Originally posted by DodgyAgent
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Um, no it isn't. It's about buying produce that has originated in your local area to start with. Not just for namby pamby green reasons - it also keeps money in your region. -
I read this in the standard the other day
Amol Rajan: Fairtrade, local, organic ... the myth of ethical food - Comment - Comment - London Evening Standard
Fairtrade fortnight, which begins today, is based on a simple, seductive and now ubiquitous idea: that shopping is the new politics.
Whereas conventional politics is cumbersome, full of distracting data about recessions, and comes around once every few years, voting with your trolley in Tesco is jolly japes. You do it every day, the choice on offer is endless, and the consequences of your decisions can be delicious.
Unfortunately, like most alternatives to politics, the idea of ethical eating is mostly bunkum. To take just three examples, Fairtrade, local and organic food are each a kind of modern obfuscation, though they have the immense virtue, unlike most ruses, of being perpetrated on the rich rather than the poor.
Of the three, Fairtrade is the least bad. The Fairtrade initiative raises awareness of the toil endured by farmers in the developing world, and often increases their income by cutting out corporate middle men. But there are two big, if not insurmountable, problems.
First, not all of the mark-up on Fairtrade goods goes to those farmers. Some of it goes to retailers instead. And second, Fairtrade messes with economic signals. If an agricultural product is very cheap, that may be because of over-production. In subsidising that over-production, Fairtrade rewards it, which creates a disincentive for farmers who ought to diversify to other crops.
As for buying local, this is just a disguise for your quite fancying the chap selling ostrich burgers with a dash of horse in, say, Borough market. Those of us who shop in supermarkets tend to make fewer trips than those who don’t. Moving food around in packed supermarket lorries is more efficient than driving the Range Rover to a local store to get a bag of sprouts. And why on earth should I support British farmers, who live in a rich country with a big welfare state, over those in poor countries with no welfare state, where agriculture and foreign exports are the bulk of the economy?
The biggest connivance is, of course, organic. The organic industry is based on two suppositions: that organic food is better for you and for the planet. Both are false — the second murderously so. Study after study shows there are no health benefits to organic food. As for the planet, it’s basic science really.
Organic food depends on compost, manure and crop rotation instead of fertiliser. As such, it is less intensive, with much lower crop yields. In other words, you have to use much more land to get the same results. As The Economist has noted, between 1950 and 2000 global cereal production tripled but the amount of land used increased by only 10 per cent. That is why Norman Borlaug, pioneer of the green revolution and Nobel Peace Prize winner, is such an opponent of organic nonsense. If we listened to the organic lobby, poor people who depend on high crop yields would starve to death.
A fortnight ago, I wrote in this space about converting to vegetarianism. A flesh-free diet is still the closest thing you or I have to good food, in the moral sense of that term. But I wouldn’t delude myself, or pretend to you, that the great challenges of our age can be conquered from the checkout. In fact, the evidence suggests fashionable food is an enemy, not a friend, of international justice.Leave a comment:
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Is it me or is this just vacuous marketing speak?
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