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The Food Business

Agribusiness has bought cheap food to the world but increasingly consumers are coming to realise that this has come great cost to both the environment and the people producing it. The third world debt crisis has opened up many of the developing countries of a source of cheap resources for us and the richer nations of the north have the power to dictate the terms of trade. If there was one single issue to contemplate consider this: coffee is the second most traded substance on the planet after oil, yet the countries that produce it: Columbia, Peru, Burundi, Uganda, Nicaragua, etc. are amongst some of the poorest of all. Fair trade really matters, and at Global supporting Fair Trade is a way of life!

Walk down any supermarket aisle, and you would be hard pushed to realise that 800 million people in the world do not have enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs. The shelves groan with goodies, some essential, but becoming more exotic all the time and as soon as a gap appears, a stacker appears from nowhere to restock. The choice is bewildering, and the quantities limitless.

However, maintaining this illusion carries a high price for producers, consumers and the environment. Producers often barely scrape a living as supermarkets squeeze them for rock-bottom prices. Consumers are often offered foods that have been sprayed with pesticides or treated with antibiotics or other additives so that producers can maximise their profits. And the environment suffers because foods are air-freighted vast distances and then wrapped in non-biodegradable packaging. In fact the food industry is a huge consumer of resources, especially energy. Often 5 calories of fossil fuel energy is used to deliver a single calorie of food energy to your plate. For an intensively grown lettuce grown in the States, sprayed as many as 17 different times with pesticides and air freighted to you the figure is more like 37 units of energy for each one delivered.

Finding foods that have neither been treated with chemicals or boxed in plastic or polystyrene, and which have been produced locally is a great deal more difficult than you might imagine, as food manufacturers and suppliers want to preserve a consumer-friendly image. And product labels are not much help. For instance, an apple pie does not have to tell you where the apples came from nor where the pie was baked. The label will not tell you if it is free of genetically modified ingredients, nor, unless the pie is organically produced, will it tell you if it contains toxic pesticide residues.

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