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During the Asian Tsunami of 2004, entire communities were raised to the ground. Hundreds of thousands of people were faced with starting again from scratch, having lost literally everything: possessions, homes, livelihoods and of course lives. But amidst the devastation, maybe there is a ray of hope - starting again from scratch offers a blank canvas; the opportunity to build back better. Faced with the realities of the fall out from the tsunami is this notion realistic? What are the practicalities of achieving it? Where has all the aid money gone?
This film aims to explore the harsh truths behind the idea of 'building back better'.
Flagship series for Al Jazeera International's current affairs programme 'People in Power'.
We meet all the top contenders for the job of UN Secretary General, and give them the job interview they'll never get. With Kofi Annan's term about to end in November 06, each region is manouvring it's candidate into place. Most commentators predict that an Asian candidate will get the job, as it's supposed to be Asia's turn under the unofficial system of regional rotation. But US Ambassador John Bolton amongst others thinks the job should go to the best candidate, wherever they're from. Flycatcher's Rob Sullivan works with Al Jazeera Internationals top news anchors throughout the world, meeting the front-runners and assessing what qualities and skills are needed for the world's top job.
Part of the Witness series, we tell the story of Mercy Oyoo, mother of four children living in Kibera, in Nariobi the largest slum in East Africa. Mercy is HIV positive and spends half her life in hospital with TB. Her husband died from Aids two years ago, so when Mercy is in hospital her twelve year old son Dennis has to look after his younger siblings. Every morning he washes them, cooks their food, changes nappies and takes them to nursery before taking food to his mother Mercy in hospital. The youngest child, two-year old Diana is also HIV positive and is constantly picking up infections in the unhygienic living conditions of Kibera. Mercy's eldest son Robert is fifteen and lives with his grandmother in Western Ukwala in Western Kenya. This is where Mercy's other three children will come if their mother dies. But the problems here are even worse than in Kibera: the whole region is plagued by a masive hunger crisis, and there is no access to clean water or safe sanitation.
The story of Mercy's family is the story of a nation, and the story of a continent. But Mercy at least is aware of her condition, and her daughter's, and is getting help. She'll have to stay on medication for the rest of her life, but her doctor says she has a fighting chance.
Three years ago, President Kibaki came to power in Kenya promising to end the corruption endemic in the previous regime. Popular jubilation endorsed this policy. But how much have things really improved?
Life talks to ministers and anti-corruption officials who suggest that the Government needs more international aid to help it stamp out corruption. And Deputy Environment Minister Wangari Maathai, who was tortured by the former regime and won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, says that Western governments need to face up to their own responsibilities for shoring up President Arap Moi.
In Senegal, West Africa, imported rice from Asia is unloaded at Dakar docks. The port, one of the biggest in West Africa, receives over a million tonnes of imported rice every year. At first glance it's a benign image - cheap food to feed hungry people. But just 200 kilometres to the north, locally grown rice is proving very difficult to sell - despite the fact that it costs the same. Local livelihoods are at risk.
So why are local farmers struggling to compete? Some modernizers blame small scale family farms for being resistant to change but others argue that small farms can be extremely successful.
In this episode of Earth Report we join researcher Awa Faly Ba on a journey throughout rural Senegal to visit some of the country's 440,000 small farms. As the government puts its finishing touches to the new agricultural policy Awa makes the case for investing in the African farmer and keeping it in the family.
For most people, living without access to a safe, clean toilet is unthinkable. Or is it? For nearly two and a half billion, almost half of us, it's a daily reality. It has a profound impact on health. The spread of water-borne diseases like diarrhoea, kill more than 2.2 million people every year - most of them children. It also in turn affects education and development.
In Uganda school toilets are in such a poor state that many pupils, especially teenage girls, at the sensitive stage of menstruation choose to stay at home rather than have to face using school latrines*.
The picture may look bleak, but in some places there are signs of hope.
Around the world people are spreading simple hygiene messages and creating their own safe sanitation systems, without having to spend millions of dollars.
Earth Report travels to Senegal, Uganda and India to see what communities are doing to clean up their act. We meet people whose vision of a world with clean water and sanitation for all is more than just a 'pipe dream'.
* See UN Projects "The Shame that Drives Girls Out of School".
