Hyper-activity
Central and Eastern Europeans, generally wealthier and in far less immediate danger from food shortages than many other nations and populations around the world, are witnessing a rapid diffusion of supermarket and hypermarket-based retailing networks, a trend that began in earnest in the mid 1990s. The first wave of supermarket expansion in the region took place in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, and accounted for 40 to 50 percent of food retailing in these countries within a decade. The region's second supermarket wave broke over Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia, where the share of supermarket-based food retailing stood at 25 to 30 percent in 2004 but is growing rapidly. Income and urbanisation conditions in Eastern Europe existed for the region's third wave to have risen earlier, but policy reforms lagged; as a result, supermarket-based food retailing was as low as 10 percent in Russia in 2004 but the country has since emerged as a top FDI destination, according to the Journal of Agricultural and Development Economics.
Supermarket retailing is closely identified with notions of progress and development in the post-communist era, but not everyone believes that everything from bygone days deserves to vanish like the dodo.
"Rocketing oil prices and security of supply has raised big questions about intensive food production that relies on long transport chains," Joe Smith, senior lecturer in Geography at The Open University, told Green Horizon. "The supermarket model so successfully exported to CEE has severely damaged the ecological, economic and social sustainability of regional food systems."
Petr Jehlicka, another geography lecturer at the Open University, has carried out extensive work with Smith in both Poland and the Czech Republic concerning traditional and evolving food practices. The pair are critical of government/NGO environmental policies and approaches that fail to properly take into account the popularity and potential of traditional food procurement practices in these countries.
"[CEE] countries could lead the way in demonstrating how different approaches to food can greatly reduce the environmental impact and insecurity of supermarket-driven systems," Smith said. "The region sustains grow-your-own and barter traditions alongside other locally based food systems that should be nurtured.
Encouraging the expansion of [these practices] could see CEE countries lead the world in sustainable food."
The researchers argue in one study, An Unsustainable State: Contrasting Food Practices and State Policies in the Czech Republic, that much of today's 'sustainable environment' literature focuses on responsible and informed consumption, and tends to be "dismissive of ideas of restraint and restriction" and voluntary simplicity. Hence there is an "abundance of useful information on a range of issues framed by the current neoliberal discourse on sustainable consumption such as fair trade, organic food and air miles."
This is not to suggest that Smith and Jehlicka resist such market options and practices, which they do view as complementary to self-provisioning, etc; they do point out, however, that "both fair trade and organic food remain negligible phenomena in Czech society" in terms of money spent. Czech citizens, for example, spent only a little more than EUR 200,000 on fair trade products in 2006, while just 0.06 percent of food sold in the country in 2003 was organically produced, according to the researchers.
