The Hindu Business Line : <I>Not on the Label</I>— Harmful links in the food chain

SUPERMARKETS have been a fertile source for eminently readable new books. Felicity Lawrence's Not on the Label: What really goes into the food on your plate (Penguin, 2004) is one such. She is the Consumer Affairs correspondent of The Guardian.

The blurb tells us the scope and thrust of the book. "In a series of under-cover investigations tracking some of the most popular foods we eat at home, Felicity Lawrence travels from farms and factories to pack-houses and lorry depots across the world. She discovers why beef waste ends up in chicken, why a third of apples are thrown away, why bread is full of water and air.

"She meets the hidden armies of migrant workers exploited throughout the UK on whom our supermarkets depend. And she shows how obesity, blighted town-centres, motor-ways clogged with juggernauts, environmentally ravaged fields in Europe and starving smallholders in Africa are all intricately related aspects of our newly globalised, industrialised system of twenty-first century food production."

"We no longer trust what we eat. We lurch instead from food scare to food scare while farming is in crisis around the world. A handful of retailers and food manufacturers exert unprecedented control over what we eat and where we buy it. We have come to depend on processed food that is routinely adulterated."

Separate chapters deal with chicken, salad, beans, bread, apples and bananas, coffee, prawns and ready meals. Food scares — salmonella in eggs, foot and mouth disease, banned antibiotics in meat and honey, and chemical contaminants in fresh fish — have cropped up in rapid succession. Governments and their experts cannot necessarily be trusted to tell us the truth about what we eat. There are many things about the rapidly-changing methods of food production that they either do not understand or cannot control.

The book's menu goes thus:

Chicken

Half the chicken on sale in the UK supermarkets, according to the book, is contaminated with campylobacter which causes a nasty kind of food poisoning with severe diarrhoea. In the last few years, officials have uncovered large-scale frauds where unfit chicken, condemned either for rendering or pet food, have instead been recycled back into the human food chain.

With the tall claim of "total control and traceability" having broken down, it is a serious matter tracing the source of supply. Many environmental health officers are unconvinced that the measures taken by the Food Standards Agency to control the illegal trade are effective. It is the economics of the globalised poultry industry that is at the root of the problem.

Big producers complained that they were being squeezed so hard on price by the retailers, and operating on such tight margins, that paying to get rid of the waste was often the final straw.

John Sandford, leading trading standards officer of Hull City Council, who has spent 20 years not for a large pay packet, but by a Yorkshireman's sense of humour and dedication to honesty, was amazed when his colleagues had brought to his notice that the chicken breasts they had collected for testing contained contaminated pork.

The structure of the globalised food industry is making it increasingly difficult for all but the largest British poultry farmers and processors to make a living.

Farmers are going out of business in droves, and the processing side of the business is seeing rapid consolidation. Pig farmers and processors suffer similar problems.

Ten years ago, a British pig farmer made £9 per pig. In 2002, he lost an average of £3 pounds per animal. Small poultry farmers in Brazil and Thailand are being squeezed out by huge farm-factories. It is a pattern that is observed in most food sectors, from vegetable farming to confectionary manufacture.

Where livestock is concerned, the drive towards industrialisation has particular consequences. The price paid is animal welfare and vulnerability to disease. In 1957, the average time taken for chicken to reach the table was 63 days and just under 3 kg of feed was required for each kg of weight. By the 1990s, the number of growth days had been reduced to 42/43 and a little over 1.5 kg of feed was required. By 2007, birds are expected to reach the required 2 kg weight in 33 days.

Salads

Bagged salads did not exist before 1992. The UK salad market, which has grown by 90 per cent between 1992 and 2002, is worth £1.25 billion, more than the total value of the sliced bread/ cereal market. This did not mean they were eating 90 per cent more salad — volumes have grown only 18 per cent.

Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP) can now increase the shelf-life of prepared salad by over 50 per cent, making it possible for supermarkets to sell washed and bagged salad from around the world. The MAP is used to keep it `looking' fresh for up to 10 days. Unfortunately, research data published in the British Journal of Nutrition reveals that it destroys many of the vital vitamins.

