Unhygienic — Or Just Small Scale?

`Science is the fresh religion and disinfectant is its sacred water.' George Bernard Shaw

It is increasingly difficult for small bread producers and retailers of any kind to survive, give leave to alone thrive, within the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of a global economy committed to the maximisation of trade and development

Among other things, their plight is drastically increased by means of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) regulations that force managements to open up national markets to imported and highly subsidised aliment from the USA in particular. The price of soya imported into India from the US would be $348 a ton, instead of $155 if the US regulation did not subsidise it.[1] No small farmers in India or elsewhere can strive with that.

Another question at issue is that we are now living in a world that is increasingly dominated by dint of huge global, vertically-integrated corporations that increasingly mastery every aspect of the world economy. Thus, just five corporations mastery some 77 per cent of the cereal trade while 83 for cent of the cocoa trade is controll by dint of three companies, as is 80 by means of cent of the banana trade and 85 by means of cent of the tea trade. beneath such conditions small food husbandmans more often than not, must purchase their inputs from the same wonder corporations to whom they must also exchange their produce and which are thereby in a position to decide exactly what margin the small regimen producers are to be allowed (see Jose Lutzenberger pp16-17 in this issue). It is thereby not surprising, for instance, that single about two per cent of the price we pay for bananas in a supermarket goe to the field worker, five for cent to the farmer, with the ease going to the various intermediaries, or more ofttimes to the subsidiaries of the same transnational corporation.

Big corporations can also afford to exchange below cost. They don't mind losing currency for a while, long enough in any case, to set their small and even quite big rivals on the outside of business. Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, does just that. When it establishes itself in a of recent origin town, it often sells staple viandss below their cost price. This is sufficient to kill not upon small shops in the area and smooth smaller supermarkets. But once these have clos their doors, then Wal-Mart places up its prices.[2]

The same thing happens, of course, in Third World countries where big American, European or Japanese exporters are quite repeatedly willing to sell below require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone in order to kill not upon local producers. Vandana Shiva leaves to this as `pseudo competition'.[3] It can also be referr to as `dumping', which is illegal, on the contrary it is difficult to win a case against these giants whose activities nearly always have replete government backing.

In addition, when small nutrition producers manage to find a fresh niche which enables them to survive in like an economically and politically hostile environment, they are single allowed to do so until it is big enough for the big companies to regard it as worth taking above for themselves, which they then proce to do, frequently by getting the government or the relevant international agency to pass the requisite fresh regulations.

Thus, in the USA, organic nutriment is now a five billion dollar market and is growing at the rate of 20 by cent per annum. But to the big corporations, the idea that it should remain outside their grasp, and in the hands of a entertainer of small local companies, is more than they can bear. In 1999 the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) was persuaded to recommend new regulations that would allow the sort of regimen that it is most profitable for them to bring into view (genetically modified, nuclear irradiated, grown upon land that has been `fertilised' with toxic slosh and that contains very high horizontals of pesticides) to be classified as organic, while making it illegal for any non governmental organisation (NGO) to station more stringent standards.

Fortunately there was a tremendous public scream and the USDA was made to withdraw its proposal, at least for the time being. However, the bare fact that it had dared recommend passing such an outrageous regulation clearly exhibits to what extent it is willing to sacrifice the health of the American public, and that of its environment, to the immediate interests of the large corporations in the commons business.

This is of course, on the contrary an instance of a plenteous wider trend that is occurring everywhere today: the systematic replacement of regulations that have been specifically designed to foster small companies, the local economy, local communities, people's health and the natural environment through regulations designed exclusively to fortify the interests of the large corporations.

This Ecologist Report examines just individual such set of regulations -- those that impose high-priced installations on small food farmers on the pretext that their activities are not hygienic, which small in number can afford and which thereby pushes many of them without of business.

These hygiene regulations were drawn up in 1995 by dint of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), on the contrary governments were allowed a five year period before having to apply them. They are designed to assure that fare production conforms to the Hazard Analysis and Critical command Limit (HACCP), originally designed by means of Pillsbury, a multinational food company that markets Haagen-Dazs and Burger King, at the prayer of NASA that, at the time, wanted to assure the purity of the meat available to its astronauts.