This World - Season 11 / Year 2014

Adventurer and journalist Simon Reeve heads to east Africa to uncover the stories behind the nation's favourite drink. While we drink millions of cups of the stuff each day, how many of us know where our tea actually comes from? The surprising answer is that most of the leaves that go into our everyday teabags do not come from India or China, but are bought from an auction in the coastal city of Mombasa in Kenya.

From here, Simon follows the tea trail through the epic landscapes of Kenya and Uganda and meets some of the millions of people who pick, pack and transport our tea. Drinking tea with everyone from Masai cattle herders to the descendants of the original white tea planters, Simon learns that the industry that supplies our everyday cuppa is not immune to the troubles of the continent - poverty, low wages and child labour.

Adventurer and journalist Simon Reeve heads to Vietnam to uncover the stories behind the nation's morning pick-me-up. While we drink millions of cups of the stuff each week, how many of us know where our coffee actually comes from? The surprising answer is that it is not Brazil, Colombia or Jamaica, but Vietnam. Eighty per cent of the coffee we drink in Britain isn't posh cappuccinos or lattes but instant coffee, and Vietnam is the biggest supplier.

From Hanoi in the north, Simon follows the coffee trail into the remote central highlands, where he meets the people who grow, pick and pack our coffee. Millions of small-scale famers, each working two or three acres, produce most of the coffee beans that go into well-known instant coffee brands.

Thirty years ago Vietnam only produced a tiny proportion of the world's coffee, but after the end of the Vietnam war there was a widescale plan to become a coffee-growing nation, and Vietnam is now the second biggest in the world. The coffee industry has provided employment for millions, making some people very rich indeed, and Simon meets Vietnam's biggest coffee billionaire. But he also learns that their rapid success has come at a cost to both the local people and the environment.

Robert Peston travels to China to investigate how this mighty economic giant could actually be in serious trouble. China is now the second largest economy in the world and for the last 30 years China's economy has been growing at an astonishing rate. While Britain has been in the grip of the worst recession in a generation, China's economic miracle has wowed the world.

Now, for BBC Two's award-winning strand This World, Peston reveals what has actually happened inside China since the economic collapse in the west in 2008. It is a story of spending and investment on a scale never seen before in human history - 30 new airports, 26,000 miles of motorways and a new skyscraper every five days have been built in China in the last five years. But, in a situation eerily reminiscent of what has happened in the west, the vast majority of it has been built on credit. This has now left the Chinese economy with huge debts and questions over whether much of the money can ever be paid back.

Interviewing key players including the former American treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Lord Adair Turner, former chairman of the FSA, and Charlene Chu, a leading Chinese banking analyst, Robert Peston reveals how China's extraordinary spending has left the country with levels of debt that many believe can only end in an economic crash with untold consequences for us all.

As Brazil prepares to host the World Cup, Copacabana Palace follows the lives of the staff and guests at one of Latin America's most iconic hotels.

Brazil now boasts more billionaires than Britain, and the Copacabana Palace is a magnet for Brazil's new wealthy elite. In its 90-year history, the hotel has played host to everyone from Orson Welles to Justin Bieber and the king of Sweden.

Today, manager Andrea Natal heads a staff of 600, who cater for the rich and famous guests' every whim. But luxury doesn't come cheap; the starting price for a night at the Copacabana Palace is £400 and the price for their VIP suites isn't even made public. But in a country where one in five people still live below the poverty line, the reality for many of the hotel's staff is very different.

This documentary for This World reveals how the hotel's story reflects the fortunes of the entire nation and how Brazil is increasingly a country of extraordinary extremes.

In Britain we give thousands of tons of our unwanted clothes to charity shops every year. But where do they actually go? It turns out most don't ever reach the rail of the local charity shop, they are exported to Africa. And even though we have given them away for free, our castoffs have created a multimillion-pound industry and some of the world's poorest people pay good money to buy them.

In this revealing film for BBC Two's This World, Ade Adepitan tells the fascinating story of the afterlife of our clothes. He follows the trail to Ghana, the biggest importer of our castoffs. One million pounds' worth of our old clothes arrive here every week. Ade meets the people who make a living from our old castoffs, from wholesalers and markets traders to the importers raking in a staggering £25,000 a day. But not everyone is profiting.

