Stopped for lunch at an agricultural research institute on my way to the east of the Volta Lake. Very excited because I am visiting a large project to produce Fair Trade mango and pineapple juice for export to the UK. I have been advising on it (free) for three years now and for the first time we are moving towards full production. Hope I will get some photos to post.
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Mmm, thirsty now. 🙂
That is good news, but can you clarify if the final juice product is freshly squeezed or from concentrate?
I buy Fairtrade where possible and I try to source produce that is organic and fresh. Sorry, but its a current annoyance of mine that I can only find Fairtrade juice from concentrate or freshly squeezed juice, so I am forced to make a decision on whether I care more for workers (generally) in other countries or my health. Surely it is in everyones long term interest to do both and I don’t get why I’m not being given the option to (apart from the obvious excuse of profit margins).
Craig ,would you do it here in Uzbekistan?
The very sweet and tasty pineapple I bought this week was a Fairtrade one from Ghana.
Anonymous at 1:03 pm, is there a specific problem with concentrate? This is a genuine question, do you think that the concentration process does some damage to vitamin C or something?
I’m asking because I can’t help thinking that moving large quantities of water around the world is somewhat worse than moving smaller quantities of concentrate.
There is a perpetuation of poverty, becasue of the global inequity in the Terms of Trade. Between the Washington agenda, the dictates of the IMF and World Bank, countries like those are caught in a vicious cycle of persistent poverty. Add to that the problem of the financialisation of the world economy:-
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25911.htm
So true – but – so sad.
It would appear that the calories and vitamins of the fruit should go into the tummies of the children of Ghana and not into our already well filled guts.
http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/health/artikel.php?ID=177492
I would certainly be interested in Fair Trade tinned pineapple (and tinned juice as well, if it tastes better than the stuff in cardboard cartons). Not to mention Fair trade tinned fruit salad. But I must admit I’m doubtful whether your mangoes are as good as Indian Alphonso mangoes.
Craig adventuring in the Juice Trade. Does this mean a tilt toward the Zionist agenda?
Talking of juice, here’s the indefatigable Captain Sherlock on that spy swap:
“Spy swap hides Cable-Huhne tradecraft – Mboya murder, Nairobi UNEP scam
James:
Check out BBC black and white propaganda and you will find the spy swap was designed to by Vince Cable and Chris Huhne to protect Crown Agents’ tradecraft in re the 1969 assassination of Tom Mboya in Nairobi and the 1972 launch of UNEP global warming scam.
If Anna “Breast Clamp” Chapman had appeared in court she might have revealed the sexual-entrapment techniques developed by the Crown Agents over the last hundred + years to control the likes of Tony Blair and George Osborne.
“Anna Chapman’s father worked as a diplomat in Kenya alongside Mr Ivanov, Russia’s first deputy prime minister, a career spy and a friend of Vladimir Putin’s, it was claimed on Saturday. The claim suggests that her family may also enjoy serious political connections inside the Kremlin.
Alex Chapman, a 30-year-old trainee psychiatrist in Bournemouth, was married to Anna Chapman from 2002-2006.
He said he met her father, Vasily Kushchenko, in Zimbabwe in 2002 and found him “scary.”
Anna had told him that Mr Kushchenko was a former KGB spy who had worked for “old Russia,” he recalled.
In an article citing Russian intelligence sources, Russian daily newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets reported on Saturday that Mr Kushchenko worked in Nairobi as a Russian diplomat at the same time as Sergei Ivanov, Russia’s first deputy prime minister. It did not give dates.
Mr Ivanov, a friend of Vladimir Putin’s, was a career spy for eighteen years – first in the KGB and then in Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service and was allegedly expelled from the UK for spying activities.
He was also posted to Finland and worked widely in Africa.
In 2008, he was a frontrunner to succeed Vladimir Putin as president but lost out to Dmitry Medvedev, while remaining extremely powerful.
The claim came as the ten self-confessed Russian agents spent their first full day back in Russia at an undisclosed Moscow location. Intelligence sources say they are probably being thoroughly debriefed by the SVR intelligence service, the agency that ran them.
Meanwhile, relatives of Igor Sutyagin [probably been whacked at Brize Norton on the return journey of the Vision Airlines Boeing form Vienna], one of the four men the Kremlin handed over to the United States, said they were getting worried they had not heard from him.
“We do not understand why this work cannot be combined with a short phone call,” Dmitry Sutyagin, his brother, complained.”
I buy frozen mango and use it to make smoothies.
Juice made from concentrate is nutritionally probably about the same as sugared water.
Most of the vitamins disappear minutes after squeezing. I buy squeezed grapefruit and orange juice from Florida Oranges, but only for the taste.
