_Noise_Conspiracy.jpg "The (International) Noise Conspiracy - 002-09-17: 9:30 Club, Washington D.C., USA")
Mange-Tout
November 16th, 2005 at 22:11
University angered me up today. Not in a bad way, either- I was angered up because I was enthusiastic about the course.
Hmm… Maybe it was bad in a way? I’ll explain why.
In my lecture (I won’t be more specific, I only had one!), we watched a video that’s a few years old now, about Tesco and the mange-tout growers in Zimbabwe. It was made before the world kicked up a fuss about Mugabe being a bit shit, but it was still horrible.
Incidentally, I also saw it during economics and business back in the days when I used to go to school, and it angered me up then, too.
The gist of it was that there’s this farm in Zimbabwe that grow it- not wanting to get into race issues, but the supervisor was a black guy, and the farm itself was owned by white guy with a British accent. He looked like what you’d imagine the people who colonised Zimbabwe 200 years ago looked like- he just needed one of those ivory-poacher hats to complete the “upper-middle-class twunt” look.
After a standard documentary vox-pop about “Do you know where Zimbabwe is?”… and the standard “Isn’t it the capital of Africa?” type responses, it went on to tell the story.
Tesco had sent out one of their buyers to check the farm- the bastard they sent out to check on them wasn’t happy with anything. He was complaining about a sprinkler not sprinkling enough water, how some of the mange-tout didn’t look perfect. That sort of thing. The reason I call him a “bastard” because he was saying how he wanted the poor farmers to be scared of the inspection, and he wanted them to constantly strive to do better. All this when presumably their standard of living ain’t great.
When this guy arrived at the farm, the buyer and his team were treated like Gods. It was sickening. Hundreds of children and employees were singing crudely written songs about Tesco being ace and being their friend. And they sat there enjoying it. The locals had bought him his team presents, and the narrator revealed that these poor farmers had in fact paid for Tesco, a company turning over billions of pounds a year, to fly out to them. All this because the contract Tesco has is what determines whether they live in great or only moderate poverty. Then more songs.
Whilst this was bad enough to watch, the documentary makers offset this god-like worship of our corporate overlords with something else.
They’d found the most sickeningly middle class, Daily Mail reading, awful woman who was having a dinner party. With some mange-tout being served, of course. She described how she was inviting round some equally middle class twunts, who work for a big insurer and something in financial services.
Cut to the dinner party in progress. I didn’t know you could fit so many cunts around one table.
I apologise for the strong language, but it’s appropiate.
They started discussing “issues”. More specifically, in keeping with the documentary, farming and the third world, and that. “They’re not advanced enough to drive cars”, “They’re not intelligent enough to use our technology”, “exploitation is vital and natural”, “I’m sure they’re much happier than we are because they’ve never had what we’ve got, so are probably happy in their mud hut”.
Cut to the farm’s “caterpillar examiner” explaining how she tried to kill herself.
It ended up saying that the growers earn a penny for every [amount] of mange-tout they pick- on which Tesco would make something like a 46p profit, and the exporter 30p ish.
It was sickening. Sickening that multinationals have such power over these people and are exploiting them so much. Mike made a good point: “It’s like slavery never ended”.
I was so sick I had a Coke.
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