Cargill: The Worst Company in the World
stories.mightyearth.org
stories.mightyearth.org
Well, yes, but that’s really “if voters and customers are happy” isn’t it? No corporations exist in a vacuum. It’s like Nike making shoes in sweatshops, people moan but buy them anyway. Voters could sort it easily by imposing punitive tariffs on any country that doesn’t comply with US labor and environmental laws.
> People complained and, at least according to what I read, not only did Nike change but they lobbied for legislation to force their competitors to change as well.
They realized their sales would drop unless they started spending more on manufacturing costs - which would decrease profit. Solution? Make all your competitors spend more too. That way we all make less profit, instead of me making less and everyone else taking over the market with their higher margins.
etc...
I mean I have a lot of values - I buy small label organics and that does a lot, but sometimes I just want to buy cheetos- I think I would think twice if I knew my enemies were benefitting.
Honestly I thought that was one of the purposes of something like G-Glass.
Anyway - but yeah, these companies exist because even if we know they are bad - we have no way of knowing what we are buying that is making them stay in power.
Money is our voting power - and unlike presidential elections, we generally have no idea what we're voting for.
---
Edit: It seems like the aforementioned https://www.buycott.com is essentially this? It's always nice to see an idea completed with no work!
That said, the idea that you can enact change by making "good consumer choices" is probably one of neo-liberalisms greatest, most insidious triumphs. It subverts democratic ideals to make us feel like we have power, while diverting our energy away from pushing for the kinds of systemic changes necessary for meaningful impact on big problem (e.g. putting the responsibility for reduction of plastic pollution on consumers, rather than on manufacturers via legislation).
Oh it's worse than that. Go to your favorite restaurant (or any restaurant really) and ask if they use kosher salt. If they answer in the affirmative, ask which brand they use. Dollars to donuts it's Diamond brand.
Guess who owns Diamond?
There is a tradeoff between producing wealth, and trashing your environment, and I don't judge too harshly the people who want to worry about carcinogens later, once they've got enough to eat that they won't starve to death. But that tradeoff used to happen within each country. When it was poor, the production was low, and as their ability to wreck their environment scaled up, so did their wealth to afford not to.
Only globalization allows companies like this to descend with 1st World money on places with 3rd world EHS rules. Cargill and its ilk exist, because we changed the rules to make it easier for them to do this.
In some alternate universe we could have free trade laws that enshrined environmental, labor, and other protections into law to benefit all. Instead we have laws that are silent (or with what we almost had under TPP toothless) on protections for anything other than corporations.
Except I believe the lack of rules, and the specific anti-regulatory pressures of modern neoliberal economic rationalists are one of the underlying axioms of globalization as implemented: Its not a coincidence, it was designed into the DNA.
But then the banana would probably become a luxury product and people vote with their wallets. Some countries that rely on this would be gutted and lose a lot of the income making their lives even worse. And it still wouldn't change anything that happens at home and is legal regardless of globalization (cut down a forest to make room for cattle? Lobby says yes).
The fact that it happens elsewhere just helps put people's minds at ease. Everybody can now have plausible deniability. But it could happen one town over, if it doesn't affect them directly most will still vote with the wallet. Some can't afford not to.
It's not globalization that does this, it's that people want cheap. And if globalization goes away tomorrow they will just find new ways, someone will always have to pay the price so all the rest don't have to. A poor town? An Indian reservation? Some wildlands? Someone will have to "take one for the team" whether it's at home or on the other side of the world.
Trade between Canada and the US left both countries better off. Largely because we have similar standard of living so neither country was being exploited.
If lawmakers did a better job putting in safeguards into trade laws then globalization wouldn’t be a synonym for exploitation.
I do agree with your point that under current political realities nothing is likely to change. I’m simply hopeful that if enough people become aware of this then policy will eventually shift—rather than respond with a knee jerk cancel all trade reaction that we see today.
The end state is the end of nation states, and especially competitive nation state economies. Not only would this create a multi-trillion dollar peace dividend which could be spent on original R&D and social investment of all kinds, it would also create a massive wealth equalisation, end many of the more obvious and pointless kinds of wealth speculation, and create a global wealth boom, as location became much less important than talent and imagination.
Changed how? Globalization took off 500 years ago and the rules seem to have changed for the better during that time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization
It could be solved by making transitive EHS rules. I.e. rules that require the source also applying these rules. This is still some kind of rarity but they do exist. For instance for years it has been very difficult/impossible to import US meat into the EU because of that. (Mostly because of different antibiotics usage AFAIK.) To some degree such rules also exist in other industries. For example it makes little sense to import a cheaply produced car from a non-EU/non-US vendor into the EU (or probably US) because it won't match the safety regulations and would at least have to go through an expensive individual (re-)certification process, and might even need customizations for that. Of course nobody does this and people buy a cheap FIAT or VW instead.
