Since I put it out at the beginning of September, there’s been a little press buzz around it as well as a new holding page for the film’s website.

You can read a selection of articles here:

Science Safari [so it appears that not only is there a Bollywood film about farmer suicides, it will be India's official Oscars entry]

Frequency.com [a sort of video news wire for documentaries]

Don’t Panic [one of the interviews I've most enjoyed doing]

Wear Organic [an interview for Pesticides Action Network, a truly excellent bunch of people who make real things happen for real people]

You can help with the crowdfunding for my film here: http://www.indiegogo.com/Dirty-White-Gold

If you’re a particularly talented and available web designer who can make a film’s page sing, do get in contact with me on info@thecottonfilm.com. Let’s work out your fee and crowdsource it – at present, I’m trying to get the film to a commission-able level so I can’t pay you oodles [considering I'm not even paying myself]. But we can work something out.

CREDITS
Director, Producer, Presenter, Camera: Leah Borromeo
Executive Producer: Claire Lewis
Editor: Katrin Maria Escay
Music and Colour Grade: Moshe Ladanga

This clip was submitted to Sheffield Documentary Festival’s Meet Market forum.

Gas flaring contributes to just over 1% of the world’s CO2. It’s where you set fire to the combustible vapours emitted by an oil well. An illegal practice in Nigeria since 1984, there’s overwhelming evidence of its continuing employ by oil companies like Shell. So much so that it can be seen from space.

The film officially launches at midnight tonight, but you can have a preview of it here.

A few years ago, a woman approached me with some evidence of nasty worker treatment by another oil company that drafts in foreign workers [Koreans mainly] to take care of jobs local Nigerians could handle. The locals were left to take care of work along the pipeline. Most of the locals employed were illiterate and couldn’t read the warning and hazard signs. As a result, a few of them died when the pipes occasionally went boom. If you want to know more, drop me a line.

For something a bit funnier, it seems Shell have halted Nigerian offshore drilling in a visionary new remediation plan.

Over 40,000 people had limbs amputated in field hospitals much like the one I worked in a couple of weeks after the quake. Medical emergency relief charity Merlin’s setup was in a disused tennis court in one of Port au Prince’s hardest hit areas, Delmas 33. My role was media coordinator, the press monkey charged with finding stories amongst the patients and doctors on site to raise Merlin’s profile. One of my ‘case studies’ was a gregarious 8-year-old girl called Dayana. With her was a woman called Nadije, 23. Not her mother, but a guardian whose story has been taking hold of my life.

Our meeting was unremarkable. She was the adult-ish figure behind the little girl I was getting to know so I could offer her story to interested journalists. I have frames of her in video I shot and in photographs I took. As I moved along the wards, she asked me for my email address. I gave her my business card and moved on. A month later, she emailed me with what I thought was a begging letter. My reply was “Sorry, I have no money to give but perhaps you would like to tell me your story.” What followed is a continuing exchange of emails and online chats – the reality of poverty told in the virtual ether.

Marcel Izard from the International Committee of the Red Cross says, “Rape is common for migrants and there are many refugee camps in the Dominican Republic where people living in them have been deported. It’s quite hard gauging numbers of Haitian refugees pouring into the DR. We mainly work in conflict zones so we don’t have an official programme to cope with this influx.”

Finding figures for Haitian refugees has been difficult. The US Coastguard only holds stats for those they find at sea – around 400 as of April 2010. Other NGOs and aid agencies say their statistics only reflect the real people they see on the ground because clocking illegal migration from a country that kept less than accurate census stats is like asking how long a piece of string is.

So with that blur of facts, figures, statistics – all the things that impress people who like Powerpoint presentations, I bring you the letter I received from Nadije. And her picture. It says more than anything I could help to collate – and more than anything you could help to understand about a natural disaster that’s shafted a people shafted by its own.

“Before 12 January, we all had dreams. I was always told that I could be somebody…for my family, my country. Now there are no more dreams. No future for us. The conditions in which I was living became so critical I could no longer bear them. There was no support.

One thing happened after another. I couldn’t find anything to eat. I had nothing to wear. The whole world sleeps under beautiful stars, but we young girls cannot because rapists lurk in the day to day. This is another disaster. I spoke with a French coordinator who worked for an NGO. I told him everything. He told me “Lady, let me be frank with you. I am here as a doctor. But I can speak to someone who knows more about aid and tell him your story. Your situation is very unfortunate but I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

So I spoke with this other man. Told him my life. I started crying. He said, “Don’t cry. There’s always tomorrow.”

