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SCENE:  SUPERMARKET BAKERY

AT RISE:  A FEMALE SHOPPER ARRIVES IN THE BAKERY AREA. LOOKS OVER THE ALMOST-EMPTY BREAD DISPLAY


FEMALE SHOPPER
(quietly to herself while squeezing all the breads)
This is like...so pathetic. Bread is at least two days old and this one is broken in three places. Who would buy it

(another shopper arrives)

SHOPPER 1
No bread, yet?

FEMALE SHOPPER
A couple of left over 2-day old breads.  They should remove them

SHOPPER 1
(bending over to look)
That happens as a result of shoppers squeezing the breads to see if they're fresh. Too many fingers pushing in one spot and the breads break in half Look - you can see the finger indentations.

FEMALE SHOPPER
Um...yeah...I see...but how else can you tell if the bread is fresh?

SHOPPER 1
Problem is that everyone squeezes the bread in the same place and this is the end result. Some shoppers have no respect for others. A squeeze here and a squeeze there...

FEMALE SHOPPERS
(uncomfortable)
Of course you're right... Looks like there's fresh bread baking in the oven. I love the smell of fresh baking bread. Don't you?

SHOPPER 1
...they'll end up having to throw out the bread of course. Disgusting with all the starving people in the world!

FEMALE SHOPPER
(looking even more uncomfortable)
Beautiful weather we're having. It's about time what with all that rain

SHOPPER 1
It's those same people that open up the strawberry boxes and exchange berries to make sure they have the best one's.

FEMALE SHOPPER
Disgusting! Some people...! Did you happen to notice if the strawberries on sale, perchance?

(another shopper arrives)

SHOPPER 2
Bread not ready?

FEMALE SHOPPER
Nope. Guess the bakers aren't rising to the occasion (laughs)

(the other two shoppers stare at her)

(cont'd) A little humor while we wait...obviously very little...

SHOPPER 1
We were just discussing how people over-squeeze the French bread to death causing it to break in half

FEMALE SHOPPER
Oh look! Here comes the baker. 'I'll take two white baguettes, sil vous plait'

BAKER
Attendez - c'est trop chaud

SHOPPER 1
What he say?

FEMALE SHOPPER
Haven't the slightest idea. I memorized my sentence from a French phrase book when I planned a trip to France

SHOPPER 1
Two whole wheat breads, please

FEMALE SHOPPER
Sil vous plait

SHOPPER 1
What?

FEMALE SHOPPER
That's French for 'please'

SHOPPER 2
Same for me

BAKER
Too hot. You must wait ten minutes for cool

FEMALE SHOPPER
How about you hand it over and we'll blow on it?

BAKER
Par-don? I know understand

FEMALE SHOPPER
A joke. You know...ha-ha-? Any-way, how about those over there on the trays? They look cool

BAKER
They are freeze. They must bake in oven

FEMALE SHOPPER
Look baked to me. Do they look baked to you, ladies?

SHOPPER 1
If he says they're not cooked... Why would he lie?

FEMALE SHOPPER
I dunno. Maybe he's saving them for friends. Look...sir. I'll take my chances with the hot bread. I promise you I'll be very careful. Really. I respect your French bread and won't abuse it. In fact, if you just put it in bags and hand it over, I'll put it in a safe place in my shopping cart where it can cool off, while I shop. I'm sure the other shoppers will also respect your bread. Right ladies?

SHOPPER 1
I can wait.

SHOPPER 2
Me too.

(SHOPPER 1 AND SHOPPER 2 walk away)

FEMALE SHOPPER
If you would give me my breads?

(he hands over the breads. She grabs them from the middle and they bend in half)

(cont'd) Oh no! A catastrophe has occurred!

(she replaces the broken breads in the empty bread display)

BAKER
Madam - your breads!

FEMALE SHOPPER
(pushing her shopping cart away
Neh! Changed my mind. You bakers take your breads so seriously

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(cont’d).  FEMALE SHOPPER



(cont’d.)  FEMALE SHOPPER


(FEMALE SHOPPER moves her shopping cart forward and gently runs into someone)

CHERRY PICKER 1


FEMALE SHOPPER


CHERRY PICKER 1


FEMALE SHOPPER


CHERRY PICKER 1


FEMALE SHOPPER


CHERRY PICKER 2



FEMALE SHOPPER


CHERRY PICKER 2


FEMALE SHOPPER


CHERRY PICKER 2


FEMALE SHOPPER


CHERRY PICKER 2


FEMALE SHOPPER


CHERRY PICKER 2


FEMALE SHOPPER


CHERRY PICKER 2


FEMALE SHOPPER


CHERRY PICKER 2


(FEMALE SHOPPER looks down at the display of cherries)

