It seems Nescafé’s tagline is ‘It’s all about you”.
…but who is it really about?
Nestlé’s official policy on the global coffee trade is that “free trade” is “fair trade”, that reducing barriers to trade will mean lower prices for consumers and higher revenues for producers 1. As a result, there is only one Fair Trade Nescafé brand (Partner’s Blend), which in the UK is sold only at Tesco and Sainsbury’s 2.
But free trade can only have this effect if barriers are lowered in importing countries as well as exporting ones. If markets in the developing world are deregulated whilst import tarrifs remain in place in Europe and elsewhere, producers are placed under global market pressure without any legal or market protection.
So how much pressure are Nestlé putting on trade regulators in the developed world? They are keen to tell us how much they are doing in Africa 3, but how much are they doing in Europe and the US?
Today I’ll be forty - and hungover - it’s an odd feeling (not the hangover - the being forty), but I suppose I’ll get used to it. Here’s to the next half.
I don’t feel old, just detached from my youth, which is probably a good thing…
God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!”
“See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.”
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
I went to see Andy Goldsworthy give a lecture in Wakefield last night, it was a highly entertaining and educational hour and a half or so. He talked about his past work and his connection with the land, but in the main, his new exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park - I recommend it to everyone.
“Morpho Towers–Two Standing Spirals” is an installation that consists of two ferrofluid sculptures that moves synthetically to music. The two spiral towers stand on a large plate that hold ferrofluid. When the music starts, the magnetic field around the tower is strengthened. Spikes of ferrofluid are born from the bottom plate and move up, trembling and rotating around the edge of the iron spiral.”