I told him “I know there will be a tomorrow. But this is not my future. I will not have a chance to see my future because I have reached my end.” He said I shouldn’t lose hope because life is good. He asked, “What do you want to do with your life?” I said I wanted to continue with my studies. He noted this down. So…I got the same response of nothing. I’m always on the lookout to see if there’s anything new. But it is always the same.

One beautiful morning, I woke up with the idea of leaving my country to go to the Dominican Republic. I spent the day walking through the markets. I met a lady who gave me work washing dishes, washing everything. Just for something to eat and somewhere to sleep. I got to know some of the people in the area and they offered me more work. Cash in hand. One day, one of these people said he wanted to take me to Santo Domingo. I said yes. I thought he liked me and simply wanted to help me. So I thanked the lady I was working for and left.

What disappointed me deeply was that I was raped and beaten by three men. It is the most deathly pain I have ever known. Afterwards, I spent two days wandering, telling everybody I met my story. Like a blessing from God, I found a job as a maid at an apartment. I thought things were getting better for me. Then one morning, Hernandez, the husband of the woman who hired me offered me 100 pesos to fuck him. I refused. That evening, I didn’t know how to tell his wife that I no longer wanted to work there. So I threw myself out into the street.

So there we are. I might as well not exist. If I have a future, I dare not dream or imagine it. My life is completely destroyed. I know misery. Pain. Ignorance. I now know it all and I have survived it all. Please help me. Help me by any means. I have a life like everybody else. I want to study. I cannot be abandoned like this. I want to be someone in my life, for I know what is misery.

Thank you and all those who reach for the skies.”

Her first email was in Spanish. Subsequent ones have been in French. She wants to learn finance or journalism. Bilingual with a knack for turning a phrase, she’s clearly no idiot.

I have nothing but photos and the fading memory of a meeting to remind me that this woman is real. Naïve trust borne from her persistent communications about her day-to-day and a gut feeling to tell me she’s genuine. She’s also one of thousands – but she is still someone. What would you do?

========

I’ve submitted this to the Guardian International Development Journalism Competition. The first time I’ve ever entered any sort of “hey look at me” shizzle. It won’t win.

It has also been selected out of over 1500 contributions for the first issue of 48hrmag and republished on The Comment Factory.

UPDATE: 48hrmag has won the Knight-Batten Innovation in Journalism award. [19 July 2010]

UPDATE: Contributors and readers to 48hrmag had two days to vote for the pieces they thought were best in Issue Zero. This was one of them. Thanks. [13 August 2010]

The Gluts are Gina Birch, Kaffe Matthews and Hayley Newman. Gina’s a founding member of The Raincoats, I once lay in Kaffe’s sonic bed in Aarhus, and Hayley’s a polymath live artist. They call their style “eco-electro. George Monbiot meets Lady Gaga and her twin sisters.” Whether I’ll be treated to a neosocialist knees-up or a trio of women screeching their way through their forties remains to be seen. But as a fan of pre-grrl rock punkstress tunes of the The Raincoats and having once dabbled in sound art, I’m erring on the positive.

Also on the bill are: John Jordan’s Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, The People Speak (and their Planetary Pledge Pyramid), Question Time, photographer and great Dane Kristian Buus and filmmaker Emily James. Hosted by Mikey Weinkove, people will get to take home a live-press zine, designed and printed on the spot by The Ladies of the Press.

Of course, I did not attend the demonstrations in Copenhagen. And my cynicism behind environmental pressure groups remains the same, if not reinforced by my recent trip to Haiti. This doesn’t preclude me from engaging with the issues – it just means I’ll most likely be found at the back with my arms crossed mocking the I Only Fly To India brigade. Like the middle-class art-school wanker I am.

Part of my role was to spark media interest in what Merlin were offering – a surgery specific relief effort that combined plastic surgery with orthopaedic surgery. So not only could a patient have their crush injuries seen to, but someone was around to make things useable. I witnessed so many acts of miracle performed by Merlin’s surgeons and nurses. And was privileged to be part of a team that had so much heart. One of the surgeons told me that he couldn’t stay in Britain when he had the skills to make a difference in someone’s life.

