The Ecologist Film Unit (EFU) is a unique project operated by the Ecologist and investigative agency Ecostorm. Launched in 2008, the EFU has, to date, produced eleven films on a range of topical and largely unreported environmental issues, with a particular focus on investigating unpalatable aspects of the food industry.
Agenda-setting
Our first investigation, Hell For Leather, probing the hidden ecological and human impact of leather tanning in Bangladesh, was featured by BBC World and a host of alternative news channels and went out to an audience of millions globally – prompting renewed interest in the long debate about the true cost of our love affair with cheap shoes and other goods made from leather.
Follow-ups included the controversial Melting Point, which investigated allegations of espionage, news manipulation, legal threats and violence against growing climate-change activism in the UK, and the hard-hitting Greed of Feed, which exposed – for the first time – the links between farmed salmon on sale in leading UK supermarkets and a host of shocking ecological and social problems connected to fishmeal production in Peru and Chile (fishmeal is a key ingredient in farmed salmon feed).
Other investigations have revealed the growing menace of MRSA connected to industrial pig rearing in Holland; the human rights abuses linked to soya cultivation in Paraguay; and the planned privatisation of Indonesia’s coastline that would see the displacement of thousands of coastal communities to make way for industrial shrimp farms and other export-orientated industries.
Story suggestions and tip-off’s
The EFU is always on the look out for original story suggestions or tip off’s in relation to wrongdoing or bad practice. Please contact us, in confidence, if you have any ideas you think we should be following up.
EFU productions to date
- Food speculation – how betting on food commodities fuels Mexico’s tortilla crisis
- Fracking Hell – the environmental costs of the new US gas drilling boom
- Sour Milk – undercover inside the US intensive dairy industry
- Dwindling forests, dwindling futures – how forest dwellers being ignored by the Bangladeshi Government
- Selling The Sea – revealing Indonesia’s little-known plans to privatise huge swathes of coastline for aquaculture
- The Killing Fields – human rights abuses and environmental devastation in Paraguay’s soya fields
- Sick As A pig – the menace of MRSA linked to industrial pig farming
- The Greed of Feed – the hidden cost of your cheap farmed salmon
- Giri Raja: the Forest King – reporting on the “wonder-chicken” hailed as a solution to feeding India’s poor
- Melting Point – on the frontline of environmental activism
- Hell For Leather – investigating the leather industry in Bangladesh
