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The world we had

2020-10-04T03:08:42.482Z


An Argentine pear makes a journey of 25,600 kilometers to be bought for less than one euro in the United States. But is this entire journey logical and sustainable?


A farmer grows a fruit that grows under the Argentine sun, is harvested and sent to Thailand, where it is preserved, processed and vacuum packed.

Once prepared, this fruit travels to the United States, where it is sold in a major supermarket chain.

Someone buys it and, before leaving the

parking lot

, opens the container and in two bites he finishes with the four pear slices that were inside.

Finally, he puts the empty container in a bin, gets in the car, and drives off.

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For this fruit to be consumed in less than 15 seconds, it was necessary to transport it more than 25,600 kilometers, various production, processing and packaging chains.

Thousands of tons of fuel for planes or ships and another hundreds of fuel for cargo trucks.

And this whole process is worth $ 0.60, which is the price that a US citizen paid to be able to taste some delicious Argentine fruits.

The logic that moves the world makes this process tremendously profitable for export, for processing companies, transport companies and of course for supermarkets.

But is it really logical?

It might be reasonable for Argentina, which has large fields of fruit and vegetable cultivation, to export its products to Finland, Norway or Kamchatka, where geographical and climatic conditions prevent cultivation.

But the United States is one of the largest exporters of fruits and vegetables in the world, with millions of hectares in California and Florida destined for cultivation.

Argentina, in turn, also imports fruits and thus the spiral continues unbridled, generating an endless rotation of products throughout the world.

That it is profitable, that it moves resources, money and jobs, does not mean that it is sustainable, much less does it mean that it is common sense.

The truth is that every time someone consumes a fruit grown thousands of miles and processed and packaged thousands of miles, the world is a little more worn out.

Today, living in a territory that is rich in natural resources does not guarantee at all that you can access them.

Since what marks the availability or not of these products within the reach of the population is the result of production minus export demand.

If the export equals or exceeds production, that product will not be available in its country of origin or it will be at exorbitant prices.

Today, living in a territory that is rich in natural resources does not guarantee at all that you can access them.

For example, for a Chilean it will be difficult to eat an avocado, since his destination will be a luxury restaurant in New York or Shanghai.

A Peruvian will not be able to consume quinoa, since it will be sold at a low price in the rest of the world and the little that remains in Peru will be sold at a price that is inaccessible to the majority.

All of this is profitable, but is it really logical?

The law of supply and demand is to the economy, what the law of the strongest was to recess in the schoolyard.

From a perspective of economic and political domination, there will be countries that will always set the rules of the game.

No matter how much efforts are made from emerging countries, under the logic that the world works today, they will be able to reach the most developed, since by the time that happens the most prosperous nations will again have distanced themselves.

It is as if we are trying to draw someone towards us, tying him up and pulling him with an elastic cord: it will break before we have reached each other.

The times that come will force us to face challenges that we cannot put off any longer.

We are facing the fourth industrial revolution, which will be as decisive in the history of humanity as the first, which, beyond the work model, revolutionized the world in its entirety, behavior and social structure.

This new revolution will be digital, it will be automated, it will be efficient, but hopefully we do not forget that the first thing that must be is human, sustainable and that it must allow progress to reach every corner of the world.

We have the opportunity to review the rules of the game, to reinvent some paradigms that take us from "for himself who can" to "here no one is left behind."

The human being is wonderful, capable of doing the most amazing things we can imagine, but he is also capable of atrocities unworthy of ethics that should mark our path.

Hopefully the fourth industrial revolution has much more of the first than of the second and we will recover for all the world that we had.

Rafael Moyano

is director of the educational corporation Escuelas del Cariño.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-10-04

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