FEMALE SHOPPER


CHERRY PICKER 2


PRODUCE MANAGER


CHERRY PICKER 2


FEMALE SHOPPER

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By David A. Bender

The food pyramid shows fruits and vegetables as the second most important group of foods in terms of the amount to be eaten each day: 3-5 servings of vegetables and 2-4 servings of fruit. This, and the associated public health message to consume at least 5 servings of fruit and vegetables a day, is based on many years of nutritional research. Fruits and vegetables are rich in vitamins and minerals, as well as many other potentially protective compounds, and low in fat (and especially saturated fat). There is excellent evidence from a great many epidemiological studies that people who consume 5 servings of fruit and vegetables a day are less likely to suffer from atherosclerosis, heart disease, high blood pressure, and many cancers.

Things have changed in my local supermarket now, but until a year or so ago, the “five a day” message appeared above the aisles containing exotic (and expensive) fruits such as mangoes and papaya, but not those containing apples and pears, carrots and parsnips. Now, however, I find a more disturbing difference. If I buy a packet of tomatoes, there is nutritional information on the package, telling me what nutrients are present, and what percentage of my daily requirement a serving contains. Some packages also tell me how much of the produce will provide one of my five servings a day. By contrast, if I buy loose tomatoes there is no nutritional information available. Similarly, when I bought a pineapple last week there was a label around the neck of the fruit, not only telling me it was a pineapple (which I knew), but where it was grown and what nutrients it contained. The next shelf contained mangoes. These had only a small bar code label that would be decoded into a price at the checkout. Three onions in a string bag were labelled with nutrition information; loose onions were not.

All this suggests that I might be misled into believing that while packaged fruits and vegetables are a source of nutrients, loose produce that I select myself from the trays is free from nutrients. Of course, this is not so, but there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that many consumers do indeed believe that unpackaged fresh produce (and indeed unpackaged meat and fish from the counter) are not nutritious, since there is no associated labelling.

It is difficult to know what to do about this. It is not likely that shoppers would read a list of nutrition information on a poster above the loose produce – indeed, it would be very annoying if people were standing reading the posters above the produce that I wanted to select. It is annoying enough when someone blocks my access to the shelves by phoning home to ask whether we should have this or that for dinner tonight. One answer might be to expand the labels on loose fruits and vegetables to include a QR code that can be read into a smart phone. I notice that my pineapple label contains a QR code that will download recipes to use pineapple to my smart phone. Perhaps QR codes could be printed on the supermarket receipt – but that is long enough already, listing every item, how much I have saved by buying special offers and “twofers”, how many loyalty points I have earned to date, how many points I have donated to charity by using my own bags, etc.

Another trend is the marketing of some fruits and vegetables as superfoods, implying that they are in some way more nutritious than other produce. Of course, different fruits and vegetables do indeed differ in their nutrient content. Blackcurrants and acerola cherries are extremely rich sources of vitamin C, containing very much more than strawberries or apricots. However, this does not imbue them with “super” status as part of a mixed diet.

The concept of superfoods was developed in the USA in 2003-4 and was introduced in Britain by an article in the Daily Mail on 22 December 2005. Superfoods are just ordinary foods that are especially rich in nutrients or antioxidants and other potentially protective compounds, including polyunsaturated fatty acids and dietary fibre.

Scanning through a handful of websites thrown up by a Google search for “superfoods” gives the following list almonds, apples, avocado, baked beans, bananas, beetroot, blueberries, Brazil nuts, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cocoa, cranberries, flax seeds, garlic, ginger, kiwi, mango, olive oil, onions, oranges, peppers, pineapple, pumpkin, red grapes, salmon, soy, spinach, strawberries, sunflower seeds, sweet potato, tea, tomatoes, watercress, whole grain seeded bread, whole grains, wine, yoghurt.

There are very few surprises in this list (apart perhaps from the inclusion of wine as a superfood, although red wine is a rich source of antioxidants, and there is some, limited, evidence that modest alcohol consumption is beneficial). Most of these are foods that nutritionists and dietitians have talked about for years as being nutrient dense – i.e. they have a high content of vitamins and minerals. The nuts, seeds, and olive oil are an exception, but they are all good sources of polyunsaturated fatty acids.

The labelling and marketing of the foods as superfoods seems disingenuous (or a clever marketing strategy), but if such marketing leads people to eat more fruit and vegetables and reduce their saturated fat, salt and sugar intake then it can only help to reinforce the message that the nutrition and public health communities have been preaching for more than a quarter of a century.

