From November 6 to December 6, the AlimenTerre festival will screen five documentaries across Luxembourg. The objective: to raise awareness about sustainable and inclusive food.
Worldwide, 2.8 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet and up to 733 million people face hunger due to conflict, repeated climate shocks or economic downturns, even as the Food is the third basic human need, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). To raise awareness of food and agriculture issues, the international NGO SOS Faim has been organizing the AlimenTerre festival in many countries for almost twenty years. And this year marks the first Luxembourg edition of the festival.
“The objectives are to highlight these issues and, in the medium term, to raise awareness among citizens and encourage them to start thinking and change their eating habits to move towards a sustainable and inclusive diet,” explains Marie-Noëlle Brigode. , national festival coordinator for SOS Faim, the organizer.
To do this, five documentaries were selected. Each film addresses a theme to cover different issues of the food problem: “sustainable food”, “social justice”, “access to peasant seeds” or “challenges of agriculture in the face of climate change” will be on the program.
The festival will open on November 6 at the Rotondes with the documentary The Boxer Theory, which addresses the question of the impact of climate change on French farmers. The various documentaries that will follow will be screened at universities or in high schools, but also in businesses.
“This allows us to mix different audiences,” underlines Delphine Dethier, director of SOS Faim. Each screening will be followed by a debate or animation in the company of experts as well as a moment around local products.
Behind the bananas, rights violations
The documentary The Evils of our diet presents testimonies from people working in Ecuador, the country of bananas, a product at the heart of the diet of Western countries. According to the NGO Fairtrade Lëtzebuerg, in 2023, 2,057 tonnes of bananas were sold in the Grand Duchy. A figure increasing by 5% compared to 2022. Yet, behind this innocuous gesture of eating a banana lie broken lives and violated rights. Jorge Acosta, protagonist of the documentary, can attest to this.
“It often happens that workers in banana fields fall ill because of pesticides and die,” confides the former agricultural aviation pilot, present during the festival presentation. After years of spreading pesticide on the fields, Jorge Acosta decided to launch the ASTAC union, which fights for workers’ rights: “We are calling for solidarity… We are not asking people to stop eating bananas, but we ask that Western consumers question themselves and we demand laws that make companies responsible.” “Through the festival, we want to show that food is political and that we have an impact through our food,” says Delphine Dethier.
Programming and registration: festivalalimenterre.lu
FAO in defense of the “right to food”
Every year, October 16 marks World Food Day. Launched by FAO to celebrate its own founding date, the day aims to raise awareness of the situation of hungry people around the world and raise awareness of the need for food security and good nutrition for all. . This year, the theme is “The right to food for a better life and a better future”.
