Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony Butcher
You say that the supermarkets gain from "other people's misfortune", but I think that is unfair. It is a market place. Without the supermarkets most of those people wouldn't have a livelihood at all, and if they aren't happy with the deal they get, they should sell to a different chain.
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It is indeed a marketplace, but not one where buyers and sellers have equal power. For agricultural produce grown in the third world -- bananas, coffee, and so on -- it's very much a buyer's market, where the buyers are huge Western concerns (such as Nestle, for instance). Unlike petroleum, there has never been a cartel for agricultural produce (though attempts have been made); as a consequence, buyers can play off producers against one another for lower prices. Since the producers are usually "banana republics" (in the literal sense of depending on the export of one or two agricultural commodities), they are desperate to sell at almost any price.
The gross exploitation may not be happening at the Tesco or Sainsbury stage, but earlier on.
On a different note, "fair price" is difficult to define operationally.