Take a current/ongoing issue of rural dairy farmers in Australia. They have been caught up in a supermarket price war between Coles and Woolworths.
The retail cost of 1 L of super market brand milk = $1AUD. The super markets takes 68 cents, packaging/distribution take about 14 cents and the farmers take about 18 cents (not sure if the ratio has changed in the past few years). Many small independent farmers have had to file bankruptcy/ go on welfare. Additional the dairy farmers protection agency head had pocketed a few million. Truly scum of the earth. However, due to geographical remoteness, neoliberal austerity, false egalitarianism,and hard yakka mentality of the farmers (and Australia in general) there is little in the way of hopes for a strong political swing towards the left. Additional, Australian Union membership is plummeting.
However, I really don't see these people, with the potential for a better way of handling this crisis. Trotting their livestock into the incinerator, due to much red scare. Australian dairy farmers are exploited and alienated by their labour, in which the free market is holding a rifle to them and their families.
A lot of the blame somehow escapes the supermarkets and is placed on the consumer. But this is public misdirection/ that shifts the issue from a structural to an agency issue. Which it is not.
Dairy farmers revolutionary potential 4.5/10
Needs more unions / leftypol discourse injected into the mainstream.
Side note I think I might make some pamphlets and send it to all the dairy farmers locked in contracts with the supermarket. Would be fun to see a milk strike / shortage in Aus right now.
