
How Pandemics, Wars and Disasters Jeopardize Global Trade
Global supply chains look efficient until a pandemic, a war, or a natural disaster breaks a single link, and this DW report tracks two companies trying to build in resilience from the start. In Peru, Catherine Körting's company Betterwood sells fair-trade tropical timber to Germany, tracing every shipment from the standing tree in the rainforest to a warehouse near Cologne, in a country where illegal logging for farmland has long stripped the forest bare. In Austria, the pharmaceutical company Sandoz runs the last penicillin plant left in Europe, in the town of Kundl, after decades of production moving to Asia for cheaper costs left the continent dependent on distant factories for basic antibiotics. A 50 million euro government subsidy helped keep that plant producing active ingredients rather than closing it down. The film uses these two cases, wood and medicine, to weigh the two responses companies and governments are testing: localizing production, or tightening control and transparency over supply chains that stretch across oceans.