| I can't really think of anything directly immoral about the business I participate in. Anything that could be pointed as an ethical grey area is more like a side-effect of the capitalist society we exist within. So maybe more specifically, I'm not working with the farmers directly. I'm working with the businesses buying and selling the grain. The "capitalism grey areas" fall into effect when a farmer signs a contract saying they're going to deliver "Wheat" at a "Grade 2" spec and show up to the elevator with a truck full of wheat. It goes through the grading specs and even though that farmer brought them a "Grade 1" they're only getting paid at a Grade 2 rate. So the grain elevator itself grabs that top quality stuff, shoves it in a silo with the other top quality stuff and sends the farmer away. They sell that grain at a Grade 1 and make immense profit that is never realized by the farmer who did the work. It gets fishier the further into it you go. Because a "Grade 1" spec implies certain qualities in the grain: protein, moisture, dockage, etc. etc etc. So if the elevator needs to sell a Grade 2 product, the grading is taken as a sample and likely averaged over the entire load. They can take 10% of that Grade 1 stuff, shove it into a bunch of Grade 3 stuff and sell it as a Grade 2... the blending is where they make their money. Then it gets even worse, because a grain terminal filling a vessel for export would sign off on a load that contains up to 1% dockage, but after the product in the silos is cleaned its likely to have <0.1% dockage or whatever anyway. So what is the terminal going to do? Surely they don't give the customer free "good" product right? Nope, they fill that vessel 99.5% full of product, then shove worthless garbage in to hit the 0.5% remainder and ship it out. So a vessel with 20,000MT of Soybean likely contains a bunch of garbage wheat or chaff or whatever else they have on hand that can't be sold. It gets absurd to think they take in those Soybeans, then run them through the clean systems to remove the garbage, but then when it comes time to fill the vessel, they just put all the garbage back in so the customer has to clean it again. |