Davey.Darwin's+Nightmare

Michael Davey Film Annotation 6: Darwin’s Nightmare Words: 942, Date: 11/15/2010 2. The central argument of this film is essentially that a globalized economy, and specifically a food system, creates massive injustices to both the biosphere and the communities at the low end of the economy. Darwin’s Nightmare focused mainly on the poverty and desperation of the Tanzanians rather than the environmental impact of the Nile Perch on Lake Victoria. 3. The sustainability problems illustrated in this film largely show how unsustainable the global economic model can be if it is left unregulated. The Nile Perch was introduced into the Lake Victoria biosphere between the 1950’s and 60’s as an experiment. This fish is a ruthless predator and over the past few decades has annihilated the competition for life in the lake. Now the lake is overpopulated with these fish, which provides a sort of industry for the community. The biggest issue drawn out in this situation is that the Indian people running the fish processing operations think that this industry is good. They believe that it supplies jobs for the community. This is true, but the fish industry leaves out many, and many more are left starving as all of the fish is shipped out of the country to Europe. A skewed sense of empowerment exists within this community, at least for those who have some sort of job. One man describes himself as a citizen of the world. He is glad to participate in the global economy, despite his poverty. The constant question panging in the back of my head was, how did these people survive without the fish business? The lake had a diverse population of fish, there was no pressure from Europe to ship out fish in 55 ton loads and the people could take care of themselves. Currently, that community is being run into the ground by a constantly accelerating global market. 4. I found the scene with the night guard most compelling. An old man, who is simply happy to have a job that pays 1 dollar per night and therefore a means of taking care of himself, sits outside a fish research facility standing guard each night. If someone comes to him, he tells them to go, but if they break in, he is to shoot them. This seems brutal at first, but as the camera pans out the viewer realizes that this guard is toting poison arrows and a bow. This Tanzanian culture has been accelerated so quickly toward industry, that its night watchmen still prefer or can only supply themselves with poison arrows to kill intruders with. Another scene that hit hard was the scene with the prostitute who desperately wanted to go back to school to work on her English and learn computers. This girl with nothing but her body still had a dream and a desire to do something productive. She was not in it for the drugs or glamour, but for survival. 5. I was not compelled by the scenes of poverty and small children, largely because I did not understand what the children said. The film making, while striking was sometimes too low budget and the long cinematic pans were lost on me and felt repetitive. I feel the film beat around the bush too much attempting to achieve too much in the way of art and not enough in terms of documentary. This raw method of film making, while striking, lacks educational value. 6. This film best addresses those who can make the connection between poverty, loss of biodiversity, food industry and globalization. If I did not have background in these areas I would have felt more lost. Many of the messages conveyed were through symbolism, for example the fly which is struck dead in the first scene by the air traffic controller. This action represents the destruction of what is natural in an effort to bring in the outside forces, in this case the planes. At the center of these actions is the Tanzanian, who seems to have no choice but to participate in the system or die. 7. As stated above, I believe the film tried too hard to be a work of art and not an effective documentary. If it focused more on facts rather than visual inference I would have felt more engaged and educated. 8. A feasible corrective action would be to buy food locally, and certainly not imported. If you know where it’s coming from, it likely did not come from a wasteland in Africa, ridden by social injustice, disease and hunger. 9. Further research I did covered the GDP of Tanzania versus the United States. We saw only the scenes of poverty from Lake Victoria, and I was curious to see the side by side comparison of our own economy versus Tanzania as a whole. The figures are approximately 20.5 billion USD in 2008 for Tanzania, and approximately 14.6 trillion dollars for the USA. ([], []) I also investigated the Nile Perch ([]), which has a reputation for destroying biospheres, Lake Victoria being the most well known. Something not covered in the film is that the perch actually wiped out some species of fish that were not found anywhere in the world but Lake Victoria after its introduction. Australians have regulation in place on the introduction of the Nile perch in an effort to prevent such events from happening. The fine for breaking this law is 150 thousand Australian dollars. This describes an ineffectiveness of the Tanzanian government to recognize a potential catastrophe in Lake Victoria and stop it before it was too late.
 * Title: Darwin’s Nightmare (2004), Director: Hubert Sauper **