Voices of Transition

Voices of Transition
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Nils Aguilar
Produced by	Milpa Films
Starring	Rob Hopkins Claude Bourguignon Vandana Shiva
Edited by	Nicolas Servide
Distributed by	Milpa Films
Running time	65 minutes
Country	France, Germany
Language	English, Spanish, French

Voices of Transition (Cultures en Transition in French) is a 2012 documentary film by film director and producer Nils Aguilar. The film was produced in France and Germany and examines the danger posed to agricultural production by energy and resource scarcity. It depicts organic agricultural alternatives in France, the Transition Towns movement and urbanised food production in Cuba as forerunners of the transformation of food production away from industrialised agriculture and towards small-scale, decentralised production methods. The German cinema debut was held on 2 May 2013 as part of a wider German cinema tour, followed or preceded by theatrical releases and tours in Italy^[34], USA^[35], Portugal^[36] Wallonia^[5] and Flanders^[6] (Belgium), Great Britain^[7], Argentina and Chile.^[9]

Using interviews and overlays of graphics and text, the film presents the current problems facing industrial agriculture. It explores why in the interviewees' view the current industrial model is not up to the task of feeding the world's people. According to the film every calorie of energy contained in a food source currently takes between 10 and 20 calories of crude oil in the production of fertilizers and transportation to produce, leading to a strong dependence of the cost of food on oil prices. As a result of peak oil and increasing oil prices this dependence will lead to ever increasing food prices. According to the film, this dependence already represents a significant weak-spot in the global food supply chain. Additionally, agriculture is already responsible for 40% of greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to climate change. Furthermore, the film argues that the overuse of inorganic fertilizers has been responsible for the loss of soil fertility and threatens the complete loss of usable soil within the next decades through soil erosion and sinking crop yields. These effects, according to the film, can only be partly mitigated by the increased use of those same fertilizers. The loss of workplaces, the concentration of land in the hands of a few (allegedly a farm closes every 23 minutes in France) as well as the dependence on large corporations are enumerated as side effects of the industrialisation of agriculture since the 1920s. Companies, such as Monsanto and Bayer, control everything from seed stock to fertilizers and the necessary chemical mixes for hybrid plants, thereby controlling the entire supply chain. The film argues that this development was supported through subsidies from the World Bank. Interviews with Vandana Shiva, the founder of the Transition Towns movement Rob Hopkins and various agricultural experts serve to argue this viewpoint. The dependence on crude oil is illustrated through the example of the wholesale food market in Rungis.