Grow Your Own Vegetables Shop!

 

There you are watching TV, tucking in to your beef lasagne and you find that it may have won the four-thirty at Haydock Park. Food quality was a major issue back in the nineteenth century and a key factor in the growth of the co-operative retail movement. Who would have thought that over a hundred and fifty years later food adulteration would raise its head again?

The horse meat scandal has exposed all sorts of shady dealing. It is shocking to discover that shops selling foodstuffs did not know (or appear to care) what it was and perhaps even worse consumers did not know or care what they where eating.

The worst feature of this crisis is not the duplicity of food producers and retailers who are after all only in it for the money. The surprise is the constant shock at the idea that profit seeking enterprises are only in it for profit!

When I was small my mum taught me not to put anything in my mouth if I did not know where it had come from. Yet millions everyday eat food that is processed to such an extent you need a forensic laboratory to know what it is. As someone who likes his grub I find this deeply sad.

Good food is one of life’s great pleasures and yet a swathe of our population has been enslaved by relentless marketing and advertising and by a growing addiction to salt, sugar and fat, to believe that this stuff is edible.   Sadly this is something of a class issue. Growing health and obesity issues do disproportionately affect the less affluent that have been conned into believing they can only afford cheap processed crap. It is ironic that in Britain the rich make a fortune selling this stuff to the poor whilst they eat like Mediterranean peasants.

It now seems amazing that early council houses where built with large gardens so that people could offset the rent by growing their own vegetables. We are a nation that has become alienated from the environment and have lost all sense of where our food comes from with many seasonal foods available all year around - all that varies is their number of air miles.

Thankfully there is growing resistance to this environmentally damaging food economy. Some of it is being lead by a growing network of new co-operative stores selling organic and ethically sourced foodstuffs. A classic example since its opening in 1996 is the wonderful Unicorn grocery in Chorlton, South Manchester. 

This multi award winning - Observer Food Monthly’s Best Independent Shop, Radio 4 Food Programs Best Independent Retailer - store’s basic offer is affordable, wholesome food with a focus on organic, fair-trade and local sourcing. As a workers co-op, owned and managed by the people who work in it they have created a place they would want to shop in themselves.

Their focus is on basic ingredients for tasty, interesting and affordable cooking with around seventy lines of organic fruit and veg at prices that compare well to the supermarket chains.

Unicorn also owns 21 acres of prime growing land, just 14 miles from the shop, tenanted by a co-op of organic growers, improving and securing the regional veg supply for the future. Packed on site they have a wide variety of staple cooking ingredients such as pulses, grains, nuts, dried fruits and spices, provide the basis for really good value meals.

Put this together with organic beer and wine, daily fresh organic bread and an ever-expanding deli counter and you have a winning combination. They also have a growing selection of environmentally friendly baby products, cosmetics and household goods made from natural ingredients.

Unicorn also caters to people seeking dairy free, gluten free and sugar free products. The shop is full of information about trade and food issues, and aims to help customers make informed shopping choices.

So does it work financially? Well it has grown from a turnover of £3,500 to £3.5 million, from 4 members to 50. The worker/members donate a steady 5% of wage costs to local and international projects relating to its Principles of Purpose and also contribute to a tree planting scheme with a carbon tax in an attempt to offset some of the environmental impact of running the business.

There may not be room for a Unicorn on every high street but surely there is a need for one in every small town and every suburb?  Unicorn encourages others to have ago themselves with a self-help guide to opening your own new co-op store on their website at: www.unicorn-grocery.co.uk. If your town needs better food and a healthier diet why not have a go and Grow a Grocery?

Hugo Chavez- 21st Century Socialism and Co-operatives

So farewell Commandante Chavez!  I was very sad to hear of the death of Hugo Chavez, taken from us whilst there was still so much work to be done cementing the Bolivarian Revolution. A great leader winning the hearts of the people and expanding the realm of the possible in Latin America. He had huge charisma and a ready wit which he often used to wind up the “the Empire”!

His attitude to the United States hardened, and who could blame him, after the attempted coup of 2002 which had US fingerprints all over it. The good news is that it will be extremely difficult to undo the opening up of citizen power in Venezuela. Having flexed their muscles it is hard to imagine any circumstances in which the people would wish to give it up.

As a co-operator one of the most exciting aspects of the revolution was his commitment to co-operatives. The growth in the number of co-operatives was astonishing in 1998; there were fewer than 800 legally registered co-ops in Venezuela with about 20,000 members. By the middle of 2006 the National Superintendence of Cooperatives (SUNACOOP) had registered over 100,000 coops with over 1.5 million members.

Since then they have continued to grow and some now estimate that there are 200,000 co-ops employing 20% of Venezuelans. There have been heated debates in the co-op movement about top-down versus bottom-up co-ops, if they are truly voluntary and even if some conventional businesses are calling themselves co-ops just to gain tax advantages.

The government have been active promoting the creation of new co-ops by providing cheap credit, preferential purchasing arrangements particularly on government contracts, and technical support. At this rate of growth it is unsurprising that in the academic and technical literature there are reports that a large number of Venezuelan co-operative members have serious weaknesses in administrative and technical skills, as well as in motivation.

It is also true that producer co-operatives are also having great difficulty in competing with their capitalist counterparts to purchase inputs and to find customers. There is a fear that their dependency on state institutions for access to capital and contracts is threatening their sustainability.

It is clear that post Chavez a new wave of co-operative development is needed to consolidate the gains of the revolution. The lack of integration amongst co-operatives needs to be addressed. The key is co-operative principle 6, co-operation amongst co-operatives. This requires an active national co-operative centre to provide advice and support for co-operative enterprise and the creation of secondary co-operatives or what are called federals linking together smaller co-ops to gain the market advantages of larger businesses especially when it comes to trading, either buying crucial inputs or selling their wares to the public.  

I am sure Venezuelan co-operatives can overcome these challenges by coordinating their activities among themselves and by exploiting the special relationships they have with their neighbouring communities.

A good dose of democratic planning and co-ordination could also serve to consolidate their organizational and ethical principles, and to transform them into true socialist enterprises that effectively and efficiently satisfy social needs.

There is no area of the Venezuelan economy in which this is more important than food production and distribution. The government broke the private sector stranglehold on food distribution with Mercal created in 2003 which markets food at low prices to some 15,000 stores about (10per cent of the total) supported by the Venezuelan Agricultural Organisation (of 2004) which owns a series of processing subsidiaries which supply Mercal. In 2010, after months of negotiations the Government purchased the supermarket chain, “Supermercados Exito”, the French group, “Casino”, and the Colombian “Almacenes Exito” then in November, they also bought the CATIVEN Supermarket Chain (also owned by the Casino Group).

With these acquisitions, they became the owner of 35 stores - renamed Abastos Bicentenarios and six stores of Gran Bicentenario (formerly Hipermercado Exito), eight distribution centres and a fleet of trucks. This new business controlled by the Socialist Market Corporation (COMERSO) gives the State a presence in the retail sector but certainly not a dominant one. Makro for example have 35 Hypermarkets compared with Bicentarios six.

These could form the backbone of a consumer co-operative retail sector that could seriously challenge the private sector. What is more our friends at Mondragon know how to co-operatise a retailer having done so with the Eroski chain across Spain.

Challenging the crony capitalist oligarchy in Venezuela is a huge challenge and Hugo Chavez deserves great credit for the progress that has been made but to consolidate these gains with out the huge charisma of an individual we need the collective engagement of a people and co-operative structures can make that possible.

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Bad Poetry Day

I read the christmas annual from the Black Country Bugle and thought the poetry in here is poor I should have ago. So I did here is my first attempt:

Wolverhampton – All Change

Nick Matthews

(With apologies to John Betjeman)

Past new student flats, so spick and span,

Against an unencumbered sky,

The Old Great Western Railway ran

When someone different was I.

Springfield bitter now does not flow

From Butlers Brewery tap

Drinkers looking to get the glow,

Use elsewhere ale to fill the gap.

St Georges where the Matin’s bell,

No longer rings. Drowned out by

Supermarket tills. A shopping hell?

Or heaven with plenty for you to buy.

Mander tower marks the spot

Where inks and paint did flow

Today in the mall get your caffeine shot

To recover from another retail blow.

