Fruit farm case is timely reminder

Apr 6 2010 Perthshire Advertiser Tuesday

Dear Editor, – Your front cover article (March 26) about the exploitation of foreign workers, especially in the farming and fruit picking industry, is a timely reminder about the conditions underpinning our “low inflation rate”.

Before rightly condemning such exploitation, let us stop and think, then ask who is really to blame. Supermarkets? Yes, because their constant price war with one another, boasting of their “100 baskets cheaper at...” masks the fact that these “reductions” are achieved by beating down producers who may then have to dig acres of produce into the soil because another producer can, by exploiting their workers as reported, supply their produce “at a lower price”.

This “lower price” is then used as a lever against other producers who have either to match that price or have their contract terminated, their crops perishing, their own livelihood destroyed.

Do we mindlessly fall for this “100 baskets cheaper...” stunt? Are we aware of the appalling conditions, the exploitation of people and the suffering caused by battery farming, especially poultry which “creates” these low prices which, incidentally, still manage to make supermarkets million in profits?

Government which boasts about animal welfare and human dignity suffers serious amnesia when exploitation can be re-named “competition”, incidentally also used to sustain their “myth” of low inflation, calculated on supermarket shopping baskets.

The greatest tragedy in all this is that even the “exploitation aware” consumers, loathing their part in this exploitation and covert slave labour system, are caught up in it because supermarkets have driven smaller specialist shops out of business.

So where do we go to shop ethically, knowing that producers and their workers are fairly paid? Would we have to pay much more if they were? Not really. If supermarkets were happy to make, say, £2.5million rather than £6million profit per year!

Mary Lindsay,

Flat B,

1 Firbank Road,

Perth, PH1 2AD.