George Monbiot (Guardian Utd): The fruits of poverty

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Tuesday March 16
]
The fruits of poverty
The wealth of supermarkets is built on monopoly, exploitation and restriction of choice
By George Monbiot

Every year the list is the same, but every year it still comes as a shock. Of the 10 richest people on Earth, five of them have the same surname. It's not Gates, or Murdoch, or Rockefeller, but Walton. They are the heirs and trustees of the supermarket chain Wal-Mart. And between them they are worth $100bn.
Considering how the media fawns on the ultra rich, we hear remarkably little about them. Perhaps this is because their position is rather embarrassing. The company that enriches them trades on the idea that it is the friend of the common man and woman, distributing rather than concentrating wealth.
Over the past 20 years, two world-shaking social transformations have taken place. The first, the effective collapse of the proletariat as a political force, has been well documented. The second, the disappearance of the petty bourgeoisie as an economic force, rather less so. The near-elimination of the small businesses supplying and running the retail trade is in some ways as consequential as the withering of organised labour in heavy industry and the coal mines. The global monopolisation of the sector has destroyed the livelihoods of tens of millions of small proprietors and their employees. But, because this workforce was dispersed, the effects are rather harder to see.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to buy some fruit trees. I travelled to the world's most unprepossessing centre of biodiversity: Langley, on the outskirts of Slough. In the first half of the 20th century, most of London's fruit and vegetables were grown round there. The farms were supplied by specialist nurseries, which ensured that Britain possessed a wider variety of temperate fruit trees than any other nation. Two weeks ago, only one of these nurseries was left. In the 1940s, JC Allgrove's kept a thousand varieties of apple tree. It is still listed in the directories as one of Britain's great growers. But I was among its last customers.

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[dweller]

1. Don't it always seem to go

you don't know what you've got till it's gone, they've paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.

Hey hey farmer put away the DDT, give me spots on the apples but leave the birds and bees, please....

prophetic,
dp