From: Bodie (mclarkc@essex.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Feb 12 2002 - 09:47:51 MST
On Tue, 12 Feb 2002, Richard Ridge wrote:
> 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.
This is not entirely true, a lot of people are concerened with poor
working conditions, not everyone is a mindless consumer that doesn't think
about where the products come from. Yes, I am extreemly cynical and
resentful of the fact that I can't turn on my radio or tv or even walk out
my frount door without the whole world trying to sell me their own brand
of whatever, it's really something I don't like, but that doesn't mean to
say that I don't care about what happens in sweat shops, for me that is a
much bigger issue that my inconvenience
> 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?
With the CAP in place, large areas of farming land or set asside so that
the market doesn't get flooded, the farmer recieves huge subsidies for
not producing food. If we did use sustainable farming methods and used
these fields, and paid the farmer a better price for it, then we could
easily be self sufficient in this country
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