There was a programme about food on Channel 4 yesterday called FOOD. Their roving reporter visited a Kenyan bean farmer, who seemed to be doing OK, and told us solemnly that out of the £1.99 we pay for a packet of Kenyan green beans in the supermarket, the farmer - after being ruthlessly exploited by the monopolistic UK supermakets, the evil airlines with their carbon footprints etc - gets about 16p, or about 8% of the purchase price.
We can look at that figure in two ways:
1. Out of £1 spent in the supermarket on UK farm produce, how much does the farmer get? At Sainsbury's, a kilo of potatoes costs about £1.50, and the UK average ex-farm price of 1,000 kilos of potatoes is £161, so the UK farmer receives about 9% of the supermarket price.
2. If you donate £1 to 'charity', how much does your intended recipient get? The charity knock off half for fund raising and admin; another half goes on bribes to officials and ends up in Swiss bank accounts; half of what's left is wasted on overpaying for projects; and those projects are often white elephants, so let's knock off another half again and assume that the intended recipient gets a tangible benefit worth 6.25% of the sum you gave.
So I'll continue buying the Kenyan green beans, thank you very much. I get the tasty out-of-season beans and the farmer and his workers get more money than if I'd given the £1.99 to a 'charity'.
Forbidden Bible Verses — Genesis 25:1-6
5 hours ago
13 comments:
Doncha just love freedom and markets? Human action? And those green beans get to market without any help at all from government or charity.
Private uncoerced charity = good. Supranational professional 'charity' = bad.
I think you've missed the point there, Mark. The 16p that the Kenyan gets for his beans buys him a hell of lot more than 16p would the British farmer growing potatoes. Plus I very much doubt that the Kenyan farmer has to hand over quite so much of his 16p as tax.
L, people freely giving other people money in exchange for goods and services. What's not to like?
B, fair enough, but the UK farmer gets the EU subsidies and the Kenyan farmer (who didn't exactly live in luxury by our standards) gets the trade barriers. It all evens out.
Above and beyond the call of duty for watching that, Mark. The website is bad enough. Lord, the turgid prose.
I hope the good Kenyan farmer did not have to pay danegeld/buy indulgences from the filth at Fairtrade in order to get his 16p?
Ch, it was quite good fun. There was no mention of FairTrade.
16p. Very good. The next question is then "How much does the Kenyan bean farmer have to pay his landlord?".
If he owns his own farm, great, but chances are good that he's a tenant farmer, so even if the supermarkets did pay him a higher price out of the goodness of their hearts or whatever, there's a good chance that the extra cash will end up in the hands of the Kenyan rentiers instead of the hands of the hard-working Kenyan bean farmers.
FairTrade may have good intentions behind it but the Law of Rent makes it ineffective in many cases.
D, the programme didn't say, but as many others have observed that this do goody stuff (micro finance, FairTrade et al) just drives up rents or land values.
Isn't that the point?
B, no, the supermarkets do it to trick people into paying more to assuage their consciences. The fact that a teeny tiny fraction of that extra income somehow flows upstream to landowners in the third world is probably lost on them.
But I suppose it's better giving money to landowners in the third world via the free market than to a Western charity.
Most western charities which deal with "foreign aid" are corrupt or have to deal with corrupt governments. As you rightly put it a tiny tiny fraction of donations goes to the intended recipients. Trade carries with it further benefits and the current "exploitation of third world countries" the Chinese are apparently doing right now will do more than ANY foreign aid we have EVER given as the Chinese are building transport infrastructure.
SW, music, ears, to my.
Been watching Star Wars recently?
SW, Wars Star watching when asleep fall always I.
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