, how many cattle have you got in today? Everything's done on such a mass scale.
The amount of cattle that they're processing is crazy.
It's one every 30 seconds.
(men yelling and whistling) (machines rumbling) Fuck.
And business is expected to get even better.
Brazil is about to be allowed to export fresh beef directly to the US.
Yeung: Americans ate more than 100 pounds of red meat per person in 2014, and now, Africa and Asia are moving toward that same diet.
We spoke to Ken Cook, a food policy expert, about the state of meat production today.
70% of the land devoted to agriculture on the planet is devoted to meat production.
That's almost a third of the entire surface area.
That many acres producing red meat, pork, chicken, all of that is completely unsustainable.
Let's assume that the world population will grow to 9 billion people by 2050.
There isn't enough land.
There isn't enough water.
There isn't the capacity for the Earth's atmosphere to absorb all of the CO2 and the methane that would come out of animal agriculture.
The problem is that our focus is on making the meat as cheap as possible, and as they cut those corners, that's where we often have environmental catastrophes.
Yeung: To see how meat production can lead to those environmental catastrophes, we went to Duplin County in North Carolina, where the pork industry is so big, the hogs outnumber people.
So, this is the lagoon right here.
See the pipes coming out? Yeung: It doesn't smell pretty either.
Larry Baldwin monitors CAFOs in North Carolina for the Waterkeeper Alliance.
Baldwin: This is the situation: The pigs are in there, they're defecating, so you've got urine and feces dropping through the floor, but then there are slots in that concrete.
The waste falls through that, and then gets flushed into the lagoon, which is what you see over here.
So, that's where we can see the pipes coming straight out of this.
Each one of these buildings has a pipe that empties into the lagoon.
That's a hell of a lot of waste.
Right here! People would be outraged even suggesting that that's the way we would handle human waste.
What's the difference? Yeung: And when you see this region from the air, the scope of these hog CAFOs and their waste is incredible.
From up here you can see every single CAFO is attached to these huge lagoons.
Yeung: Whoa, yeah.
Yeung: There's hundreds of them.
There's such an intense concentration here.
Yeung: The ground simply cannot absorb this much waste, and according to Kemp Burdett of Cape Fear River Watch, that's wreaking havoc on local waterways.
This stream is surrounded by hog farms.
You see nitrogen and phosphorous levels off the charts, bacterial levels off the charts.
It's raw feces.
And how many sort of streams like this are you looking at in North Carolina? Thousands.
If you're a fisherman or if you're a swimmer, if you're throwing the ball for your dog, you've got to deal with dangerous levels of bacteria.
And this creek flows downstream into the Northeast Cape Fear River, which is a part of the Cape Fear River basin, the largest river basin in North Carolina.
It's a problem.
You have to pay more to treat your water, which means you have to pay more to drink your water.
You drink this water? A fifth of North Carolinians drink water out of the Cape Fear River Basin.
Yeung: And it isn't just the quality of the water that's the problem.
In meat-producing regions in the West, it's the quantity.
In the dry High Plains region, many feed crops draw water from the Ogallala Aquifer, which is now losing water faster than it can be replenished.
Mike Callicrate, a small cattle rancher in this area, broke down the relationship between water, corn, and industrial meat.
It takes about 2,500 gallons of water to produce a bushel of corn.
And if an animal eats 50 bushels of corn in its time in the feedlot, we're looking at about 125,000 gallons of water per animal, under the industrial model.
So when it comes to those industrial-scale feedlots, the majority of the water they're using actually goes into producing the corn.
That's correct.
And the reason that JBS has a big feedlot at Yuma, Colorado is because there's water, and they don't pay one dime for that water.
And they pay below the cost of production, of that corn.
The corn is the cheapest thing that we can feed.
Because we can buy it below cost of production.
The water is subsidizing that operation.
Yeung: So with free water and cheap corn, the price of mass-produced beef is kept artificially low.
The question is, how much of the Ogallala Aquifer do we need to support an industrial model? Or any model as far as that goes? And if we are so foolish as to let that precious resource run out, that's a tragedy.
Yeung: Mike showed us the scale of land and water used by the giant meat producers here.
So we're just flying over Yuma County in Colorado.
This is one of the huge, huge scale feedlots.
You've got 100,000 cattle in this one feedlot down here.
Is this all corn down here, these circular--? That's a lot of corn fields.
Yeung: While this is the system that produces most of our meat, we spoke to one farmer who's going in a drastically different direction.
A system that depletes your resource base will eventually crash and burn.
