Kate Vlckova talks to J P Olsen and Luke Walden about their film ‘The Narcotic Farm’.

Kate Vlckova: The film uses unique government archives, captivating music and interviews that make the story very vivid – how long did the research last? Have you encountered any challenges trying to get hold of some of the footage?

JP Olsen: Luke and I spent two and a half years, off and on, researching “The Narcotic Farm,“ finding photos and documents and film. When we started there was no central archive to go to, everything was scattered all over the U.S. among dozens of different public and private archives. We got material from people who worked there or were imprisoned there and we also found rare material at the Kentucky Historical Society, which, incidentally, told me they never had anyone ask for the Narcotic Farm’s archive, even though they’d had it sitting there for two decades. The biggest challenge by far was getting the films of human experimentation that went on at the prison.

KV: Why return to this subject 34 years after the Narcotic Farm was shut? What inspired you to make a film and write a book about it?

JP Olsen: Several years ago I worked on a documentary on drug abuse and my research included interviewing long-time methadone patients. A few people I interviewed were in their late 60s and early 70s. In every case these old-timers either knew about or had spent time at Lexington. I didn’t know what Lexington was at first, but one guy in particular talked about what a great place it was with this great jazz band and how LSD was tested there and how you could get free heroin and that people were put to work on this big, beautiful farm to milk cows and so on. I thought, well, if he’s telling me the truth, this is an incredible American story and I’ve just got to do this. I felt very passionate about saving this story because it was clear to me that this project would be centered around a population that was dying off, and dying off very quickly. And, in speaking with people at these clinics, frankly, I liked them. They were all characters. The book came about completely by accident. Wayne Kramer’s wife – Wayne is our film’s composer and narrator as well as a former inmate – saw the photos that Luke and I were collecting for our research and said we should try to get a book contract. She put me touch with a book agent, I wrote up a proposal, and to my surprise he told me he could sell it. And then, to my amazement, he sold it. But that excitement wore off quickly when we had to figure out how to make a film and write a book at the same time. That’s when Luke and I called historian of science Dr. Nancy Campbell for help because she knows as much as anyone on the planet about Lexington.

KV: One of the former inmates featured in the documentary mentions the shock of coming to a farm from New York City. Why did the authorities consider treatment at a farm to be effective?

Luke Walden: The Narcotic Farm’s founding precept in 1935 — that farm work could cure drug addiction — illustrates how little was known about addiction in the early 20th century. The idea was a vestige of a 19th century medical theory called moral therapy, which was motivated by an agrarian nostalgia that concluded that “urban“ diseases such as tuberculosis, mental illness, and addiction would be cured by convalescence in a healthful, rural setting. The idea at ‘Narco’ was that fresh air and sunshine would reinvigorate addicts, farming the institution‘s 1,000 acres would teach the virtue of hard work, and this newfound work ethic would sustain abstinence from drugs. By the early 1950s it was obvious farm work didn’t cure drug addiction. But the farm continued to be part of the institution, providing inmates with healthy food and exercise that helped return them to physical health even as it failed to improve their prospects of staying clean permanently.

KV: According to the film prisoners volunteered to participate in the drug research programme – was there any cases of forced participation?

JP Olsen: The short answer is no. I never heard anything like that from former prisoners. These were hard-core junkies and the idea of getting free drugs was a dream come true, so I don’t think any arms were twisted to get people to sign up. There were enticements. You got better food, your own room, a television, that kind of thing. But all signs, including internal documents on the patients in the drug program, pointed toward free drugs as the prime motivation. Also, more than a few inmates felt that being in the program was a way of getting one over on the government for locking them up in the first place. That came up a few times. Today, of course, we look at this issue all very differently. But the practice of giving addicts drugs for research exists in the U.S. today, right now. I know of one program in Manhattan that gives out free crack. To me the only fundamental difference between that practice and Lexington is that people who volunteer for these crack studies are not in prison, but walking around freely, doing this on their own accord. That’s considered ethical now because a cure for crack addiction could really help people out, so that’s the deal society is willing to make for now. But who knows whether this will be considered ethical in 25 or 50 years? I think ethics are a moving target, and that’s part of why we made the film the way we did. We wanted it to exist as a record of its time, not a comment on the time. Luke often said our film would be used as text that would help generate discussion about research ethics. I really hope that’s the case.

