by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
This picture of the MV Ever Given embedded in the banks of the Suez Canal shows exactly what is wrong with our trade today and how close the current system is to the brink of collapse.
As an example there was a story the other day on the BBRC Radio 4 about a wood merchant who has some wood flooring on board of that ship. The flooring is French Oak which was shipped all the way to China where it was turned into veneer and then glued onto plywood tongue and grooved to become laminate flooring.
The same as, and not just the UK, send, or used to sen, our recyclable plastic to China to be turned into pellets to be re-imported into our respective countries to have plastic products made from or import plastic products made in China from those plastic bottles. We keep sending tulips to Holland, so to speak, each and every time instead of doing the things at home.
In addition to that the story with Covid-19, aka SARS-Cov-2, and it new variants is threatening, so we are told, imports into the UK, for instance, from the European continent as Britain may be putting a number of EU countries on the “red list” with regards to the infections. The haulier associations say that any measures imposed such as testing and quarantine could discourage truckers coming to the UK and thus could threaten supplies of foods and other goods.
As far as Britain is concerned, having left the EU, the time would be right to reconsider home production of many things and also and especially improving the situation of farming by returning to smaller general farms rather than the huge farms and for farmers, as well as fishermen, instead on thinking first and foremost about export to actually think about feeding the nation.
The same goes for production and ownership of companies. Time to bring things back “in house”, so to speak, and to make things again in the country rather than to be relying almost wholly on imports from China and other such places where labor is cheap and environmental laws lax and workers' rights almost non-existent. But, hey, it is cheap and everyone wants things cheap and the corporations want cheap labor so as to reap high profits.
The corporations do not care that, for instance, in the extraction of both the materials from which the batteries for our cellphones and electric vehicles are made and the production of cacao for chocolate child slaves are being used. As long as whatever is being produced can be produced cheaply is all that counts for them.
What to do? Towards autonomy, zero waste, creating a network with the neighborhood, training to acquire the old knowledge and so on. Back to basics, more or less literally.
One of the most essential things that leads to autonomy is to make your vegetable garden, and it does not always need a great deal of space. Grow up instead. The other is to learn to make things for yourself and to learn to and be able to repair things.
Instead of relying on technology to solve the problems we might do well to look at other ways, some not so complicated ones.
© 2021