Supermarkets

I'm often asked why I hate supermarkets with their economy, variety and convenience. The answer is that these things are an illusion.

Is it really variety you are offered behind the plastic packaging, or homogeneity? Consider that two-thirds of UK farmers say supermarket demands for conformity have led them to give up on otherwise productive varieties of fruit. So, for example, 94 per cent of eating pears grown in the UK consist of just three varieties. Yet there are 550 varieties of pears native to Britain. To achieve cosmetically perfect fruit cheaply, bucketloads of pesticides and fertilisers are necessary. Any part of the crop that fails to meet these pointless standards is wasted. Out-of-season Coxes are transported 14,000 miles from New Zealand during our growing season, while our own apples lie rotting on the ground.

But beyond issues of diversity, the cost is enormous. Each year a typical UK family of four generates 4.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide from their house, 4.4 tonnes from their car and 8 tonnes from the production, processing and packaging of the food they eat. Supermarket demands for imports of fresh food mean UK airfreight is growing at around 7 per cent a year. Add it all up and a Sunday lunch bought at a supermarket could have travelled more than 26,000 miles.

For the environment then, supermarkets are bad news. But still, we are told, they are merely accommodating consumer demand for cheap food. That too is an illusion. There's nothing cheap about supermarket produce. The packaging alone costs the average household £470 a year - almost a sixth of their food expenditure. And if supermarkets are good at anything, they're expert at getting people to buy more than they need. In 2001 Tesco raised its prices in the weeks before it began a public price-cutting campaign. Supermarkets use "loss leaders", kept at an artificially low price to entice customers, yet other products can often be found more cheaply in local, independent shops. Friends of the Earth found that organic food in farmers' markets is 33-37 per cent cheaper than the supermarket equivalent.

Even where people are paying less for produce in a supermarket than they would at a farmers' market for instance, many consumers are not aware that they have already paid for that produce through their taxes. The supermarket regime depends on all kinds of hidden and less hidden subsidies, without which it would not be nearly as economic as it currently is. For one thing, intensive agriculture itself, the lynchpin of supermarket trade, is propped up with generous subsidies. Professor Jules Pretty has calculated that the taxpayer forks out £2.4 billion each year to cover the indirect costs associated with intensive farming in Britain. Beyond that, there is the infrastructure that enables Safeway's, for example, to send all its dairy produce through a single distribution point in Warwickshire. Again, it is the taxpayer who stumps up for roads.

But the greatest cost that supermarkets don't tell us about is the cost to the community. Eight local independent stores closed each day between 1986 and 1996. More than 600 local chemists will close over the next five years as supermarkets undermine their business. By incorporating newsagents, pharmacies and dry-cleaners as well as music, clothes and petrol retailers, £14.5 billion was spent on non-food items in supermarkets in 2000.

Ironically, given the Government's fondness for the giant retailers, some of the best research into the negative effects of supermarkets was conducted by the same Government in 1998. Its unambiguous conclusion was that supermarkets destroy jobs, shops, rural livelihoods and local economies.

This is the reality that confronts us when we walk down our high street - but what is happening to farmers is worse still. Every week 1,000 farmers and farm workers leave the land. Yet in 2001 Tesco and Sainsbury's profits were greater than the income of every farmer in the UK. We aren't told when we buy a pint of milk for 35 pence that the farmer is paid only 9 pence to produce it. The tragedy is that farmers, who are the first to be crushed beneath the feet of the supermarkets, cannot complain. With nearly 70 per cent of all food being sold through just four retailers, a farmer, no matter how big their farm, has zero bargaining power and can be deleted with minimal effort.

Fortunately, consumers are waking up to the ugly truth about supermarkets and there is the beginning of a return to a local food economy. The UK went from having no farmers' markets at all in the mid-1990s to more than 270 at the end of the decade. At one, in Winchester, it was found that local shops reported 30 per cent greater takings on days when the market was open for business.

It is time for us all to disabuse ourselves of the notion that the supermarket is our friend. Farmers know only too well what the supermarkets' notion of loyalty is. It's time we all cut up our loyalty cards.

Zac Goldsmith is Editor of The Ecologist.

Friends of the Earth's briefing Super markets or corporate bullies can be downloaded free from www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/super_markets_corporate_bullies.pdf, or get a copy by calling Freephone 0808 800 1111.

For what farmers really think about supermarkets, see www.farm.org.uk.