Mangoes win fresh, but you have to pick them when they are ripe but a week or two before they are ready to eat, otherwise the monkeys get them. I’ve got two or three trees in my garden but they fruit just after one holiday has ended and before the other one starts so I’ve never managed to eat one yet!
Indian mangoes, particularly Alfonsos, are generally considered the best in the world. Most are sold to the domestic market though.
Pineapples grow easily(in some places they’re considered a weed) so that you’re not going to get great value added from them. If you could get them by ship to the UK, then you’d probably make money selling them fresh.
Oh, and don’t forget the plastic crates for the mangoes you want to sell fresh and don’t try using American Aid Agencies to finance them 🙂
http://aidwatchers.com/2010/05/of-mangos-and-plastic-crates/#comments
Sorry this is off topic Craig, but the linked video is a must see. Watch a British libel lawyer being publicly taken down a notch or three. Something juicy for your 4:45 link maybe.
I’ve looked at the beginning of the video David mentions. Frankly it seems to me that the lawyer has all the arguments on his side.
Assange makes some exceptionally ignorant statements, such as the old canard that the burden of proof in libel cases is on the defendant (it isn’t; first the plaintiff has to prove what was said was libellous).
There are problems with English libel cases (mainly to do with costs) but not the hoary old chestnuts that Assange brings up.
Mango, banana & coconut shakes, that’s how you drink mango. Mango, sticky rice and sweet milk, that’s how you eat mango. I’m lucky, all the fruit I eat is grown on the island I live on.
I’m conflicted about shipping food across the globe. For a long time I was against western food subsidies that prevented developing states from being competitive in food production. However now I question whether we as a species can justify the energy use and pollution created to ship food everywhere. I also like seasonal treats, it makes the food seem more special, but my feelings may be different if I lived in the cold UK ;P
Stephen Jones why did you stop watching? It was such fun. You would have seen the silly lawyer go all quiet and huffy. And, somehow he also failed to make the questionable point you made. HE certainly never called Assange ignorant, and he had plenty of opportunity. You are however right to say that UK libel proceedings costs are an important factor, and Assange makes this point convincingly.
A libelous statement IS presumed to be false, unless the defendant can prove it true. But don’t take it from me, do your own damn research.
Right on David. Thanks. Julian Assange rules OK.
This in the Independent today. There are some moronic comments beneath attempting to discredit his efforts.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/wikileaks-founder-who-torments-the-pentagon-comes-out-of-shadows-2022895.html
and the now famous but horrifying video of the callous and inhuman attack –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0&has_verified=1
Dear Craig,
Please email me business contact for distribution, happy to launch in Scandinavia!
Greeting from tropical Finland (+32C)
-Sami
I’m not generally a fruit juice fan, but the fresh mango juice in Accra was like nectar: thick, sweet and creamy, like a smoothie in its own right. I could have drunk it by the bucket. The pineapple juice was even better. I wouldn’t touch the substitute we get in the UK “from concentrate”. It’s like the difference between fresh milk and powdered milk.
About cocoa and the speculators in the hedge funds causing price rises. Has anything at all changed since the so-called ‘crash’?
From medialens –
Speculators’ new craze for chocolate leaves a bitter taste
Posted by MikeD on July 11, 2010, 8:52 am
European cocoa traders threaten to quit the London market over ‘manipulation’
First they ruined the property market, and then they fouled up the banks and building societies, before wrecking the high street. Now hedge funds and other financial speculators are threatening the good order of the chocolate market.
Cocoa prices have reached their highest levels for 33 years, increasing 150 per cent in the last 18 months, and financial speculators are being accused of inflating prices to make a financial profit. Cocoa crop failure in the Ivory Coast, the world’s top grower, is partly the cause, but some experts are blaming the London commodity market where cocoa is traded.
Speculation is now so rife that a group of European cocoa trading companies have taken the rare step of making public a complaint about the extent of the speculation on the London cocoa market and demanding tighter regulations. In a letter seen by The Independent on Sunday, leading cocoa industry figures claim there is clear “manipulation… which is bringing the London market into disrepute”. They accuse the market of lacking “transparency and control”. They warn that unless action is taken to stop “big players from cornering the market” they will quit London.
Fair-trade activists and anti-poverty pressure groups are calling for government action to curb financial speculators from inflating food prices. They warn that unless urgent moves are taken to clamp down on the hedge funds and other financial groups behind the speculation there could be shortages, death through starvation and outbreaks of civil unrest in poorer countries.
Barbara Crowther, of the Fairtrade foundation said: “Fairtrade’s experience is that people are willing to pay a little more for chocolate, if this supports cocoa farmers in poor countries to improve their own standard of living. But consumers would be very angry if this is simply helping rich and powerful financial speculators to line their own pockets.”