KV: Why did recovered addicts volunteer in experiments which would put them back into the misery they know so well? What was their reward in return for the participation?

Luke Walden: Overall the reputation of the research program among the inmates at Lexington was very positive. Bernie Kolb, a volunteer patient we interviewed who worked as an aide in the drug research center remembers the researchers as caring and committed; “I liked it there because the doctors were trying to help addicts. My feeling about them was that they really came there to do some good.” Regardless of the researchers‘ intentions, however, is it undeniable that the primary motivation for participation was, as former test subject Edward Flowers remembers, “to get some drugs.” So there was always a long list of inmates eager to get high on narcotics for the duration of a research study, whether that was one day or one whole year. An added bonus was that until 1955 research subjects were paid for their participation in extra doses of their favorite drug. This is one practice that really got the institution in hot water when it was re-examined in the 1970s.

KV: Major US papers covered the research in Lexington from the 1930s onwards, yet no-one questioned whether drug testing on human guinea pigs was unethical. Why was so?

JP Olsen: I think the simplest way to explain why the media didn’t question Lexington in a negative way is that it wasn’t considered unethical to use prisoners for research until – at least – the mid-1960s. That’s not to say that somebody, somewhere wasn’t wondering to themselves about whether this was ethical or not. But neither Luke nor I ever ran across anything like that among the hundreds of newspaper and magazine stories we read during our research. And it’s clear that doctors did have ethical guidelines, so they did think about it, they just didn’t think about it in the way we do know. To get a sense of how differently people thought about giving drugs to drug addicts, in the 1930s and 40s Lexington only allowed white people in the program because the drug program was seen as a good thing, a desirable thing that should be afforded to whites only. That, I think, underscores just how differently this was thought of back then. I think the turning point in the thinking about research ethics in the US began to change in 1966 when a social worker named Peter Buxton questioned the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. In my opinion, and this is the opinion of some others who have looked at this, Buxton brought into question the whole way the U.S. Public Health Service did business then, particularly how it relates to what are now considered vulnerable populations such as prison inmates. That’s when changes in ethical thinking started happening around this issue. And of course, we’re talking about the late 1960s in America when many were rethinking basic assumptions about our society and openly challenging them.

Luke Walden: Medical research on prisoners was legal and common across America in the 1930s through the 1960s. At that time a common attitude held even by some prisoners was that by participating in research inmates were making a noble self-sacrifice, a repayment of their “debt to society.” This was especially true in the case of research that was obviously for the public good, such as research on malaria conducted on inmates in other prisons in the 1940s. For the doctors at Lexington, and evidently for the public at large, the quest to solve the puzzle of drug addiction was in the same category. The research was considered a worthwhile endeavor and the inmates participation as guinea pigs was considered a worthwhile sacrifice because it was unquestionably for the public good and would also eventually be for the good of the specific population involved — drug addicts themselves.

Essentially what we’re dealing with here is a story with no real bad guy, and to me it’s a really interesting example of the historical contingency of ethics in general. We’ve decided now that the practices of the ARC would be unethical today, and research on federal prisoners is no longer allowed. So in retrospect the ARC’s practices seem like they were unethical all along. But in fact, the ethical climate was so different then, and the program seemed to make so much sense to so many people, that even many of the former inmates of Lexington whom we interviewed still have no ethical problem with what went on there. So my view is that while we are glad this kind of research no longer happens in prisons it’s pretty hard to be too critical of the doctors who carried it out fifty years ago.

KV: The Narcotic Farm became a true meeting point for a number of great musicians. Is it true that some people not addicted to drugs volunteered to go to the Narco Farm just to be able to play and practise with top-class jazz artists?

