Centuries of Indian life could be extinguished by the arrival of Walmart

[Judi Lynn]

Centuries of Indian life could be extinguished by the arrival of Walmart

The country's street sellers will almost certainly vanish once foreign supermarkets are allowed into the big cities

Ian Jack
The Guardian, Friday 21 September 2012 17.30 EDT

Certain habits in Indian life once gave an illusion of permanence. On hot afternoons 30 years ago, for example, you could lie on your bed under a slow-turning fan and hear noises from the street that had been the same for at least a century. The lonely wife in Satyajit Ray's film Charulata heard them in the film's celebrated opening sequence as she flitted about her Victorian mansion in 1870's Calcutta like a trapped butterfly, and in 1982 you could hear them still: some rhythmic chanting, the hollow patter of a little drum. And if, like Charulata, you went to the window and looked down, there in the dusty lane you would see a gang of coolies shouting something like a work-song as they pushed a wooden-wheeled cart with a heavy load, or a street entertainer drumming up business with his tabla. The most common sounds, however, were the singsong calls of peddlers selling fish or vegetables, or milky sweets and ancient biscuits from a portable glass case. Some salesmen rode bicycles; that transport apart, these were scenes that looked as if they had existed for centuries and would never be expunged by modernity.

Their extinction is coming – not immediately and not everywhere, but probably inexorably in the middle-class districts of the big Indian cities, now India's governing coalition has said it will open up the retail market to foreign supermarket chains. The coalition put the plan on hold last year after some of its smaller parties, notably West Bengal's Trinamool Congress, branded it as against the interests of "the common man". The postponement suggested a weak and muddled government. Economic growth was faltering, the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, looked particularly ineffectual, and the administration's reputation suffered the lash of critics at home and abroad (not least in the USA). Last week it decided to face down opponents and show its free-market muscles by reviving planned reforms that will allow familiar European and American names – Walmart, Tesco, Carrefour — to build stores in cities of more than a million people, providing the local state government agrees.

Western supermarkets arrived in China several years ago and there is now hardly a country in the world without them. India's resistance came out of what Louise Tillen, an academic at the India Institute in King's College London, describes as a "compound of opportunism and ideology" in a democracy that tolerates dissent and political fixes, but that resistance looks to have collapsed. The government says the marketing, technical and managerial expertise of the big supermarkets will transform food production and consumption by cutting out middlemen and building the system known as "the cold chain" that delivers fresh food swiftly from the field to the shelves. The farmer gets higher prices, the consumer pays lower ones and less food is wasted: the supermarkets hire staff in their thousands, no food rots in the warehouses.

Perfection! Unless you are a middleman, or one of India's 12 million small retailers, or a peasant farmer with a crop yield too insignificant to interest Walmart, or a street vegetable peddler. The process is known as "retail Darwinism". In Vietnam, to quote a recent survey, a supermarket needs 1.2 people to sell a tonne of tomatoes rather than 2.9 people for every tonne in more traditional distribution channels. In several large Indian cities, fruit and vegetable sellers have already seen their incomes cut by up to 30% since the advent of smaller Indian-owned supermarkets; the powerful giants from abroad could bring far larger changes.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/21/indian-life-extinguished-by-supermarkets

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. I am still crying of the decimation of the buggy whip makers

If a non traditional approach is cleaner or provides the same food at lower cost to the consumers, I feel there is no need to stay with the days of coolie labor

[fasttense]

4. That's a big IF

If you want to improve your food's cleanliness and lower the cost don't count on Wal-Mart to do it for you. Pass a few laws that require better handling and control prices and labor. But don't think for a minute that Wal-Mart is going to give you quality, sanitation and better labor treatment if your laws don't demand it.

Chain stores like Wal-Mart are in it for the profit, not to improve your food distribution and employment system. They will do as little and pay suppliers and employees as little as your laws will allow. So instead of that coolie labor being out and about, chain stores will take them to work for them. But it will still be collie labor even under a different name.

Then the big chain stores will form lobbying groups and demand that your country lower its standards even more so their profits are even bigger. To top it all off, all that money people will be spending wont stay in the country. It will be funneled off to Arkansas to give the billionaire Walton's another billion.

Here in the US Wal-Mart gases their meat to make rotting brown cuts look fresh and pink. Sometimes the smell from the fresh looking pink cuts can gag you. They mix ammonia into ground waste meat and sell what would be on a slaughter house floor for $3.00 a pound or More. They sell Australian lamb that tastes like five year old mutton at $12 a pound and gas vegetables and fruit to make them look ripe. They wax their vegetables so they look shiny and clean. They sell rotting produce, moldy bread and over charge you if you are not on the look out for it and they can get away with it.