Yeung: Joel Salitan is part of the farm-to-table movement that focuses on responsible production.
He uses a system called rotational grazing.
(cattle mooing) So you just moved these cows from this patch into here? Yes, so, everyday the cows get a brand-new salad bar.
That was one day's plateful of food.
Today they get a new plateful of food.
So there's a huge difference between where they were just now and where they are now.
Sure, this looked just like this yesterday at this time, and then in 50 days, this will look like this again.
So this is the way that cows have traditionally grazed on grass, right? This is the role of herbivores in nature.
Yeung: On this type of farm, every animal has a role, and even their waste plays a part.
Joel's demonstrating for us this integrated system that he's got going on, so he's actually moving his eggmobile containing all the chickens, right to the spot where the cows have just been.
Joel: Here we go! We follow the cows with the eggmobiles.
The chickens then scratch through these cow patties, incorporate them into the soil, eat out the fly larvae and actually sanitize the fields before the cows come back through, so it's a very multi-speciated system.
Yeung: Never seen anyone so excited to eat shit before.
Industrial-scale farming segregated the animal from its feed.
We grow the corn over here, the corn then is fed to cows that are locked up in a feedlot, that are generating so much manure it's toxic to its ecosystem.
So the whole system that's supposed to be integrated, becomes a segregated series of liabilities.
Cook: If you farm the way Joel Salitan and producers like Salitan farm, that has tremendous benefits for the land and for the environment.
The downside, in our current economy is, it takes more time, more labor, more management.
It's more expensive to do it that way.
Yeung: So, instead of moving towards the more sustainable model that's been catching on in parts of America, it's mass production that's on the rise in most places.
And the market for cheap, industrial meat, is blowing up around the world.
If the meat industry continues as it is at the moment, where does that take us, in 20 years time? Meat production globally is an environmental disaster now.
If we try and expand meat production to reach 9 billion people by 2050, it will be a complete, unthinkable disaster.
Meat production in Brazil is so land-intensive that it's responsible for more than two-thirds of the deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon.
But it's using up more than just our land, because producing a single pound of meat requires over 1,800 gallons of water.
And that's just one part of a food production system that may be threatening the single most important resource that we have.
I'm standing in one of the most fertile regions of the world, Tulare County, California.
The crops from this place feed the entire planet.
The only problem is, they're running out of water.
Nearly half of the country's fruits and vegetables are grown in California, which is now locked in the worst drought in its history.
Farmers here, like Mark Watte, are getting desperate.
Watte: This land has been in constant production since the mid to late 1800s.
Never in that time frame has there ever not been a summer crop grown on it until this summer.
So, what you're saying is that this drought is worse than anything you've seen.
In the history of farming here in the San Joaquin Valley, yes, absolutely.
Gandhi: California has lost nearly five billion dollars and more than 38,000 seasonal farm jobs in the last two years alone.
And without rain, farmers like Daniel Errotabere are being forced to pump more and more water from underground.
This is a field that we didn't have sufficient water to plant tomatoes or garlic into.
And here is the field that we could.
We simply don't have enough water.
Millions of acre-feet are being pumped.
I know my own farming operations, the water table is going down.
That's not sustainable.
And the concern is, is it recoverable? Gandhi: As their crop yields get smaller, many farmers are installing expensive drip irrigation systems, the most efficient way to irrigate plants and save water.
You can't get any more efficient than drip.
You're putting on exactly what the crop needs.
So you've pretty much gotten as efficient as you could possibly be and you're still running out of water.
Right.
Well, now the last five years, we've been pumping a lot of groundwater to keep this ranch going.
Eventually you're going to run out.
That's the scary part.
What happens when it runs out? I guess we're done.
Gandhi: But while there's still water left underground, farmers are drilling more wells to get it, some at record depths of 2500 feet or ten times deeper than the state average.
So it looks like you're digging for oil.
No, it's an old oil rig that has been converted over for water wells.
So what's business like these days? Right now our wait list is around between one to two years, depending which rig and what size of well.
My phone rings constantly.
You know, farmers, "Hey, I lost-- another well went dry.
" I don't like to hear stuff like that.
I don't like to see a farmer losing their crops.
If they want to stay in business and farm, they have to drill a well.
Gandhi: But as more wells are drilled, California's water is being depleted by nearly four trillion gallons per year.
That's more than one billion gallons every single day.
At that rate of consumption, the system of reservoirs, lakes, rivers, and snowpack that replenishes California's groundwater is in critical danger despite this winter's El Niño rains.
