Global Tomato Industry: Economics of Red Gold | Documentary Analysis

[00:00:10]i grew up in the south of france  in provence a tomato paradise one day a piece of news shocked me le cabano the jewel in the french crown  of tomato sauce had been bought by a   chinese investor general liu he decided to  produce sauce promensal with asian tomatoes general liu was trying to conquer this  sector the local deputy seemed delighted but i did not understand why a country  where they do not eat tomato sauce   wanted to compete with provence or italy for two years i put my life on hold to understand   how this product had become  a necessity to all mankind i discovered a different tomato unlike the one we  see in our salads a tomato that you'll never see   round and whole on your plate a tomato modified  by geneticists to meet the needs of the agri-food   industry these are tomatoes that are very firm  fruit you can drop them and they won't burst i discovered a misunderstood and fascinating  industry an industry born from the success of   italian gastronomy and reinvented in the united  states by a few men who turned it into red gold in california i met the biggest leader  of this industry a multi-millionaire who   was obsessed with productivity in italy i saw  harvesters exploited in africa farmers ruined   for the past two years i've been collecting sauces  juices soups concentrates pulp peeled tomatoes and   ketchup from around the world the story i'm going  to tell you is not about a simple canned food   it's an absurd story of our globalized  world it's winners it's losers the men   and women who feed mankind without  ever seeing the fruits of their labor to discover how the chinese produce their  tomatoes i needed to make a very long journey   three thousand kilometers from beijing  in the west of china to xinjiang long inaccessible to foreigners and under military  control the region was annexed by china in 1949 it's the territory of the uyghur  people a muslim ethnic group that   regularly rebels against the central power uyghurs are now a minority in xinjiang this region is now populated by millions of han   the majority ethnic group in china  and migrants from other regions and this is all at the initiative of beijing here a third of the harvest is still  manual as it was in the west 50 years ago oh foreign and his wife come from the  distant region of sichuan   3 000 kilometers from here paid for what  they pick they earn 0.01 euro per kilo um this difficult work with an  uncertain income attracts   the poorest families in the  country including children foreign minimal labor costs destitute families paid for  their labor i understood better why the chinese   tomato was replacing the provencal tomato and  the chinese workers replacing those in europe but who had the absurd idea that china  should launch itself into this industry   china is one of the few countries  where they do not eat tomato sauce   that is the whole paradox i searched for  a reason in the chinese capital beijing   in a neighborhood that is reserved for the rich  i found the main player in the chinese tomato   industry this is the first time he has agreed  to be interviewed in front of a foreign camera   liu yi also known as general yu  a former leader of the bingtuan as explained in this official video the bing  tuan is a military industrial organization   founded in 1954 on the order of mao and composed  of former army soldiers its mission is to populate   control and develop the region of xinjiang  to avoid any rebellion of the uyghur people in reality general liu never led a  fighting unit but under his command   battalions of chinese workers were sent  into the commercial war of the tomato this is how in the early 2000s  the chinese army found itself   at the head of a group of tomato  sauce the chalkis group a matter before arriving in china the tomato went around  the world in five centuries once upon a time there   was a red fruit round and fragile known only to  the people of south america brought back to europe   it was planted in the garden of the kings of spain  in the kingdom of naples and even on the banks   of the thames its red color fascinated botanists  but it was feared to be toxic in the 19th century   the italian industrialists embraced it and put  it to good use but the tomato is still fragile   in the 20th century geneticists invented new  varieties which didn't get crushed before they   arrived at the factory it is this new tomato  that is harvested all over the planet today   from the fields i followed the  tomato trucks to the factories today china has become world number two in the red   gold industry with the kafko tunhea group  a state-owned company an agri-food giant   the director's assistant at one of the largest  factories in the country takes me on a tour every day five thousand tons of  fresh tomatoes are delivered here unloaded with jets of water they are  sent into the depths of the factory inside the principle is barely more complex  than when you reduce tomatoes at home in these vats the tomatoes are sterilized  and transformed into concentrate   the red gold of this industry it takes six  kilos of tomatoes to make one kilo of this paste i now understand where my  favorite sauce comes from in 20 years china has become a  superpower of the tomato industry   thousands of tons of concentrate are packaged  for export