Julian Oram, Head of Policy & Campaigns at the World Development Movement, said: “It has profound consequences for the world’s poorest people by pushing up the price of basic foods like wheat and corn. Governments really need crack down on the banks and hedge funds that are gambling on what is a basic human need.” He warned that market instability affects farmers in developing countries, particularly in West Africa, the dominant cocoa-growing area by making it harder to plan.
Critics claim that financial speculation in food commodities has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths through malnutrition. A steep rise in prices for staple foods between 2006 and 2008, including rice, which rose 217 per cent, and wheat, which increased by 136 per cent, resulted in a global food crisis and riots in Haiti, Bangladesh and Egypt. Oxfam said an extra 119 million people were pushed into hunger.
Its an old wives tale that concentrated juices loose all their goodness. Freshly squeezed is more of a luxury but not a health matter – except in combination with quite unusual diets by western standards.
Organic is more desireable as it gauranatees no pesticide mistakes and sustainable practices. Along with the extra fine goodness of fairtrade!
This sort of work (even updaid) really reinforces my respect for people. Campaigners can tug passionately in various directions, sometimes admirably, sometimes haplessly, but making good things happen is greatness.
Craig, I can’t seem to get hold of you by other means. Just thought I would let you know that Stuart O’Neill, formerly Customs out of Ashgabat, has died just 43 or so. He spoke of you fondly.
http://www.andrew-drummond.com/2010/07/10/prisoner-of-ashgabad-a-humble-tribute-to-a-dear-friend/
If you indicate any dissent at this blog, then you must be a Jewish agent.
That is, if you believe that 19 Arab Muslims did 911, then you must be a Jewish agent.
——“A libelous statement IS presumed to be false, unless the defendant can prove it true. But don’t take it from me, do your own damn research.”——
But that is after the plaintiff has proven the statement is libellous. That’s to say he has to prove that the statement is one that would seriously damage his reputation.
Once that has been established the defendant has to justify why he has damaged the other person’s reputation. There are varying defenses to this, of which the truth of the statement is one.
It’s no different from what would happen if instead of libelling me you had punched me on the nose. As a plaintiff the burden of proof would be on me to prove you had done so. Once that had been established you would need to establish a defence (self-defence, irresistable provocation whatsoever).
—-“Stephen Jones why did you stop watching? “——-
Because immediately after coming out with the crap about the burden of proof being reversed, he came out with the other canard about the UK being a center for libel tourism. It’s like reading Alfred or Larry, when people get so many things so obviously wrong in so little space it’s not worth wasting any further time giving any attention to them.
—-“Its an old wives tale that concentrated juices loose all their goodness. “——
It appears to depend on the temperature. But in eight weeks storage as concentrate you can expect orange juice vitamin C levels to be 82% at 28C down to 15% at 45C.
It does seem I was being a bit hard on the concentrates, so now I can go back to buying them and save money 🙂
“A libelous statement IS presumed to be false, unless the defendant can prove it true”
“But that is after the plaintiff has proven the statement is libellous”.
To be precise here the plaintiff must first demonstrate that a published statement has caused damage.
This of itself however does not make the statement libellous. If the defendant can demonstrate either that the statement is true, or that it was an honestly-held opinion, then there is no libel, however damaging it may have been.
8 weeks at 28 & 45C ? ..bleuch
Quote: Craig Murray,”So you think this is a free country?”
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/
2008/09/so_you_think_th.html
“under this country’s crazy libel laws you cannot even retell things you did yourself unless you have other objective evidence that you did it. And you may not express opinions that are not mainstream, or which may upset the government or the rich and powerful.
That is not exaggerated.”
——“under this country’s crazy libel laws you cannot even retell things you did yourself unless you have other objective evidence that you did it. And you may not express opinions that are not mainstream, or which may upset the government or the rich and powerful.”—–
British libel laws are basically the same as those in the rest of the world.
The US, after the Sullivan ruling, basically allows anybody who is a public figure (which is pretty well anybody the paper takes an interest in) to be libelled with impunity, but it is pretty well the only country that does so.
The problem with British libel law lies with the costs. In many jurisdictions it is a criminal offence, which may seem harsher than the situation here, but in practice that means the costs are a lot less. They could be reduced considerably if they were judged by a county court (or even a small claims court) than by the High Court, but the quality of judgements would decline.
I think you will have your work cut out properly establishing those claims here. Perhaps not in the Mango Juice thread but in the next UK libel one certainly…
I’ll have little difficulty proving the claims. The problem is people (including Craig) keep making inaccurate statements instead of analysing where the problem lies.
This comment for example is absurd: “And you may not express opinions that are not mainstream, or which may upset the government or the rich and powerful”
An opinion can’t be libelous; only an allegation of fact. So to state you are an absolute douchebag no normal person would sit in the same railway carriage as is not libelous, but to say you bunk off work ten minutes early on Fridays may well be.