ABSTRACT
Both farmers and supermarkets operate in a business environment that can sometimes change radically. The price of milk, how it gets from cow to consumer, and the collateral damage from the ‘milk price war’ that supermarkets have waged on suppliers presents a whole microcosm of the deleterious effects of supermarket commercial power on the farming industry and wider rural society. A wide range of other food items are also sold in supermarkets at a price where the retailer takes most of the money and leaves very little for the farmers, processors, transporters and others. Supermarkets do not just sell food, but have diversified into a wide range of other goods, including clothing. Supermarkets are highly dependent on a mass supply of cheap outputs from chicken farmers, both eggs and chicken meat. Food labelling is meant to advise the customer, but as noted earlier in the case of chicken welfare and pork standards, it often obfuscates more than it informs.
