Multinationals always the winners
8 January 2001
Multinationals always the winners
ONE thing “freeing-up our markets has shown is how little, if anything, this tends to help those who are targeted – but it still damages our own interests.
The big winners are always the multinational corporations
who wade in to expolit cheap labour and can freely dissappear if the going gets tough.
The truth with sugar-cane is that traditional growing
countries have lost out to big corporations growing on a large scale (e.g in the Pacific), just as the West Indies cannot compete with the likes of United Brands in Costa Rica in marketing bananas.
Please do not forget that very real threat exists here paricularly to the UK, in that we have substanitally more facilities to refine cane sugar than our EU counterparts.
If “Everything But Arms” goes ahead, our beet industry will be the first to suffer, and we also have the government that is least likely to care.
John Thomas, Llanmaes, Glamorgan
john.thomas@farmline.com