Supermarket Bans Bee Chemicals

There was some interesting news from one of the smaller supermarkets, who have banned the use of a whole group chemical pesticides that are implicated in the death of Bees.

Firstly, I should explain to my overseas reader, about The Co-operative Wholesale Society. The business was started to provide cheaper and better quality food for workers. At the time, many of the Mines, or the Weaving Mills or the many other major employers in towns up and down the country also owned and ran the food shops. Thus employers often made as much money from feeding the workers as they did from their core business. Therefore, the co-op became an important part of shopping for many people in many towns.

I am personally a member myself, but while I agree with many of the principles of the cooperative, but there was a time in the sixties and seventies that the membership owned business lost its way. Previously, it had ensured that it only sold foods that were of good nutritional value, it was one of its founding principles. However, when the supermarkets emerged they played follow my leader to them and started stocking and selling all the junk food the others do.

There was a time in the 1980s when I really did think that they would fail as they looked just like any other supermarket but were more expensive. Then in the 1990s they really started to get back to their core values and lead the way on Fair Trade with Coffee, Tea and Chocolate. In their own brand products they exclude many of the additives that are questionable.

The real problem that the stores have though is that the staff is normally rather surly. I have often joked that you get “Service with Sneer” there. Also the prices are not competitive and are often unreasonably high. On some essentials in the village branch they are ten percent higher than in their branch in Consett.

So while I agree with many of the objectives of the organisation, they also have some suspect business practices too. In many rural locations they have bought up competitors to exclude them from competing and increasing prices once in that dominant position. Just talking about the local shop, it has a really limited range, and sells far to much of the junk food to really be credibility different to the supermarkets.

However, because the Co-op back when it first started bought farm land and farms to ensure that the produce was of good quality, they are now the largest Farmer in Britain. Thus their stopping use of the nicotine based pesticides that are implicated in the death of Honey Bees is significant.

In France and Italy these chemicals have already been banned and there are fewer instances of Colony Collapse Disorder. As I have reported here before, Genetically Modified crops are also implicated, so while this ban is helpful as the environmental impacts on bees are very complex it may not be the whole of the solution. The major difficulty with major problems like Colony Collapse Disorder is that the cause and effect of what we are doing to the ecological systems are not clear there will be multiple causes behind the death of Honey Bees.

If only the rest of farming would follow this lead then perhaps we will still have Bees in years to come. And if the Coop can start showing their principals by stop selling the same junk as the other supermarkets then they really will become the market leaders they once were.