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News from a few film buff friends of mine in Australia of two good documentaries viewed at Melbourne Film Festival. Our Daily Bread is a film that enters the lurid world of industrial food production and high-tech farming. Not for the faint-hearted apparently, as about a third of the audience walked out. Bound to send ripples through the industry once it gets released at the London Film Festival this September. View Our Daily Bread website here Workingman's Death explores heavy manual labour in the 21st century - down illegal mines in the Ukraine, among the sulfur workers in Indonesia, with lions at a slaughterhouse in Nigeria, ship breaking yards in Pakistan, and Chinese steel workers. Looks like amazing cinematography. View Workingman's Death website here

McDonald's has agreed to stop buying chicken fed on soya grown in deforested areas of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. So what's so bad about soya? Soya farming is chewing up the Amazon rainforest at unprecedented rates as huge areas are cleared to make way for massive monoculture plantations. The impact is huge, not only on the plants and animals that make up the forest itself but also on the communities that live there. From an illegal port built in the heart of the Amazon by agribusiness giant Cargill to handle the vast quantities of soya being shipped out from the region, soya exported by Cargill goes directly to Europe to feed the chickens found in fast food retailers like McDonald's and supermarkets across Europe. A campaign by Greenpeace has been so successful that not only have McDonald's made their own pledge, but with the help of Greenpeace, they've been instrumental in getting other food companies and supermarkets, such as Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury...