Berhe W. Aregay
15 February 2006
opinion
Addis Ababa — What is more harmless and nutritionally sensible than an intake of a glass of orange juice? For a lot of people, a glass of juice on the breakfast table in the morning is something you don't plan for ahead of time; it is as if it materializes by itself. Some would even equate not having it in the morning with human rights violations of some sort.
So what is new with affluence, you might ask. Ethical living might change, that routine; that is what is new. For some people in parts of the developed world, orange juice is no longer as snow-white pure as is generally considered.
When and how did the orange juice saga go awry? The Guardian of 10-01-06 puts it this way. "So great is its importance, that since 1996, orange juice has been included alongside cocoa, coffee, cotton and sugar as agricultural commodities deemed worthy of being traded on the future markets at the New York Board of Trade.
"----- But beyond the veneer of orange juice as a source of vitamin C, lie many problems for consumers to mull over. First, it is the product of a highly industrialized farming and manufacturing process. Orange plantations are very thirsty, needing 6,000-9,000 cubic meters of water per hectare of water per year".
The paper goes on to describe other sins. A study in 1991 estimated that for every glass of Brazilian orange juice, 22 glasses of processing water and 1000 glasses of irrigation water were required.
Orange juice, as pre-packaged and sold in super markets is supposed to be energy-intensive product. It has to be pasteurized, concentrated, frozen, shipped, and then rehydrated at the destination countries. That is a lot of energy indeed.
Still, why all the fuss? Because of something called ethical living or ethical consumerism. Granted, orange juice does all the good in the world for you. It tops up your vitamin intake. It gives you that early get-up-and-go, especially if your head has been fogged form Jack Daniel's of the night before. Ethical consumerism is well aware of that.
What its motto tries to tell us is, if you can switch to other equally tasty and equally nutritious fruit juice but which carries less baggage with it, so much the better. Come to think of it ethical living is sticking for your planet Earth. In other words, what you are asked to do is to partake in all the bequests of the good earth, but to please stop short of sucking it dry.
Ethical consumerism takes many forms. Being an informed citizen is one of the requirements. That may even save your life. If you are not aware, for instance, that all the rivers in Addis are heavily polluted, you may still go ahead and munch your green salads just rinsed there.
Consider all the fraud that take place in our capital and often reported by the media. Butter, pepper, cooking oil, honey etc. could be hazardous to your health. Not in the sense that they might clog your arteries, but that, they could be downright toxic due to the alchemy that goes on in between the time.
Some even suspect that we now have reached a situation in which finding a genuine food article such as butter in the market is a thing of the past. Only a leap of faith is what keeps us buying again.
So discriminating against products, food or otherwise, that have obviously violated sensible environmental behavior is one way of waging a fight for the protection and well-being of our natural resources, and as in the instances above, protecting our health.
Ethical lifestyle makes sense and works best when a society is better informed and when the rules and regulations of the game are not stacked against the little man. Sudden or unannounced power surges, for instance, have seen the demise of so many electronic goods such as radios, television sets here in Addis and other towns.
If you believe the compensation, process by the concerned organization for your loss will be simple, straightforward and matter of fact, think twice. You might probably hit a brick wall.
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