GAS

Don't worry! This post is not about fuel for your car nor flatulency; it's the unfortunate acronym of "Gruppo di Acquisto Solidale" ["Solidarity Shopping Group"].
This acronym identifies pretty much the spontaneous and organized associations of people who, tired of the philosophy of consumer consumption at any rate, decide to give an ethical stamp to their purchases.
It's a while since i've discovered this concept by chance, and i began to become informed through the Internet that there is plenty of GAS located all over Italy (this is the website that collects all of them).

Fair trade bananas campaign

Not far from home i found three of them, and i decided to visit the nearest one (la Comunità della Sporta), which looks, among them, also the best organized.

The concept is simple: since a big part of the cost of a product is given by the intermediate trades from hand to hand between the producer and the consumer, simply removing those trades, the product dissipates less in its value. Therefore, GAS tries to use that savings to give ethical dignity to those goods.
The peculiarities of this type of commerce can be listed essentially in these points:

• The producer is compensated the right amount. The GAS doesn't "fleece" the producer as it often does the traditional trade. This feature may not be very important for some Italian producers, who can choose the best offering. But certainly it is for those in Third World counties where labor is overworked, if not reduced to slavery, and even involves children. GAS guarantees that their products do not rise from these practices.
  
• For those products where it applies, local sources are preferred. This philosophy allows to cut the (economical and ecological) costs to move the goods. Beneath the expense, infact, pollution given by the transportation must be considered. Of course for some products this principle doesn't make sense, for example tropical fruits cannot obviously be bought at the Italian producer, but for the majority this cost can be eliminated.
  
• Agricultural goods and their by-products are of optimum quality with the importance stressed on being environment-friendly. GAS infact prefers organic products, and by compensating producers with fair earnings, it allows them to conform to this type of cultivation. Product tracking is made easier by the proximity between producer and consumer, as well as direct contact (they also organize tours to the producers' farms and factories). Moreover, shortened delivery time favors nature's biological cycles (fruit matured on the tree is much better than the one matured on the shelves of the supermarkets).
  
• In GAS they also try to reduce the use of unnecessary packaging, decreasing the obvious waste and polluting materials within the environment. To tell the truth, for some products, this is not always possible, but under this point of view the situation is drastically better than the traditional distribution. For example some detergents are sold "on tap", and one can buy them only if he brings his own proper container. There is, moreover, a careful attention to biodegradability of sold products. For example, the detergents sold at "la Sporta" are all 100% biodegradable.
  
• GAS also tries to minimize the waste of perishable goods. I suppose that every Gruppo d'Aquisto Solidale adopts different methods to obtain this goal. At "la Sporta" fresh products are distributed in 2-week cycles: during one week one can pick up products that have been reserved two weeks before. Often there is excess of fresh products available that can be bought also without any reservation, but it is just a minimum part.

It is possible to shop at "la Sporta" after subscribed to the association (the fee is 9€ a year or 3€ a four-months period). Whoever is subscribed is given a user name and a password that allows online shopping. Who manages the shop does it as a voluntary service. In fact, at the time of the subscription one undertakes atleast twenty hours a year to help manage the service (receive the providers, welcome the customers, manage the store, the website, prepare the reserved goods...)
An encouraging principle is that unlike the traditional channels of consumer trade, nothing is gained from offering one product over another.

A thing that, indeed, i find a little "uncomfortable", in the GAS (at leat at "la Sporta") is the need of reservation in advance for the perishable products. It's difficult to be ready to satisfy a sudden desire of strawberries and cream if the strawberries have to be reserved eight-fifteen days before! But i suppose this is the price to pay to allow us to avoid useless wastes.

An obvious critic to this type of commerce is in the fact that, eliminating the intermediate trades of the goods between the producer and the consumer, one eliminates also those jobs that within those trades receive their profits. If i buy peaches at the GAS that stocks up from the produce next door instead of the supermarket that buy them in Spain, it is obvious that those peaches don't need to be transported, with obvious loss to the truck driver.
This is true. The price that is paid for buying the product goes almost entirely to the producer and who is involved in the production cycles, and so that value is redistributed less within the population.
But this is another reason i like philosophy of GAS. Uselessly dispersing the value of a good is typical of consumerism. Clearly GAS put much less money in circulation than how traditional trade does, and it is absurd to think to place this problem only to who has the misfortune to be employed in one of the jobs that can be reduced. But it is also true that the wealth that is used to finance those jobs is the one that does not produce any useful good (or service).
In other words, buying a useless product provides the society exactly the wealth just enough to finance the production of that useless good (or service). In order to exist, consumerism imposes us to work to acquire a wealth that we need to buy what somebody else produced. And so we are driven to buy it even if we don't need it.