JP Olsen: I first heard that from Phil Schaap, a very informed jazz radio host in New York who grew up with jazz musicians all around him. He spoke at length about this. He told me stories about people going there for exactly that reason. I heard these kinds of things from jazz musicians too, that people in the jazz life would show up at Lexington, some hoping to kick, some just looking for a bed, many of them expecting – deluded in their thinking or not – to sit in with one of the greatest jazz bands in the world at the time.

KV: Were there any positive outcomes of the research?

Luke Walden: Over its 40 years the Addiction Research Center at Lexington advanced major fundamental discoveries about the biology, psychology and pharmacology of addiction and addictive drugs. Researchers developed methods to measure the severity of drug dependence and the intensity of drug withdrawal. They theorized the existence of opiate receptors that heroin and morphine stimulate in the brain. They also put forth a theory of cues and conditioning to explain why relapse is so common among recovering addicts, a theory now integral in drug treatment programs. The research center demonstrated – for the first time – that alcohol withdrawal was a genuine physical condition and not a psychological delusion. They proved that barbiturates, once prescribed with little concern over their safety, were highly addictive and have a dangerous withdrawal syndrome and successfully recommended controls for medications that would have clearly caused widespread addiction and abuse if released on an unsuspecting public. In the mid-1970s, shortly before the lab was closed, Lexington’s drug research lab also pioneered buprenorphine, the current great pharmacologic hope to treat opiate addiction medically. But among the lab’s most important contributions is the idea that addiction is a chronic, relapsing disease. This was the reigning philosophy among Lexington’s researchers long before it became the accepted belief that it is today, at least in the US.

KV: How far has the understanding and research into drug addiction progressed since the Narcotic Farm closed in 1975?

Luke Walden: It’s difficult to assess and different people will give different answers. Nora Volkow, the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in the U.S., might say that with current advances in brain imaging and the science of genetics a biological cure for addiction is within reach. Former head of NIDA, Robert DuPont, on the other hand, thinks the government has been throwing money at researching this problem for 70 years and we still have no cure for addiction. The current NIDA budget is over a billion dollars per year and the obvious question to be asked is whether a billion dollars a year is money well spent or whether that money might not do more good if it went to woefully under-funded treatment programs that have already demonstrated success, such as 12-step programs. The obvious rebuttal to that question is that the research, including Lexington’s research, is what has yielded the detailed scientific understanding of addiction we have today, which is a long way from the fantasy that farm work can cure drug addiction.

KV: It may seem that one of the main reasons for the closure of the Narcotic Farm was triggered by the controversial LSD study between 1932 and 1972 on African-Americans suffering from syphilis. Was this the principle reason for closing it?

JP Olsen: I think more than anything Lexington closed because it cost a lot to operate and its “cure“ rate was poor. So the question became, why are we keeping this open? It costs a lot to operate, it’s not working that well, and other forms of treatment – methadone and therapeutic communities in particular – are doing as well or better in keeping people off heroin and doing it for much less. Also, culturally, by the late 1960s Lexington was totally out of touch with what was going on in terms of drug treatment. They were the old guard and they had old guard views, including the fact that they fought against federally funded methadone maintenance despite the fact they pioneered the use of methadone for detox. That’s part of it. They were old and in the way in the eyes of the new guard. But there is no doubt – despite what some from the institution will tell you even now – that the revelations of CIA money flowing through Lexington to test LSD on inmates to find who-knows-what, hurt the institution deeply. It hurt their standing in the eyes of their contemporaries.

Luke Walden: Just to clarify, the drug research at The Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Kentucky, and the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, which took place 500 miles away in Alabama, were completely separate and unrelated research projects. The one thing they have in common is that they were both conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Public Health Service. The similarities stop there, at least in our opinion. But these two things were joined in the public mind in large part because that’s the way the media portrayed Lexington when news about the CIA connection broke in 1975.

KV: The film appeared in TV stations across America since November 2008. What has been the response so far?

