In Bwabwa, Malawi, farmer Anita Chitaya grows corn, beans, pigeon peas, and pumpkins. She uses agroecological practices, combining multiple, diverse crops in one field, planting legumes to improve soil fertility, and using plants to control weeds naturally. But she also has to trek long distances to a dry riverbed to dig below the surface for drinking water.
Malawi’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions were just .08 per person in 2019, but the country has already been hit hard by the world’s changing climate, with increasing droughts, heavy flooding when rains do come, and rising temperatures that threaten crops. Hunger and malnutrition are common. By comparison, Americans produced 16 tons of carbon per capita in 2019, but many have not experienced the impact of the climate crisis so directly.
The new film, The Ants & the Grasshopper, captures Chitaya’s efforts to address that unequal reality.
“If I could, I would go to America to bear witness, to tell them how things are here,” Chitaya says in the opening sequence of the film. What follows is a chronicle of the journey Chitaya and fellow farmer Esther Lupafya—who are both part of a Malawi organization called Soils, Food, and Healthy Communities—take across the U.S. to do just that.
“Here’s a group that has ended patriarchy and ended child malnutrition and is confronting climate change. They’re doing all the big stuff,” says author and academic Raj Patel, who produced and co-directed the film with Zak Piper. “In many ways [activists in Malawi are] making advances far beyond what we’re seeing in the food movement here, and it seemed right to show that story as something to aspire to and something we could learn from.”
During their trip around the U.S, Chitaya and Lupafya encounter climate skepticism on farms in Wisconsin and Iowa and trade techniques and songs with farmers in Detroit and Maryland. Chitaya’s observations about the comforts and contradictions of American life and systems illuminate profound realities. “The truth takes long to spread,” she says, “while lies spread fast here.”
The filmmakers are still in discussions with distributors, but the movie premiered on May 27 at the Mountain Film Documentary Festival in Telluride, Colorado—where it won the Moving Mountains Award for social impact. The Ants and the Grasshopper will also be screened starting this week at the U.K.’s Sheffield DocFest, which will include Zoom discussion panels with Chitaya and Lupafya.
Civil Eats spoke with Patel, who is also a Civil Eats advisory board member, about the process of capturing the women’s story on screen and the role he hopes the film will play in food and climate conversations.
How did you find Anita and Esther, and why did you decide to tell their story in this way?
The film really began about a decade ago, when I was quite frustrated at the way that food documentaries were always representing communities of people of color as victims. If folks in the Global South were mentioned at all, it was either high-profile activists or, again, the Global South was presented as a site of victimhood. Around that same time, the big food documentary was Food, Inc. The takeaway message was that if you buy organic yogurt at Walmart, everything’s going to be fine. That total lack of ambition and vast underestimation of both the scale of the problem and the scale of transformation required to meet it frustrated me.
I wanted to find stories that were very character-driven and showed that folks in the Global South are innovators with some of the best ideas, ideas that are big and transformative, rather than tinkering around the edge with crop rotations or something. And I wanted to do that in a way that people would want to watch.
The [initial] director was Steve James, who did Hoop Dreams. It was Steve who came to Malawi and was behind the camera when we first met Anita. He said, “You know, Anita is the character who is going to be driving this forward.” And over the successive decade, we followed Anita, and gradually what happened was that Anita transformed from being a character in the film to being essentially the co-creator. She was the one who suggested we come to America. It was the right thing to do, to find a way where she could figure out what she wanted to say in terms of narration. We figured out a way of [having her screen the film], and we had long discussions about it and [about how to] compress her thoughts into a few sentences. We were in Malawi just as the pandemic broke in order to do that.
In the end, Steve needed to do other projects . . . but his vision at the beginning and Anita’s co-creation led us along this path. I’ve been working with the Soils, Food, and Healthy Communities group for a while. I first visited them in 2004, I think, because one of the co-founders and I went to grad school together.
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