Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

Advertisement
Europe France

Let’s talk agriculture!

peter 0

In June 2008, Michel Barnier left rue de Varenne  after two years as France’s farm minister. He was outwardly at peace with the world, after two years spent steadfastly denying that he had any serious differences of opinion with President Nicolas Sarkozy. This was not altogether convincing, since Sarkozy was prone to talk up his chances of successful plans and policies long before they were anywhere near ready to be seen in public. Such stoicism in the face of  a president that spoke first and thought later does not come easily, as the Americans are learning in 2025. Barnier was trained as an administrator, graduating from the École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris (ESCP) in 1972 .

This does not mean that he is a rug to be walked on: far from it. He won a number of internal battles without comment. Some of his victories were reversed by political opponents who went over the minister’s head and persuaded the President to see things their way. People such as Xavier Beulin, head of the FNSEA, had Sarkozy’s ear and seized any opportunity to put ideas into his head. In Beulin’s case, it was personal: the farming unions had operated a system for sitting in on agriculture ministry meetings and generally making sure that the FNSEA view prevailed elsewhere in the ministry.If this sounds overstated, have a look at this post, describing the modus operandi. Barnier cleared the corridors at rue de , Varenne of unwanted loiterers, by simply re-issuing security passes to ministry staff and setting higher security standards. He also succeeded in raising the level of public debate around agriculture with a series of state-sponsored debates scheduled for 2008. There were two in Paris and a third in Brussels. There was no mistaking tone of the events, which challenged the FNSEA’s founding principles, namely to corner every centime of public funding for  agriculture. The battered steel barrel, dominates one set of conference documents, with the question of the day in big white letters: “What kinds of agriculture(s) do we want for tomorrow?

Barnier sets the scene in the opening paragraph: “There can be no doubt that the outlook for the world has changed. The abundance of nature that we have unthinkingly squandered has now given way to a weak and fragile planet, in which resources are threatened. Today, we have the results of years of work from the scientific community. We can no longer ignore them.The age of widespread scarcity has begun.” Readers will be glad to learn that unless things turn nasty, I shall make these two conference documents available for as long as possible. I have no plans to offer a translation unless a significant number  of people request one. There is no way I would put the documents through an AI system, the words are too carefully balanced to survive a bot’s blunt ignorance and I haven’t got the necessary time to make a useable translation.

There can be no discussion of how to set things back on track without an understanding of population dynamics. Barnier sketches it out like this: “The prodigious population explosion that marked the 20th century is set to continue until 2050, at least. It will impact the poor world, in the places where the hunger is already  rife and  in urban areas, where eating habits at all levels of society have been messed up.” Up until now, Barnier argues, humanity has usually been able to patch things up with technical solutions. In 2008,  there was a glimmer of recognition that the scale of the problem was greater than anyone imagined.

“Faced with rocketing food costs (in 2008), confronted by food riots, hampered by shortages of basic resources: the strategies which we used to think would solve the problem will do no such thing.

“We are faced with an equation, the like of which we have never seen before (still in 2008) (the French use “inédit” so much that it ceases to carry much weight) . “To deal with the problem, on the basis of current evidence we have to break with development models that will increase the consumption of finite resources. This is what makes the situation so urgent, since all the checks and balances that keep the planet in working order are threatened.”

 

MORE FOLLOWS LATER

crunchy numbers UK

Morrisons disposals: the end of a hot air balloon race?

peter 0

This spring, Bradford-based supermarket chain Morrisons dumped all its added value satellite profit centres, in a bid to reduce costs and consolidate its position in the English groceries market. 

The closures ensure that there can never be any question of a revival of the pipe dreams Morrison family shareholders entertained years ago. Morrisons was one of a number of retailers across Europe that monitored the twists and turns in the relations between Edouard Leclerc and the former Leclerc retail member Jean-Pierre Leroch.

Harassed and  constantly attacked bitterly by his former retail partner, Leroch established Intermarché, a retail group that owned the manufacturing capacity for 20% of its retail sales. This was successful in part due to the group’s strong roots in Britanny. The Intermarché business model was admired by many and bits of it were adopted by Swiss retailer Migros, as well as the Swiss Co-op and the Basque Eroski group.

The Morrison disposals are extensions of retail departments, such as the meat or fish counters, where higher levels of product knowledge are only retained at a price. The prospect of skilled staff moving to competitors is a bigger issue to operational management than it would ever be for strategic number crunchers. This has all the signs of a desperate attempt to throw heavy kit off a hot air balloon before it crash lands.