I’ll expand on this soon. Until then, here’s a small photo gallery of the people I got to know in Haiti. I miss them all.

“Film it. Present it. You can do it,” I think is what she said to me. My head was rushing with all sorts of fears based around fucking up.

A few months on and the taster for the film was selected for the Branchage Film Surgery session as part of the London Short Film Festival. Got some amazing feedback. James Mullighan and his surgeons took a potato peeler to my eyes and have given me a clearer idea of how I should take this project on.

Claire Lewis has agreed to Executive Produce my film. Less than a week after its taster was first screened.

I now need to find a cameraman with kit who believes in the project and is willing to work for deferred pay.

So I’m standing naked over the precipice but can see a nifty boutique at the other end.

Watch the taster here: Dirty White Gold

=====

Am a heartless bastard. Let me use this space to thank everyone who has helped so far (and has yet to be credited). This includes all at Pants to Poverty (inc Ben and Cecilia), all who attended the Branchage, those at the Frontline Club who’ve aided me so far (you know who you are), Mike Cupcake, those at Frith St with whom I share a space (again, you know who you are), Suzan Keen…lots more but I’ll save that for the Oscars speech I’ll give in the shower ok?

Over 50,000 members of the “I Only Fly to India” militia will descend on Copenhagen over the next week to demonstrate over a shopping list of demands longer than J-Lo’s rider. Attendees are an international who’s who of the best-branded campaign groups from Oxfam to Action Aid to superglue and D-lock specialists Plane Stupid. Lesser-known groups like Brazil’s Land Reform Movement will be there to boost everyone’s ethnic credentials.

Developed countries like the USA and the UK have pledged to cut carbon emissions (on their terms) by 2020 alongside developing nations like China and India cutting their carbon intensity (on someone else’s terms). The finer points over who does what by how much and who’s going to police 192 countries will also be debated.

A sore point has already come up with the leak to The Guardian of the ‘Danish text’ – a leaked draft agreement that gives rich nations more power, marginalises the UN’s role and abandons the Kyoto protocol. All the jaw jaw about making a difference to the world’s global temperature becomes hot air in the cold Copenhagen wind.

The feeling that a potentially powerful global movement is being hijacked by some very slick PR is keeping me away from Denmark. The talk around and within the conference seems to be an exercise in appearing to make a difference without actually changing a damn thing.

Initiatives like the 10:10 campaign (who recently accepted missile makers MBDA onto their scheme with the lines “Of course arms manufacturers can reduce their emissions by 10%. What they do with the rest of their time is a different matter, on which we couldn’t possibly comment”) ask individuals and companies to pledge to reduce their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010. I had a recent Twitter debate with one of their worker ants, @malchadwick, who failed to see the hypocrisy in cosying up with a firm whose business it is making things that kill people.

If it makes you feel better about yourself turning off a few lights and flushing the loo only for solids, just be aware that the bandwagon you’re joining broke down a long time ago and your cooperation is helping corporations wash their sins away in the green haze of a well-run publicity campaign.

This weekend and next week will see a range of so-called direct action protests. How direct and effective will sitting in a street getting water-cannoned be if you’re an Indian farmer considering suicide to get out of debt because your crops failed?

What’s needed is justice. Fair rights and fair pay for workers and bold international policing of commerce and corporate structures. Grass roots movements that tackle tangible goals, not semantic abstract concepts. Proper justice and action directed at those who use and exploit. Not branded climate justice and a spectacle only likely to achieve hypothermia.

=====

This article was originally published in The Guardian, 11 December 2009, and republished on The Comment Factory.

A bit like Fulham?

In the background, the Sheraton Hotel. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The poshest place in town…possibly in the country. Owned by the richest man in the country who’s half Ethiopian and half Yemeni. He’s also one of the richest men in Saudi Arabia…more wonga than the entire Bin Laden family. He reckons he can throw billions into Ethiopia and turn it into a progressive African economy.

In the foreground is a local Addis neighbourhood where corrugated steel roofs are de rigeur and entire families live in spaces 4m x 4m on around $70 a month. If you’re lucky. The road on the way down to the Sheraton is smooth, paved, marked by security checkpoints to keep out the undesirables. The roads in the neighbourhood are patted down through years of footfall and litter where you’re asked to “drop a note” if you want to photograph anything. Which is only fair if you’re gonna gawp at the poor people.