in these large blue barrels these barrels of concentrate  are like barrels of crude oil   shipped around the world they will then  be refined by a multitude of brands i think ketchup sauce is a lot of products you  you you consume in europe already contains uh   ingredients from this factory from our fields  we are selling a lot of to uk to germany   uh east europe for sure we are trusted by all  the international big all the international names   heinz unilever mccormick nessler etc so all  these big names they buy from our tomato paste it's slow so slow the biggest buyer of  tomatoes in the world you all know it   it's heinz this multinational is the first to have  made the tomato a multi-billion dollar industry every year heinz sells 650 million bottles  of ketchup in more than 140 countries i decided to go back to the very beginnings of the  tomato industry to the east of the united states according to legend it was in this modest  two-story house that the entrepreneur henry   john heintz laid the foundations of his empire a  touching story of a billionaire who started out   with nothing just how they like them in the united  states and that's worth a little photo souvenir how did heinz become the world's  number one ketchup almost 150 years ago what you're going to discover is  not written in history textbooks at the end of the 19th century pittsburgh was  the world capital of iron and steel activities   the carnegie factories produced  a quarter of american steel   pittsburgh was the symbol of the  country's industrial development   a city where the floods of european migrants  came to find work in steel and ford car factories but it was heinz that  revolutionized mass production the birth of mass production  really came out of this area   out of these plants heinz clearly was using the  assembly line technique before uh henry four   henry ford really had evolved but henry ford's  first really production line was around 1915.   heinz was using assembly line process here  in 1890s they were a little different like   i said he used a lot of gravity feed systems to  make it automated he used the automated welding   for his cans on a line you know way  ahead of when ford was welding his car so   yeah a lot of his techniques he was very into  technology heinz was a pioneer in technology   contrary to popular belief the bottle of  ketchup preceded the car on the assembly line henry john heinz was the first to make ketchup a  consumer product his slogan the world is our field of german descent he sells  preserves of horseradish   jam meat pickles condiments and  katsum the ancestor of ketchup   a puritan who was obsessed with hygiene he  used clear glass for his bottles a pledge   of transparency and quality he thus gained the  confidence of consumers well heinz is a capitalist   i mean he was a he was a pure capitalist i mean  it was all about uh you know money and marketing   treated his people well but the end result  was he wanted to make money heinz ketchup from the 1950s ketchup became part of the  american way of life it came to be one of the   symbols of a triumphant america along with  coca-cola rock and roll and american cars   the american dream of a society of prosperity and  abundance is realized through mass consumption today industry provides the bulk of our diet agrobusiness generates an annual global  turnover of four trillion dollars   a sector that the billionaires covet in  2013 the heinz company was bought out for   23 billion dollars by warren buffett  the second richest man in the world   it was the largest takeover in the  history of the agri-food industry the arrival of the billionaire was  not good news for the employees i found workers that heinz brutally fired  the price of adjusting to capitalism in this city with a population of 28 000  nearly 1 000 employees lost their jobs   when the ketchup giant decided to close  its largest plant in north america   a year later half of them are still unemployed that's the 20-year service award that you got at  heinz yes i gave you the 20-year award there it's   very nice i was very proud of that and i got  that and i stayed there but they closed down   yeah i was here what's that plaque  i was the employee of the year   two years in a row and they gave me that  beautiful plaque over there no i would have   got that as i stayed there have you stayed  there you wish you were i would have gone no one expected a man whose fortune is estimated  at 73 billion dollars to close the factory a   couple things i've always heard was heinz will  never close down people eat people need food   and there'll never be a tornado here 2010 there  was a tornado in 2014 heinz closed down so it   just goes to show you that never say never  cause things happen like that i understand   that they they can say all they want like you  know they say well it wasn't competitive enough   we wasted too much space it was this it was  that what it comes down to is it costs them   money and they don't want to pay a decent wage  they want to pay third country or third world   wage and it doesn't matter if you give up you  know cut your wage in half or do this or do   that they're going to close it so anything  that they come up with that the union can   go back and say well here's here's the money  saver right here too back we're getting close the plant produced 100 canadian  tomato juice