Politics: June 2005 Archives

Something I came across whilst doing the tiny bit of research necessary for the previous article (make poverty history), was a 1997 study by the US Department of Agriculture entitled "Estimating and Addressing America's Food Losses".

The amount of food wasted by the US (and I guess other similarly advanced countries) is absolutely staggering.

Out of 162 million tonnes of food available for consumption in the USA in 1995, 44 million tonnes was wasted by "food retailers, consumers and foodservice establishments". That is almost 30% of the total amount of food produced for human consumption!

Fresh fruit, vegetable, milk, grain, sugar and corn syrup accounted for two-thirds of wasted food.

What is truly criminal about this is that not only was the value of this wasted food estimated at over $31 billion but it is estimated that this would have fed up to 49 million people.

I noticed today, whilst dining at my usual restaurant on Trinity Street, a number of people sporting what appeared to be nasty cheap white wristbands. The sort of thing one might expect escaped loony patients to be wearing should they forget to remove their hospital ID tags.

These were, it was pointed out to me, wristbands one pays the princely sum of £1 for (70p to charity) to show solidarity in the fight to make poverty history.

A little digging reveals that these wristbands, of which hundreds of thousands have been sold in the UK alone, are made by a Chinese firm, the Tat Shing Rubber Manufacturing Company in near 'slave labour' conditions.

Not only do the employees of this company earn as little as 9p per hour, they work long hours, a seven-day week, no paid annual leave, poor health and safety provisions, no right to freedom of association, and the list goes on.

People in rich countries can do far more to help alleviate poverty than spending a quid on a bit of plastic, but of course far better to make a simple gesture and forget about it than actually doing something useful to help.

Typical of our modern consumer culture. Instant gratification and move on.