Switzerland

Off the back of a lorry

peter 0

Tomorrow, on Friday (September 5) Swiss cooperative Migros is marking its centenary by selling basic groceries off the back of a pick-up truck, just like its founder Gottlieb Duttweiler did 100 years ago. He loaded a fleet of five Model T Fords with six basic products: cornettes (Swiss pasta); coffee; rice; sugar; soap and blocks of refined coconut. Duttweiler got off to a good start despite the difficult economic times. The customised pick-up trucks went from one village to the next, in the French-speaking districts and uplands around Mont Blanc. To mark the occasion, this year’s centenary trucks will be carrying 100 Migros-manufactured own label products, Migros store inventories routinely run to 40,000 Stock Keeping Units (SKUs).

Switzerland has a long tradition of  integrating road transport: its PostBus network has been operational since 1906, with a number of forays into retailing. When developing a strategy for Migros, Duttweiler researched his competitors’ working practices and adopted the productive ones. It is worth noting, for instance, that although PostBus retained dedicated facilities for horses until 1962*, it ran very few horse-drawn buses. By 1925, Henry Ford’s Model T series had become the commercial motor of choice around the world, since it could be extensivly modified for local requirements. Duttweiler carried out simple and cost-effective adaptations to his fleet, which grew steadily.

If you want to join in with the celebrations in Switzerland, follow this link.

*Coincidentally, Dr Beeching began his programme of cuts to the UK railway network at around the same time, starting with stations that still had stabling.

A footnote that Betty Bossi would endorse…

Never confuse the Swiss national pasta with macaroni: that would be sacrilege! A cornette looks like an elbow joint and the shape tends to settle into a stodgy honeycomb, unless a sauce of the right viscosity is added at exactly the right moment.

PS Pasta maker Betty Bossi is the Swiss market leader.

On October 18, peter added:

The Migros Merci (“thank you”) bus is safely back in its garage after completing a round trip of eight and a half thousand kilometres, stopping at 100 places to celebrate the Swiss retailer’s centenary. Over 45,000 people turned out to buy souvenirs of the occasion — the best sellers were Migros mini baskets, croissants and cervelas, from a choice of six products.

 

asparagus bread flour ship UK

Distance and price

peter 0

The further food travels, the more it should cost. Logically, yes, but the full story may not be quite so simple. With ingredients travelling literally half way round the world, it is no simple matter to differentiate one proposition from another. Take the example of 1925 loaf of bread, in the  previous post. The starting point is 20-stone sack of flour that anyone could visualise for themselves, suppposedly costing 42 shillings and a halfpenny. There was, in those days, total silence from the millers concerning where their wheat came from, let alone what it might have cost. Since millers earn a living from making flour,  their reticence is understandable.

By creating a synthetic starting point for the journey that would put a loaf of bread on the table, millers were able to influence the British public’s notion of what bread ought to cost. The 42 shilling sack was not a hard sell, it was a working  price point for those years. However, the Linlithgow committee, to a man, refused to make any comment on the prices of wheat, wherever it might have come from. In one sense, wheat and bread pass through very different markets, yet the two are joined at the hip for some purposes, notably if supplies fail: no wheat, no flour, no bread. It is that simple.

All through the latter years of the nineteenth century, British ports were unloading grain from every corner of the known world. For most people, grain imports were a permanent fixture and, as part of the British Empire, this happy state of affairs would somehow be left continue. However, the U-boat attacks, which started in 1916, jolted Britain into protecting inbound shipments of any description. From being adventuresome and exciting, life on a long haul merchantman took on a more challenging aspect as the U-boats extended their range from the concrete bunkers at Rochefort, comfortably crossing the Bay of Biscay.

 

 

 

bread City life crunchy numbers flour food production UK economy weights and measures

The pricing of daily bread

peter 0
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Industry_during_the_First_World_War-_Flour_Mill_Q28276.jpg

This female factory hand was photographed at work in Birkenhead during September 1918. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Logistics contractors refer to it as the final mile, but many of us would settle for “delivering the goods.” It is potentially a complex stage in a product’s journey to meet the end user.

In December 1924, the LinLithgow Committee supplied the Royal Commission with four sets of operational models and an outwardly robust methodology to analyse the cost of bread.  It was based on the bakers’ key ingredient, the 20-stone (127 kg) sack of flour at the heart of every batch of bread baked across the land in those days. In its day, this was a Known Value Item, to borrow a modern term. It traded at forty two shillings and a farthing, according to popular belief, not moving from one year to the next. Every baker who ever bought a sack of flour from a miller in those days  paid 42s and one farthing, the story goes. Did anyone ever query the extra farthing? Where did it come from? Where did it go?