and ketchup   it may be surprising but in southern canada  the climate is ideal for growing tomatoes   this culture even maintained around 40 local  producers since 1909 the canadian tomato capital   has grown to the rhythm of heights the families  of the city provided labor for four generations when that company closed down it hurt me   emotionally i think it did most people that  work there we gave our life to that plant   yeah and i loved working there i liked  the people i worked with but it hurts   to lose a plant like that all because of some  money and that's the bottom line it's money and   not people's lives i don't think that they they  cared enough about the people here if they came   here and looked at what they've done to some of  these people they should be ashamed of themselves since its acquisition warren  buffett has closed five plants   and cut 7 400 jobs about a  quarter of the company's workforce   if factories are closing all over the  world many more are opening in china who sold the chinese the industrial  techniques to make this concentrate polo of the tomato industry is armando gandalfi   in parma the gandalfi family have been tomato  merchants in the industry for three generations   armando is the world's largest  trader in tomato concentrate opportunity is dozens of factories paid for by  the chinese with a barter system ecuador foreign and it is thanks to this transfer  of technology that china has become   the world's largest exporter of red gold in these barrels nearly one million tons of  concentrate leave the port of tianjin each year the main destination takes a  crossing of several weeks to italy a thousand tons of chinese concentrate  are unloaded every week in salerno the chinese concentrate is then  reconditioned by the italian industry the recipe is simple take chinese concentrate   dilute it in a little water add  a pinch of salt and you're done these cans are then exported to africa the  middle east and europe this is how you can   eat chinese tomatoes while believing  they were grown under the italian sun   there's nothing italian here except a name and  a flag so is there anything illegal here no   i would say basically what you're talking  about is misleading consumers so it's part of   the company's responsibility or responsibility  sorry to try to give an image of serious or uh   seriousness and to try not to cheat consumers  by telling this looks italian is not italian the spaniard juan jose amazaga is one of the  biggest tomato concentrate traders in the world each year he buys the equivalent of 600  000 tons of fresh tomatoes for resale   in the form of concentrate if you eat  tomato sauce it's partly thanks to him the agro-business giants  trust him for their supplies in the tomato industry a trader does  not just stay in the trading rooms   juan jose amazaga travels the planet  to select the most beautiful harvests   if the italians are supplied  by china he prefers california today tomato is a red gold today california  has been growing tomatoes for many many years   and growing steadily the  acreage as consumption increased and they have you know good technology they've  got the highest yields in the world as a country   as a region and it's always enough it's a it's  always good to know what what's going on here here i am in the heart of the largest tomato field   in the world it reaches  further than the eye can see this is like a tomato version of silicon valley   california produces a third of all  the tomato sauce consumed in the world in these fields none of the fruit is picked by  hand machines are used for the entire harvest   yet up until the 1960s large landowners relied  on mexican manual workers known as braceros two   hundred thousand of them handled the harvest  of tomatoes each summer for 30 cents an hour at that time cesar chavez an agricultural worker   and a charismatic leader worked with his  union to demand better working conditions for 40 years cesar chavez fought for more  social justice in the california fields he organized strikes and demonstrations  which were harshly repressed his rallying cry si se puede was  echoed by barack obama during his   2008 campaign with his famous yes we can cesar chavez passed away in 1993 he was  considered an icon of american civil rights   his former private secretary  mark grossman told me this story i think of some words that cesar chavez  spoke in the late 1970s when he said   capital and labor together  produce the fruit of the land   but what really counts is labor the human beings  who sacrifice their youth numb their spirits and   torture their bodies to produce the greatest  agricultural wealth the world has ever known   and yet these same men women and children  too often do not have enough food to feed themselves he called that one of  the tragic ironies of our time in 1964 cesar chavez succeeded  in persuading the government   to end the bracero program landowners could  no longer exploit this cheap labor force rather than raising wages the owners decided to  mechanize the harvest to increase their profits fifty thousand farm workers were employed in  the canning tomato industry in the years before   mechanization researched the two generations  of mechanization in the canning tomato and   essentially what happened was that  over a period of about a decade   the workforce was decimated and those people  