i.want.world |
my project & life in vienna |
This video deftly skewers the food industry's current fixations, including This-Is-Why-You're-Fat-grade hamburgers, fancy TV dinners, and junk food masquerading as wholesome:
We take the finest ingredients and put them in a bowl with salt and butter.
And "hide your salad" describes my salad dressing technique perfectly...it ends up more like ranch soup, really.
Nestlé has just announced that KitKat – Britain's biggest-selling chocolate bar – will carry the Fairtrade logo from next month. But how much do consumers really know about the Fairtrade movement? Is it, as some say, an essential safety net that helps poor farmers earn a better living or, as others say, an example of western feel-good tokenism that holds back modernisation and entrenches agrarian poverty?
We might think of sub-Saharan subsistence economies when we think of Fairtrade, but the biggest recipient of Fairtrade subsidy is actually Mexico. Mexico is the biggest producer of Fairtrade coffee with about 23% market share. Indeed, as of 2002, 181 of the 300 Fairtrade coffee producers were located in South America and the Caribbean. As Marc Sidwell points out, while Mexico has 51 Fairtrade producers, Burundi has none, Ethiopia four and Rwanda just 10 – meaning that "Fairtrade pays to support relatively wealthy Mexican coffee farmers at the expense of poorer nations".
The article additionally points out:
Another criticism is over institutional inefficiencies. The vast majority of the money from Fairtrade sales remains in the west – with only about 5% of the Fairtrade sale price actually making it back to the farmers. As Philip Oppenheim says, "any intelligent person will ask why I should pay 80p more for my bananas when only 5p will end up with the producer". Fundamental to the failure of wealth transfer are issues such as the fact that while 90% of the world's cocoa is produced in the developing world, only 4% of the chocolate is produced there. Developing countries remain locked in the primary sector commodities market, while the west cashes in on their value-added conversion.
"The first rule of BS is to expect it... If you want to detect BS, you have to swallow some cynicism and add some internal doubt to everything you hear... The first detection tool is a question: How do you know what you know?"
Two years ago today became the day when every trip I took to the grocery store started to be an agonizing, tormenting episode. That day, I came relentlessly to the conclusion that the organic world was entirely filled with bullshit, lies and irrefutable illusions. The story begun right at the moment I heard of this fad. As soon as that happened, I knew I had to question it. It amounted to feel like I was surrounded with friends and acquaintances who were all in a state of helplessness and had acquired a sort of blind faith in the Utopian idea of the mass marketed promises of organic goods.
The gullibility and callowness of the quite numerous shoppers of 'organic' food started to inflect a sort of nauseating drama in my thoughts that I realized I really needed to do something against that fact and inform my friends of this fantastic sham. An empiricist at heart, what had started out to be a skeptical inquiry became a hobby then pure obsession which ultimately lead to Diplomatic Goods; the world's first open standard for organic goods. An endeavour which we hope will fulfil the expectations of this deficient industry and address the misfortunes of the well intended organic idea.
While reading a study commissioned by the EU with the objective of determining "to what extent the European standardization system in its present form can guarantee appropriate access to all interested parties" along with accompanying recommendations for "avenues of exploration", I came across this paragraph:
"The participation of SMEs and societal stakeholders can be hampered by a lack of resources and technical expertise. This can, in turn, affect the consensus reaching process and therefore cause delays in standards development. The Commission is therefore providing financial support to European organizations and associations representing SMEs and societal stakeholder interests."
The Commission pays these guys in order to gain 'consensus' and the 'participation' of stakeholders - so called 'private organizations' - during the standardization process. I really would like to know, how does that work?
France will lose its familiar green Agriculture Biologique (AB) label next year. New rules came into effect on Jan 1, 2009 aimed at harmonizing standards among the 27 European Union nations on organic agriculture. While the text seeks to simplify and impose common standards, the net effect for countries like France is to considerably lower the barrier for organic agriculture. According to a poll conducted by the CSA/Agence Bio in 2008, 85 percent of French people know the AB label and use it as a reference for consumer decisions.