The preparation and packaging of fresh foods such as salad are now solely dependent on cheap casual labour. That cheap labour has been largely provided by migrant workers. Many of them, however, now live in the UK in appalling squalor. The scale of migrant labour in the food industry is much larger than anyone is prepared to acknowledge; and a substantial proportion of that labour is employed illegally.

Bread and meat

Getting water into the dough is one of the keys to profitability. In 1978, a government committee found that on average water in a loaf ranged from 36 to 40 per cent. A subsequent study in 1986 found the average percentage had risen to 45.

Chemical wizardry and economic efficiency have undoubtedly produced cheap daily bread. Yet, the economics of the bread market is so distorted that for many people there is no real choice. The baking industry, despite being concentrated in the hands of a few main players, is at the mercy of the forces that really control shopping today: The big retailers.

At the root of the problem is selling products below the cost price. For instance, nearly 60 per cent of the high-street butchers in London disappeared between 1985 and 2000. There were some 47,000 independent grocery retailers in the UK 15 years ago. Today, there are only 28,000. Keep this cold statistic before you when consultants spearheading the entry of FDI in supermarkets in India propagate that it will not result in the disappearance of neighbourhood shops.

Apples and bananas

The UK has lost nearly two-thirds of its apple orchards in less than 30 years. There were 6,000 varieties of dessert and cooking apples and hundreds more of cider apples, but many of them have been lost to commercial production and survive only in fruit shows.

Food processing and retailing are vastly profitable today but across Europe farmers are going bankrupt. Bananas are British retailers' largest-selling and most lucrative item. For every £1 of bananas sold at retail, the supermarkets keep 40p while growers receive just 10p. The top 30 grocers in the world now control a third of all food sales.

The UK Competition Commission's investigation into supermarkets revealed 52 alleged "coercive and abusing business practices'' used by them. The supermarkets have become the gatekeepers which control access to the customers. This has forced thousands of small and medium farmers, traders and truckers out of business.

Nearer home, there has been a concerted campaign for the opening of retail trade to FDI. Several western supermarket chains, including Wal-Mart, had come to India to canvass their case but due to differences among the UPA coalition partners, the issue has gone to the background — at any rate, for the present.

Imported food burns up energy

The link in the chain that connects fluctuating orders to casual labour around the world is the supermarket distribution chain. This new system is miraculous in its scale, speed and efficiency, but it is built on a fatal flaw. It is dependent on the unsustainable use of that most politically volatile of substance, crude oil.

Dr Andy Jones, author of the report Eating Oil, brings out the absurdity of a system that regularly brings vegetables to northern Europe from the other side of the globe when we could be eating our own season's produce.

It takes 88 calories in the form of fuel energy to fly one calorie of carrot to the UK from South Africa. Importing just two calories of lettuce from California burns up 127 calories of fuel energy. Transporting food long distances is energy-inefficient. One imported basket of food releases as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as an average four-bedroomed household does through cooking for eight months.

Coffee and conviction

It is a dreadful irony that the net result of the efforts of the international institutions and their free market ideology to help poor countries develop has been environmental damage and a collapse in their income from coffee.

For instance, the pathetic plight of the Wynad coffee-growers who faced the crash of prices for their produce and are being driven to suicide.

Some of the poorest coffee growers have not waited to hear the end of the debate. They have uprooted their unprofitable coffee bushes and replaced them with a more lucrative cash crop.

When the supermarket multinational corporations gain a foothold in India, the consumer pattern is likely to undergo a great change, much of which may not be for the better.

Felicity Lawrence concludes: "Who will concern themselves with whether we are sold junk? We must look to ourselves. It will take a coalition of interests in which the public, as in the previous centuries, take the lead.

Change will come when ordinary people, realising that their current food system is environmentally, ethically and even biologically unsustainable, exert their buying power and finally say: "Enough is enough".

(The author is a former Executive Director, LIC.)

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Plugging IT loopholes

Performance reviews

A pricing policy for the petroleum sector

Not on the Label— Harmful links in the food chain

The climate change in Kolkata

Good business from bad loans?

Don't throw forests to the wind