Supported in order to produce and supply food products, satisfy the consumers with good quality and reasonable pricing, and boost up the cooperative movement globally. Due to ever growing consumer-ism, many business firms are marketing food products with attractive designs, colors and packaging, and applying different business strategies to sell their products at high prices to get good profits. Food adulteration is also racing parallel to consumerism. Due to this, several health hazards are cropping up affecting the health of all sorts of people of all ages, alarming the world to wake up and take appropriate measures. Present-day man cannot find enough time to discover things for good health, and a kind of ignorance is still overruling his intelligence. Man is neglecting the idea of "to be" and is embracing the wicked idea of "to have", and this tendency is encouraging many corporate business firms to violate the business ethics without thinking about the long-term safety of mankind.
When compared to corporate business firms, cooperatives have more ethical values in both formation and functioning, and can compete in food marketing by producing and supplying good food at reasonable prices. But most of the cooperatives are showing poor performance due to several reasons like meager capital base, liabilities, membership problems, politics, etc. Such cooperatives should learn a lot from the successful ones to pull themselves towards success in food marketing, so that the world would be benefited by the good quality, reasonable pricing, and safe food. Recent reports reveal a lot of bitter facts about the adulteration of food, for example, mixing of pesticides in cool drinks, harmful preservatives in processed foods, urea and other dangerous chemicals being used to make milk, adulteration of edible oils, etc.
Even some branded firms and giant multinational organizations are also following the same evil path. Advertising has become a major competitive strategy among leading food processors with the food processing sector outspending every other sector of the economy (Connor et al., 1985). At present, electronic media like television, internet, etc., are becoming strong mediums to attract people's attention about the different food product(s) by costly and attractive advertisements. In connection with the advertising rivalry between Coke and Pepsi, former Pepsi president, John Scully (1982), said that such marketing battles do not involve "Some gladiatorial contest where one of us has to leave on a stretcher. We're both winning." That is their confidence and optimism, and such a tendency is becoming common among most of the corporate business firms leading to a depletion of business ethics. In addition to this, such corporate business firms are adding all the costs being spent by them for huge advertising campaigns, establishments, etc., on the product prices without adhering to standard pricing-policy, and the prices of food products are going up day by day.
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