Blood Sweat and Takeaways

To coincide with the appointment of the new Poet Laureate, Carol Anne Duffy, here in Britain, the BBC have been running a series of programmes on Poems and Poetry. However many of these programmes were on Digital television, as I only have an analogue set and I am not allowed to fit a new digital Ariel had it not been for the computer and the BBC I-player then I would not have ever had the chance to see them.

In a conversation recently about these programmes, some wag (wit) said; it would be cheaper fro the BBC to have just sent out a DVD than to have broadcast them. While I could go on about how people will listen to poetry, and some bad poetry at that, when set to music and called Lyrics, anything that requires a bit of though is sneered at by many. While I may not understand the attraction of football, I do not sneer at it nor do I think that there is not a place for it on TV. Just as I chose not to watch football, I can chose to watch programmes that I find stimulating, stretching and engaging.

Now I don't want to create a false impression that I am some high brow intellectual, my high brow is the result of male patten baldness. But the way the BBC have broadcast these programmes has required effort to watch them. Had it not been for the I-player, I would have been excluded from the audience. When digital switch over does happen, I don't know what I will do.

But this is not a rant about that, as by having to use the I-player to watch these programmes, I also discovered other programmes that I have found fascinating. Not all of them have been comfortable viewing either.

Not least of these has been a series on the food industry and where some of our popular foods that are the ingredients for our take away meals come from. Done as a reality style show, where a group of six Brits were taken to Asia to work in the Tuna canning factories, Prawn industry and the Rice Fields, the programmes have been as much a revelation of the attitudes of the young people in Britain as the industries themselves.

The effect of shows like Big Brother and that style of reality television was evident from the start of the first programme, only one of the participants in the shows was coming across as likeable. Thus while the style and participants were likely to make watching the programmes difficult, as the topic was one that interests me, I stayed with the vile and uncaring attitudes of the people in the show. By vile attitudes, one participant in the opening sequences was saying that if people in the developing world were exploited to bring us in the western developed world, cheap food, then that was acceptable.

While I am well aware that television producers will select people that will generate conflict, I did work in the media industry myself, but I have en-counted that attitude myself. So that is not untypical of the view of many people.

The attitudes of the people in the programmes did evolve and change, as they were put to work in a tuna Caning factory, Prawn Pealing and working on a Prawn farm. But the shocking aspect was just how unwilling the people were to work. The Indonesian workers who work in these jobs have to work like slaves just to make a living. And this is in the best factories that are sending food to Europe, so while the conditions were difficult, I have no doubt that in other less well run processors it would have been harder.

The main discovery was simply just how hard the poor in Indonesia and Thailand have to work just to stay alive and bring us in the west our cheap food.

While the environmental exploitation matters, it is the human exploitation that is perpetuating this problem. While there is an argument that these people need the work, and its clear that they do as if they don't work they starve. The system is so close to slavery that it makes me very uncomfortable about the attitudes of the British towards the cheap food we demand.

While I personally do not buy Tuna as it is endangered, or to be precise; the Blue Fin Tuna is endangered, The Yellow fin is officially “At Risk” and the skip-jack Tuna that is the most common tinned Tuna is under pressure as the other species rapidly reduce. Even so, the price in the retailers is minuscule compared to tiny fraction that the fishermen and the factory workers get paid. With wages that are just two pounds per day, the bulk of the profit goes to the retailers.

In the case of Prawns, the farmer will earn twenty pounds for eighty kilos of prawns yet those same prawns sell for over one thousand pounds in the UK. Again it is the businesses in Britain that are gaining the majority of the profit. This inequality leads to the greater exploitation of the animals that feed us, as the farmers, fishermen try harder to make their lives better.

I wish that these programmes had been broadcast on the main channels and not been hidden away so that more people could have seen for themselves the impact our developed worlds demand for cheap food has on the lives of the people that produce it. I am a firm believer that the developing world has to be able to trade its self out of poverty, but its clear that our demands for cheap food stops them doing this. Add to this the excessive profits made by western companies that are importing and selling the products and it becomes clear that the so called “Free Trade” economic model is just another form of slavery.

I am well aware just how lucky I am, and the programmes on poetry have been able to feed my soul just as the food in my fridge feeds my body. In Indonesia and Thailand the people barely cover their housing and food costs. So while I may be poor relative to the population in Britain, I don go hungry the way the people are in the rest of the world do. We need to develop a new economic model that is fair to all.