Soya: Meat’s Hidden Face

People all over the world consume soy, often without realizing it. Because soy isn’t just a vegan protein source: it’s an essential feed for raising cattle, pigs, and poultry, whose industrialization has increased production tenfold in less than a century. Most of this production involves GMOs, on which Europe is entirely dependent.

Agribusiness giants such as Archer Daniels Midland and Bunge Limited, which own the world’s largest soybean processing plants, have turned soya into a strategic ‘commodity’ that is in high demand depending on harvest fluctuations, trade agreements, and political disagreements. For the tariff war triggered by Trump has turned into a soybean war: Beijing has responded by shifting away from American suppliers in favour of Brazil, which has become the world’s largest producer and exporter.

 But this commercial expansion also has a dark side: the accelerated conversion of forests and grasslands into plantations, the irreversible loss of biodiversity, the widespread use of glyphosate-resistant GMO technologies, the violation of local farmers’ rights, and the erosion of food sovereignty. 

From South America, where millions of hectares of forest are being cleared to make way for soy, to the European and Asian markets where demand is skyrocketing, via Canada, which is emerging as the world’s fourth-largest producer, this documentary traces the journey and impact of a food that has become one of the driving forces behind food globalization. How did this unassuming little grain come to occupy such a central place in our diet and our economy?