Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - March 1, 2022, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE A7 THINK TANK PERSPECTIVES EDITOR: BRAD OSWALD 204-697-7269 ● BRAD.OSWALD@FREEPRESS.MB.CA ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7 TUESDAY MARCH 1, 2022 Ideas, Issues, Insights Potato-chip war is tip of the iceberg W E recently learned that Frito-Lay, a brand owned by giant PepsiCo Canada, stopped selling to Loblaws after the retailer refused requests by Frito-Lay to increase their prices. Food manufacturers, when selling products to grocers, suggest retail prices. With low profit margins, labour shortages, packaging issues and supply-chain woes, inflation has been violently disruptive to manufacturers. It’s not the first time this has happened. But the scale of this stop-sell is unprecedented, and the manoeuvre by PepsiCo tells us that food manu- facturers in Canada have had enough of grocers changing the rules to their advantage. Unlike other industries, food industry suppliers will pay clients to do business. It’s such a strange environment for the neophyte. Manufacturers pay listing fees to have the privilege of selling to grocers. It’s always been that way. But in recent years, grocers have arbitrarily charged more fees and, in some cases, reduced suggested prices without consent. That’s a nightmare for manufacturers, who need market discipline to protect brand equity. As a food producer, the last thing you want is a price war involving your products. If things were free, we wouldn’t have much of an economy or jobs to support Canadians. So maintaining sup- ply-chain order is critical to our entire food ethos; jobs and economic growth are at stake. Frito-Lay products are made in Canada, using potatoes grown by Canadian farmers. The rift between PepsiCo and Loblaws is long overdue. And make no mistake: many other man- ufacturers and grocers are involved in similar tug-of-war disputes. It’s happening in dairy and bakery, so many food categories are impacted by this. Reporters just happened to learn about the PepsiCo instance, likely because someone wanted the public to know. Canadians may be puzzled by the news. Why would Loblaws be blamed for keeping prices low- er for consumers? The answer’s not simple. For grocers, the game is easy since they have all the power. Almost 90 per cent of all the food Canadians buy is sold by just five retailers. Grocers want to remain com- petitive and will defend their margins the best they can against market rivals. It’s an oligopoly. And if Loblaws gets a lower price, that doesn’t mean Canadians benefit all the time. They may sometimes, but shareholders are often the big winners. But don’t expect empty shelves in the chips aisle or other sections of the grocery store anytime soon. And if they do show up, they won’t be there for long. Grocers will find ways to fill shelves with other brands, including their house brands. Given the current market conditions and the fact the food inflation rate is over six per cent, consumers will trade down and seek more house brands. Grocers know it, so the time may be right for them since they have the power and many weapons at their disposal. Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic started almost two years ago, many food manufacturers — including PepsiCo Canada — have thought of selling food directly to consumers. They could control market conditions and gain more authori- ty over their brands. The pandemic has made the supply chain more democratic and inherently more virtual. In terms of store merchandising, PepsiCo is one of the best companies out there. It masters the middle mile to support in-store merchandising for grocers. The company is incredibly efficient: it could extend its fleet of trucks to connect manu- facturing plants with consumers. This is a definite possibility, but the transition from business-to-business to business-to-con- sumer is never easy. Many companies have failed miserably during the pandemic while attempting to pivot. For years, during supply-chain games, food manufacturers had to blink first. PepsiCo’s move signals that the sector is tired of and desperate to stop supply-chain bullying. The industry desperately needs a code of prac- tice, so companies can go to an arbitrator to avoid more market disruptions. This dispute over chips is concrete evidence of how supply-chain wars can impact consumers directly. We need sup- ply-chain peace; we need an authoritative code. Some people may feel they can simply live with- out PepsiCo products, or other products, for that matter. That’s fair enough, but remember: fewer manufacturing options for grocers will eventually mean higher retail prices. Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the agri-food analytics lab and a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University. © Troy Media Revisiting a 50-year-old crime ‘THE object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours… There will be no indig- enous population except seagulls,” wrote Sir Paul Gore-Booth, a senior official at the British For- eign Office, as the plan to expel the 2,000 Chagos Islanders from their homes was taking shape in 1966. “We must surely be very tough about this.” They were indeed very tough about it. Six years later the Chagossians (“Ilois,” as they call themselves) were scooped up, loaded on ships, and dumped on the waterfront of Port Louis in Mau- ritius, where most of them have lived in abject poverty ever since. But last month, a number of them went back to the islands on a Mauritian ship. Not to stay, yet. They were shadowed by a British “fisheries protection” vessel throughout their visit, which comically claimed that it was “co-operating in environmental research.” But the balance has now tipped so far in favour of the former residents that the British ship dared not stop the Mauritian vessel. While their own ship’s crew worked to define the territory’s maritime boundaries for the Mau- ritian government, the Ilois revisited their old homes, now roofless and overrun by vegetation. Afterwards, they had to go back to Mauritius — but why were they exiled in the first place? The crime that Gore-Booth was shamelessly discussing in 1966 was committed on behalf of the United States. The Chagos Islands, an archipelago of 62 coral atolls in the middle of the Indian Ocean, would make an ideal bomber base from which to dominate most of south Asia and eastern Africa, and the Pentagon wanted it. Britain, in its usual kiss-up, kick-down mode, was happy to oblige, but there was a problem. The Chagos Islands had been governed as part of the British colony of Mauritius, which was due to get its independence in 1968. The United States wasn’t keen on having a major strategic base in an independent African country, so something had to be done. The solution, obviously, was to separate the Chagos Islands from Mauritius and declare them the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Easily done: offer the Mauritians three million pounds for the islands, and tell them they can’t have inde- pendence unless they accept the deal. However, this was happening at the height of decolonization, when colonial territories all over the “Third World” were claiming the right of self-determination. What if the Ilois do the same? Well, then, we’d better remove all the inhabitants. So that’s what Britain did in 1972, falsely claiming there was no resident population, only contract workers. The Ilois have not been allowed to return for 50 years, and all the people who were actually born there are getting old, but their children and grandchildren have not forgotten. They actually managed to get a decision in the British courts in 2000 ruling that the expul- sion had been unlawful and ordering the Brit- ish government to let the islanders go home. It might even have been obeyed — except that 2001 brought the 9/11 attacks, and the U.S. base on the Chagos island of Diego Garcia became a key hub in the “war on terror.” American B-52s flying from the Chagos Islands have bombed Afghanistan and Iraq at intervals for 20 years, and Diego Garcia, with no civilian population, became a transit point for prisoners being flown untraceably between American “black sites” around the planet. The islands were on long lease from the U.K., and the U.S. didn’t want them given back. Britain still insists it is the sovereign power on the islands (although it is the U.S. that runs them), but since the International Court of Justice ruled in 2019 that the whole expulsion had been illegal it has been on the defensive. The UN General Assembly and, more recently, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea have backed that ruling. It will take some time, but the United States no longer really needs a base on Diego Garcia since it has access to air bases in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, all much closer to the action. Moreover, Mauritius says it doesn’t mind if the base stays, so long as it gets its islands back. So the Ilois will be going home one day soon — and meanwhile, here’s a fun fact: the Chagos ar- chipelago is at the bottom of a giant bowl-shaped depression in the ocean, almost 100 metres deep. If the sea was actually level — if not for the huge gravitational anomaly that holds that bowl open — the Chagos Islands would all be in very deep water. Gwynne Dyer’s new book is The Shortest History of War. Education plays critical role in troubling times IN the early 20th century — 1906, to be exact — my great-grandparents, along with thou- sands of others, fled the pogroms and antisem- itism of Europe, specifically Russia, in search of a better life. As Jews, they were the frequent targets of hate, violence, and inequality under the law. They made their way to Canada, with little in the way of English, possessions, money, or sense