Wal-Mart in the US overcharges on taxes and may not ring up the marked price if people don't notice. They pay their people so little that many of their employees have to go on food stamps or get subsidized health care to survive. Many chain stores actively discourage Unions to keep their employees poor.

Chain stores like Wal-Mart will only push the envelope to see how much they can get away with. They are not in it to help make food cheaper or better. They are merely in it for the money.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

5. Regardless of the issues they raise, is it better than what they have now?

Not clear that it is or is not. The prior system was very crude.

[fasttense]

6. The current system is no more crude than what their laws allow.

Do you think Wal-Mart will be any better? Why?

If there are no laws that say food sold to the public can NOT be crawling with bugs, why would Wal-Mart sell food that is NOT crawling with bugs? It is a hassle to keep all those bugs out. Oh they may make it look pretty but that does not mean the bugs weren't on it right before they put it out. Do you really think Wal-Mart would go through extra pains to produce and sell foods that are more hygienic if it costs them money?

People think Wal-Mart will go in and have grocery stores just like the ones here in the US that require them to be somewhat hygienic. But the truth is they will only do what the laws force them to do. If lead dipped candies sell and there are no laws against it, Wal-Mart will sell them for a profit. They are not in the grocery stores business to improve the quality or distribution system of food. They are in it only for the money.

[midnight]

2. Earlier this year Walmart was hit with bad news....

Last week, the largest pension fund in the Netherlands and a major Walmart investor announced that it would pull out its $121 million investment in the company due to Walmart failing to rectify concerns the fund’s managers had over labor practices. Recent attempts at conciliation with critics of its business model were “not enough” to satisfy the Dutch fund.

A major pension fund and longtime investor in Walmart has blacklisted the retailing behemoth, citing poor labor practices and the company’s anti-union stance as the driving force behind its rejection.

Walmart typically shrugs off criticism of its labor practices as union-driven propaganda and insists that its employees are happy and well-managed, but investing experts say that when one of the largest pension funds in the world divests, the company would be wise to listen to the message. It’s the same message the American labor movement has been pushing for decades.

On Tuesday, the Netherlands’ biggest pension fund, Algemeen Burgerlijk Pensioenfonds, with more than $300 billion in assets, announced that it was blacklisting the largest retailer in the world for noncompliance with the United Nations’ Global Compact principles. The Global Compact presents a set of core values relating to human rights, labor standards, the environment and anti-corruption efforts. Sixteen other companies were blacklisted along with Walmart, nearly all of them excluded for producing chemical or nuclear weapons that violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
http://sunstateactivist.org/ssablog/2012/01/10/walmart-faces-blowback-over-anti-labor-agenda/

[marasinghe]

3. in one of the few positive notes ....

in New York City, a number of immigrant street vendors - mainly African, Asian & Central American - have comparatively successful fruit & vegetable, and food, vending carts, operating on assorted street corners in Manhattan.

last month, taking a walk late in the evening - down Park Avenue & the 70's, where the real estate is among the priciest on the planet - an Asian immigrant had set up, a more or less permanent, fruit & vegetable stand. close to midnight, some of the rich neighborhood denizens were buying fruits & vegetables from the guy.

another street vendor, a semi-permanent fixture near the UN, said he managed to buy a couple of houses for his kids, in his home city in Asia, on the proceeds of years of selling fruit & vegetables, from his cart on that corner.

on the downside - when visiting my native (Asian) city nowadays, i find the traditional open air markets & street vendors disappearing rapidly - being replaced by numbers of large supermarkets & small fast food restaurants. many inhabitants have even given up cooking their own meals on working days; settling for restaurant fast food. something unheard of in my childhood & uneconomical from a monetary viewpoint.

so, this old model of trade may be returning, with a bit of success, to New York City; but, it seems to be dying out in the very countries where it is needed much more.

Schumacher warned us in the '70s. like most seers - he was ignored. now the vultures are coming home to roost.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful

Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered is a collection of essays by British economist E. F. Schumacher. The phrase "Small Is Beautiful" came from a phrase by his teacher Leopold Kohr.[1] It is often used to champion small, appropriate technologies that are believed to empower people more, in contrast with phrases such as "bigger is better". .... The Times Literary Supplement ranked Small Is Beautiful among the 100 most influential books published since World War II.