 

 

crunchy numbers customs clearance Europe haulage key concept seafood Switzerland

A voice from the past

peter 0

Twenty five years ago Europe was in a state of flux. Many differing political agendas were being promoted in the belief that drafting the right regulations would somehow automatically unlock all the expectations with little or no further discussion or purpose.

If there was a single example to illustrate the processes involved, you will not be surprised to learn that I happen to think that competition is  sine qua non  for civilised society. Considering the central role of competition in a liberal economy, it is disturbing that at no point during the closing years of the 20th century was there a single EU-backed discussion or study of commercial planning permission for urban populations. At the time, there was just one voice to be heard in the darkness, challenging the naif notion that competition would somehow develop unhindered in a bed of thistles, that we would somehow recognise this state of innocence when it emerges from the shadows. The voice was that of French deputy Jean-Paul Charié. He presided over la commission de la production et les Echanges, publishing a parliamentary report into dysfunctional competition. At the time I was a production sub on a weekly trade title . Intrigued by the subject matter and knowing that this was a one-off opportunity, I phoned the French parliament and spoke to Chariés office. I was pleasantly surprised to get a phone call back from Charié in person, when he promised to post me a copy of the report to get the full story. Sadly, I never spoke to him again, since he died, but his published work casts a bright light on topics that thenceforth could  be debated in public with impunity. The evidence he collected on commercial malpractices came from all over Europe, painting a rather downbeat picture of how ethical standards in  retailing had declined while managing to appear outwardly presentable.

Follow the Freench logo to track this extended series.

royal-commission UK economy

What price data?

peter 0

The biggest challenge that faces  traders of all descriptions in arriving at a reliable price structure is the speed at which food products can change. Some animal products undergo a series of changes from farmgate to end user, others barely change at all. Some foods deteriorate very fast, while others are stable; add to this processes such as grading and the scope for differentiation can spiral out of control.   For a comparison to be usable, the items need a number of similarities, bearing in mind that not all users will have the same interests. At the risk of keeping alive a business myth, there were some retailers who chose to take a cut in their margins rather than push up prices. Some individual members of of the Linlithgow committee would have been very well informed about specific markets and sector, but less inclined perhaps to share.

The stability and predictability of sectors such as cereal crops, milling and baking followed a pattern of incremental development. The step from wholesale  trade to retailing, however, marks a sea change, reflecting the finer detail in retail distribution and home delivery costs. Investing in automotive resources ran deep in the bedrock of the economy of the day and was not going to be neither quick nor cheap.

The constant chivvying for market data was neither focussed for the most part nor available in the sort of unambiguous form that would have helped lay readers to learn more about the free market edifice. For instance, try explaining day-to-day shifts in retail pricing, arising from wholesale price changes that operate on a different basis. Even the denominations of coinage had an impact in the pricing of the retail world.

The ministry dug its heels in and refused to make a rod for its own back. The public should not be left to be baboozled by the high power antics of economists. How could such experts in their individual fields be left to explain the rise in mutton prices was a consequence of higher wool prices? After all, sheep are not killed for their wool.

Europe haulage horse lorry

Comparing muscles to motors

peter 0

Urban Food Chains has chipped away at a series of posts on the introduction of heavy machine guns which carried out a mechanised cull of thousands of working horses and pack animals. Intentionally or otherwise, the result was to clear the way for commercial motors of different sorts on British roads. Rule of thumb loading practices for draft animal at the time would have been about 20% bodyweight. Given that the working life of a horse can be up to 20 years and you have to spend four years feeding and training them before putting them to work, there was no point in sending fit young horses to battlefields to die within weeks of arrival having realised only 0.00520833 recurring of their potential work capacity (one month, a notional average) had they lived to work for 16 years, or close on 200 months.

 

Motor manufacturers, including foreign groups which set up assembly lines in the UK (notably Ford; General Motors; Chrysler) , throttled back their car production and turned over their car lines to two and three ton lorry chassises for subsequent adaptations / personnel carriers. Their component stocks were low specificity (eg alternators to a basic spec, multiple mount options).

 

There was nothing particularly complicated about a WW1 pick up truck, like most new products there was a lot of workshop time to anticipate. There were  20 or so manufacturers supplying the market, including high end folk like Thorneycroft (half tracks and road/rail hybrids). The core manufacturers turned out just over 20,0000 vehicles during the war, when entry level commercial motors were 500 pounds a go. That gave the makers a combined order book of around 10 million pounds over the four years of hostilities.