When I buy underwear, I ask myself “is the cotton used to make this organic cotton?” If it isn’t organic, I follow up with a series of sub-questions tripping around “what permanently debilitating condition does the farmer who grew this have?” and “which pesticide gave it to him?”

Actually, I don’t. And nor, I suspect, do you. I give the style a cursory glance, determine if I would be proud to have it hanging around the house to dry, and check the price tag. And check if my bum would look big in it.

The source, the origin, whether a farmer has a debilitating condition or if he got paid a fair price for his hard labour…that matters little when I’m choosing a triangular piece of cloth I hope won’t show me up when I next pull. Pesticides? The last thing on my mind when I have Visible Panty Line to consider.

Shruthi, an endosulfan victim in Kerala.

Pesticides are toxic chemicals sprayed on crops to kill “pests”…or any other living thing that can damage those crops. Insecticides kill insects, herbicides kill weeds. So on. So forth.

Hazardous chemicals associated with global cotton production also kill little fishies and get into the drinking water. Chemicals are known to contaminate freshwater rivers in America, India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Brazil, Australia, Greece and West Africa.

Despite a ban across 62 countries and a pledge by its primary manufacturer, Bayer, to cease its distribution, a ‘persistent organic pollutant’ known as endosulfan is in widespread use on crops from cotton, soy, coffee, tea, and vegetables. Its ban is due to its high toxicity to humans (among other living organisms) and its knockweed-like knack of not just keeping pests away, but everything else that may do the environment a bit of good.

On humans, endosulfan can cause “convulsions, psychiatric disturbances, epilepsy, paralysis, brain oedema, impaired memory and death.” Spend too much time around it – like cotton growers in India and West Africa – and you run the risk of immuno suppression, neurological disorder, birth defects, chromosomal abnormalities, and significantly decreased mental capacity.

Aldicarb, a nerve agent, is one of the most toxic pesticides applied to cotton. A teaspoon on the skin is enough to kill an adult. Yet it is the second most used pesticide in cotton production.

Despite pesticide prevalence among non-organic cotton growers, chances are you won’t be able to detect it in your underwear or t-shirt. All traceability gets lost at the spinning level of production…the bit where various cotton sources are spun into fabric. So cotton ginned from Mali could end up in the same cloth as cotton ginned in India (ginning – where seeds are separated from the cotton boll – is the process that comes before the fabric is spun). This lack of traceability makes it difficult to identify which retailers import the most non-organic cotton.

For you and I, there are few if any horrific side-effects to those who wear cotton grown using pesticides, though studies show that hazardous pesticides can be detected in cotton clothing. Instead, a brown person who works with pesticides in a far flung country will get it in the neck. And in the chest. And in the bowels. And on the skin. And in the blood.

Pesticide manufacturers and distributors insist they are safe if used with the proper equipment and stored in the recommended way.

“The majority of farmers working with pesticides like endosulfan live in one room huts with their families. In that one room, the family eats, sleeps, lives,” explains Pesticide Action Network’s Damien Sanfilippo. “Everything is stored close together and it is not uncommon to see pesticide bottles next to food. Furthermore, the bottles carry a financial value. Empty bottles are sold in markets for one euro and people use them to store things like water and cooking oil. They’ve not been properly cleaned and cross contamination is common.”

Up to 99% of the world’s cotton growers live and work in the developing world. Cotton is grown as a smallholder crop by the rural poor and few can afford the protective chemical suits pesticide manufacturers say should be used with their products. Even if a suit is acquired, working for ten hours in a field in 40-degree heat and humidity in what is effectively a plastic bag doesn’t make for a happy farmer.

According to the World Health Organisation, 1 – 5 million cases of pesticide poisoning occur every year. Of that, 20,000 agricultural workers die and over a million require hospitalisation. Over 200,000 commit suicide.

Other culprits in the pesticide family include monocotophos and deltamethrin. Disgustingly, the former was withdrawn from the US market in 1989 as it can cause paralysis in children, but is still widely used in developing countries. The latter is another nerve agent used in over half the world’s cotton producing countries. Medical analysis in a South African village near cotton farms found traces of deltamethrin in human breast milk.

