The Series “Blood Sweat and Takeaways” This the program raises some important statistics about middle man profiteering and then fails to properly address them :

Tuna Episode 1 :

600 tins of tuna a day per worker

So the factory retains £297.00

Ok they have to pay for the following costs, the fish from the boats and cost of factory setup and production costs. Presumably this also has a big profit, the question is how much exploitation is there in the middle man part of the equation, in my opinion that £297.00 seems more exploitative than the price we might be paying at the supermarkets, and the question is if you paid more for your food at the supermarket would it actually reach the workers in the first phase of production. My estimation is no, it would get absorbed by the medium sized enterprise industrialist in the middle of those host countrys, who are growing fatter of the misery of others.

Episode 2 : Prawns

£1.20 per KG is paid at processing plant where the prawns are collected
the Tennant Prawn farmers receive 25p per Kg

So the 80kg they harvested from the tennant farmers received £20 to produce 80kg of raw product.
that 80Kg when fully processed can cost up to £2500.00 in the UK ? if you break that down £31.25 per KG subtract 25p from that leaving £31.00 dissappearing between tennant farmers and consumer ? theyre are costs, but really is middle management being honest when that kind of money dissappears in the process somewhere along the line.

Duma the sulawesi prawn farm worker earns £50.00 a month £600.00 a year salary, which he spends surviving in Thailand, and cant afford to save the £20.00 to get back home ? so over a year he cant afford to save 3.33% of his salary per annum ? to get back home. equivalent of earning £14000 per annum and not be able to save £462.00 a year out of it.

Fair trade and the removal of too extensive a middle man culture will improve this scenario. for the prawn farmer himself.

So never buy your prawns processed. Give the Tennant Farmers the land/lakes they work, and buy direct, with a great increase to tennant farmers wages and no price change at the supermarket.

Episode 3 : Rice

Rice Workers are paid £2.00 per day.
Rice mill is paid £17.00 per 30kg bag
30kg of jasmine rice is worth roughly £125.00 when packaged and sold in the UK.

A seven fold markup by the time it reaches the UK consumer, thats needs further analysis.
Brown Rice is much cheaper and healthier than white rice and involves less processing, if brown rice was slightly higher priced and that increase was passed to the worker.
Again Fair trade is probably the only thing that will farm direct is the only way you can guarantee the landless worker will be paid more.

Episode 4 chicken :

£4.00 for processing 5000 peices of chicken a day.
theyre must be crazy profit there compared to slaughter processing in the UK.

ok what does this all really highlight :

The more people there are between RAW product producer and the consumer, the more potential there is for exploitation and profit to be eeked at each step. Therefore there is an extreme necessity to reduce the number of these steps , and in that process make sure, more of the money saved by this re-structuring reaches the labourers involved.

Always therefore purchase fair trade or producer direct as this is the only way to guarantee more reaches the labourers in question.

To purchase less processed food, and to basically consume less.

To aim for a decrease in world population as the more people there are, the cheaper a commodity labour is, and the more exploitation can occur to that pool of labour, as illustrated by that classic expression of “Theres a Thousand people outside this factory willing to take this job” Factory owners can always rely on poor people breeding excessivley, and thereby those poor progeny being a perpetual and undiminishing supply of labour, and as more automation occurs theyre value is worth less again.

Basically human beings are the cheapest robots, money can buy.

Truth is the more processed your food and the more international the more exploitation is likely to have occurred.

Having visited colombia myself for a month and stayed in poor rural tennant farmer community’s, you can see how body’s like NAFTA and various middle men are the real exploiters in this scenario. In the mountain village I visited the villages that stand between the remoter villages and the urban centres, can also exploit the remote villages. The world is full of exploiters, we have trained human beings to exploit each other, its surprises me this program doesn’t raise this fundamental issue clearly. And suggest ideas to solve it because thats the big question.

If you look at it clearly rice farm worker salary £612.00 but 6 months work only £306.00 possible
Worker in Rice mill equivalent annual salary £725.00
Prawn Farmers salary I couldnt even calculate, but that seemed a very low wage on the basis of 25p per Kg unless theyre harvesting like 80kg a week ? in which case it might be like £600-£900 a year
Duma Prawn Labourers wage £600.00 a year.
worker in canning factory equivalent annual salary £936.00 (UK wage for same job £14500 ?)
worker in slaughter plant equivalent annual salary £1248.00
and the callgirl has the potential to earn £2400.00 annual salary.

Now if you wanted to even the standard of living around the world you would have to multiply up these wages to their UK equivalents.

This program also crazily highlights how the media so cynically select some of the softest people to stick in these shows, just so they can stick the program in the gullet of the viewer even harder. With deliberatly wet and annoying people selection. Im sure a slaughter worker or fish monger could handle those jobs no problem, the conditions and pay maybe not, but the actual work yes. ITs the field labour today that english people cant really get a grip on, Rice farming is particularly over the top in its manual intensivity as illustrated in this program, and that definatley needs machine based advances to automate it. Is all rice production this manually intensive and un-mechanised ?

I think that Mitchell Webb sketch that attempts to illustrate the scynical mindsets of the producers of the apprentice, really well illustrates how these programs are made in such a simplistic way as to deliberately irritate the viewer.