David Bender graduated in Biochemistry from the University of Birmingham in 1968 and gained his PhD in Biochemistry from the University of London in 1971. From 1968 until his retirement in 2010 he was a member of academic staff of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, and then, following a merger, of University College London, teaching nutrition and biochemistry, mainly to medical students. He is Emeritus Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry at University College London. He is the author of Nutrition: A Very Short Introduction.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday, subscribe to Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS, and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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Image credit: The Food Pyramid, drawn by the author David Bender

The post Apples and carrots count as well appeared first on OUPblog.

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By Hope Michelson

Walmart now has stores in more than fifteen developing countries in Central and South America, Asia and Africa. A glimpse at the scale of operations: Nicaragua, with a population of approximately six million, currently has 78 Walmart retail outlets with more on the way. That’s one store for every 75,000 Nicaraguans; in the United States there’s a Walmart store for every 69,000 people. The growth has been rapid; in the last seven years, the corporation has more than doubled the number of stores in Nicaragua (see accompanying graphs — Figure 1 from the paper).

When a supermarket chain like Walmart moves into a developing country it requires a steady supply of fresh fruits and vegetables largely sourced domestically. In developing countries where the majority of the poor rely on agriculture for their livelihood, this means that poor farmers are increasingly selling produce to and contracting directly with large corporations. In precisely this way, Walmart has begun to transform the domestic agricultural markets in Nicaragua over the past decade. This profound change has been met with both excitement and trepidation by governments and development organizations because the likely effects on poverty and inequality are not known, in particular:

• What existing assets or experience are required for a farmer to sell their produce to supermarkets?
• Do small farmers who sell their produce to supermarkets benefit from the relationship?
• What is the role of NGOs in facilitating small farmer relationships with supermarkets?

Supermarkets require that farmers meet standards related to production, post-harvest processing, and delivery; for example, the use of specific pesticides and fertilizers and the cleaning and packaging of vegetables. Moreover, supermarkets generally require farmers to guarantee production year round, which requires planning (sometimes across multiple farmers), irrigation and capital. These requirements can present significant challenges to small farmers with little capital and it is thought that such challenges could strongly effect which farmers sell produce to supermarkets.

Generally, researchers have studied the inclusion of farmers in supply chains by measuring the income, assets and welfare of a group of farmers selling a crop to supermarkets (“suppliers”) with a similar group of farmers selling the same crop in traditional markets (“non-suppliers”). This research has provided important insights but has struggled with two persistent challenges.

First, because most existing studies rely on surveys of farmers living in the same area, we do not know how important farmer experience or assets such as farm machinery or irrigation, are for inclusion in supply chains in comparison to other farmer characteristics like community access to water or proximity to good roads.

Second, without measurements on supplier and non-supplier farmers over time it is difficult for a researcher to isolate the effect being a supplier has on the farmer. For example, if Walmart excels at choosing higher-ability farmers as suppliers, a study that just compared supplier and non-supplier incomes would overestimate the supermarket effect because Walmart’s high-ability farmers would earn more income even if they had not contracted with the supermarket.

With these two challenges in mind, I implemented a research project in Nicaragua in which I first identified all small farmers who had had a steady supply relationship with supermarkets for at least one year since 2000 (see accompanying graphs — Figure 2 from the paper). I also revisited 400 farmers not supplying supermarkets but living in areas where supermarkets were buying produce. My team and I surveyed farmers about their experiences over the past eight years: the markets where they had sold, the farming, land, and household assets they had owned. Since my study included farmers selling a variety of crops to supermarkets and measured how their assets, and supermarket relationships, changed in time, I was able to more rigorously address how these markets affected small farmers. The project was part of a collaboration between researchers Michigan State University, Cornell University, and the Nitlapan Institute in Managua.

Results

Farmer participation

Farmers located close to the primary road network and Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, where the major sorting and packing facility is located, and with conditions that allow them to farm year round were much more likely to be suppliers. Remarkably, this effect was much stronger than other farmer characteristics such as existing farm capital or experience.

Farmer welfare

Suppliers do benefit from selling their produce to supermarkets. The assets of farmers that sold to supermarkets for at least one year between 2000 and 2008 were 16% higher than for farmers that did not sell to supermarkets.

One way to think of income is as a flow of financial resources based, in part, on a farmer’s assets. By statistically relating a change in assets to a change in income I find that a 16% increase in assets corresponds to an average increase in annual household income of about $200 — or 15% of the average 2007 income for the farmers I studied.

