November 18, 2024

Out the back of special

For years going to the wholesale produce market my last stop was at Sam Mustafa’s apple and pear stand.

Short, stocky, with a sparkle in his eye, Sam was my favourite grower. He was the last stop because I wanted extra time to catch his news or maybe one of his stories.

Sam grew up on a farm in rural Albania; he wore rough calf skin clothes, didn’t own a pair of shoes until he was nine, which was also the first time he saw the inside of a shop.

As a young man Sam came to Victoria in the 1950’s looking for a better life. His first house was an old cow shed in Thorpdale, his first job was digging acres of potatoes by hand.

He found work in an underwear factory in Collingwood. For years he put in long shifts, saving hard until he bought the orchard in Kyabram where he’d raise his family.

Sam was a gifted farmer, he taught me a lot about fruit-growing, he also introduced me to my favourite pear – the beautiful brown-skinned beurre bosc, so crisp and earthy, so good with cheese.

Sam retired a while ago now, we still buy pears from his son John, but I thought of Sam this week when I read the news coming out of the ACCC Supermarket Inquiry.

A pear grower had been testifying to the Inquiry that for a long time Coles, Woolworths and Aldi had been paying farmers below the cost of production so they could run heavily discounted promotions on pears.

The grower explained that if you were buying pears in the supermarkets for around two dollars a kilo then the farmer who grew them would be making a loss.

Growing fruit at a loss makes no sense to anyone except the big supermarkets. It’s heartbreaking yet unsurprising that Victorian farmers are bulldozing their established pear orchards at a rapid rate.

I thought of Sam because I couldn’t begin to imagine how I would ever go about asking him to sell me his fruit at a loss – something I knew would put him and his family into hardship, would push him to cut his workers wages, run his orchard and his machinery down and eventually force him off his farm.

It continually confounds me that regular people go to work at Coles and Woolworths – two of this country’s wealthiest companies – and sit down together in meeting rooms and decide that asking their farmers to work for nothing in order to run a special on pears is okay.

And then to add insult to injury – go out and run an ad campaign celebrating how hard they’ve worked to save us money on our shopping.

Sam Mustafa worked hard his whole life – if anyone had a right to want more than their due it was Sam, yet in all our dealings I never met a more generous-hearted and fair person.

Go figure.