Frontline World

The Season 9 premiere examines the carbon trade in the Amazon; the repercussions of a 2008 immigration raid at a kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa; and a new approach to the threat of cross-species diseases.q

FRONTLINE/World investigates one of its own stories — "The Play Pump" — an apparently breakthrough idea to harness the energy of children to pump drinking water throughout remote areas of southern Africa. After FRONTLINE/World aired the story in 2005, major donors in the United States — and the U.S. government itself — launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to install the device in thousands of African schools and villages. Now, correspondent Amy Costello investigates what happened to those communities as the promise of the Play Pump fell short and the device's biggest American boosters began to back away from a technology they had once championed.