Even I live in the UK. Precisely because of the many supermarket giants like Tesco, morrisons and Sainsbury's many small time retailers had to close their businesses. This was reported and discussed extensively in the BBC UK news and also prompted an investigation by the competition commission in the UK to look for any possible unhealthy competition practices being followed by the big supermarkets. One of the supermarkets for example used to buy prime land in cities and not use it, purely to avoid competitors from entering the market and competing with them.
Because of the big money power these supermarkets wield, they almost control the whole production market. For example the farmers will be forced to sell their products at a price the supermarkets will dictate.
Soon the same supermarkets will start importing food from across the world from wherever it is available at a cheaper price. This will have adverse impact on the local economy and also on the environment in terms of the green house gas emissions being generated during such unnecessary transport.
All these things are happening for real in countries like UK. Majority of the fruits and vegetables being sold in the UK are sourced from outside the country. The power of the supermarkets is such that they can dictate what crop the farmer should grow in countries as far away from UK as African and south american countries.
Because of such malpractices coming into light, now there is a new range of produts called fair trade products which in a nut shell means that they are grown and bought in a very ethical way, without wielding the supermarket power.
The day is not going to be far from reality in India too when such things would happen and we too will have to set up the so called "competition commissions" and we will also start looking for "fair trade" products.
To me the very existence of a product line called "fair trade" means to say that fair trade in reality is hard to find and therefore it has to be specially labelled like that!
