Wal-Mart, Massmart and Mass murder

Oh dear, Wal-Mart is coming to SA.

Apparently, 97% of the shareholders of Massmart, the company that controls South African retailers such as Makro and Game, have approved a bid by Wal-Mart to buy a 51% stake in their company. All that is pending is an analysis of whether doing so will be anti-competitive, and then the deal is likely to go through.

Aside from competition-related concerns, I have two main, and unfortunately related, fears. First, hygiene and animal cruelty, and second, the impact on poverty and related blights. I plan to deal with the first one here, and the second in a post later on in the week.

(In the spirit of fairness (and in the name of avoiding a defamation suit), I should add a disclaimer: My concerns are not about Wal-Mart's entry into SA per se, but rather about the entry of large businesses like Wal-Mart and what they stand for in my mind.) In essence, this is my opinion and, where possible, I have tried to reference facts that I allege or assert.

My first concern is about factory farming and what it means for both the treatment of animals and food hygiene. While there must be some inhumane treatment of animals going on in SA even now, the reality is that the US is the poster-boy for inhumane and unethical farming techniques. See, for instance just how prevalent factory farming is in the US.


Why? It's a crazy spiral that begins in simple supply and demand. Let's use an ordinary farm - it probably has large fields devoted to grazing its sheep, and it may even be family-owned. When an existing large retailer (like Wal-Mart) decides that it is going to offer cheaper food in its stores, the decrease in price will prompt consumers like you and me to increase our demand for the food. So suppliers have to produce more, and at the lower cost demanded by the large retailer.


It's nigh on impossible for a farmer to refuse to produce more food, cheaper, especially when the prices are being pushed down by a large retailer that already has some market dominance (as will be the case in SA). They use this market dominance to force farmers to reduce the costs of food production - they can either comply, sell 'organic' produce for a fraction more to Woolies (and run the risk of still not covering their costs), or go under. While selling organic or free-range produce to Woolies would be the ideal, the reality is that most South Africans can't afford to buy their meat there, so the demand for meat is small and only a few suppliers can enter, and stay in, that market. Instead, for most farmers, the choices are limited to:

1. Get out of farming - they can neither cover their existing costs nor support themselves on the lower purchase prices being offered by the large retailer.
   
2. Lower their costs somehow - typically this means cutting corners, as farming is already considered a low-profit industry. This means more sheep in smaller and smaller areas. It means making sure that your sheep grow up bigger and stronger, faster, by feeding them hormones and steriods. Obviously, you have to feed them cheaper food, which is generally of a poor quality. Soon the sheep are ill from too many hormones, poor food and not enough exercise. The quickest, cheapest cure? Antibiotics.
   
   But, of course, not just a few sheep get ill - it's expected that all of them will - so to prevent the spread of disease among the masses of animals living in close proximity to one another, all of the sheep are fed antibiotics. And so are the cows. And the pigs. And the chickens. Partly in response to the onslaught of illness in sheep, and partly in response to separate increased pressure to reduce the price of beef, pork and chicken. In terms of hygience, we get meat that is full of steriods, antibiotics and poor-quality protein.
   
   Heck, while we're cutting costs, who actually checks meat for worms? How about mad-cow disease or swine flu? Obviously not all suppliers or retailers go to these lengths. But, when they do, the government's response is retrospective at best, so contamination carries on for some time before anything is done about it. And this is in a first world country with relatively decent testing and enforcement of food standards.
   
   Hygiene concerns aside, another way of cutting costs is to kill animals cheaply and efficiently. And, because time is money, checking that an animal is actually dead before hanging it up to "bleed" is a luxury that can ill be afforded. So some animals face a slow, agonising death as they lose blood or suffocate when their throat is cut - just enough to sever the trachea, but not enough to kill the poor beast outright. Goodbye to eating ethically.
   
3. Fight it. Farmers themselves have very little power to fight against the market dominance of the retailer. Consumers have more power, but in a country with obscene levels of poverty and an obsession with eating too much meat, preventing the inundation of markets with unhygienic and inhumanely-produced meat is unlikely to rally massive support.
   
   The only option is for the government to step in. Alas for us, our government is busy legislating around sexual offences, universal education and access to healthcare - and rightly so. Its budget for enforcing legislation is also spent on other causes, all of them noble. And this means that neither time nor money is likely to be spent on devising, promulgating or enforcing minimum standards of hygiene and humanity in food production.

This means that there is only one other lobby with enough power to do something about factory farming. Although, not for the reasons outlined above; avoiding these is just the cherry on top. Instead, factory farming will mean that there will be pressure to decrease wages, take on only casual, illegal or foreign labour (who will work for less, and won't complain) and lower labour standards. In fact, lower the living standards of those who are already among the poorest in SA, if not the world. And give them shitty food.


Enter: The Unions.
(see the next post)