From Maya Hammarsal.
ON the surface it looks simple. Food prices are high, so bring in a large chain supermarket and everything will be OK.
Well, no. If you think things are bad now, they’ll just get a whole lot worse. Not at first, of course

They’ll pull on their vast resources to undercut local shops – and this applies to all shops, not just food stores – then once established we’ll see their true colours. Check out the Walmart movie before you say ‘yes’. See how this particular consumer predator rips out the heart of small communities, like Jersey, leaving shopping deserts and the locals bound as wage slaves to the corporation.

Companies like Tesco, Asda and so on aren’t looking to help our economy or to stretch our pound further. They want into Jersey because they see a nice fat profit for their shareholders, gained at the expense of our pockets and our retail industry.

And it’s not just that part of our economy at stake. Tourists love our town, looking so refreshingly different from every UK high street, but that will change. The shops will be empty, tourism reduced, jobs lost, competition reduced, the heart of town dead and our unique culture crushed.

And what about agriculture? Already we have examples of local growers forced by UK supermarkets to grow under glass using hydroponics, thus forcing up the cost of production and prices, and there are others who have been driven out of business when the supermarket has arbitrarily torn up the contract and bought elsewhere at the time of picking. #]Think about it: they provide cheap goods precisely because they have exploited the producer – of which Jersey’s agricultural economy is part – underpaid their staff and left communities with no choice. They’ve already had a negative effect on our economy – do we want to give them a chance to really destroy it?

Jersey’s food supply is insecure and vulnerable. That’s what is making food and other items expensive. Food prices are rising globally due to the cost of fuel both in production and transport. Bringing in another supermarket won’t protect us. Quite the reverse, for it is through diversity that stability is achieved.

We need to look at providing for our needs within our own community as much as possible, not allowing multi-nationals to take advantage of us. We should now be establishing an agricultural policy that supports farmers growing mixed crops (organically) for the local market, setting marginal land aside for allotment use by the public, preventing properties with land being sold to 1(1)Ks so they can have a big garden, but instead leasing to locals to be run as food-producing smallholdings.

We need to be protecting ourselves through ‘growing our own’ in the Island, investing in and supporting a diversity of local businesses and industries – not just finance – providing education to ‘skill up’ our people, focusing on providing gardens not car parking spaces, putting a stop to shareholder monopolies and running these as co-operatives for the benefit of the local community.
These are the ways to ensure fair prices, a stable economy and protection for all.
16 Vauxhall Street,
St Helier.