Under the EU law, national labels will disappear in July 2010 to be replaced by a mandatory European logo, which is currently the object of a contest open to EU art or design students.
On the positive side, new products like wine, plants, seeds, yeast and aquaculture will be classified under the new label. The new legislation upholds the fundamental principles of organic agriculture: ie a ban on the use of chemical pesticides, respect for animal welfare, a ban on the deliberate introduction of GM crops.
However, a doorway has been opened to accidental GM contamination from neighbouring fields, on the condition that the traces of GM crops are less than 0.9 % of the total weight of the product. Furthermore, contrary to previous French legislation, pig and poultry farmers no longer have to produce at least 40 percent of their animal feed on site. Finally, the new legislation has fewer restrictions on antibiotic treatments (three annual treatments are now permitted. Poultry can now be sold at 70 days compared with the former minimum of 81 days and anti-parasite treatments are now allowed.
French organic producers, for their part, intend to roll out their own, more demanding set of criteria starting from January 2010 in order to maintain their high standards. Standards aside, it is worth noting that France – Europe’s top pesticide user – is a big laggard when it comes to organic agriculture in terms of surface area planted. Only 2 percent of land in France is farmed organically, compared with the European average of 4-5 percent. Best performers among the 27 are Austria (13 percent), Estonia, Latvia and Italy (9 percent) and Greece (8 percent).
The above artifact, a "Reputation Statement of Account," was designed by Jason Tester, a researcher and a designer at Institute for the Future, as a part of the 2004 Ten Year Forecast.
A recent article in MIT Sloan Review has posed the question whether one's firm should embrace it or not.
What, though, I admired most about the post was that the authors, Bougreau and Lakhani, addressed the topic of business models.
What's the Business Model?
Whether a company's product is a computer operating system, a social network, a motorcycle, a kitchen appliance or even a board game, the decision to open it to external innovation means that the product will be transformed into a platform. And to generate revenues from that platform, executives need to think about the nature of the accompanying business model.
I could not have said it any better. This is a question that is rarely neither confronted nor thought of by the recent Social Media scene.
I think we all do agree that there is no question that leading firms undoubtedly do adopt some form of open innovation, the article tackled however how to best position oneself in deciding which type of open innovation to select, whether it be " a collaborative community or a competitive market"
The answer however "... depends on three crucial issues," the article concluded.
Illustration: briantmurphy
Although Chris Anderson may have 'mistakenly' referenced a few Wikipedia paragraphs without any citation, his argument of Free in his new book is still up for heavy debates and viraling across the web. My observation however has led me to a sort of a perplexed state in regard to Bruce Nussbaum of BW's coverage of the tiff between Godin and Gladwell's refute of Anderson's thesis.
Nussbaum says in agreement with Godin:
"I agree. That's always been at the core of capitalism-unique things or services we crave and pay for become over time commodities and cheap (almost free) and are replaced by new stuff, which we are willing to pay lots for."
His previous post however in regard to his anecdotal account of boomers loving their Kindle ended with an overly contrary support of Anderson's exact prediction and argument that "Tech is too cheap to meter..." What I do gather from Anderson's argument is that digital goods in essence will undoubtedly have a hard time at fetching a price.
Excuse me Gladwell, but a pill is not a digital good. It may be intellectual property, but its far from ones and zeros.
Illustration: Rodrigo Corral
Photo credit: Made-By
A late-morning tweet by @ecofashionista reminded me that it's been three years since we last checked in on Made-By, an independent, Amsterdam-based consumer label that encourages sustainable and ethical practices in the fashion industry through production-chain transparency. Made-By hits the big leagues Since 2005, the number of brands associated with Made-By has mushroomed from four to almost 30, including bold-face name.
via TreeHugger on 5/25/09
