Supermarkets and Fruit Trees

The wealth of supermarkets is built on monopoly,
exploitation and restriction of choice

======================================

By George Monbiot

The Guardian (UK)
March 16, 2004
Commentary

Every year the list is the same, but every year it
still comes as a shock. Of the 10 richest people on
Earth, five of them have the same surname. It’s not
Gates, or Murdoch, or Rockefeller, but Walton. They are
the heirs and trustees of the supermarket chain Wal-
Mart. And between them they are worth $100bn.

Considering how the media fawns on the ultra rich, we
hear remarkably little about them. Perhaps this is
because their position is rather embarrassing. The
company that enriches them trades on the idea that it
is the friend of the common man and woman, distributing
rather than concentrating wealth.

Over the past 20 years, two world-shaking social
transformations have taken place. The first, the
effective collapse of the proletariat as a political
force, has been well documented. The second, the
disappearance of the petty bourgeoisie as an economic
force, rather less so. The near-elimination of the
small businesses supplying and running the retail trade
is in some ways as consequential as the withering of
organised labour in heavy industry and the coal mines.
The global monopolisation of the sector has destroyed
the livelihoods of tens of millions of small
proprietors and their employees. But, because this
workforce was dispersed, the effects are rather harder
to see.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to buy some fruit trees.
I travelled to the world’s most unprepossessing centre
of biodiversity: Langley, on the outskirts of Slough.
In the first half of the 20th century, most of London’s
fruit and vegetables were grown round there. The farms
were supplied by specialist nurseries, which ensured
that Britain possessed a wider variety of temperate
fruit trees than any other nation. Two weeks ago, only
one of these nurseries was left. In the 1940s, JC
Allgrove’s kept a thousand varieties of apple tree. It
is still listed in the directories as one of Britain’s
great growers. But I was among its last customers.

Since the owner died two years ago, the business has
been run by a volunteer, Nick Houston. "There are bits
of ground here where no one’s been for 20 years," he
told me. Recently, scrabbling beneath the ivy that now
covers the orchards, he found an apple he had never
seen before. It was a Baumann’s Reinette: the
horticultural equivalent of a Fabergé egg. "But I had
no idea which bloody tree it had fallen off." Somewhere
in the nursery there should be two varieties - King
Harry and St Augustine’s Orange - that even the
national fruit collection doesn’t possess, but he
hasn’t been able to find them yet. The land is to be
sold. Nick will salvage what he can and run a business
of his own, under the old name, to try to keep the rare
breeds growing.

He gave a one-word answer when I asked him what had
happened to the business. "Supermarkets." Today the
apples they buy are landing three miles from JC
Allgrove’s. Heathrow’s first runway was built on
strawberry farms and orchards. From the air, you can
still see derelict greenhouses and the parallel lines
on the land where fruit trees once grew. Richard Cox,
the man who bred the world’s favourite apple, is buried
beside St Mary’s Church in Harmondsworth, which will be
flattened if a third runway is built at Heathrow.

The superstores have used their buying power to force
the world’s farmers to compete directly with each
other. Yesterday I spoke to a fruit grower in
Gloucestershire, who told me that to stay in the game
he must sometimes sell Coxes for as little as 57p a
kilo, less than his cost of production. The superstores
then sell the same apples for between £1.60 and £1.80.
They can buy them for even less from Chile, New Zealand
and South Africa, where labour is cheap and the farms
huge. This would present no threat to the growers here,
had the superstores not used their political power to
ensure that fuel costs stay low, and the docks and
airports keep expanding.

These companies are now strolling over the battlefield,
dispatching the last of the wounded. A few days ago,
Verdict Research published a report on the takeover of
Britain’s cornershops. The big chains have moved into
the suburbs, where they are closing down the
competition. "Now smaller retailers can no longer hide
in the neighbourhood," Verdict reports. "A major shake-
out is inevitable."

Wal-Mart, which owns the British chain Asda, is now the
biggest company on Earth. In the last financial year it
took $245bn. It is successful partly because it is one
of the most ruthless employers in the western world.

In the US its sales clerks made an average of $13,861
in 2001, almost $800 below the federal poverty line for
a family of three. It is reported to have told new
employees how to apply for food stamps so that they
don’t starve to death. In November, the police found
hundreds of illegal immigrants working as cleaners in
its stores. Some of them claimed that they were obliged
to work seven nights a week, without overtime,
insurance or benefits.

By forcing down the prices of the goods they buy, the
superstores encourage even more repressive conditions
in the companies that supply them. A recent study by
Oxfam documents the systematic abuse of workers in the
factories and farms that the superstores buy from. The
Waltons are so rich because others are so poor.

Beside this, the destruction of our horticultural
diversity looks trivial. But both are manifestations of
the same problem. As the superstores capture the
market, they shut down all our choices: about where we
shop, what we buy, who we work for. This, of course, is
what all monopolies seek to do.

We might have hoped that governments would treat them
as such. Indeed, there was a time when they did. In
1936, a federal anti-trust act was passed in the United
States to protect small shops from the Great Atlantic &
Pacific Tea Company. But governments were braver then.

In Britain, the Office of Fair Trading and the
Competition Commission seem to spend their time
devising new excuses. They continue to insist, for
example, that big stores and corner shops are separate
markets. Tesco might sell 25% of all Britain’s
groceries, but it owns "only" 6% of the convenience
store market, so it should be allowed to expand in that
sector as it pleases. Last month the Office of Fair
Trading admitted that its voluntary code of practice,
which is supposed to protect farmers from the excessive
power of the superstores, is not working. By way of
remedy it proposed "more research".

In response, the MPs Andrew George and David Drew are
launching an early day motion in parliament today,
calling for a legally binding code of practice and a
supermarket watchdog. But Tony Blair seems to be as
frightened of the superstores as he is of the tabloid
press.

Nick couldn’t find me any of the rarest varieties. He
sold me an Adam’s Pearmain, a Charles Ross, a Sturmer
Pippin and a Cornish Aromatic. I would have bought the
names even if the trees weren’t attached to them. If
they survive my clumsy handling and produce fruit, I
will regard every apple they produce as a minor act of
insurrection.

monbiot.com

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1170013,00.html

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