Pericles and others
Your perspectives please:
Should we life like… car journeys and accidents are inevitable and simply redesign the car (a flawed implement) and then move on or should we look for a better way we move people?

Likewise should we accept the stated goals of Gates Foundation World Cocoa Foundation (ADM, Mars, Hershey, Nestles etc) donation of $23 million as an act of "generosity" to increasing cocoa production as a rush of humanity? Or as I see it a symptom of what ails us, a cynical exercise in both PR and guaranteeing a cheaper price for the beans. This means cheaper costs - cheaper products - more sales (this assumes that all the price reduction in raw product isn't passed on) – more and greater profit. And the farmer...not so wow. (No free lunch syndrome?)

Refer to how the coffee market crashed because of foreign influence to grow more coffee. Nestles’ domination of the instant market forced the price down to whereby the farmer became even poorer in the end the US government had to get involved with a temporary floor price ….while the farmers diversified if they could?

I also tender Mars bar marketing (manipulation of the end user)...first a bigger size (wow) then a disproportionately bigger price after the market has been ‘desensitized’ (i.e. used to the bigger size).

Firstly who in these clearly documented scenarios really benefits? The farmer? The end user? The fat clinics, dentists, heart surgeons… you get the point. (The Corps Execs get the lunch and we/farmers all pay)

Back to our struggling cocoa farmer wouldn’t it be more equitable/effective to simply set a fairer price then let the market work from there?
Fund their ability to make informed marketability of their product? Give assistance with diversifying? Perhaps there are even better crops those that will feed that could be funded researched etc. How is this an impossible or even expensively impossible change?

Now the biggy should we accept this as ‘generosity’ (sic) on face value or see it for what it is and try to change a pipe dream into reality

Examinator - (hope I'm included in the "and others"),

From a truly objective point of view any kind of benevolent intervention could be seen as disturbing the intended natural progression.

If we were to view events on this planet from the perspective of a disinterested outsider, rather in the way kids do with ant-farms, and knowing that survival of the fittest makes for a more efficent 'ant farm', we would be apalled at any intervention such as you mention. Without it, one problematic sector would disapear and make way for another, more efficient one, or be absorbed into the whole, thus strengenthing it.

Thus one could argue that any charitable move - such as overseas aid, disaster relief etc. - is actually simply counter-productive: if millions of non productive units disapear from our ant farm it would be strengthened. Hundreds of cocoa-farmers ditto.

In this view, there would be no place for ultruism. In fact, to be effective, any intervention must contain benefits for the stronger, more efficient units in order to counter the intervention to the weaker ones - whose continued survival counteracts the natural law.

Perhaps the Gateses are simply ant-farmers?

I am for the pipe dream. A world where Gates foundations are not necessary, where farmers receive a fair price for their produce. This is not "propping up the weakest" which has become synonymous with the distortion of "survival of the fittest".

This little excerpt may clarify where I am coming from:

"For starters, there is a lot more to evolution by natural selection than just the survival of the fittest. There must also be a population of replicating entities and variations between them that affect fitness - variation that must be heritable. By itself, survival of the fittest is a dead end. Business people are especially guilty of confusing survival of the fittest with evolution.

What's more, although the phrase conjures up an image of a violent struggle for survival, in reality the word "fittest" seldom means the strongest or the most aggressive. On the contrary, it can mean anything from the best camouflaged or the most fecund to the cleverest or the most cooperative. Forget Rambo, think Einstein or Gandhi.

What we see in the wild is not every animal for itself. Cooperation is an incredibly successful survival strategy. Indeed it has been the basis of all the most dramatic steps in the history of life. Complex cells evolved from cooperating simple cells. Multicellular organisms are made up of cooperating complex cells. Superorganisms such as bee or ant colonies consist of cooperating individuals."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13671-evolution-myths-survival-of-the-fittest-justifies-everyone-for-themselves.html

Therefore I do not see a conflict between the practical and the moral in production of cocoa or anything else. For too long we have been brainwashed into the idea that it is a dog-eat-dog world. I have yet to meet a doggie cannibal. However, I may well have met human cannibals.

In fact I posit that if the entire species of homo sapiens disappeared overnight, the ecosystem known as planet earth would actually benefit. We are not so much at the top of the food chain,as we are parasites.

Now I expect to be accused of being a human-hater. Not so. I'm just very logical.

There's no easy answer examinator, as I suspect you already know.

>>Likewise should we accept the stated goals of Gates Foundation World Cocoa Foundation (ADM, Mars, Hershey, Nestles etc) donation of $23 million as an act of "generosity"<<

It must be very frustrating, being Bill Gates.

He woke up one morning with the revelation "hey, I can't spend that amount on myself in a hundred lifetimes", so he established the B&MGF. He put really good people in place - I was lucky enough in a previous life to know Patty Stonesifer - and they really try as hard as they can to get money to places where it will do the most good.

Make no mistake, over the years, he and Melinda have first-hand seen more individual and collective suffering than the vast majority of the posters here, if not all.

Think what that must do to you after a while.

Heck, those experiences alone would almost be full atonement for foisting Windows on the world.

Almost.

I did say almost.

There are so many parallels in ordinary business.

If you build a factory in Togo (or wherever) to make T-shirts, are you i) providing much-needed employment to an area where 80% of families are at or below subsistence level, or b) exploiting a third-world country to enrich your shareholders?

Where is the line between enlightened altruism, and blind charity?

Should there be a line at all?

We cannot divide the world GDP equally between 6.5 billion individuals, so we have to do the best we can, with what we've got.

Is it "fair"? No, and never will be.

When I'm not being practical, I'm in the Fractelle "pipe dream" camp. Unfortunately, human beings, poor creatures that we are, are unlikely to realize that dream before the planet boils.

Interesting thread.

I don't have anything more to add to the
comments except to refer posters to
the following website which may be of
interest:

"Yes, they can."
Why altruistic firms can survive in a competitive market."
by David Vogel.

http://creativecapitalism.typepad.com/creative_capitalism/2008/07/yes-they-can.html

Foxy snookums

Great piece, great link...gonna read more of it later. Need more thinking music. Hmmm Pastrol Suite or Julie London or Deep Forrest..I know 'Er hu' the chinese Violin that works.
Ta many thankums

:-)