Luke Walden: By far the most impassioned response has been from people who are either in recovery from addiction themselves, have a friend or family member in recovery or who work as professionals in addiction treatment. In the US this is actually a very large population. We’ve shown the film in prisons and film festivals and colleges and on American TV and the general response is, “I can’t believe I’ve never heard about this place.“ Many former addicts have told us that they are grateful for the objective and sensitive way we portray the addicts in the film, neither as blameless victims nor monstrous dope fiends.
Several former inmates and staff members at the institution have gotten in touch to let us know that we got the story right, which is gratifying especially as getting it right meant taking a stand for historical objectivity that has been challenging for some. I think many people – including us as we began our research – might hear the broad outlines of the story and assume that the film will have a clearly critical point of view about the research program. However what we actually learned in our research simply didn’t justify that approach and so we decided to present the story as an objective history rather than an expose’. We want to leave it up to viewers to debate the ethics and reach their own conclusions. This approach has had its detractors. One public television programmer in the US told us that the film was “too balanced and objective for public TV.” We are glad it was aired nationally anyway and that we’ve had a chance to show it in London at LIDF and Raindance film festivals and are especially honored to have it shown at The Barbican.
The film will screen at the Radar Hamburg Film Festival in the first week of November and we hope to continue to get it out to audiences across Europe.

Katerina Vlckova talks to Gustav Hofer about ‘Suddenly, Last Winter’

KV: What prompted your decision to pick up a camera and make a documentary?

GH: When we started to make the doc we wanted to document a historic moment for Italy. We were optimistic that finally, with a centre-left government, Italy too will finally give some rights to same sex couples. We wanted to film that moment of hope for so many people. But with the ongoing discussion, the intrusion of the Vatican and the reporting of TV it became clearer day by day that things might not turn out as we thought. So instead of making a film about a step towards a more open and equal Italy it became a film about a defeat.

KV: Was it always your intention to use documentary film as a campaigning tool?

GH: We could not imagine that the film would get so much attention and that it would be able to speak to so many people. It was all above our expectations.

KV: Why the title ‘Suddenly, Last Winter’?

GH: There are two reasons: For us it was homage to Joseph L. Mankievicz film based on Tennessee Williams play “Suddenly, Last Summer”, a movie we both love very much, which actually is a film about homophobia.  On the other hand all this wave of homophobia hit us suddenly, during the winter 2007.

KV: Can you give us an idea of what sort of difficulties homosexual couples have to face in Italy? How does that compare to other countries from what you’ve heard or  experienced?

GH: The situation over the last few months has got worse. Almost daily we read about violence again gay men and women. So there is the physical and psychological difficulty. Many homosexuals in Italy don’t dare (or care) about coming out, because there is always an old aunt or uncle who they don’t want to shock. They are ashamed of telling anyone and say “It’s nobody’s business with whom I sleep”, pretending that being gay is just about sex and not about your identity. On the other side there is the legal discrimination which obviously you are not aware of until the moment you get into certain situations, like being refused to visit your partner in hospital, to decide about his treatments, questions of heritage, etc. Luca and me have been together for almost ten years, but for our country our relationship has never existed. To the State, Luca and me are total strangers who just happened to pay the phone bill together. It’s quite humiliating. That makes Italy one of the only EU countries which has no law for same sex couples. In almost all other countries there is some kind of recognition: gay marriage or civil unions. Even Albania is now discussing a law on gay marriage!

KV: If you were a politician and could draft a bill on gay rights, what would the perfect law look like?

GH: Give the same rights to all citizens to decide how they want to regulate their relationships, independently of whether they are straight or gay. Give the option.

KV: Would you say that obtaining rights for gay couples is just a question of time and campaigning or do you fear it could become a never-ending struggle?

GH: I think that history does not develop progressively but in circles. Italy probably was more open and progressive in the 70s when important rights like abortion or divorce were achieved. We are going through very conservative times where the Church is very strong because politics is very weak. We don’t have politicians who dare to oppose the dictates of the Vatican. If we don’t have strong parties which are clearly secular and don’t accept interference from the Church, things will not change in our country.

KV: What sort of reception has the film received to-date in Italy?