lost their jobs and lost their livelihoods   it was a sudden and dramatic uh decimation   of people's livelihoods who had relied upon  canning tomatoes for many of them for generations here is one of the industrialists who  prefers machines to workers chris roofer this steve jobs of the tomato  industry is the boss of morning star   the world number one in the industry it  alone produces almost as much as china this entrepreneur methodically applies his  libertarian ideas a mixture of anarchism   and ultra liberalism here every movement is  timed starting with those hundreds of trucks   each day they offload 20  000 tons of fresh tomatoes we had to start putting water in the  trailers before to save 15 seconds   so when they come in here that's  already pretty pretty much full of water saving 15 seconds per truck saves seven minutes  per hour the equivalent of one working day per   year here more than elsewhere time is money  i'm paranoid i think we can do a lot better   i know i see more detail and so  it's a lot of things to fix a   lot of things to improve so i  don't consider we do that well morningstar efficient company very much  because they have managed to reduce costs   all through the supply chain from the field to the  trucking of finished goods per dollar investment   in a plant you produce much more they can produce  more than six million tons of fresh tomatoes   that's more than all italy in three  factories it's impressive really amazing   yes the man by my side produces more than all  of italy each hour chris roofer transforms one   million three hundred and fifty thousand kilograms  of tomatoes into concentrate under the control   of only two employees how's it going 44 last hour  44. they still give me this excuse i can't pump it   in this factory that has been automated to  the extreme many executives and workers have   been removed and replaced by computers they're  running the whole factory these two seasonal girls   they got an issue they call they  call they call jimmy or something   hey jimmy get out there and do that  okay they're like the plant managers the world's largest factory runs  with only 70 workers per rotation chris roofer likes parables for him liberalism is  a best of five sets and tough luck for the losers   so if you play tennis with another person  you're there you're proving your game   so the competition allows you to improve your game  and if you improve your game you have more fun so   that's what the competitive system's all about  is getting the people with better ideas better   processes to to expand and and kindly telling  those that aren't doing as well that maybe they   should do something else maybe they shouldn't play  tennis maybe they should take up golf or swimming   applied to the labor market his  lesson sends shivers down your spine for 50 years large companies have been increasing  their profits by mechanizing production   and reducing the cost of wages everywhere machines  replace manpower lay off more to earn more this is   companies winning formula and the more the bosses  invest in technology the more production volumes   increase supply stimulates demand never before  have the shelves been so stocked never before   has mankind consumed so many tomatoes but  by concentrating more and more wealth in the   hands of big companies and destroying more  and more jobs how long can this system last today three great powers of the tomato industry   are in fierce competition the  united states italy and china in the war of red gold there are no rules  even the least ethical moves are permitted this is what i discovered here at jin 2d   one of the biggest chinese  exporters of tomato-based products the managing director of the company  agreed to show me his factory   like any good entrepreneur he starts with  a small guided tour of his production line until now everything seems normal the first surprise was waiting  for me in the warehouses   gina gina does that not remind you of anything  this is gino's chinese cousin that famous brand   created in italy and which actually contains  chinese concentrate to compete with their   former partners who hid chinese concentrate  in italian cans the chinese camouflage   their tomatoes in cans that are the colors of  italy in the end everybody is eating chinese media the factory has a secret weapon  in this trade war against italy   that the director forgot to  show me a miracle ingredient a white substance is added to the  tomato sauce in large quantities   this substance does not appear on the label no no no no can you ask me um according to my information some boxes of chinese  concentrate contain up to 55 percent additives   it's a method of lowering manufacturing costs  since these additives are cheaper than tomatoes in reality the reason they can  cut their products with soy   is because of an agreement with their distributors the entire production and distribution  chain is complicit in this fraud   only the consumer is fooled which is what the  trader juan jose amazaga condemns and one thing   i must say is that these people are declaring that  to the buyer they're telling the buyer that we're   going to put so much of this and this and this and  this is a price if we don't put this this is the   price so it's normally a higher price when it's  pure tomato paste then they add fiber 20 fiber   three percent color whatever