So uncool, but hooked on foreign unsold

When, in the late ‘70’s, I began my first overseas assignment for Her Majesty’s Overseas Development Administration, I was posted to Tanzania.  Those were the difficult days in that country, the time when the first Swahili word a foreigner learnt, after ‘jambo’ and ‘asante sana’ was ‘hamna’.  “Bread please”. “Hamna”. “Milk?”  “Hamna”. “You have petrol?” “Hamna” ‘Hamna’, is one of those wonderful Swahili words for which no single English word is an adequate translation.  It means ‘we have none’, and encompasses the accompanying expression of regret. I was therefore surprised that, on those occasions when the small stores had something I wanted, imported groceries were often past their sell-by date. Youth rarely ponders on such issues, especially when all around is new and exciting, but I casually ascribed this to the widespread poverty in the country at that time.  It can’t be poor shelf management when there is nothing else on the shelf.

What shelf life
My next posting was to Kenya.  Our scientific unit, chasing the caterpillars and moths of African armyworm across East Africa, was supplied with Landrovers, those wonderful Series III 109’s that I think were stronger than any of the subsequent models.  I was intrigued that of the three newly imported, one looked odd, the front and rear wheels were not in line. Only just, rather like the columns in a Christopher Wren church. I wondered if it had dropped off a crane onto the wharf at Mombasa. Wisdom, or at least common sense, grows with experience, and I later came to realise this was not possible. The forces needed to twist a landrover chassis would seriously damage everything else, yet everything else worked perfectly.  It must have been like that when it left the UK. By the early 80’s I was in the Solomon Islands, working on a wonderfully remote island called Kolombangara.  There was one store, a small wooden structure, selling, now and again, the most basic of commodities. 

For the weekly shop, we would take a canoe to Gizo, across the heaving Pacific swells, flying fish erupting from the bow wave, dolphins twisting and turning in joyful pursuit and the occasional whale spouting as we passed. They were the best shopping trips of my life.  Apart from the beer, what we bought wasn’t.  All manufactured food products, were imported from either New Zealand or Australia.  We tried to find Kiwi goods, because the Ozzie ones were almost always out-of-date. They would be delivered off the ship out-of-date, or within a few weeks of the sell-by date.  This was not just an out-island phenomenon, it applied in the capital, Honiara, too.  I was beginning to gain insight.

Something curdled
During subsequent assignments to several Caribbean islands, insight turned to understanding; rather an inexcusably long time, but science, not society dominated my mind then. Most of us travel now and again, and have experience of North America or Europe.  Nothing out-of-date on those shelves; there’d be hell to pay, financially, in the papers, amongst ones corporate peers.  In fact, only perishables have a date label that is just around the corner. All those non-perishable items are removed from the shelves several months before they have to be destroyed.  Ever wondered what happens to them?  Are they destroyed early, or stored in some safe warehouse?  These are costs, and business always looks for a return. I suspect they are sold.  Legally or illegally they find their way onto the supermarket shelves of countries without consumer protection laws or where the laws are not enforced; in Africa, the Pacific, the Caribbean and from my colleagues’ reports, parts of Asia and Central America too. I live in Trinidad now, a country of foreign used cars and foreign unsold groceries.

Profits to make
This observation has been fuelled by recent experiences in my local supermarket.  Cooking chocolate, still on the shelf, sweating darkly through the yellow cardboard box, pasta sealed in its original packaging nibbled to dust within days of purchase, taco shells instantly, pungently rancid, with the stamp ‘01’ inside the packet.What was rare is becoming increasingly common.  Complaints to the management are met with a mumbled or effusive apology.  My return is replaced or refunded, but the rest of the consignment is still there on the shelf when I next go shopping. I pointed out a tub of cottage cheese, a month past sell-by date, the lid bulging with the pressure of gases released within.  It was still there a week later. Was it eventually bought or did the staff wait for it to explode on the cheese shelf? 

Is this phenomenon a result of excruciatingly bad warehouse and shelf management, or is there a deliberate policy of buying the goods cleared from North American supermarket shelves.  Somebody is making a huge profit.  If the supermarket returned nearly expired items to the importer/distributor, they would stop importing it. If the importer refused to pay the foreign supplier, we won’t be sent someone else’s waste products next time.  Or do the supplier, importer, distributor and retailer simply constitute another cartel ripping-off the Trinbagonian public? And that landrover?  Same principle.  What you can’t sell at home you export abroad, to a developing country without the resources to challenge you. We have the resources but we seem not to have the will.

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