Our previous work discovered that supermarkets don’t pay farmers a higher mean price than traditional markets but they do offer a more stable price. This analysis suggests a reason that household assets – and thus income — increase among farmers who sell to supermarkets; shielded from price fluctuations in the traditional markets by the supermarket contract, farmers invest in agriculture, in some cases moving to year-round cultivation. Farmers finance these investments through higher and more stable incomes and new credit sources. Income increases are attributable not to higher average prices but likely to increased production quantities.

NGOs

NGOs have played an important role in small farmer access to supermarket supply chains all over the world. In Nicaragua, a USAID program funded NGOs to help small farmers sell to supermarkets. These NGOs established farmers’ cooperatives and provided technical assistance, contract negotiation, and financing. Do NGOs change farmer selection or outcomes? Do they choose farmers with less wealth or experience? Or do farmers working with NGOs benefit in a special way from supermarkets because of the services NGOs provide?

We find, on average, that NGO-assisted farmers start with similar productive assets and land as those who sell to supermarkets without NGO assistance. Nor do we find a special effect on the assets of NGO-assisted farmers. However, we do find that NGOs play a critical role in keeping farmers with little previous experience in vegetable production in the supply chain. Low-experience farmers who are not assisted by NGOs are more likely to drop out of the supply chain than those assisted by NGOs.

Conclusions

These findings offer grounds for optimism and also a measure of caution with respect to the effects of supermarkets operating in developing countries. Supermarket contracts improve farmer welfare, and the improvements are detectable in farmers’ assets. However, since being close to roads and having the ability to farm year round is so critical to inclusion in the supply chain, not all farmers will be afforded these opportunities. Moreover, because these trends are still nascent in Nicaragua and in many other parts of the developing world, it remains to be seen what the broader effects will be for the agricultural sector and development. For example, as NGOs invest in preparing more small farmers to supply supermarkets, the gains to farmers from joining supply chains may be lost to increased competition. Our results in Nicaragua suggest that, given the small number of supplier farmers, changes in rural poverty related to supermarket expansion will be modest, but how will these supply chains, and the benefits they represent for farmers, change over time? I am currently a part of a team studying Walmart supply chains in China, which will interrogate these questions on a much larger scale in the context of a global and rapidly expanding economy.

Hope Michelson is a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in the Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment program. She completed her doctoral research in the Economics of Development in 2010 at Cornell University’s Department of Applied Economics. She is the author of “Small Farmers, NGOs, and a Walmart World: Welfare Effects of Supermarkets Operating in Nicaragua” in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, which is available to read for free for a limited time.

The American Journal of Agricultural Economics provides a forum for creative and scholarly work on the economics of agriculture and food, natural resources and the environment, and rural and community development throughout the world.

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Image credits: All images property of Hope Michelson. Do not reproduce without permission.

The post What happens when Walmart comes to Nicaragua? appeared first on OUPblog.

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THE LINE UP II - a short playette for a short encounter
By Eleanor Tylbor


SCENE: Supermarket. 8-items-or-less line, where three people are waiting to check out items. A female with a shopping cart attempts to go through

FEMALE
Um - excuse me?

Male in front appears not to hear her so she speaks a little louder

FEMALE
Excuse me! I'd like to pass?

Male glances at her, then quickly away

FEMALE attempts to go by but is unable, due to the man blocking her

FEMALE
The aisle is wide and I'm thin, but not enough to squeeze by. If you don't mind - could you move to the side?

the other two customers gladly move against the counter to allow the shopping cart & female to pass. Male mumbles something unintelliglble, pointing to the door

FEMALE
Look - I had to pee. Okay? I parked my shopping cart outside the door and now I have to get through here to shop. So if you'll step aside...

MALE
Go out and around!

FEMALE
Pardon? You expect me to take my cart, go outside and re-enter when all you have to do is move towards the side, which will take a mere 10 seconds? Not!

the two shoppers move against the counter, again to allow the cart to pass

FEMALE
I don't believe this!

MAN STANDING AT COUNTER NEARBY
Me neither! I've been watching the guy. Misery!

FEMALE
Are you going to let me by or not?

MAN stands defiantly in middle of checkout aisle

FEMALE stands leaning on shopping cart, glaring at man who up until this point has been taking his time packing his things in bags.

FEMALE
(as MAN moves by her)
You are just too kind and what a gentleman! I'll make sure to remember your face in case you want the same courtesy.

MAN STANDING NEARBY AT COUNTER
Oh he's a real nice guy, alright!

As MALE passes, FEMALE shopper moves her shopping cart forward and somehow rolls a wheel over his foot

FEMALE
Oh no! How clumsy of me! Just one foot, though. You still have another! And now to go shop for food...

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