Day 284 - 22 Oct 96 - Page 13
1 this demand and supply chain, but not in great detail,
2 including the necessity of having to feed animals that are
3 used in the food industry and generally what you might call
4 the cash crop economy, where the sting of meaning of the
5 cash crop economy is that cash crops are replacing
6 self-sufficient farming and farming for local people's
7 needs. That is where the home comes in, that instead of
8 people being able to grow food for themselves or for their
9 region, cash crops are instead creating raw material for
10 large companies. This obviously also, this process, would
11 continue over on to the rainforest page.
12
13 Having set the scene in the page before can I just go on to
14 say something about the supply chain? McDonald's
15 responsibility as the main incentive and the most powerful
16 component of the supply chain means that they are
17 necessarily responsible for what happens lower down in the
18 chain. So, for example, under 'hungry for dollars'
19 McDonald's is one of several giant corporations with
20 investments in vast tracks of land. What investment does
21 McDonald's have and what is sold to them, obviously, in our
22 opinion, must be the beef and the cattle because that is
23 what their business is about, and that is, what anybody who
24 knows what McDonald's business is about, needing a supply
25 of cattle and beef.
26
27 The fact that the cattle are sold to a slaughter house
28 before being sold to a hamburger factory, before being sold
29 to McDonald's is, we would say, immaterial as regards
30 McDonald's responsibility for that supply chain, and in
31 fact, we would argue -- and I am sort of bringing in
32 thoughts that relate to these matters as I am going through
33 -- that McDonald's have accepted that responsibility by
34 claiming to have a policy where they accept that they
35 control their supply chain. But they proudly trumpet that
36 round the world in their corporate rainforest policy which
37 they formulated, we say, in 1989, four years after this
38 fact sheet was written.
39
40 So if I can just mention one other thing that crops up
41 about the supply chain. If you remember, very near the end
42 of the rainforest evidence -- I can't remember what the
43 reference was for it, but it was an advert about potatoes
44 which I held up. I do not know if you remember. Do you
45 remember that? Do you remember the advert for potatoes
46 which said, you know, 'We do this, we do that, we do the
47 other. We plant the potatoes, we wash them' -- you know --
48 'We cut them up, we sell them to you.' We would say that
49 is also McDonald's publicly and proudly saying they have
50 control over not only their beef supplies, as we have heard
51 from other areas, but they say they have control over their
52 other raw materials, and so we would say that they have
53 accepted responsibility and, in fact, where things go in
54 their favour they proudly wish to take credit for the
55 responsibility.
56
57 For example, they have claimed that the forests used for
58 their paper packaging are sustainably managed. They have
59 not said, 'We do not give a monkey's, it is nothing to do
60 with us', they have taken that as some kind of credit. In
