14 – Foods and Products We Take for Granted

Canada’s favourite fruit is not the home-grown apple but rather the imported banana. By weight, Canadians eat more bananas than any other fruit and, of course, not one of them was grown here.

There are many imported foods which Canadians take for granted. There are foods we consume every day in this country even though they cannot be grown here; besides bananas, these include citrus fruit, coffee, tea, and cocoa. Other foods–rice and sugar, for example–are only grown in limited amounts. And still other foods–fresh fruits and vegetables–are only seasonally available in Canada and must be imported at other times of the year.

But even though these products are not grown in Canada or are only seasonally available, Canadians still expect to have them all year round. And what’s more, they expect to have them at a certain price. Canadians drink a lot of coffee, for example. In fact, one coffee chain has become a national institution. But although coffee cannot be grown in Canada, Canadians still expect it to be “reasonably priced.” At the time of writing, a visit to a local grocery store revealed that coffee ranged in price from about $3.00 a pound to over $6.00.

Coffee is a tropical crop; it comes from developing countries. About two-thirds of world’s supply originates in Central and South America where it is primarily grown by small-scale farmers who can be paid as little as five cents a pound for their crop. Consumers are told that it is by keeping the price of production down that coffee remains affordable. But in fact the price paid to the primary producer may be only 2% of the market value of the commodity.

A similar argument is made about the cost of producing clothing. Much of the clothing sold in Canada is now manufactured off-shore. In particular, many trendy name-brands are produced in workshops located in the developing world. The directors of these clothing companies believe their products would be less popular if the workers who produced the clothing were paid a union-scale wage in Canada. And they may be right. If those workers were better paid, the price of the clothing would no doubt be higher. The way the manufacturer keeps the cost down is by having the items made elsewhere, somewhere where the price of labour is less expensive than it is in Canada.

Many multinational corporations have moved their operations to locations throughout the developing world in order to take advantage of lower labour costs, relaxed environmental standards, and tax breaks. So now a wide-range of products are produced in the South which at one time would have been made in places like Canada or the United States, something which has not made unionized workers in those countries very happy.

From the corporations’ point of view, however, it just makes good economic sense to move their factories overseas. After all, the cost of living in most developing countries isn’t as high as it is in North America, something that is used as a justification for the lower wages paid. But the fact is that in most overseas garment factories, the salaries are not adequate to meet the workers’ needs even in terms of the local economy, and the working conditions have been revealed time and time again not to meet basic human rights guidelines.

A pair of high quality athletic shoes can cost as much as $250 a pair. But the total cost of the labour which produced those shoes may be only $10. So only four percent of the price reflects the amount paid to the individuals who made the shoes–the individuals who are directly responsible for the quality of the shoes.

These are some of the hidden costs of the products we take for granted.