Natural disasters like the recent Indian Ocean Tsunami are unavoidable, but the misery and damage they cause could often be reduced. Recent floods in the Philippines cost over a thousand lives and caused massive damage- all due to illegal logging. Similar mudslides have killed thousands in Haiti. Being warned and being prepared can make all the difference.
In these two films, in the run up to the UN World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, we travel to disaster hotspots around the world - meeting the survivors and those responsible for trying to reduce the damage. In Part One we visit Bangladesh, Haiti & Cuba in the Caribbean and Congo in Africa. In part two we travel to Japan, Iran and the Swiss Alps to look at what people are doing to reduce the death toll of the next major disaster.
Two films looking at the devastating impact of the logging industry on the forests of Central Africa. In part 1 we reveal the plight of the Baka Pygmies - a group of indigenous hunter gatherers whose traditional way of life has been shattered by industrial logging. Using rare black and white archive from when the pygmies were first "discovered", we hear the prophetic words of anthropologist Colin Turnbull who said the pygmies were doomed back in the seventies.
Today's disturbing images of a people lost and defeated give his predictions an eery ring of truth. These shy forest-dwelling people have lost their traditional lands, many of their homes have been burnt, and they struggle to find work in a bantu-domintaed society. The forest animals they rely on for their staple source of food are being hunted out in large numbers by commercial poachers who then sell the meat in towns and cities.
As we witness the special Baka water dance performed in the forest, we question how long this way of life can survive.
In Blood Timber 2 we expose the links between illegal poaching and logging companies in Cameroon and the Republic of Congo. We meet former poacher Joseph Melloh whose undercover footage reveals the shocking extent of the bushmeat crisis. Governments, logging companies and two of the world largest conservation groups (WWF & WCS) assure us the situation is under control, but Joseph's footage tells a very different story.
The roads built by logging companies become highways for the bushmeat traders, who enter the forest with Kalashnikovs to slaughter endangered wildlife. Undercover video evidence shows the meat of protected species being transported out of the forest by logging trucks and reveals a world of chaos and corruption.
Filmed & directed by Steve Couri
Written, produced and edited by Rob Sullivan
Three years after filming Not a Dirty Word 1, we return to see how life has changed for three different communities living without access to safe water and sanitation in India, Brazil and the Philippines.
For those living in makeshift homes perched on stilts on the edge of Manila Bay not much has changed - without land rights the families squatting here won't invest in a safe future, as they could be moved on at any time. In one of Sao Paolo's many run-down favelas, local residents have clubbed together to clean up their neighbourhood. Three years ago an open sewer flowed through the heart of the favela: now they've installed over 500 metres of sewers and hope to finish the job by next year.
For one group of India's hidden untouchables, or scavengers, life in the last three years has changed almost beyond recognition: when we filmed this group of women three years ago, their job was carrying away raw human excreta from the dry latrines of people's homes. Working before dawn like silent shadows, they slipped quietly down the narrow alleys of the ancient city of Alwar in Rajasthan, continuing a tradition that has persisted for thousands of years. When we returned this year the women had been rescued by the Sulabh Sanitation Movement - they are now being re-trained in other jobs like sewing, beauty care and food preparation, and some are about to start their own businesses.
For every statistic on ill-health and poverty, the Welsh Valleys top the charts for Western Europe. In one of the most developed countries in the world, we visit former coal-mining communities on the poverty-line and meet a man with a mission to make a change and rid the valleys of their pariah status.
High in the forests of Hawaii 3 lonely
little birds are hopping around, unaware that they are the
very last members of their species on Planet Earth.
In 2002 Flycatcher Films documented a
last ditch attempt to create a Po'Ouli breeding pair. The
mission was successful, but ultimately the birds failed
to breed.
Stop-press: In September 2004 the team successfully
caught and moved one of the females into captivity where
she now awaits the male - field biologists are now frantically
trying to find him before it's too late.