With cheaply made western clothes flooding the market, the local textile industry has been decimated. Ade visits one of the last remaining cloth factories and finds it on its knees. And the deluge of our clothes isn't just destroying jobs, it has also had a seismic effect on Ghanaian culture. Western outfits are fast replacing iconic West African prints and traditional garb. Ade travels to remote villages to find everyone wearing British high street brands.

In April 2013, 18-year-old Shirin became one of thousands of people trapped inside the Rana Plaza building when it collapsed in the worst industrial disaster in the 21st century. In this moving documentary for BBC Two's This World, Shirin and some of the other survivors tell their remarkable story of survival and escape. Many were rescued by ordinary local people who risked their own lives crawling into the rubble to save them. But Clothes To Die For also reveals the incredible growth of the Bangladeshi garment industry and the greed and high level corruption that led to the Rana Plaza tragedy. This tiny country has become the second largest producer of clothes in the world after China, transforming the country and providing employment for millions of people, most of them young women. As the personal stories of survivors reveal, in Bangladesh even a wage as low as £1.50 a day can be completely life-changing and many don't want that opportunity taken away. Producing goods for several British and European high street stores, the tragedy at the Rana Plaza sent shock waves around the world about the safety of the Bangladesh garment industry. As one local factory owner said 'At the end of the day if the retailers want more compliant factories they have to pay us more. Get the retailers together and make sure they pay us five cents more. Not even ten, we don't even want ten cents, we want five, we're happy with five cents on each garment'.

In 2013 the movie Philomena was shown in cinemas across the world and earned four Oscar nominations. The film was based on the true story of Philomena Lee, who was forced by the Catholic Church to give up her illegitimate son for adoption, and detailed her journey with journalist Martin Sixsmith to find her child 50 years later.

In the weeks and months after the film went out, Martin was contacted by other mothers who had their own stories to tell. Now, Martin Sixsmith goes on a journey to investigate the Irish Catholic Church's role in an adoption trade which saw thousands of illegitimate children taken from their mothers and sent abroad, often with donations to the Church flowing in the other direction. In Ireland and in America, Martin hears the moving stories of the parents and children whose lives were changed forever and discovers evidence that prospective parents were not properly vetted - sometimes with tragic consequences.

In America, thousands of prisoners are locked up in solitary confinement for years, even decades. With unique access to the punishment wing of a supermax prison, award-winning director Dan Edge paints a shocking picture of this hidden and often violent world.

Filmed over six months in Maine State Prison, this film follows the institution's new warden as he tries to reform the system and release some of the prison's most dangerous inmates back into the general population. Unsurprisingly, some of his staff are nervous and resistant to the reforms and he faces a prison culture which has always emphasised punishment over rehabilitation. The film also features younger inmates, inside for less serious crimes, who are driven to shocking self-harm and even suicide by the mental stress of being locked up alone for 24 hours a day.

In 2013, four gunmen walked into a crowded shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya and set about systematically murdering shoppers. The entire attack was recorded by more than 100 security cameras. Drawing on the thousands of hours of footage, this is the chilling and dramatic account of a terrorist attack that shocked the world.

Featuring moving interviews with the men, women and children who came face-to-face with the terrorists and survived, such as Amber Prior. She had already been shot in the hip - and her two young children had witnessed people killed around them - when she made a remarkable decision to confront a gunman.

As well as documenting the brutality of the gunmen from the Somalian group al Shabaab, who killed 67 people, the film charts the extraordinary bravery of the plainclothes police officers and civilians who risked their lives to rescue trapped shoppers.

Twenty years on from the Rwandan genocide, This World reveals evidence that challenges the accepted story of one of the most horrifying events of the late 20th century. The current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, has long been portrayed as the man who brought an end to the killing and rescued his country from oblivion. Now there are increasing questions about the role of Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front forces in the dark days of 1994 and in the 20 years since.

The film investigates evidence of Kagame's role in the shooting down of the presidential plane that sparked the killings in 1994 and questions his claims to have ended the genocide. It also examines claims of war crimes committed by Kagame's forces and their allies in the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo and allegations of human rights abuses in today's Rwanda.

Former close associates from within Kagame's inner circle and government speak out from hiding abroad. They present a very different portrait of a man who is often hailed as presiding over a model African state. Rwanda's economic miracle and apparent ethnic harmony has led to the country being one of the biggest recipients of aid from the UK. Former prime minister Tony Blair is an unpaid adviser to Kagame, but some now question the closeness of Mr Blair and other western leaders to Rwanda's president.