Globalization is really nice I think because it connects countries and people through economy and thus also fostering peace. ;) It could become even much nicer by adapting regulations in the destination markets. Custom tariffs and local subsidies are another way to solve this but those are obviously much less fine-grained (25% on everything :)) and come from a time when there was no globalization. In fact the high EU subsidies on agricultural products still seem to be the reason that impede African countries to export agricultural products into the EU. On the other hand the African market is flooded with subsidised EU produce, making it hard to sell products for small farmers.
Probably markets could be far less distorted if the regulations in the industry nations would be modernized... I'm not in favour of any form of turbo capitalism but free markets cannot really be blamed for this because we don't have them anyways.
But, to your main point, most 3rd world countries don't have the resources to enforce or abide by 1st World EHS rules. That's understandable; we didn't have them in the 1st world when we were at those income levels, either. Plus, most of the trade between the 1st and 3rd worlds exists primarily in order to get lower costs, and most of those lower costs are due to the lack of EHS rules; if you eliminate the EHS arbitrage, you eliminate most of the trade. Which is fine by me, but just eliminating the trade directly is much more plausible than somehow forcing 3rd world countries to spend their money on 1st world levels of government regulatory apparatus.
There's a great book "Merchants of Grain" written in the 70s about the secretive foods megabusinesses. It's arguably gotten worse since then. They make oil companies look like public servants.
Food is worse as policy seeks to stabilize prices.
http://www.mightyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/Mighty-Earth-R...
This piece did inadvertently introduce me to Shorthand, which tells me that "the world's most successful digital storytelling teams" are using it to "create simply beautiful stories using" Shorthand's "beautifully simple" story editor. I can only wonder how much more successful those teams could be if they would beautifully, simply stop.
If it sucks on mobile, so what? Everything sucks on mobile.
I have now had a chance to see it in a mobile browser though, and yeah, it is pretty bad. Still, the desktop site is much better, as usual.
It performs well enough on my connection, because it's pretty good about playing "load as you go." But it's loading a lot of stuff. By the time I scrolled to the end and read through the entire timeline, this "web page" had loaded over 52M of data.
Speaking of scrolling, I had to scroll both down and to the side at various points to accomodate that "clever" timeline thing. I don't think this sort of approach is particularly user-friendly. It's even worse on mobile.
Mobile! As noted, this site doesn't do well on mobile, and it's not doing badly on mobile in a "Well, all sites are bad on mobile, [shrug emoji]" fashion. It's very clear that the site is trying to demonstrate responsive design: it's not "broken because tiny screen," it's "unpleasant experience because poor design choices." Former Congressman Henry A. Waxman is a lovely fellow, but I don't actually need his image in a partially-transparent overlay taking up nearly half the screen of my iPhone XR when I'm reading his forward. The timeline display is even more annoying on the phone, as it starts with a non-modal "swipe to navigate, OK?" demand. If you get past that, scrolling gets janky, until you move past and get another fixed image which only takes up a third of your screen this time. So yay.
Actually, I'd argue scrolling is kind of janky even on the desktop, in no small part because it's doing all this fancy "here's a picture scrolling up with the text! now it's fixed! now it's scrolling!" Is it pretty? I guess. Would it be less pretty if the images were just, you know, images on the side of the text? Not really, and if you just let a web browser scroll a page without this kind of fluffery, it scrolls really well! Scrolling turns out to be a solved problem! Also, does the picture of Former Congressman Henry A. Waxman need to be that big on the desktop? No. No, Mr. Waxman, it does not.
Last but not least: you know how I mentioned the web page was over 52M of data? The PDF with the same data is only a hair over 36M. It doesn't have a cute scrolling timeline in it, but it does have footnotes. Which the Shorthand web version doesn't. The web version has footnote numbers, but they don't go anywhere -- no links, no popovers.. For a report that has 61 footnotes, this is actually a pretty big fail.
So that's my issue with Shorthand. Thanks for asking!
I have to disagree on the scrolling behavior. If you think of the goal as just trying to reproduce static printed content, then sure, scrolling is a "solved problem". But this presentation method is actually a meaningful improvement. Photos for an article are probably the least useful example, but imagine reading a technical article, with diagrams that you want to reference multiple times while scrolling through the text. Or a code tutorial, with code blocks on the right and extensive documentation on the left.
This behavior can probably be achieved with 10 lines of JS and CSS, almost certainly not the case here. But despite the ostensible problems with this implementation, the idea is good, and I'd be happy to see this more often. As long as it's performant, responsive, not full of tracking nonsense, etc.
Not if you put a bit of thought into your web design, it doesn’t.
Very distracting, and I skipped past the foreword because of it.
On the contrary, there are strong philosophical arguments that selling meat and eggs, as Cargill does, is 'inherently' immoral.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-animal/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4i0iqx/wh...
As a Minnesotan, I was wondering how long it would take before someone would notice them and shift their attention from Koch, but it had to happen at some point.
I'm sure one can argue with the piece's conclusions -- Cargill almost certainly will! -- but your summation doesn't seem to be supported by even a cursory reading of the report. The environmental advocacy group that put this report out is not making the case that Cargill needs to have an IPO.
Cargill's business practices are supplying economic growth that is dwarfed by the externalities that are being accrued.