Fair Trade

I didn't see the programme, Myarka, but I totally agree with you. I believe this sort of thing is widespread; I remember reading something to do with flowers grown in one of the African countries and also huge subsidies going to American - was it cotton growers? - which prevented third world growers being able to sell their product at a viable price. I'm sorry I'm so hazy on details but I have always thought how totally immoral it is that the rich are only interested in getting richer while the poor are brought to their knees. There is no altruism in big business and I think we should weep that this is so. I'm afraid that until those in power are made to see that we are all brothers then this kind of thing will continue.

xxx

Missed programmes can be watched on here:

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/catch-up/

It looks as if it's on there, but I don't know how long it'll be available.

Holistic

I missed the programmes too but agree entirely.
:soapbox: I fume at the system that stops us farmers from producing food in this country because the supermarkets can import it cheaper from abroad, (using cheap labour and often sub-standard methods of production) usually depriving the third world from a source of their own food supplies, while we are paid to have land in 'set-aside' on which we are restricted to growing either rubbish or non-food crops. It is ludicrous 😡.

While our farmers are going out of business at the rate of 100 per month (if I remember rightly), we are now importing fresh milk from the continent, vegetables from Spain, Africa and South America, potatoes from Poland, beef from Brazil and Argentina (decimating rain forests), pork from Eastern Europe and the Far East - all of which could be grown here - leaving precious little land for the indigenous peoples to live off :(. We now only produce 40% of our food.

Yes, the people are given jobs by the big conglomerates that run these units, but they then usually have to buy their food from the company store. It's been going on for years, but no-one does anything. Makes me mad :mad:!

The other thing that destroys the local economy of poorer nations is the dumping of unsuitable foodstuffs at little or no cost and the locals lose the market for their own produce. Not only that but their indigenous seed base is decimated - eg imported hybrid maize from USA won't reproduce and if their own maize is not planted because some 'aid' has been dumped on them, then the following year there is famine because of the failure of the hybrids to produce any fruiting cobs.

No-one seems to think things through!!!!

I'd better get off my soap-box now :soapbox:. I was brought up in Africa and seen much of this first hand. We should be feeding ourselves and allowing developing nations to do so too, by teaching them agricultural practices suitable to their own systems.

Caroline

Hang on though. Not all of this thread is making sense if you put it together? First of all, if the developed nations can produce their own food cheaper than importing it from, say, Haiti, then it would be anti the free market not to do so. Therefore I assume Sunanda is hitting the nail on the head, that goods such as US rice production is subsidised, is it? (I don't know.) That would indeed impact on Haiti. Now Caroline is writing what is a completely opposite PoV - that it's bad to import cheaper food from abroad. Why is it, so long as it is not subsidised at the point of production? Stopping those Third World exports is what Myarka posted about and against. :confused:

One rider I'd put on this, however, is that it is indeed safe to have quite a lot of a nation's food produced locally. Not that I'm exactly expecting U-Boats in the Atlantic tomorrow as in WW2, but it's always potentially precarious to rely on a huge percentage of food imported from elsewhere, and even more so energy. So IMHO there is perhaps some degree of argument there, just maybe, in favour of local production by us. Certainly re energy.

V

The message is quite simple, subsidised crops from the USA are destroying local markets.

The end product is that children starve to death.

No other message, no politics, just simple horror and disgust.

There are times when we don't need debate, just honesty.

Myarka.

Subsidies and anything that disrupts the nature-al flow of the free market usually tend, IMHO, to end up with painful results.

It had basically struck me that one post, unwittingly, was saying the opposite to the message of the thread that had been started.

V