of what the future held in store. Just a few generations later, their sacrifices have paved the way for members of our family to achieve things that, to them at the time, would not have been thought possible. As a direct beneficiary of those sacrifices, I am grateful for their courage, but the root causes of their forced departure are not lost on me, and remain even more present in my mind today as events unfold in Ukraine. As I watch what is happening in Europe with disbelief and horror, my thoughts are taken back to the months I spent in Grade 9 with leaders from Winnipeg’s Jewish community as they prepared us for a trip to Washington, D.C., and a visit to the United States Holocaust Museum. It was during those conversations that my peers and I learned about the ways in which an entire people were brainwashed to believe that their fellow citizens, colleagues, neighbours and teachers, were “lesser than.” It was as a result of those prevailing attitudes that my ancestors were forced to migrate west. My classmates and I were taught these les- sons, not only for the purpose of understanding the past and the harsh realities of our Jewish heritage, but more importantly to help ensure such atrocities could not be permitted to occur again. Russian President Vladimir Putin is keen on implementing a brutal regime while dehuman- izing the Ukrainian people with accusations that include false claims that its Jewish pres- ident and prime minister are, in effect, Nazis. These accusations, not only false and more accurately descriptive of Putin himself, are eerily reminiscent of the ways in which Adolf Hitler began his slow and methodical goal of eradicating the Jewish people, and other mi- norities, from European society, and his push for greater territorial control. A widely accepted definition of genocide includes 10 stages: classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, exter- mination and denial. It is clear, as we watch reports of news feeds from Russia and the rhetoric from Putin, that the Russian population has, in large part, been led to believe — through official state information — that Ukraine and the Ukrainian people are not legitimate, and that war is justified on that basis. Much of this comes as a result of government propaganda aimed at dehumanizing another group. There is no doubt that several of the 10 stages of genocide are active in Putin’s campaign. This is not to imply that what is happening in Ukraine right now will inevitably lead to genocide, but the strategic approach to demonizing a people is clearly in line with other historical conflicts that began in similar ways. We have also seen this play out in Donald Trump’s America and the election that led to his presidency, and more recently here in Can- ada during the so-called “Freedom” convoy, as people consume information through amateur social media platforms that attempt to create fractions within our own populations, and play upon fear and lies to achieve the larger aims of greater power and control. As an educator, I am left to wonder what role we can play to ensure our young people are not only aware of what is going on in Ukraine, but that they have the necessary tools to make sense of it. This includes an ability to draw links between other historical events and what is happening today. We need to help young people understand the power of communication, the role of govern- ment and its different forms, the role of media, and how to find — and then make sense of — the truth within it all. Historians often use what are called “histor- ical thinking concepts” as an approach to the study of human history. The six primary con- cepts are: 1) to establish historical significance, 2) use primary source evidence, 3) identify continuity and change, 4) analyze cause and consequence, 5) consider historical perspec- tive, and 6) understand the ethical dimensions of historical interpretation. As the Historical Thinking Project of Canada says, these concepts allow students to “detect the differences … between the uses and abuses of history. Historical thinking only becomes possible in relation to substantive content.” We need our young people to engage in discussions about world affairs at home and in the classroom. By asking them, and others we engage with, where they got their information, how they know it is true, whether or not it can be trusted, what they are going to do with it, and what questions they might have moving forward, we can greatly impact the develop- ment of their critical thinking skills and, as such, contribute to a better future. Ben Carr is principal of the Maples Met School in Winnipeg. SYLVAIN CHARLEBOIS BEN CARR RICHARD B. LEVINE/SIPA USA FILES A pricing dispute between Canadian grocery giant Loblaws and potato-chip manufacturer Frito-Lay could mean a scarcity of some familiar snacks on many stores’ shelves. GWYNNE DYER A_07_Mar-01-22_FP_01.indd 7 2022-02-28 5:57 PM ;