The Eleven-Cent Dilemma

2009-12-13T11:22:00.000-08:00

ATLANTA – As I was early, I thought I could have a bite just in case my next meeting lasted longer than expected. On the drive-thru window I ordered coffee and apple pie. “One pie is 89 cents, sir; would you like two for one dollar?” I hesitated: either I could eat the extra one later that evening and get 260 calories or I can squander it anyway if I am not hungry at all. “Just one, please,” I replied.
The apple pie in the story weighs only 80 grams, a micro-fraction of what I am going to talk about but it helps me to introduce the subject. Gross reports estimate that some 25-30% of the total food production in rich countries is mercilessly thrown away. (These percentages exclude waist gains, a different but real kind of waste.) Though we are dealing here with quite large numbers, the question to ask is not how much of that chunk could be taken to poor children; we well know that transporting provisions to empty mouths would cost much more than the stuff itself. (Thousands of sheep are killed in Australia every time their demand is low; animal rights defenders are more concerned about the how than the why sheep are slaughtered). The actual concern is the large volumes of oil and fresh water that are used to produce and distribute the food to be dumped and the huge costs of disposing the food waste.
As expected, the problem is most crucial in U.S., where the average income per capita can buy the most food. A recent report of the Public Library of Science estimates that food waste in this country is around 40%, the production of which uses roughly 25% of the total freshwater consumption in America and some 300 million barrels of oil per year, approximately half a month of the States oil demand. Furthermore, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, 12% of the solid waste generated in U.S. was food scraps, out of which less than 3% was recovered for composting or hog feeding. Making things even more disturbing, landfills are the largest emitter of human related methane, a greenhouse contaminant 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Although waste weigh estimates are not readily available for most countries, we can easily guess that worldwide medium-to-high income people also throw away hundreds of tons of food every day. This is not an issue to be handled by government agencies or international agencies—of course they can help; raising prices by decree or agreement is not a solution. The corrective duties rest on consumers and producers. One, it is the duty of every single individual who has never known (or might have forgotten) what real hunger is; two, it is the responsibility of every food company and their marketing agencies.
As for people, I can hardly think of any other behavioral change—buying just what is to be eaten—which is both easy to put into practice and powerful in social impact. The habit modification is about refraining from doing as opposed to taking action. We do not need to join any charity, send money to any fund or provide assistance to any group. Simply by only getting what we need, we will save money; by keeping the refrigerator half empty, we will stay healthier. Unexpectedly, without aiming at that goal, we also somehow become better citizens. Corporations on their side, as part of their social responsibility, should tune their logistics plans to produce and distribute only what is to be consumed, not what can be packed into customers by advertising.
Cutting down food waste should become our daily win-win choice. We win as we evade the temptations to exceed our nutritional daily requirements. The environment wins because Mother Earth receives less waste. The resulting job cutting considerations may make us falter. Still is it not immoral to use food for damaging our Planet? The truth is that eleven-cent apple pies should never be baked.

Gustavo Estrada
Business Process Consultant and Writer

Author of Hacia el Buda desde el occidente

Tolerating Inefficiency

2009-09-07T13:21:00.000-07:00

ATLANTA – Through the implementation of Information Technology (IT), business productivity—the ratio of results turned out to resources used—has increased substantially over the last twenty years. Two key marks just keep moving in opposing direction: sales per employee, going up; number of workers, going down. IT is eliminating jobs by the thousands in every business sector and unemployment everywhere will eventually reach levels unseen before.
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As companies optimize their business processes, jobs are being replaced by admirably designed combinations of software and hardware. Not only core business functions are done much more efficiently today by computer programs with minimum human intervention but also tasks that were performed in the past by internal personnel are now carried out through input submitted directly by “unpaid” customers. The need of intermediaries between sources and destinations—factories and consumers, service providers and users, print shops and readers, movie producers and viewers, transportation industries and travelers—is shrinking when not disappearing.
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The time to tolerate some inefficiency and to slow down business process optimizations has come. Or maximized productivity will kill us. The financial evaluation of manpower reduction projects—are there projects which are not?—should at least consider the social cost of eliminating jobs; perhaps a “societal” charge should be added to cash flow analyses. Reasoning is straightforward: Unemployment leads to crime, which demands preventive and corrective measures, which costs money, which governments should pay, which requires additional taxes. Such hypothetical charge is simply the cost of maintaining some socially-inconvenient-to-eliminate positions.
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Tolerance to inefficiency must be even bigger in underdeveloped countries where unemployment is already very high. In such countries, the jobs that develop the replacing technologies are located somewhere else in the global chain; no new openings—no job counting compensation—occurs locally.
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Commodity distribution is a good example for the kind of tolerance is worth considering. Every new huge supermarket and every giant department store cut jobs by the hundreds; for the same total throughput in a given community, many more people, obviously with lower salaries, would get a weekly pay with the traditional approach of small shops in every block. The sales per clerk of the former (the more efficient big stores) are several times larger than the same index of the latter (the small ones).
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The world economy is moving to a scenario in which having a job is going to become a luxury, a privilege. Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, establishes that “everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.” This civilized and well intentioned prerogative is now an endangered right, impossible to sustain as such when worldwide unemployment rates get to the 30-40 percent ranges.
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It is extremely difficult to come to terms with tolerating inefficiency. The idea is not pursuing it by breaking healthy processes down where IT is already in place. Still recognizing the social worth of keeping “already existing” jobs, when their elimination is not absolutely necessary, is an issue to review. At the very least, the magnitude of the core problem—potentially massive unemployment—deserves both a thoughtful debate and the anticipated search of possible lines of actions.

Gustavo Estrada
Business Process Consultant and Writer
http://pragmatic-buddha.com/

OVERPOPULATION + HIGH PRODUCTIVITY = UNEMPLOYMENT

The Eleven-Cent Dilemma

Tolerating Inefficiency