at it it's a little  another price so the buyer knows it he's aware of   it doesn't appear on the label but the buyer knows  it distributing companies that buy thousands of   tons of chinese paste in cans under their their  own brand in the distributors brand in africa   know that the product will have these things  and it's not declared let's go back to china   in 20 years it has gone from a tiny  player to a giant of the tomato industry   initially the chinese didn't care at all about  tomato sauce but with their legendary charm   the italians exchanged factories  for five years of tomato concentrate what a beautiful chinese tomato  a bargain for italy that turned   chinese production into a sauce that was  made in italy without anybody noticing   but since then the chinese decided to take  on the italians with sauces made in china   the battlefield for this jewel of red gold africa  where they consume the most concentrate per capita with a population of 27  million and six percent growth   ghana is a dynamic economy the  second biggest in west africa don't worry mama tasty talk  globalization is changing eating habits   the secret behind delicious meals in this part of  africa in terms of vegetables the tomato is king   it accounts for one-third of vegetable  expenditure but the local tomato market   is collapsing in favor of sauces from china and  italy imports have multiplied by 30 in 15 years the conquerors of this new market i visit  them 12 000 kilometers from beijing in   their secure residence guess who i find  there general you and his son quinton the general has been there for two months  because he sniffed out a good opportunity   west africa is the region which has the  fastest growing consumption of tomatoes   and his presence is part of a policy that is  promoted at the highest state levels in china this confident talk also reflects a reality   the african continent is fast becoming  the next big consumer market in the world in this market that you saw there's hundreds of  shops that sells tomato paste here and the brands   there are 50 brands at least in the market it's  90 chinese factories who produce because they have   invested so much into the machineries and they  need a way out to do it so they will produce for   anybody whether it's oem whether it's for their  own burn that they can sell in the african market   so in terms of that the chinese producers need  to find a way to to to digest their own excess   surplus the wheels of the economy keep on turning  in ghana i arrived during a major economic change   china is relocating part of its production to  benefit from cheaper labor on production lines   imported from their country the liu's manufacture  their finished products from chinese concentrated are paid four times less than  chinese workers 100 euros per month   this year in china as you know the global economy  is not that uh well you see a lot of factories   shutting down moving to southeast asia moving  to uh moving to vietnam moving to indonesia   malaysia those areas and you will see especially  in the tomato paste business that you see a lot of   factory moving to african countries and i glad to  say we're one of the first who took in this step   to establish our presence more closer to the  market rather than that 10 000 miles away   by purchasing canned chinese tomatoes rather  than fresh tomatoes from his own country   the consumer weakens local producers a  little more since independence thousands   of ghanaian farmers have been growing tomatoes an  activity that offered a future to entire families   their tomatoes were processed in factories  in the public sector and the canned goods   were sold in the markets a sector protected by  customs barriers to the delight of the farmers but under pressure from international  financial institutions free trade has   become the rule and imports  have overwhelmed the country   which has been disastrous for farmers  and the local factory had to close so since nobody buys their tomatoes  and the state does not help them   some of them try their luck in europe  in italy ironically they pick tomatoes as early as five o'clock in  the morning hundreds of men   head for the fields coming from africa via  the mediterranean their journey ended here to survive they have no choice but to pick  the specialty tomatoes of southern italy in 2011 musa siliman and mohammed suleiman  traveled 3 500 kilometers in search of a   better life than the one they had in sudan for  several years they've been living in hardship 30 000 migrants work on the harvest on hundreds of  plots that are too small to be done mechanically they have come from africa but  also from india romania or bulgaria they're paid an average of 20 euros for  10 to 12 hours of work under a blazing sun supermarket foreign today he works for a cooperative es frutta zero   exploitation zero which produces organic and fair  trade sauces especially for the german market tomato sauce will never  taste the same for me again   it has the bitter taste of economic forces that  concentrate profits in the pockets of a few   it has the smell of liberalism which has  established itself from one continent to   the next and the color of migrants blood from all  over the world every year world demand grows by   three percent and it will grow even faster  when the chinese start to eat tomato sauce foreign you