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I agree with your point on reducing our exploitation of the developing world, but do you think the current measures will actually achieve that? I think it'll only leave a gap there for other global manufacturers to fill and ultimately net exploitation of the developing world won't be impacted by this.
Now I don't want to argue that since there'll be exploitation regardless so it's better that "we" do it, but I think it would be better (from both a UK and EU perspective) to have European manufacturers to rely on those supply chains as they are at the moment, capture market share and exert influence on them to make them more ethical and sustainable, rather than let other global manufactures take that market where we're able to exert less influence on them to clean up their act.
Would it not be better to be slightly more pragmatic about this and positively incentivise the development of local supply chains rather than wash our hands of the exploitation (that will continue to go on) as long as it's someone else doing it?
The problem with exploitative supply chains is that they’re chains, so even if you make one link less exploitative, the sources and next steps in the chain likely remain exploitative.
Each improvement makes things better. If we let perfect be the enemy of good then we just allow exploitation to continue because we couldn’t fix it all at once.
Companies have already been exerting influence on these supply chains for decades to “improve” them, and they have only gotten worse. No, I don’t think that’s better.
Manufacturers aren’t going to just sit back and say, “oh well I guess we’ll just not compete in the industry anymore, let’s just let our competitors take it.” No way, the people running these firms aren’t going to just throw away business like that. They’ll lose out on some profits for a while and throw all their toys out the pram about that, but they will not just leave the market (or price themselves out of it). That’s just their gaslighting propaganda.