Organic. A word impregnated by images of armies of yummy mummies mowing prams through Broadway Market. A mot scented by a pale indigo, Cath Kidston prints and Birkenstocks. A bit nouveau hippie, a bit aspirant middle class, a bit Womad. Not what you think of when you want to conjure the sharp, forward angles of high fashion, the slick ambient electro soundtrack of air kisses and champagne. Dahlink.

Your typical £20 t-shirt will earn a non-organic farmer 15p, 9p of which will have to go towards buying pesticides. Going organic and learning how to manage beneficial insects in the field (the ones who kill the insects nasty to cotton crops) will eliminate the need to spend that 9p. These farmers are also encouraged to grow farm system crops that not only help maintain a healthy biodiversity on the farm but offer another means to increase their incomes.

“You can look good and save the world,” insists Pants to Poverty’s Ben Ramsden. Pants to Poverty was set up as part of the Make Poverty History campaign in 2005. They make underwear. Organic underwear. And have successfully campaigned to get Bayer Crop Sciences, the world’s largest producer of endosulfan, to withdraw the pesticide from international distribution by 2010 in countries where it is still legally available. “The point behind choosing organic cotton is not to take the fun out of fashion. Clothing manufacturers make money because cotton yield increases when farmers go organic. Farmers make money because corporations pay more for their crop. And they’re healthier. It’s win win. And the best part is that the consumer is driving this ethical economy.”

UK consumers spend £23bn per year buying clothes and campaigners say it’s clear that people want organic cotton. Demand currently lies somewhere near £1bn and outstrips supply.

Designers such as Katharine Hamnett have been producing work using ethically and environmentally sourced fibres since the late 1980s. “Conventional cotton kills thousands of people every year and by using organic cotton, I can make clothes without having blood on my hands”.

Hamnett has said that although consumer demand for organic cotton is high, the market is small due to the fashion industry’s apathy and reluctance to change their production process. “The problem is that the fashion industry doesn’t care. I think the industry is more callous than the consumer. And it’s taken me a long time to find anyone interested in manufacturing clothes ethically in organic cotton. They saw it as inconvenient, they’d have to source their supply chain from scratch…. Everyone was going along happily making money without having to make any changes.”

Though there are changes afoot. Howies is a high street firm pushing for total transparency in the fashion market. They acknowledge that it’s good to do organic shirts, “but the dyeing process isn’t so nice…we’re looking to find lower impact ways of doing that.”

Supermarket chains such as Tesco and Marks and Spencers have committed to including organic cotton in their clothing ranges.

“Playing with these major corporations can be seen as a grey area as far as activists are concerned but it is the only way to ensure organic cotton is spread out as much as possible,” says PAN’s Damien Sanfilippo. “Ultimately, the farmer benefits and the environment benefits.”

In a world where 26 million tonnes of cotton is produced, its little wonder why cotton is called “white gold”. Worldwide organic cotton production increased by 152% in 2008 to just under 150k metric tonnes according to an Organic Cotton Farm and Fibre Report released by the Organic Exchange. The question of how best to dye cotton is one that stings organic campaigners in the tail. The use of dyes and their disposal, especially the ones used to make black, is still an issue that needs to be resolved.

But consumers are on message. Fashion designers are on message. Even Tesco is on message. The fashion industry, however, will have to undergo an overhaul and a rethink. If the reams produced organically can be cut and shaped into stylish designs as well as reams produced conventionally and the profits made by going organic outstrip conventional farming, the onus is on the bulk of the fashion world to pull their manicured finger out and make organic the convention.

Despite Bayer’s capitulation to a campaign group featuring a character known as the Panteater, other pesticides are still in use around the world and they still kill. Furthermore it’s bloody stupid to carry on with a method that not only impoverishes and harms communities and the environment if a more financially viable and healthier alternative is available.

Ben’s right. You can look good, and save the world.

UPDATE: A week after this article’s deadline, I received a call from Bayer Crop Science’s Dr Julian Liddle. “We stopped the manufacture of endosulfan because it was no longer financially viable. A more efficient, and safer, alternative has emerged and we are focusing on that.”

Which is?

“Genetically modified cotton.”

=====

This article was originally published in Who’s Jack Magazine, September 2009.