Happy New Year. I hope that anyone lucky enough to be in Italy over the holiday period was not badly affected by the Pineapple Strike. In case you missed it, the Italian Agriculture Minister Luca Zaia announced the Strike at a news conference on 16 December. In place of pineapples he encouraged Italians to purchase fruits produced in Italy, together with the traditional Italian Christmas products of zampone (pig's trotter stuffed with pork meat) and cotechino (pork sausage). I have an Italian friend who loves Hawaiian pizza. I couldn't help thinking of the mental anguish that the Strike would cause this Italian patriot and pineapple lover.
Having done my first blog post on the subject of consumer patriotism, it feels nostalgic to return to the same topic to kick off 2009. Minister Zaia's laid out three reasons for seasonal Italian consumer patriotism. First, pineapples are a 'symbol of everything that is not Italian'. Second, foreign producers of pineapples may use carcinogenic insecticides. Third, he was concerned about the environmental impact of shipping pineapples over long distances.
From a consumer's point of view, trade is at heart about introducing variety. In essence it is all about buying symbols of other countries. I like to buy seasonal fruits and I am a sucker for farmers' markers - but a holiday period consuming only British fruit would be a drab affair. From my point of view, being able to buy a ripe pineapple at any time of the year is one of the luxuries that quick transport and international trade offers. And it is often developing countries that are in the best position to provide these out-of-season luxuries. Italian pineapple imports were worth Î73 million in 2007. Two of the biggest exporters of pineapples are Cote D'Ivoire and The Philippines. So long as the producers there are producing safe products, I don't think that we should be discouraging consumption of their pineapples.
Plus these luxuries needn't be viewed as guilty pleasures, even taking into account the fact that they are often transported over large distances. Calculating the carbon footprint of a product is far more complicated than simply looking at the 'food miles' that a product has travelled. A study by Lincoln University looked at the carbon footprint of producing and transporting New Zealand lamb versus Welsh lamb. I don't agree with all the findings of the study - but it illustrates that how far a product has been transported often has much less impact on its overall carbon footprint than how it was produced. In fact, whether you drove or walked to the store to buy your pineapple may turn out to be a bigger factor in its overall carbon footprint than how far it travelled to the store.
Posted at 15:19 05 January 2009 by Oliver Griffiths | Comments[0]
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On a recent trip to the local bike shop I overheard another customer deliberating between two bikes - a Cannondale and another make. Now the British government doesn't endorse any particular bike brand. But I do. I love Cannondales and own two. But they're definitely pricey, as the customer in the bike shop discovered. The Cannondale was about $100 more expensive than the other, equivalent bike and he quite naturally asked why it cost more. The assistant's answer was that it was because Cannondales are made in the USA (in Pennsylania) while the other make was made in Taiwan. This isn't the reason I buy them but it got me wondering about the premium that home producers can charge over competitors from abroad for similar goods. And whether you could put together a league table comparing the different level of premium that home producers could charge in different countries.
The economist's answer is that you should just buy the best goods at the best price. End of story. That will force the competition to catch-up or get out of the business, raising standards across the board. But emotion seems to pull the other way. This phenomenon has been given the rather grand title of consumer patriotism.
A 2007 Zogby poll found that one in three Americans would be willing to pay four times as much for American-made toys over foreign substitutes (which in effect means Chinese goods, as China has over 90% of the global market in toys). Paying four times as much sounds absurd. But if true, MBA graduates must be flooding into toy manufacturing. Japanese consumers have also, famously, been willing to pay a substantial premium for Japanese rice - though in that case supposedly because of a superior level of stickiness. (Consumer patriotism - if only I had known the phrase - also dictated the choice of our family car. My father bought a succession of unreliable estate cars made by British Leyland. It didn't save British Leyland.) One of the least effective consumer patriotism initiatives was - or so I recall from law school - a Buy Irish campaign that was brought to the European Court of Justice for being in contravention of Article 85 of the EC Treaty (one of the EU's competition articles, now changed to Article 81) because it discriminated between producers in the EU. One defence put forward was the fact that sales of Irish goods had actually dropped during the campaign. So my initial international consumer patriotism league table runs: USA, Japan, UK, Ireland.
Anyway, the customer in the bike shop decided not to buy the Cannondale.
Posted at 20:49 21 September 2008 by Oliver Griffiths | Comments[2]
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