By the time the postwar economy had settled down, engines had improved in power and reliability and manufacturing margins had recovered. The world’s horse population was about 8 million less than at the turn of the century, and the conversion of agricultural businesses to new technologies was gathering pace.

Two related nuggets: when I moved to Crawley, one of my neighbours  once worked as a spy for the British government  while posted to the Afrika corps. His favourite anecdote was that the Ford lorries supplied to military buyers all used the same drive shaft construction. This meant that US army stationed in Europe; ae well as the relatively small number sold to Hitler’s army as well as the British army were interchangeable.  Final item: Hitler couldn’t fully fund diesel powered troops on the eastern front, so he sent horse units with troops riding in a sort of sidecar. You can see them from time to time in Pathé news footage of the day.

haulage horse lorry UK economy

Technology forces changes in warfare

peter 0
The arrival of Vickers machine guns in the second Boer war changed military expectations of what would become possible in years to come.

 

Starting with the Boer war at the turn of the twentieth century, the impact of heavy machine guns was devastating  on industrial battlefields, where thousands of horses were culled. The effect on the British economy was immense and immediate owing to the huge numbers of working animals needed to move equipment such as artillery from one site to the next. Such basic tasks became lethal interludes, as enemy machine gunners could take out the lead pair in a team of six or eight, immobilising the equipment, the surviving horses and the hapless soldiers who had to sort out the situation and salvage what was recoverable.

 

Horses and other pack animals were valued more highly by the British general staff than the rank and file soldiers of the day. The loss of thousands  of horses was a problem for manufacturers everywhere, especially those who needed to provide local delivery services for their customers. 

 

You can reckon that horses would have been expected to carry up to twenty percent of their body weight. Their harnesses may not have been taken into account, but would have been a significant proportion of the loaded animals’ burden. Establishing the loaded weight of a pack horse allows us to make some very rough and ready comparisons between the horses lost to the war effort and the rising numbers of two and three ton commercial vehicles that started to appear on British roads in 1914.

 

The power output of the early lorries used in opening years was fairly low for the most part, around 10 horsepower. You could say that every lorry did work that would have taken a team of six or a team of eight horses. In doing so, it is important to establish more than one set of parameters to make the comparison useable. It is fair to add that the power output from commercial motors increased rapidly from the late 1920s, this can readily checked by consulting contemporary advertisements. Despite its years of international power and influence, Britain was a net importer of horses between around 1860 and the 1930s. This not only stressed the economy, it makes valid comparisons between machinery and horses hard to establish.

 

It is quite likely that vehicle purchases made by the British government throughout the war years contributed to greater volumes of lorry traffic on British roads attributable to registered vehicles. Even if a high proportion of military vehicles are not registered through civilian agencies, what matters is that the total pool of vehicle tonnage was boosted in the process. Wartime government purchases of 20,000 vehicles will have added about ten million pounds to the postwar development iterations of the next generation of commercial motors..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

France

Who lost out in the revolution?

peter 0

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Napoleon redrew the map of Europe. He suspended all the laws in France that preceded the revolution. He replaced them with a series of codes or simple, clear legal frameworks, giving men total power over women; removing any political power that religions may previously have wielded; defining the laws of things, such as property, along with the rules governing its transfer. The third section covers succession and contracts, listing valid forms of agreement. The code also defines obligations and contracts. It dumped a lot of hard-fought revolutionary principles, not least womens’ rights. It was not until well into the twentieth century that some of these were restored.

The Code de la Commerce established the principle that it should be illegal to sell at a loss. Article L 442-5 has been the object of extensive discussion and attempted modifications ever since, as people have looked for ways round it. When Sarkozy came to power in 2007 there was a determined effort to redraw the political landscape of the French economy. La loi de modernisation de l’économie (LME) was an administrative bulldozer, which slashed payment terms for invoices, setting a new ceiling at 60 days and easing planning requirements for small (less than 1,000 square metres) retail premises. In among the debris was the legislative wreckage of article 442-5.

The parliamentary passage of the LME was a baptism of fire for a novice parliamentarian at the time, Bruno Le Maire. His first major legislative task was a sea change for the economy. He also succeeded in making annual buying reviews for retailers and their suppliers a passage through purgatory by reversing the buying cycle. In previous years, suppliers would deliver goods through the year and meet at the start of the next year to discuss terms for the coming year. With a year’s worth of sales data to hand, suppliers were in a position to offer retailers end-of-year bonuses for specific listings and stay in business. Under Le Maire’s system, suppliers are expected to guarrantee a price for the coming 12 months, field demands for promotional stock and stay in business to do it all again the following year.

Links to further posts on this topic will appear at the foot of this page.