GH: This year we got a very important award for Italian cinema. We won the Nastro d’Argento for best documentary, it’s the award from the Italian film critics union. The reception has always been very enthusiastic; not only from a gay audience but even from Catholics who saw the film. We have received nice emails and compliments. Many of them said that watching the film made them understand how they have been used by the Church for their propaganda.

KV: What is interesting about this film is that combines two genres: a political documentary and a personal diary/human interest story. Could you say something about the decision to ‘cast’ yourselves. Did this seem a necessary and unavoidable condition?

GH: For me it was fundamental to make it personal, the story needed two faces to make people understand, that a law would make life better for people and that it is not an ideological question. I think that the personal is political and as a filmmaker I wanted to underline it. It was also a way to lighten up the mood on a topic which otherwise could be heavy.

KV: The film shows that even today certain groups within society face intimidation and exclusion in one way or another. Why do you think Italy appears to exhibit a greater intolerance to homosexuality than many other European nations?

GH: There are many reasons for it. One is, as I said, the Vatican. Another is the way especially TV is talking about homosexuals. But it is the tolerance level of homophobia which has got higher and so people feel that they have the right to discriminate, not only homosexuals but also immigrants, for example. With the Lega Nord we have an openly xenophobic and homophobic party within the government, which insults minorities continuously. So if the government can say certain things why should people not do the same?

KV: When you think of the suffragette movement in the early 20th century for example, women had to flight for equal rights for decades. Today, women hold top posts in politics and business – something unimaginable only half a century ago. Do you draw optimism from examples like this one?

GH: Actually the situation for women in Italy is not as rosy as you might think. We have very few women in high positions or in politics. On TV shows women are just there to seduce men, dancing almost naked. Italy is still today a patriarchal society run by men and especially old men sticking on their power. I hope that Italian women will soon start to protest about their situation and about how they are represented and that together with the gay movements they will become a movement of social and political change.

KV: You have said that before making this film you lived in a relatively safe urban ´microcosm´ surrounded by your open-minded relatives and friends. When did you first realise the extent of the intolerance around you?

GH: Lucky enough we lived in our microcosm! It wasn’t really fun hearing people say that you homosexuals are sick, perverts and paedophiles. But it was a big surprise for us to see that so many people still think that way or repeat what they hear on TV or in church.

KV: Are you optimistic about the ability for a documentary film to change society, particularly given the dominant role of television? How is this film being used within a broader campaign?

GH: I think the film should help Italians to see that on this issue we are talking about civil rights and nothing else and it could help to change the situation. The problem is that no national TV station will broadcast it as it is too critical about politics, the Church and the media. “Suddenly, Last Winter” will not be on Italian public TV any time soon. If it happens it would be a sign that Italy has changed. So we will continue to show it around the country with the help of local cinema owners, cultural associations and motivated people. Thanks to doing this we meet other Italians all over the country, those who don’t agree with what is going on and who show a great deal of solidarity.

KV: In the film, you have expressed what most Italians would probably call, radical views on religion and the Vatican. Has this caused you any particular problems or made life difficult for you in any way?

GH: We did not make a film against Catholics but against the invasion of the Vatican in internal Italian affairs. Of course, without all the criticism, I am sure that the documentary would have been broadcasted.

KV: Italian film distributors have been, up to this point, reluctant to pick up the film. Now that you have had international success at numerous film festivals across Europe, do you believe this might change?

GH: Unfortunately I don’t think so. It is hard anyway to get distribution for a documentary and of course it is even harder for a film which does not please either the left nor the right.

KV: What do you plan next – more films, more campaigns, or other forms of political engagement?

GH: About that issue we have different points of view.

Luca: I’m quite worried about the idea of making a second film, maybe I will go back to my previous life as a film critic. We’ll see.

Gustav: We will make another film and we will keep on asking for our rights.

Photo: zacgoldsmith.com

Coming up is our first DocSpot screening which features Pig Business. Kate Vlckova talks to Zac Goldsmith about raising people’s awareness on the subject of food-processing and animal welfare as well as his fascination with the film.