Flycatcher originated the concept, and produced 7 out of the 10 films in this global documentary series about the world's water, as well as producing the website design and animated graphics for the series. http://www.tve.org/cc/
A single jumbo jet crash makes the world's headlines. But each day the death toll from drinking dirty water is equivalent to 20 jet crashes. Earth Report visits India, Brazil, Philippines and Karachi to explore the problem. http://www.tve.org/cc/doc.cfm?aid=927
Credits
Camera/Editor: Rob Sullivan
Researcher/scriptwriter: Amber Delahooke
Produced and Directed by Rob Sullivan and Amber Delahooke
Globally, agriculture uses more than 70 percent of the fresh water drawn from lakes, rivers and underground reserves. Earth Report visits Gujarat where farmers are drilling deeper and deeper for scarce supplies; and South Africa where the government are trying to redress the imbalance in access to water. While the poor struggle to find enough water to drink, let alone grow food, large scale farms growing export crops own the rights to the rivers and have invested heavily in irrigation infrstructure. http://www.tve.org/cc/doc.cfm?aid=908
Credits
Camera/Editor: Rob Sullivan
Research/Script: Amber Delahooke
Produced and Directed by Rob Sullivan and Amber Delahooke
Studies for the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change, predict that 170 million more people will face severe water shortages as a result of global warming. Earth Report visits two climate change hotspots - Orissa and Mozambique, where consecutive droughts and floods are causing untold misery. As the tell-tale signs of a changing hydrological system are beginning to show Earth Report discovers that local management of the envrionment has just as much of an impact. Will current methods of managing water be able to cope under ever more extreme weather patterns?
http://www.tve.org/cc/doc.cfm?aid=915
Credits
Camera/Editor: Rob Sullivan
Research/Script: Amber Delahooke
Produced and Directed by Rob Sullivan and Amber Delahooke
Will water scarcity lead to wars over water? We join a a workshop to negotiate the fate of the Okavango river and angry farmers in Texas who accuse the Mexicans of holding back their water.
http://www.tve.org/cc/doc.cfm?aid=928
Credits
Research and Script: Amber Delahooke & Charlie Savile
Camera: Charlie Savile
Editor: Andy Netley
Producer Rob Sullivan and Charlie Savile
For one in six people on the planet, finding water for drinking, cooking and washing is a daily struggle. As freshwater resources become ever scarcer, the UN has set a target to halve the number of people without safe water by 2015. How can this be achieved? Plumbing the Rights meets the people at the sharp end of the water crisis to find out their ideas on how to solve it and explores why there's so much opposition to the privatisation of water.
http://www.tve.org/cc/doc.cfm?aid=917
Credits
Camera/Editor: Rob Sullivan
Research/Script: Amber Delahooke
Produced and Directed by Rob Sullivan and Amber Delahooke
Is access to water a human right? According to the United Nations it now is. And yet more than a billion people still go without a safe regular supply. But it is one thing to recognise a right, quite another to apply it to poor communities who cannot afford to pay the bills. The United Nations World Health Organization wants governments to take responsibility to guarantee their people affordable water. As Changing Currents counts down to the 3rd World Water Forum in Japan, Earth Report visits Bolivia and the USA to find out why people are taking to the streets to claim their rights.
Credits
Camera: Rob Sullivan
Research/Script: Amber Delahooke
Editor: Andy Netley
Produced and Directed by Rob Sullivan and Amber Delahooke
An overview of water issues explored throughout Changing Currents. http://www.tve.org/cc/doc.cfm?aid=936
Credits
Camera: Rob Sullivan
Research/Script: Amber Delahooke
Editor: Rob Sullivan & Andy Netley
Produced and Directed by Rob Sullivan and Amber Delahooke
A 30 minute documentary about global efforts to control
invasive species: featuring rat eradication in the Seychelles,
Bug control in the USA and the Hedgehog dilemma in the Outer
Hebrides, Scotland.
Winner of the EKOFILM Best Environmental Documentary
Award, Czech Republic.
A 30 second Public Service Announcement
for the World Health Organisation on the United Nations
declaration on the Human Right to Water, broadcast on BBC
World, CNN and other international news networks.
A 5 minute Video News Release for the
World Health Organisation on the Human Right to Water.
An 8 minute Curtain Raiser funded by
UNEP for the African Ministerial Conference about the Environment
on the Environmental Initiative of NEPAD - focussing on
the envrionmental and development problems faced by Africa.
A 6 minute video production for UNEP
about water - produced for World Environment Day 2003 to
be held in Lebanon.
A 12 minute educational video for the
Research Corporation of the University of Hawaii about the
work of the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project, and the efforts
to save the Po'Ouli from extinction.
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