Then the Molineux, the pleasure ground,

You stood behind the goal up at the back

Feeling the crowds sway and sound

Come on you Wolves the old gold and black.

The work benches are all empty now

At Chubbs great red brick pile

Ask and they will tell you how

They kept us locked and safe in style.

The only thing that does not change

St Peter’s proud upon the hill

The tiles spick and flowers arranged

A place loved and tended still.

Wolverhampton all change!

Comes the cry from an unencumbered sky,

Over old Great Western rails I did range,

Now homeward bound am I.

If you are familiar with John  Betjeman you will recognize his poem a Distant View of a Provincial Town which I think is based on a trip to Swindon! Anyway its not brill but the Bugle liked it!

Time to End Fairtrade Fortnight

Every year I wish that fair trade fortnight could be the last because we have made all trade fair! Capitalism is very good at through the abstraction of the market at hiding the unequal human relationships that mark out the interchange of goods and services between us.

So fair trade is a small step in making those relationships real. This year we have been asked by the Fair Trade foundation to “go further for fair trade”. And there is one co-operative that seems to be doing just that.

For the last thirty years Paul Birch has been better known as a record producer and MD of a record label. In that time he has released over a thousand albums by artists as diverse as Stone Roses to UFO, the Scorpions to Sister Sledge. He struck the fair-trade bug when he started developing a line in merchandising for many of the bands he promoted.

Paul says that it took a while to tick all the ethical boxes finding your way through the process of getting the T-shirts with fair trade and organic accreditation was a steep learning curve. Having built up a supply chain and created relationships with the producers it seemed like a good idea to put together all the marketing skills they had developed in thirty years in the music business into selling fair trade products.

In thinking about this the idea of a co-operative structure linking producers and consumers became the obvious vehicle. Today  Revolver Co-operative Limited is the trading co-operative company behind the Revolver World brand. Organised as an Industrial and Provident society it is a bona fide co-operative, formed with the help of The Co-operative Group (through the Co-operative Hub) and Co-operatives UK.
What is unusual about it however is that they incorporate the whole supply chain in the ownership of the business. As a multistakeholder community co-operative membership open to all, producer co-operatives in the developing world, retailers such as the Co-op’s in which it sells the products and the final customers.
What’s more 25% of the profit is invested back into the producers' communities. It prefers to trade with co-operatives because it says this strengthens the relationships between consumers and producers. In a very short time as well as a great range of fair trade organic apparel it now has a great range of coffees.
I have to make an admission at this point. Despite the fact that I come from a family of tea bellies.  I hate tea. I just can’t drink it. I am a total coffee head. And one of the most depressing features of modern life is the fact despite the fact that coffee and coffee shops have become ubiquitous most of what they sell is not very good!
So I drink most of my coffee at home and I like to try out coffees from around the world and have become a bit of a coffee snob. So to discover Revolvers coffee range was a delight. Their African coffee is grown by the co-operatives Kagera Coffee Union in Tanzania and Gumutindo Coffee Co-Operative in Uganda. This superb blend combines Tanzanian Peaberry, grown on the upper slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, and Ugandan High-grown Northern Bugisu, grown under shade not far from the Ugandan/Kenyan border.
Their Columbian coffee is a single-estate blend grown by the Riseralda Co-Operative established in 1959 of Fairtrade certified Arabica beans and the their Costa Rica coffee comes from members of the CoopeDota coffee growers co-operative who produce a terrific AA Grade Tarrazú arabica coffee.

The most recent venture however is probably of most interest to Morning Star readers. Paul says, “Cuban coffee is one of the most underrated coffees we've come across recently. Not only is it delicious, its quality rivals that of the established 'standard' coffees like Colombia. Not a word of a lie, when we received our first cupping samples in the office it's all we drank for two weeks straight!”

There is no doubt that their latest product is a bit special: exclusively imported Cuba Altura coffee sourced from one of the oldest grower co-operatives in Cuba.

Paul adds that, “at the moment given the somewhat 'unique' commercial situation in Cuba its not possible to get Fairtrade accreditation but nonetheless we're delighted to have this co-operatively produced arabica in both whole bean and roast & ground. Try it may well become one of your favourites - it makes great espressos.”

