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Old 19-07-2007, 03:32 PM posted to uk.rec.gardening
bobrayner bobrayner is offline
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First recorded activity by GardenBanter: Mar 2007
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Default Food miles & Kenyan growers

On 17 Jul, 23:33, Martin wrote:

It would be even better if the profits made selling African produce in European
supermarkets went to the growers.


A lot of it does. I realise it's popular to vilify supermarkets, but
the grocery market is competitive enough that supermarkets can't get
away with gouging customers for imported fruit & veg. If some other
supermarket could charge a lot less for the same things, they would,
in order to bring more customers in through their door; the
supermarket adding huge "profits" to grocery costs wouldn't sell much.

A lot of the cost of getting food from farmer to consumer happens at
the end of the process - shops & supermarkets have a lot of costs (big
buildings, staff, trucks, electricity, wastage &c). If you spend £1 on
an oven-ready badger from Tesco, I daresay Tesco have already spent
50p of that on freezing, wrapping, transporting, displaying and
selling the oven-ready badger so it's silly to expect 90p of your
money to go back to the badger breeder.