Much of the cheap meat and dairy produce sold in supermarkets across Europe is arriving as a result of serious human rights abuses and environmental damage in one of Latin America's most impoverished countries, according to a new film launched in conjunction with the Ecologist Film Unit.

An investigation in Paraguay has discovered that vast plantations of soy, principally grown for use in intensively-farmed animal feed, are responsible for a catalogue of social and ecological problems, including the forced eviction of rural communities, landlessness, poverty, excessive use of pesticides, deforestation and rising food insecurity.

The film, Killing Fields: the battle to feed factory farms – produced by a coalition of pressure groups including Friends of the Earth, Food and Water Watch and with European coordination by Via Campesina, – documents the experiences of some of those caught up in Paraguay's growing conflict over soy farming and reveals, for the first time, how intensive animal farming across the EU, including the UK, is fuelling the problem.

Campaigners plan to use the film to highlight the 'unsustainable' nature of modern food production, and to spearhead efforts to raise awareness of the largely hidden cost of the factory farming systems supplying much of Europe's cheap meat and dairy produce.

The moves come as international concern over global food insecurity grows, and amid fresh warnings that millions of the world's poorest people face acute hunger in the coming months and years because of the twin threats of climate change – impacting farming in large parts of the developing world – and the ongoing credit crunch which has seen global food aid budgets slashed.

Protein king

Soy is prized for use in animal feed as it provides a cheap source of protein for poultry, pigs and other intensively reared animals that require fast growth in order to produce large meat, egg and milk yealds. The EU ban on the use of bonemeal and other animal by-products in agricultural feed following the BSE crisis has further driven demand for soy as a principal feedstuff.

Globally it has been estimated that as much as 97 per cent of soymeal produced is now used for animal feed.

Attracted by cheap land prices, poor environmental regulations and monitoring, widespread corruption and low taxation on agricultural export commodities, agribusinesses have long viewed Paraguay as an ideal country in which to do business. In recent decades increasing chunks of rural land have been bought up and turned over to export-orientated soy cultivation.

Paraguay is now the world's sixth largest producer of soy, with over 2.6 million hectares of land given over to cultivating the crop, and the fourth largest exporter. Vast quantities are exported to neighbouring Argentina, from where much of the crop is shipped to China to supply the country's growing demand for animal feed.

The EU is the second largest importer of Paraguayan soy, with Germany, Italy and the Netherlands among the biggest customers.

Indigenous people, such as this elder from the Kaiowa tribe, say that their traditional way of life is being eroded by intensive soya farming

Although new laws have been introduced to protect forested areas following the decimation of the world renowned and ecologically important 'Atlantic Forest' region, campaigners say the rate at which forests elsewhere in Paraguay are being devastated to make way for soy plantations is increasing, with some 500 hectares per day still being lost, according to some estimates.

Families have been displaced by the spread of soya farming. There are reports that those who refuse to sell their land to farmers have their land sprayed with herbicides

Those who protest against soya plantations have met with a heavy-handed response, according to campaigners

• COMMENT: How the Government could easily fix our food chain
• Greed of feed: the cost of producing farmed fish feed
• Sick as a pig: how our appetite for cheap meat leads to MRSA-type 'superbugs'
• Behind the label: soya
• 10 reasons GM won't feed the world