From: Richard Ridge (richard_ridge@tao-group.com)
Date: Tue Feb 12 2002 - 08:05:13 MST
> its not necessarily the corporation itself, or indeed its desire to sell
> "food" which is the problem. The problem with food in general is the
> intensive farming methods used by farmers throughout the western world.
Is it? I could be being excessively cynical, but much of your post has the
look of a post-hoc rationalisation to me. It often looks like much
anti-globalisation protest is essentially a stylistic protest against
advertising and branding; its intellectual progenitor was Johnny Rotten, not
Karl Marx. When asked, the elaboration is always about poor working
practices (or the like), but the original complaint always appears to be
outrage about companies having the temerity to sell products and advertise
them. I can think of very few cases where this order is reversed. You get
the impression that if Nike didn't advertise, then no-one would care about
sweatshops.
Just out of interest, would it actually be possible to support the current
UK population through sustainable and organic growing practices alone (plus
banning factory farming) ? This is obviously a hypothetical question, since
we would have recourse to imports, but if all of said imports are also
produced through intensive agriculture this would seem a moot point. For
that matter, if british agriculture were to go over to these kind of
practices, would not the market be immediately inundated by cheaper imports
achieved through intensive farming? As a further question, if McDonalds
increased staff pay would it actually be able to sell anything? It's not
exactly in the high quality end of the market and increasing costs would
probably leave most of its tepid offerings overpriced. Assuming that we
increased both the labour costs for McDonalds and the food costs (farming
practises of the kind you seem to be advocating are not especially
costs-effective since they do nothing to deliver any economies of scale),
and that the same was happening to the supermarkets and other businesses,
would not the result be that food budgets for the poorest sections of the UK
population would start to look more than a little bit stretched?
All of which isn't to invalidate your argument, but it is to point out that
you've reduced a complex issue to an attack on a corporation for essentially
responding to market conditions. It has after all been a consensus by
government and public for fifty years that cheap food was the main
requirement for british agriculture (largely due to rationing during WW2)
and it is this that has led to the situation you have described. For
example, when you said "due to the vast amount of meat which they (and other
fast food chains) buy," you probably should have said "due to the vast
amount of meat which they (the public) buy." It's not as if they're aren't
alternatives.
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