San Giorgio's Bitter Fruits
' If a man has his own home, even if it is only four walls and a roof; if he has regular work; and if he has enough to eat for himself and his family, he is not poor. Now tell me, who in this village lacks any one of these things? '
That is how Vittorino Cerigone , a Peasant farmer, talks about San Giorgio, a village that sleeps upon a mountainside in Calabria, that remotest of provinces in Italy's ' deep south'.
It is still assumed that this is a forgotten, neglected land whose destiny is controlled by faceless bureaucrats in Rome and multi-national companies in Turin; a land that people leave because of a brutalising poverty that has no Prospect of alleviation.
It is the proposition of Ralph Glasser , a Scots economist who has lived in San Giorgio, that such attitudes are no longer valid and People leave for reasons other than poverty; that the reasons are the same in Kenya, Bangladesh and Peru; and in misunderstanding these reasons we are in danger of losing many of the things we most value and desire.
Film cameraman HENRY FARRAR Film editor PETER MINNS Producer RICHARD TAYLOR
Series editors ANTHONY ISAACS and PETER JONES