 Given that fairness is the whole basis of the Cuban economy you can do your bit and get great coffee and support the Cuban revolution by breaking the embargo everyday!

Currently a 227 gram pack is selling for just £3.75 and a pack of six for £22.50 or a kilo of beans for just £15.99. If you don’t have a co-op shop near you to obtain Revolver World coffee head to the website at www.revolverworld.com

Co-op Weathers the Retail Storm

The economic crisis that is being made worse by George Osborne is causing tremendous turbulence in the retail sector. Consumer spending which was the driving force of the economy before the banking crash is under massive pressure and this is exaggerating other cultural shifts in the way we shop.

The disappearance of many familiar names from the high street is a symptom of deep underlying structural changes in the sector. Osborne’s, “Honey I shrunk the economy” is ensuring that we have too much retail capacity. It is also hard to understand why David Cameron moans about people not paying their taxes when Osborne allows firms, like Amazon who sold £3.3billion worth of goods in the UK last year, to pay next to no corporation tax and exploit VAT loopholes.

Other factors include high fuel costs squeezing disposable incomes and reducing consumers’ appetite to travel plus the massive social impact of the internet both for shopping and for price comparison.

For the Co-operative retailers the ongoing migration into convenience stores has been accelerated by these forces. Concentrating food retail forces in this area made sense as the margins where better and it was a good fit with the existing co-operative retail estate.

This may have been a pragmatic response to the huge shopping “sheds” of the big four food retailers but no one realised how quickly these huge assets could become liabilities. Deloittes are predicting a 40% “downsizing” of retail space in the next five years. We will see retailers having fewer stores and the beginning of the end of the huge out of town shopping “hangers”.

Many people loved these huge stores, a whole retail village under one roof always dry and warm (a real boon given our climate) that buzz has however long gone. Now we can do our browsing online and often get stuff delivered to our homes cheaper than they can sell it in the shops.

Stores complain of shoppers coming in to take a look at goods then buying on the internet, a practice known in the trade as “show-rooming”.  Not a service you can offer for very long.

If the Co-op move to convenience made sense it has not gone unnoticed by the competition with all the major retailers developing small store formats. For the Co-op having a store in every UK postcode means that the business rises and falls with those communities and outside the South East they are being seriously squeezed.

The long retreat from non-food retailing continued this month when Midlands Society announced the closure of its nine Fashion and Home department stores after producing significant losses. This will be the end of an era in places like Derby, Chesterfield and Ilkeston where these stores have long been part of the fabric.

It maybe ironic but some of the competition has come from the fast growing Co-operative Electrical, the Co-op Group’s online business. Over Christmas it enjoyed a 15 per cent increase in sales compared with the previous year. Best sellers included, tablet PCs, printers and laptops, products that did not exist when those department stores first opened.

The co-op food retail sector had a good Christmas with many independent co-op retailers especially the East of England, Midcounties, Southern and Lincoln doing particularly well and the Co-operative Group had respectable results.

The real winners given the state of the economy where the discounters Aldi, Lidl and Iceland as well as at the other end of the spectrum Waitrose - showing that austerity is only for the poor. For the big retailers at best it was a stand still position with big discounts and high food inflation damaging margins.

This tough environment is the challenge for the new CEO of the Co-operative Group, Euan Sutherland. He will replace Peter Marks who most of us expected to be Sir Peter in the New Year’s honours list however he had to settle for a CBE.

I found this a bit insulting given his record. Maybe I’m an old cynic but this just adds to my scepticism about the whole honours system and those dreadful imperial labels.

Euan comes from Kingfisher where he was Chief Operating Officer, so for those of us in retail at least he is a shop keeper and not the banker that we thought the FSA might foist upon us.

Keeping the Co-operative retail sector competitive with smaller shops and lower volumes than our rivals is a tough ask. Back in 1993, the movement finally - not before time - got its buying act together. The formation of the Co-operative Retail Trade Group brought together all the buying for the movement into one body.

Many co-operators are now saying it is time to form or join a European version, joining with colleagues in Spain, Italy, Scandinavia, and elsewhere so we can really compete with the giant retailers.

Then there is the internet and the question of what should be the Co-ops online offer?  The new CEO is going to find that as well as the integration of a huge banking acquisition there is no let up in the retail competition and that is without going into funerals, pharmacy or farming!