Let's work less. We will be poorer and we won't have enough money to buy useless things. Somebody can like this or not, but for sure it saves resources on a global scale, it pollutes less, and, if widely applied, it reduces the differences between the poor and the rich because it allows everyone to buy what they really need.

Anyway, I like GAS because, if widely appplied, it revolutionizes the system in favor of a more just, sustainable, impartial, ecological economy.

It would be nice to progressively substitute consumeristic economy with the one of GAS, but to do this, prices must be kept competitive with the traditional trade, because the consumer (sometimes understandably, some other times less) at the end must deal with his wallet.
As much as i can say from my experience, today, the products at "la Sporta" have about the same prices one can find at the grocery stores, but they have a bigger value given not only from the quality point of view (they are all organic products), but also the ethical one.

Here it goes our first shopping-experiment at the GAS:

• 530g [1lb and 2.69oz] of fair-trade bananas AltroMercato - with no packing (2.56€ a kg [5.64€ a lb]).
• one kg [2lb and 3.27oz] loaf of "pugliese" artisanal organic bread, natural rising, with flour 0 and wheat bran - with no packing (3.10€ a kg [6.83€ a lb])
• one pack with 51 toasted bread slices Il Fior di Loto - packed in a plastic sheet with a paper label (3.35€ a 450g [15.87oz] pack).
• 2 bottles of rice oil "delicate and natural" from organic agriculture Zibra - in glass bottles, with paper label and metal cap (2.40€ a 0.5l [1.06pt] bottle - 30% off because close to the expiration date).
• one pack of organic rice noodles - plastic bag (2.85€ a 500g [1lb and 1.63oz]).

Total: 13.85€.

Since it was the first shopping, made when subscribed, it was not possible to reserve the two weeks before, and in fact the goods we bought are long-life products or dry goods, except bread and bananas that were a surplus.
We are now waiting to get next shopping, reserved online last weekend. I'll tell you about it.

I am for saving

This post starts from a discussion started on Maurice's blog, about the habit, to drink, of the water sold in the stores, typically in plastic or glass bottles instead of the "mayor's water" (the one coming from the aqueduct [in Italy it is a service by the Municipality], that is declared drinkable, and often purer than the one sold in bottles).

We, at home, use water in returnable glass bottles. The attempt is to cut to the bone the waste of plastic, fighting not only the scattering of this polluting material, but also the environmental damage, smaller but still not insignificant, given by the recycling processes.
Nevertheless also the returnable glass bottles cause a useless environmental damage, because this system produces some wastes: for example the detergent to wash the bottle, the plastic cap to close it (note that in a regular plastic bottle, the amount of material in the cap is bigger than the much in the bottle itself), the paper label and the glue to attach it, the energy for the machines that fill the bottles, the fuel for the transportation to the groceries, the fuel to take the bottles home, and then all the path backward of the returning bottles till closing the cycle.
But, the "mayor's water" in our village, also admitting that it is bacteriologically pure, is really disgusting. It tastes like chlorine and it is very calcareous. For this last problem there are efficient filters in commerce, but against the chlorine there's no simple solution, as far as i know.

In that discussion, Maurice himself writes:

Credo che sia necessario anche mettersi d’accordo sullo sviluppo sostenibile, come sostengono alcuni ecologisti fra i quali vorrei collocarmi.
Una semplice bottiglietta d’acqua inquina il pianeta, ma dà anche lavoro (e quindi produce ricchezza) a chi deve produrre la bottiglia ed il tappo, a chi la imbottiglia, a chi la trasporta, eccetera.
Leggiamo spesso cifre precisissime sull’inquinamento - ricordo a memoria che una bistecca inquina quanto un’auto che corre per 50 km - ma non ho mai letto quanto valore produce la bistecca in termini di lavoro e di ricchezza.
Credo che si possa vivere con agiatezza rispettando la natura e l’ambiente, senza con questo ritornare alle società primitive. Ammesso che esse rispettassero l’ambiente, come non hanno fatto i pellerossa distruggendo le foreste delle grandi praterie per permettere la sopravvivenza delle mandrie di bisonti e di loro stessi.

