Pandemics, wars, blocked shipping routes: wide, international trade routes can jeopardize our security of supply. They also harbor the risk of production taking place under poor working and environmental conditions. Transparency, monitoring and short supply routes ensure greater security.
The rainforest in Peru: for decades, this valuable habitat has been destroyed by humans through illegal clearing for agricultural land and extensive deforestation. Catherine Körting has found a way to help preserve the rainforest by selling tropical timber. With her company Betterwood, she sells fairly traded, deforestation-free tropical timber in Germany.
Together with her business partners in the rainforest, she ensures that only as many trees are felled as the ecosystem can support. She knows exactly where the wood is felled and by whom, who stores the wood, ships it and brings it from Peru to the Betterwood warehouse near Cologne. “Our traceability extends from the standing tree to the final destination.” Here, the tropical wood is valued by consumers due to its particular resistance to weathering, so the long journey is worthwhile. Even if trees are felled for this purpose, Körting believes that the economic use of the rainforest can also contribute to its conservation: “If there is an opportunity to give people an income for protecting or managing the rainforest in a sustainable way, then people will do so.”
Empty shelves in pharmacies, antibiotics out of stock. When vital medicines are no longer available, the consequences of long supply chains become apparent: most of the antibiotics sold in Germany come from Asia, and shortages occur time and again. But one European company continues to produce: Sandoz in Kundl is Europe’s last manufacturer of penicillin. The Austrian government’s support with 50 million euros in subsidies for the production of active ingredients is an important step towards ensuring security of supply in Europe. At the plant, you can see where the money has gone: millions of units of the valuable antibiotics are produced in huge halls. And the company is continuing to grow: in future, it should be possible to supply the entire European market with penicillin from here.
A Film by Anna Pflüger and Viola Löffler
30 min | 2023