Darwin's Nightmare shows a poor and disrupted community at the Tanzanian shore of Lake Victoria. It's not a pretty sight, as illustrated by orphans roaming the streets trying to survive, prostitution and a raging AIDS crisis. Although huge quantities of Nile perch are fished from the lake, it's too expensive for the locals to eat. Instead, they eat the left overs of the fish processing factory. But not before it's rotten en dried, though.
This movie is listed as a documentary. However, no matter how disturbing the images are (and trust me, they *are* disturbing!), the movie raises actually more questions than it answers. Afterwards my friend and I started to get annoyed by everything that the movie did NOT tell us. I expect a documentary to be factual and objective. Factual it was, but in a very subjective way.
The biggest question you are left with is "Where does the money go?". The processed fish is very expensive. So the locals (or the other --starving-- Tanzanians) can't buy it. So were does the profit go? To the fishermen? To the factory employees? To the factory owner? We are told that the guard of the National Fishing Institute earns $1 a night. But what does a fisherman earns? Or a factory worker? Why do people need to be hungry or eat rotten left over scrapes, when there is a lake full of fish at hand? Not that no figures are given at all. During a certain period of time, the factory produces 500,000 tons of fillet. The factory director is taken by surprise by the question how many people that can feed. The answer is 2 million. Later we get to know why this figure is so interesting. That year (2002), there's a famine in central Tanzania. The UN wants to collect $17 million in order to feed 2 million starving Tanzanians. It's up to the viewer to think "Why not use the fish?". Correct answer is of course that you can buy much more rice for that money than fish fillets.
The questions bugged me. Where does the money go? Why let the left over rot first (producing toxic ammonia in the process) before frying them? Why don't the fishermen take their women with them, instead of leaving them in their village and relying on prostitutes? No doubt there are good answers for all of these questions, but don't expect them to be answered in this documentary.
I read in some reviews that this nightmare is the result of globalization. But I wonder if the fishermen and factory workers would have been better off being hungry poor farmers in their village (as in other places in Africa, like Malawi). A quarter of Tanzania's national income comes from fish exports. Would Tanzania really be better off without this? Does the fact that weapons shipment come with the same plane as the fish is flown out with really implicate that the weapons would not come in if the fish would not be flown out? I don't think so.
So, the movie shows terrible living conditions. But it connects the wrong wires. It doesn't reveal the structure behind the problems. And these problems will not go away if we stop eating Nile perch. It will only create more unemployment in the towns at the shores of Lake Victoria.
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