This is what the reservoir Lake Success looked like in 2014.
And this was Lake Success less than a year later.
In the 42 years I've been here, this area here has never been dry.
We depend on the snowpack to fill the reservoirs in the spring when the snow melts.
These mountains behind me, these hills and mountains, there are snowcaps there and then those melt Right.
and they come down these rivers and fill this place.
Correct.
And now, I mean, you can't even really see where the river is anymore.
Fost: We have actually zero in-flow, nothing's coming in at all.
We're standing on dried grass and we should be standing in five feet of snow.
But people should realize, we're in an historic drought, and that demands unprecedented action.
Gandhi: Governor Jerry Brown enacted mandatory, statewide water-use reductions for the first time in history.
But even California's unprecedented conservation measures won't be enough to halt a crisis that's gone global.
We're in Pasadena, California at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, here to speak with hydrologist Jay Famiglietti.
Why are we at a NASA lab when we're trying to talk about water on Earth? That's because the best data that we have comes from satellite imaging.
It's a very colorful horror story.
The places that are red are losing water, and those red spots represent groundwater depletion.
California is actually running out of water.
And our wet seasons don't even rise to the level of dry seasons.
We would need to get an additional 12 trillion gallons of water in storage, in snowpack, in reservoirs, in groundwater to sort of climb out of the drought.
12 trillion.
12 trillion, with a T.
There's a lot of discussion and hope for an El Niño, but we need to have about three years in a row of above average rainfall just to get back to normal conditions.
It's happening all over the world.
Very, very clear trends.
The North China Plain, around the Himalayas, northwestern India, Bangladesh, Middle East, southern South America around Argentina.
Here's Brazil here.
So, they're having some big issues.
Are there any cities or places that are most affected? Well, Sao Paulo has just been having a really rough time.
(people shouting) Gandhi: And for the people of Sao Paulo, the most populous city in Brazil, it's a lot worse than just a hard time, as the worst drought in recorded history, has 20 million residents scrambling in fear for what's left of their water supply.
And with the population expected to grow to more than 23 million in 2025, a drought-stricken Sao Paulo is likely to see more unrest.
(speaking Portuguese) Why do you think this is happening? Gandhi: And if Sao Paulo's complex system of reservoirs fails, collecting rainwater alone won't be enough.
We're standing at this blue dot, and behind me is part of the reservoir that serves nearly nine million people in Sao Paulo.
This is what it used to look like, and this is what it looks like now.
Marussia Whately has been an advocate for water conservation and awareness in Brazil for more than 15 years.
This doesn't really look like a reservoir.
So this is one of the biggest reserves of water This is the biggest.
Where would the water naturally have been several years ago? That's like hundreds of feet from where it is now.
So there's a general trend in the weather pattern here that there has been less precipitation than ever before.
Gandhi: As the levels in the reservoirs continue to drop, Sao Paulo's water utility, SABESP, is taking emergency measures to keep what's left flowing.
The man operating this excavator for SABESP saw us filming and wanted to tell us how desperate the situation has become.
We arranged to meet later that night.
Gandhi: He told us that water in the reservoir is actually below what engineers consider zero.
Meaning that they have to pipe the remaining water uphill just to get it to the intake pipes.
Dr.
Antonio Nobre, climatologist at the National Institute of Amazonian Research, believes that the causes of the crisis originate 2,000 miles away in the Amazon rain forest.
So the trees are actually fighting fighting the drought.
(bell ringing) Gandhi: And those in the know, understand that this crisis has water's value as a commodity skyrocketing.
The market for water-related industries is estimated to be worth $600 billion, and could reach one trillion dollars in the next four years.
Water demand is going to exceed water supply.
Man: As investors bet on water becoming the new oil.
Woman: Is this a good time for investors? One word, and that is "absolutely.
" Gandhi: And with the global population growing and water resources shrinking, there are fewer and fewer tracts of land that still do have reliable access to water, and investors are snapping them up.
Large-scale agricultural investors bought up an estimated 500 million acres of land across the developing world between 2000 and 2010.
We will see the emergence of hydro-geopolitics.
Right? We will.
We'll see strategizing for water.
It will become the central resource that we covet and that we, you know, that we fight to protect.
We have a global water crisis.
I don't actually think that it's likely to ever disappear.
We've been fixated on the other resources like oil, energy.
This one has been sneaking up to take the top position.
Without water there's no food, without water there's no energy, without water there's no life.
Where are we going to be 50 years from now if we don't take any action? We'll be in the post-apocalypse.
The apocalypse will have happened.