Blair ignores farmers innovation
16 February 2001
Blair ignores farmers innovation
DISCUSSION of Brazilian corned beef (Brazilian beef, FWi Open Forum) jogged my memory of an idea a local farmer came up with not so long
ago.
He suggested that farm leaders press the UK government to use the Overseas Disaster Aid Fund to produce a supply british corned beef for food aid purposes – after all, a community suffering devastation needs clean water and food to avoid further misery.
As many of us know, this fund is routinely abused by multinationals to dump unsold, unneeded and unwanted “healthcare” products in poor countries around the world.
The farmers plan also involved a British Steel plant for the canning and,, of course, a British slaughterhouse, thus using the whole spectrum of British industry.
He was told that the plan had no chance and some rightly or wrongly described it as crackpot.
Now that the slaughterhouse in question has closed and the steel plant in question is also to close (and a number of farmers have gone out of business, too), was it really such a crackpot idea after all?
Perhaps Im a cynic, but I believe that if the plan had originated from industry and not from a farmer, the labour government may have taken it more seriously.
There again, the governments inaction with the steel industry until it was patently too late, may show that they like steel workers nearly as little as they like farmers!