Kate Vlckova: Pig Business is a shocking, but, at the same time, revealing film. It certainly provokes discussion and makes one think about where meat in our supermarkets comes from, how it is processed and how much pollution factory farming meat production affects our environment.  How can we use films like Pig Business to engage the public in discussion? It must be extremely difficult coming across indifference, corporate greed and comfortable mass consumption?

KV: We have seen celebrity chefs launching nationwide media campaigns drawing the public’s attention to animal welfare. To what extent would you say this film is different?

ZG: I love it that celebrity chefs are raising the issue of animal welfare and mobilising lots of people, and that’s part of the story. What this film does very effectively is show that when we talk about cheap food it’s not actually cheap. We pay for it in a number of different ways. If a company is producing food but exhausting and polluting the environment the taxpayer pays for that. The food is then paid for again over the counter. So the only reason it’s cheap is because we pay twice for it. That’s not the case with more localised, organic agriculture so there is a kind of indirect subsidy there. The film raises this issue and I think that is what makes it different. There is another thing that makes the film different. It shows there is unfairness in the system. Take Britain, we have relatively high animal welfare standards and what we’re saying to our farmers is ‘you have to adhere to these standards but we’re still going to buy junk from the world’s markets’. The fact is that we are really just hampering our own farmers. Either we have to say ‘we’re not going to have high standards in this country’, which I don’t think anyone wants, or we have to say ‘we’re going to keep the standards that we have here but we’re going to impose the same standards on products we buy from abroad.’  That is what I’d like to see happen.

KV: Supposing the Conservative Party comes to power, do you have an agenda on how to put what you’ve just talked about into practice? The EU works as a single market and it is difficult to stop all cheap imports from countries where welfare standards are not adhered to. What can we do?

ZG: There are things that we can do immediately and there are things that may take a bit longer. We can, for example, require honest labels on food produce. The labelling regime in this country is mad. Products look like they had been produced in Britain, but in fact they may have been produced in other countries. The result is that consumers are given a false choice and they are being misled. An honest labelling campaign is something we [the Conservatives] are doing and something we would put into practice if we won the next election. We also need to start to make better use of public money. We spend about £2 billion a year on food for schools and hospitals and instead of buying the cheapest junk on the world’s markets we could invest the money in sustainable local producers. We would be pouring money into the rural economy, we would be cutting out our use of oil because food would be travelling shorter distances, and we would be giving children and patients much better quality food. That can be done even within existing rules.

There are two other things that we have to do but we are not there yet. First, we must recognise that there is an imbalance of power. Supermarkets control so much of the market and companies like Smithfield absolutely dominate. In my view, the consumer and the small farmer have no bargaining power, which is why the government needs to step in and say: ‘we’re going to balance the market’. That requires strength, which at the moment is lacking.

KV: The Ecologist magazine has set up its own film unit and it intends to make documentaries about some of your journalistic work. Would you let us know why it was set up and how you intend to use the unit most effectively?

ZG: At the moment we are teaming up with lots of different people but we will make use of films that are being made by others. So, for example, if this film (Pig Business) is turned into a 5 or 10-minute film suitable for the Internet we’d put it up on our site and we’d promote it as heavily as we could. I think there are lots of young people out there with good ideas but have no real way of breaking into this world, so we want to encourage competitions and get people to make films for us. For example, what is progress? What is cheap food? Is cheap food really cheap? These are the kinds of issues which need to be addressed. We want to create some very exciting competitions which will hopefully draw in lots of talent, and out of that we hope to be able to find good, reliable long-term partners. There is a huge amount of work that can be done on the Internet. I am sure you will remember ‘The Meatrix’, an extraordinary cartoon made by an American NGO looking at the story of food production. It was downloaded and viewed by 20 to 30 million people. I think there are other people out there with the same skills who can put these incredibly important issues into a format the mass market can understand.

KV: What are your views on animal welfare in intensive farming is the situation as hopeless as it seems?