 
  

Heres to a more Cydweithredol Cymru

If 2012 was the International Year of Co-operatives, then will 2013 be the Welsh Year of

Co-operatives?

Why so? Well the Co-operative economy in Wales is not insignificant there are around 400 co-operatives with a turnover of £1.3bn. For the fourth year running they outperformed the UK economy with a growth rate of 1.5%.  Very encouraging but when you consider that there are about 58,000 businesses in Wales there is considerable room for improvement.

Those of us in the co-op sector where delighted when last july Edwina Hart, Minister for Business, Enterprise, Technology and Science in the Welsh Assembly launched the Welsh Co-operative and Mutual’s Commission. Under the Chairmanship of Professor Andrew Davies, the Commission is charged with making, “recommendations on growing and developing the co-operative and mutual economy in Wales in order to create jobs and wealth in support of the Welsh Government’s aims and ambitions”.
 
The Commission is due to report in the autumn and has the potential to be a springboard to take co-operative development to a new level. Wales has always had a ‘co-operative culture’ and has a distinct enough economy for measures to encourage co-op development to have a significant impact.

There is no reason why Wales cannot become one of the World’s great co-operative regions like Emilia Romagna or Quebec. Wales already has some significant co-operative development assets like the Wales Co-operative Centre. For 30 years they have been providing reliable support to co-op start-ups, mainly funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the Welsh Government. Unusually for this type of economic development body they owe their existence to the Wales TUC who established them in 1981.

There is huge scope for better advice, support and financing for new co-operative start-up’s but there is also huge scope to return of previous state owned assets to community co-operative ownership.

The platform of a good solid supportive relationship between the trade union movement and the co-operative movement has the potential to be the basis for making this a reality in a growing Welsh co-operative economy.

There are signs of a Welsh difference. The recent rows about water charges had little impact in Wales because of the ownership structure of Welsh Water. Owned by Glas Cymru, a single purpose company, with no shareholders run solely for the benefit of its customers it has a business model that aims to reduce the industry's single biggest cost, capital.

Welsh Water's assets and investment are financed by bonds and retained financial surpluses. Financing efficiency savings to date have largely been used to build up reserves to insulate Welsh Water and its customers from unexpected costs and to improve its credit worthiness so that the cost of finance can be kept as low as possible in future the years.

Compare this with £1.5 billion that shareholders have siphoned out of Thames Water over the last four years. I think Glas Cymru’s structure would be even better if it was owned co-operatively by the people of Wales creating real democratic accountability.

Another sector crying out for co-operative ownership is the railways. There is a vision for Rail Cymru a new co-operative railway company serving the people of Wales and the Borders which would put their needs before those of private shareholders and foreign owners -ironically the current Wales and Borders franchise is operated by Arriva which is owned by the Deutsche Bundesbahn the German State Railways – so it is OK  for public ownership as long as its someone else’s public!.

The vision for ‘Rail Cymru’ involving rail employees, passengers, the wider community and the elected government of Wales, is supported by amongst others Aslef and Co-operatives and Mutual’s Wales. The idea is outlined in a report written by Professor Paul Salveson who argues it would deliver better value for money to the taxpayer and provide a more responsive service.

The franchise comes up for renewal in 2018 allowing time for the Welsh Government to develop its plans in detail, ensuring employees, passengers and the community are fully engaged with the vision for a people’s railway set in an integrated network of connecting bus services, with improved access for walkers and cyclists to stations and with those stations being transformed into hubs of community activity.

There are also plans for the development of co-operative social care in Wales. If one sector should be denied to the profit hungry private sector it has to be social care. There is huge scope for co-operative solutions in this sector empowering service user’s and social care workers. The scope for co-operative schools is also tremendous.

Encouraging more fan owned co-operative sports clubs like Wrexham and Merthyr Town also has to be on the agenda. These issues and more will be discussed when the caravan of the Co-operative Congress rolls into Cardiff in the summer. The venue is the home of another another co-operative business Glamorgan County Cricket Clubs Swalec stadium.

I am sure co-operators from across the UK will be throwing their ideas into how to make Wales a co-operative champion in 2013.