hello david,
>Today in a meeting with Congressman Earl Blumenaur about farming and free
>trade, I said that farmers get 5ó for raising the wheat that goes into a box
>of Wheaties while Tiger Woods gets 10ó. It really stopped the congressman, he
>challenged me as to were I got that fact. I thought it came from sanet though
>I couldn't find it in the archives. Has anyone else heard this figure and
>know were it came from?
here's one story for these strange rises between farmer and
consumer:
[a few years ago, after considerable controversy about the lack of
nutritious cereals on the market (with some critics speculating
that eating the box might have been more nutritious than eating
what was inside) the big four began marketing "fortified"
cereals, introducing the new brands with 21-gun ad campaigns.
consumers were bilked by such campaigns. general mills, for
example, added less than two cents worth of vitamins to a
12-ounce box of "Wheaties" and marketed it as "Total". yet, the
shopper today pays almost 50 percent more for a box of "Total"
than for a similar sized package of "Wheaties".]
(taken from "the corporate reapers", a.v. krebs, p. 120)
"i'm talking of an industry which can market a cornish
dairy chocolate ice cream which doesn't come from
cornwall, isn't made in a diary, and contains neither
chocolate nor cream."
- derek cooper, presenter of the bbc radio series "the food
programme" addressing a soil association conference which
launched a campaign to link farmers with consumers.
or take your almost holy national drink "cola". value of the
ingredients about 25 cents (for the normal coke, most of it for
the 50 sugar lumps per litre, roughly 11-12 cents for the diet
version). what's the price for a litre in the shop ??? their
slogan "even better" was never claimed to be valid in terms of
nutritional value.
(damn, i forgot, you buy it by parts of a gallon.) for explanation
of the elegance and ease of that marvellous system: if i have 10
bushels of grain and before selling them, i spray 5 gallons of
water on them to add weight - how many percent more do i get for
the grain ??.
honestly: how much do you pay for a gallon/litre of coke in
america nowadays ? here it is (roughly recalculated to $$ based
on the average national income) $1.72 per litre or $6.5 per
gallon. you get more than 26 kg grade A wheat for a gallon of coke.
if i would make the same relative gain in farming, every farmer
would not only really own his farm, but also the town beside
it...
klaus
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