ZG: It’s difficult, as we’ve got these enormous businesses with incredible power. We see that they provide money for politicians all around the world and they are very good at influencing policy. Our politics has been contaminated. The regulatory system is very weak and easily manipulated. That really is a core problem that we have to deal with, but the good news is that people are waking up. There are lots of incredible campaigns, some of them are grassroots, others are more systemic campaigns, and they create a change in food policy. The consumer is becoming more and more aware of where we are, what’s wrong with where we are and where we need to go. I think it will happen. We are going to move in the right direction but the question is how long is it going to take?

KV: Perhaps catastrophic pandemics, possibly swine flu, could wake people up?

ZG: I think it’s a series of problems, including perhaps swine flu, that will force us to rethink the modern global food economy. Right now people don’t take the issue of food security very seriously, but I think that will change. If climate predictions are accurate, if even the most conservative ones are accurate, we are going to have real problems. The world’s breadbaskets are all shrinking and serious water problems affect many countries. All these issues are combining with a rising population and the possibility that we are going to run out of oil at some point – which is obviously the key for getting food from one side of the world to the other. All this adds to our problem with food security.

Food security will become the defining issue in relation to food policies and after that we are going to have to do some serious re-thinking. One of the things we will have to do is to work out how to support our domestic, small scale, diverse family farmers who, at the moment, are going out of business. On top of this young people are not interested in getting into farming because they see no future in it and that has to change.

KV: It is very disappointing that the corporate takeover of the meat industry is accelerating. Take North Carolina, for example, where 27,000 independent family pig farmers became 2,200 pig factories. Our current situation seems insolvable when people are demanding more food in a more comfortable way.

ZG: I agree with that but there is a shift at the same time. The trends at the moment are all heading in the wrong direction, but there is something happening.  There is a resurgence of local food campaigns; school farms are being built; farmers’ markets are becoming more popular; the local food sector is growing, not just here but in other countries as well.

And something bigger than that is happening and this is where the debate is changing. For example, a few months ago a report was released by UNEP (United Nations of Environment Programme), UNESCO and the World Bank. They now accept that the small diverse traditional farm is more productive in terms of the land use than big intensive industrial monocultures. They are less productive in terms of labour because they require more people but that’s not a bad thing given there are so many people without jobs. For 50 years they have been pushing the opposite, so this suggests real U-turn.

KV: Can I just briefly touch on the subject of Smithfield expanding in the UK market? What can be done to avoid it? Can such a situation be avoided at all? In the film, we have seen Smithfield also taking their operations to Central & Eastern Europe, in particular to Poland and Romania.

ZG: The key is to protect the standards we have here and increase them. We need to become much tougher. We should be able to say that if imports don’t meet our standards we won’t accept them. That technically is not legal under the EU law but my view is that if the law makes common sense a crime then it is the law that should change not common sense. I hope the Conservative party, once we have won the election, will be strong enough to do that. It’s not a manifesto commitment but I will do what I can to ensure that it becomes a commitment. If we want our families to survive, if we want animal welfare standards to be maintained, and most people do, then that’s what we have to do.

KV: What do you think is the most effective model to satisfy both global economic and environmental demands?

ZG: I think small farming in a localised economy is the answer. It’s more productive per unit of land; it’s good in terms of creating jobs and livelihoods and in terms of protecting the environment. It is clear that there is a difference between sustainable agriculture and non-sustainable agriculture. The model that we embrace has to be one that does not exhaust its own base. It can’t exhaust the soils, it can’t exhaust knowledge and it can’t exhaust water. If it does then it is the wrong agricultural model.

KV: Which country in Europe, or internationally, in your opinion, pursues high standards of meat production and how can we learn from them?

ZG: There are pockets of wonderful examples all around Europe, many wonderful producers. In terms of international standards, none of the countries, I think, are where we need to be. I think, Britain is not in a bad shape, but we need to go much further. The reality is our own standards are already being undermined by imports and that’s where we have to start. But I think there is a lot to be said for British agriculture, we have great farmers and our produce is often very good quality. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t improve our standards – we should – that’s what people want but we can’t do that unless we address the unfairness of the system allowing local farmers to be out competed by cheap imports of much lower standard.