Supermarkets and intl farming corporations are evil I think: international trade, refrigeration, and the race to the bottom
nowadays we have refrigeration, freezing, and fast-moving vehicles with these technologies installed. This means that it's now possible to move perishable goods over longer distances.
Up front, seems pretty cool. You can get mangoes in Norway and saltwater fish in deeply-landlocked places.
There have been benefits to some people too. Primarily this is with fisheries for desirable catches with a restricted geographic range and no real farms. For example, Nephrops norvegicus is a crustacean that lives in cold water. It is known as scampi†or langousteen when sold as food . As a shellfish, it spoils incredibly quickly, and so is primarily sold in two forms: frozen, and live (to be killed immediately before cooking). Neither of these options would be possible to sell to far-away locations without modern tech, and french desire for high-quality nephrops was the main thing keeping many individual crustacean fishers in Scotland afloat financially (until Brexit happened, and customs slowed down trade enough that live nephrops weren't able to be sold to france, so the fishers had to sell frozen ones for less profit and it's been very not good and pushed a lot of people into poverty , Brexit, babey!)
but the Big Thing here is that a lot of foods are not geographically restricted in a way we can't overcome right now. A lot of things can be just fine living somewhere else, but just can't swim across the ocean to get there, etc. Quinoa farms in England, olives in California, cacao in Africa, potatoes almost ubiquitous. So when something can be grown wherever and technology means we can ship perishables around the planet no-prob , big supermarkets can now choose where they get their goods from a wide range of options.
And where do they pick? They pick to buy from the cheapest places; the places where environmental + workplace safety regulations don't impose more costs, where the workers are underpaid or enslaved and their wages don't mess with their boss's bottom line. The way a country can attract a big company (and its money) is by crushing unions, allowing slavery, and so on. If a government enforces environmental regulations or minimum wage etc, then the big company moves its operations to a different country. This is the race to the bottom, where countries gain jobs by disenfranchising their people. Sometimes, "structural adjustment programs" and the like are used by companies to say: Hey, financially-struggling country, we'll pay you a bunch of money in exchange for some land & for implementing laws that reduce workers' rights.
& in countries with better workers rights and environmental protections, jobs evaporate into thin air as supermarkets by goods elsewhere.
Who benefits? only the higher-ups in these companies, buying goods at the lowest possible cost, and then selling them at a huge profit margin in countries where the living costs are different. Buy one chocolate bar in exchange for the money a cacao-picker may earn in a day of backbreaking labor.
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I live in a less-populated country where low-density urban centers are surrounded by farms.
On the bus ride to the hospital I saw fields of oilseeds, edible brassicas, strawberries, potatoes ... sheep and cow pastures ... forest-banks grown lush from the high-latitude midnight sun, full of wild edibles.
In town center there is one store that sells local goods, only meat.
I go to the store and the produce is sourced from despotic regimes and countries implicated in human rights abuses and forced labor. fresh vegetables cost money people don't have. health issues from insufficient nutrition are chronic and frequent. the supermarket CEOs have multiple mansions.
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the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte established ABasteCer markets, land in prime (town central) locations where proprietors could bid to run the market; certain important foods such as fresh vegetables would be sold at a fixed, lower price, while buying the goods from farmers for a higher price, while others would be sold as normal. While the fixed-price foods didn't have a profit margin, the proprietors didn't have to worry about rent , & the unfixed foods provided enough of a wage for them.
Local farmers got paid more, exploitation elsewhere avoided. Lower prices meant poor people could buy important foods, nutrient deficiency dropped.
I wonder how much fighting it would take for such a thing to be established elsewhere in the world . Shall we?
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thanks for reading!🪱🦀
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†note that if it's cheap then they're probably lying and selling you intensively-farmed Litopeneaus prawns ... these are implicated in ecological problems such as mangrove destruction.
World Hunger: 10 Myths. Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins, 2015.