I believe that it is also necessary to agree about sustainable development, as some ecologists, among whom i would put myself, assert.
One simple water bottle pollutes the planet, but it also gives work (and so it gives wealth) to who produces the bottle and the cap, to who fills it, to who transports it, etcetera.
We often read very exact numbers about pollution - i remember that a steak pollutes as much as a car that runs 50 km's - but i never read about how much value the steak produces in terms of work and wealth.
I believe that we can live in prosperity respecting nature and environment, without having to go back to the primitive societies for this. Also admitting that those ones used to respect the environment, as the native american did not, destroying the forests of the big prairies to allow the survival of the bison herds and of theirselves.
[Free translation by me]

I believe it's a mistake to justify consumerism with the excuse that it is a system that allows a fair redistribution of wealth. Firstly because it doesn't seem fair at all to me.
But above all, the hole in the capitalist consumerism is right intrinsic in the mechanism, according to which the amount of commercialized goods (and services) must always increase, and so, also the useless has to be sold (and bought) anyway.
From one side it is true that the commercialization of a water bottle gives wealth to those who are part of its production/distribution chain. But let's consider, for example, the driver that transports it on his truck, which we can name Mario. At the end, how great is the wealth that Mario gets from the delivery of a bottle? For sure less than the cost at the store of that bottle. Mario, indefatigable worker, will eventually be thirsty, before or after, won't he? And how will he quench his thirst? Will he drink from the tap the "mayor's water"? No! Carefully applying the logic of consumerism, he will go to the shop to buy a water bottle similar to the ones he hauled (spending more money than the amount he made for each of them).
Now, it is also true that our Mario doesn't deliver only one, but an entire truck of bottles, and I'm not going to say that the necessary physical exertion for that job gives him such a thirst to drain the entire charge. But it is also true that Mario would have the need to buy other products, which probably suffered similar commercial stages. If Mario buys an apple because he's hungry, it means that there is somebody else that hauled apples. And maybe this last delivery person would have the need to quench his thirst with Mario's water besides to appease his hunger with his own apples.
In short, applying this mechanism to the whole closed system, society consumes exactly the entire amount of products that are commercialized, spending exactly an amount given by the sum of money that any single individual made as fruit of his work. In this system, so, no wealth is created. At most it has been re-distributed in higher or lower amounts belonging to how hard any individual worked. Since the amount of wealth in the closed system is not infinite, if wealth is proportional to work, when an individual works more, the other individuals must work less. And this mechanism generates social inequalities, which is the exact opposite of the system purposes.

One could raise the objection that instead of spending the entire amount of money made it would be wiser to save something. Or, that Mario should decide not to buy the apple, if he's not that hungry but to keep that money. But doing this way, that apple would remain unsold, and the wealth destined to who worked on it won't be available. In substance if the savings increase, in our closed system the consumes would decrease, and so also the money to be re-distributed would.
In other words, in our closed system, if we avoid to buy the useless, it is true that we would decrease the circulating wealth, but it is also true that this reduction is exactly equivalent to the value of the unsold useless goods.
To come back to our example, if we all used the "mayor's water", it's true that, as Maurice says, the wealth that would have been distributed in the commercial chain of the water in bottle would decrease, but its also true that globally that lost wealth would be exactly equivalent to the amount we save not to buy the water bottles.
And so, where's the social advantage in buying the water bottles?

A remark is needed about the fact that, in this analysis i considered a "closed system", which, apparently, doesn't apply very well to reality. In the capitalist westerner world (and also pretty much in the rest of the world), economical systems are not closed, meaning by this that they are based on export (and import).
The statement that working more one makes more money to the detriment of others that, working less, make less money, in a context of a non-closed system, it is false, because the eventual exceeding of product wouldn't be lost but exported. But this assumption presupposes that there is, elsewhere, another non-closed system (an importing country) that buys the surplus.
But this means that the importing country wouldn't have the need to produce the imported good, and so it doesn't have the possibility to employ workers in that productive cycle, and to produce the relative wealth, necessary to buy that product. And this looks to me a non-ethic side of the system, since it implies the increase of public debt, which means political dependency, of the importing country, increasing the social difference between rich and poor countries.
Considering instead the global economy of the world, which is obviously a closed system, since it's not possible to export outside the planet (and it looks it won't be for a lot of time), no wealth can be created, if by wealth we mean the purchasing power. Wealth equals the sum of all the goods globally produced, and so it is clear that the one coming from the production of a useless good is useless itself, because it allows only to buy a useless good.

The real wealth should be computed not in the basis of purchasing power, but according to the ownership of goods useful to better our lives. For example, the invention, production and distribution of cellphones didn't create wealth meaning purchasing power of individuals. Simplifying, the wealth given by the salaries of the workers that contributed in invention/production/distribution of cellphones is even to the wealth spent by consumers to buy that product... that's to say, at the end people that work get a salary that, after, is useful to them to buy the same goods they produce. The real wealth given by progress, instead, is the possibility to use those goods. If cellphones weren't there we wouldn't be able to send each other all those short messages to tell us romantic stuff like "TVTTTTTB" [in Italian it's the acronym of "ti voglio tanto tanto tanto bene" ("i love you very very very much"), typical teenagers' language].

Adimitting that water in bottles has the same quality of the "mayor's water" (which is clearly false in my case), to buy water bottles is absolutely useless from the economical point of view, and only a damage from the ecological one.

Anyway i am not an economist. Where's the error in my line of reasoning?