Morrisons and Asda rationing some fruit and veg

Apparently farming is not conducive for ‘Net Zero’ so they want farmers to cut back on their livestock and dairy produce. They are deliberately causing food shortages.
Did you also know that Bill Gates is buying up large swathes of farmland in the USA and shutting down the farms Eliza.

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I shopped in Waitrose this morning and as far as I could see there were no shortages on the salad shelves - not that I buy salad at this time of year anyway.

Yep, good idea that, shut down the food production so, folks can offset the effect of flying round the planet on all the jet planes, genius :rofl:

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no i didnt know that about Bill Gates,whats the point in that .? im off out now will see your answer when im back

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Not sure what this has to do with the rationing of produce in the UK, but this is not true.

Bill Gates owns a tiny fraction of the farmland in the US which he purchased to help make more productive. He owns 0.03% of the total farmland in the US.

Snopes has shown the idea that Bill Gates is buying land to create food shortages as false.

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Perhaps but there’s myths in the press that this is about a poor harvest & other excuses

so did jersey/guernsey stop growing tomatoes or are they just too expensive for British shoppers? I think this is all to do with rising energy costs and retailers cutting down on supply chain /logistics to make goods remain price neutral (but less plentiful). It’s up there with reducing the number of crisps in kettle chips to about 5 per bag, making milk plastic carton casing so thin that it causes leaks if you don’t gently coax it from the fridge. They have stopped putting use by or best before dates on some fruit/veg so that it’s practically rotten on the shelf. There’s so much of all this going on that it’s a very long list

The decline of the Guernsey tomato growing industry began in the 1970s - it started with a gradual decline for many reasons -

Guernsey lost the monopoly they used to have over the UK market - prior to us having free trade with Europe, Guernsey had a big commercial advantage of being a preferred trading partner with no export/ import levies - because of their monopoly, they had been able to “control the price” which the U.K. paid by “controlling” the supply
(if there was abundant supply, the tomato growers in Guernsey will admit now that they used to make sure some of the crop was kept back to keep the demand and price higher)
Obviously, when UK started having free trade with Europe, they had more competition from tomato growers in other countries, who were no longer at a competitive disadvantage due to levy tariffs.

The Guernsey tomato industry was ill-equipped to cope with this competition because they had enjoyed a monopoly for so long, they hadn’t needed to “keep lean and competitive” and also because there were problems with the structure of their “co-operative marketing structure” - then they were hit by a number of factors which made them unable to compete with growers from other countries -
the OPEC oil crisis started in 1973, when a lot of the Guernsey growers were relying on oil for heating (Netherlands used much cheaper natural gas) the high oil prices prompted Growers to spend money on modernising greenhouses to improve insulation and more efficient heating systems to reduce costs of production -
Then they were hit by the huge interest rate increases in the late 1970s - having taken out extra finance to pay for the modernisation, many of them just couldn’t afford the high interest repayments and it forced a lot of Guernsey growers to go bankrupt or get out of tomato production.
After that, the much reduced industry limped along in gradual decline, as growers got out of the industry their exports dried to a trickle,while UK had a wider choice of European markets to choose from.
Another nail in the coffin for the Guernsey growers was the rising power of the big supermarkets - whereas in their heyday of a monopoly market, the Guernsey Growers benefited from a system of controlling prices all along the chain from Grower to End Buyer - this was turned on its head by the large supermarkets who had the buying power to take control of pricing negotiations - instead of the Guernsey Tomato Marketing Board deciding on the pricing to protect the Growers profit margins, they found themselves having to accept prices which were sometimes below break-even prices.

It sounds like good riddance if they were deliberately hiking up prices

Yes - that’s one of the problems of having a trade monopoly - you can get away with secretly dumping a glut of produce to maintain a higher price.

A bit of competition helps to keep prices lower.
The Guernsey Growers had a couple of very lucrative decades from the post-war days until the end of the 1960s and lots of Guernsey families made very good profits out of growing tomatoes.
They couldn’t expect to maintain a monopoly forever and avoid all competition.
To discover now that they were hiking up prices back then, when life was still a bit grim in post-war Britain and while women like my Mum struggled to afford enough food to feed us all rather puts things into perspective - mis-using the power of monopoly is not just a recent phenomenon - it’s probably been going on since trade began!

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regarding the milk carton splitting , I had a bottle split at the Bottom and I thought at the time how thin the plastic was .

I’ve managed to get my money back when this happened with Ocado, but last time it happened it was bought in Tesco and the refund is not worth the trip. I’m waiting for the day they will just sell milk in a plastic bag!

I have to say that I am wondering which real news story is being deliberately dumbed down so we can sit and talk about salad shortages…I mean this shortage of supermarket stock is nothing new since Brexit & we’ve a whole thread about it but it’s suddenly headline news…hmmm

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It’s designed to see how many folks rush out and bulk buy degradable food stuffs, some sort of social experiment. :icon_wink:

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yes thats often the case hiding a news worthy story , of course we would talk about food shortage because it effects everyone,

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Yesterday my Sainsbury’s order …everything was there tomatoes , salad bags, cucumber, lettuce ,celeriac ,celery ,broccoli , ,grapes ,apples , apricots, bananas , no substitutes.

Are you intending to consume these items or cherish them :icon_wink:

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Metro
Woman tried to walk out of Lidl with a 100 Cucumbers, she said she wanted them to make detox drinks…

Maybe she had Baggy Eyes!!!

I’m a veggie … already made a start on the fruit & tomatoes