"Every year the list is the same, but every year it still comes as a shock. Of the 10 richest people on the Earth, five of them have the same surname. It’s not Gates, or Murdoch, or Rockefeller, but Walton. They are the heirs and trustees of the supermarket chain Wal-Mart. And between them they are worth $100 billion. Considering how the media fawns on the ultra-rich, we hear remarkably little about them. Perhaps this is because their position is rather embarrassing. The company that enriches them trades on the idea that it is the friend of the common man and woman, distributing rather than concentrating wealth.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to buy some fruit trees. I travelled to the world’s most unprepossessing center of biodiversity: Langley, on the outskirts of Slough. In the first half of the 20th century, most were supplied by specialist nurseries, which ensured that Britain possessed a wider variety of temperate fruit trees than any other nation. Two weeks ago, only one of these nurseries was left. In the 1940s, JC Allgrove’s kept a thousand varieties of apple trees. It is still listed in the directories as one of Britain’s great growers. But I was among its last customers.
Since the owner died two years ago, the business has been run by a volunteer, Nick Houston. “There are bits of ground here where no one’s been for 20 years,” he told me. Recently, scrabbling beneath the ivy that now covers the orchards, he found an apple he had never seen before. It was a Buamann’s Reinett: the horticultural equivalent of a Faberge egg. “But I had no idea which bloody tree it had fallen off.” Somewhere in the nursery there should be two varieties – King Harry and St Augustine’s Orange – that even the national fruit collection doesn’t possess, but he hasn’t been able to find them yet. The land is to be sold. Nick will salvage what he can and run a business of his own, under the old name, to try to keep the original breeds growing.
He gave a one-word answer when I asked him what had happened to the business. “Supermarkets.” Today the apples they buy are landing three miles from JC Allgrove’s. Heathrow’s first runway was built on strawberry farms and orchards. From the air, you can still see derelict greenhouses and the parallel lines on the land where fruit trees once grew. Richard Cox, the man who bred the world’s favourite apples, is buried beside St Mary’s Church in Harmondsworth, which will be flattened if a third runway is built at Heathrow.
The superstores have used their buying power to force the world’s farmers to compete directly with each other.
Wal-Mart, which owns the British chain Asda, is now the biggest company on Earth. In the last financial year it took $245 billion. It is successful partly because it is one of the most ruthless employers in the western world.
In the US its sales clerks made an average of $13,861 in 2001, almost $800 below the federal poverty line for a family of three. It is reported to have told new employees how to apply for food stamps so they don’t starve to death. In November (2004), the police found hundreds of illegal immigrants working as cleaners in its stores. Some of them claimed that they were obliged to work seven nights a week, without overtime, insurance or benefits.
By forcing down the prices of the goods they buy, the superstores encourage even more repressive conditions in the companies that supply them. A recent study by Oxfam documents the systematic abuse of workers in the factories and farms that the superstores buy from. The Waltons are so rich because others are so poor.
Besides this, the destruction of our horticultural diversity looks trivial. But both are manifestations of the same problem. As the superstores capture the market, they shut down all our choices: about where we shop, what we buy, who we work for. This, of course, is what all monopolies seek to do.
Nick couldn’t find me any of the rarest varieties. He sold me an Adam’s Pearmain, a Charles Ross, a Sturmer Pippin and a Cornish Aromatic. I would have bought the names even if the trees weren’t attached to them. If they survive my clumsy handling and produce fruit, I will regard every apple they produce as a minor act of insurrection."
Originally published in the March 17, 2004 issue of The Guardian, published by Guardian Newspapers Limited.
© George Monbiot.
.
|