Fix this!

Pope Benedict places his concern for the world’s hungry at the centre of the Church’s social justice platform. Earlier this month he told global leaders attending the World Food Security Summit in Rome that starvation and malnutrition were unacceptable in a world that can produce plenty to eat.

According to Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s nuncio to the United Nations, a billion people are at peril because of rising food prices. A large proportion of South Africans find themselves among the billion people who, as the archbishop put it, spend most of their daily income in search of food.

In that light, on-going revelations about price-fixing in South Africa’s food manufacturing sector represent a dismal scandal. Last year, several bread producers were fined for operating a cartel which inflated the price of bread. Currently, dairy companies are being accused of manipulating and fixing the price of milk.

While price-fixing in luxury goods and services (such as committed by automobile manufacturers and airlines) can be described as mendacious, the manipulation of staple food prices in a country with widespread poverty is repulsive, even evil (and we are applying this word advisedly at a time when its misuse has diluted its essential meaning).

The government evidently shares our revulsion over such acts of collusion. A proposed law, the Competition Act, would see guilty perpetrators punished stiffly, even with jail time.

Appealing though it is to imagine mercenary industrialists behind bars, legal experts warn that the proposed Competition Act would make it in fact more difficult to prove and punish incidents of price-fixing. The sensible option, therefore, is for government to revise its law, and in the meantime invest greater resources and powers in the Competitions Commission, with an attendant increase in fines for the exploiters of the poor.

The key in dissuading companies from manipulating prices resides not in the threat of consequences to the individual, but in the injury to their bottom-line. Company executives may happily risk serving time in a minimum security jail if caught, but they are likely to be terrified of facing the wrath of the shareholder when called to explain a crippling fine.

It is a sad indictment of the free market that one needs to seek functions of deterrence to encourage a sense of basic decency among some of its practitioners. Indeed, both Popes John Paul II and Benedict have often lamented the exploitative nature of capitalism, making it clear that it is a fundamentally flawed economic model (already criticised in successive Catechisms in reference to “merchants who desire scarcity and rising prices”).

As Catholics, we are called to observe Jesus’ injunction to feed the poor, to stand in solidarity (a word Pope Benedict uses frequently) with those who have nothing. This solidarity can find expression in material assistance, but it also requires our social engagement. Price-fixing producers should be left in no doubt that their behaviour is unacceptable, perhaps even by ostracising their products from our supermarket trolleys.

In a statement in January, the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference said the Catholic response to corruption, including price-fixing, is not only to condemn it, “but also to be actively involved in promoting a Christian vision that is committed to reversing the corrosive influence of moral decay. The Church needs to promote a strong sense of obligation to become directly involved in halting corruption and crime by actively promoting a value-based ethical living.”

In that spirit, Christian leadership must be unequivocal about the actions of those whose greed for profits deprives poor people of staple foods, even to the point of famine.
So let’s call this exploitation by its name: a mortal sin.