KS3 Geography › Globalisation: Is the world shrinking?
KS3 Geography › Globalisation: Is the world shrinking?
These are the points the worksheet questions are built around.
A huge share of the food sold in UK supermarkets does not come from the UK at all. Close to half of it was grown or made abroad, and for fresh fruit the figure rises to roughly four items in every five. The route each product takes to the shelf is called its supply chain.
Around sixty years ago, food came from a row of small shops that each sold one kind of thing, such as the butcher, the greengrocer and the baker, and families made the rounds a few times every week. Britain did not get its first self-service supermarket until 1948, yet today supermarkets supply nearly everything most households eat.
Three changes explain the switch. The first was the car: supermarkets need a lot of room, so they sit on the edge of town, hard to walk to but easy to drive to. The second was the fridge, since before fridges milk and meat spoiled within a day or two and people had to shop little and often. The third was the growth of processed food. Processing is any change to a food's natural state, such as beans being cooked in a tomato sauce and then tinned, and food treated this way keeps far longer on the shelf. Together, they made one big weekly shop the sensible choice.
Some supermarkets have become global companies, which are businesses operating in more than one country. Tesco, the UK's largest supermarket with over 300,000 staff, trades in Ireland and in Central European countries such as Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, and at one time it even had shops in Japan, South Korea and Malaysia. It works the other way too, as Aldi and Lidl both began in Germany. This linking of countries through the shops people visit every week is an example of globalisation.
A supply chain covers every step in making a product, getting it from place to place and selling it to the people who buy it. A chain that passes through several countries is a global supply chain, and it can stretch across thousands of miles. It does not begin at the factory but earlier, with raw materials, which are things grown or dug out of the ground before they have been made into anything, such as wheat, cocoa beans or a cow's milk. From there, most products move through five stages in turn: sourcing, processing, packaging, transporting and, last of all, selling to the customer.
A loaf of bread shows these stages clearly. Wheat grows in a field and is harvested, then taken to a mill to be ground into flour. A bakery bakes the flour into bread, and the loaf is then wrapped and carried by lorry to the supermarket. Processing is not always needed, though. A fresh apple misses out that stage entirely, being picked, packed and shipped in the same state it grew in.
Chocolate depends on cocoa beans, a crop that will only grow in hot, wet places near the equator, with most of it coming from West African countries such as the Ivory Coast and Ghana. The milk in the same bar might come from a dairy farm in Britain. These separate journeys all come together at a single factory, and the finished bar then travels on to the shops.
The distance food travels from where it is grown or made to where it is eaten is measured in food miles, and the total includes every ingredient inside a product. An avocado from Mexico, for instance, travels about 5,500 miles before it is eaten in the UK, further than six trips from Land's End to John o' Groats. Most food finishes its trip by lorry, cargo ships handle long journeys between continents, and a little fragile food that spoils fast, such as fresh berries, is flown. All three burn fuel and release greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which add to global warming, so more food miles generally means a bigger impact on the environment. Flying is by far the most damaging: sending food by air creates dozens of times the carbon dioxide of carrying the same amount by sea.
Bananas show why so much food has to travel. The plants need heat, bright sunshine and heavy rainfall all year, which is why nearly every banana comes from the tropics near the equator, from countries including Ecuador, Costa Rica and Colombia. Most of the crop is then sent by ship to cooler regions that cannot grow it, such as Europe, North America and northern Asia. Bananas bought by the UK from Ecuador count as an import for the UK, meaning goods brought in from another country, but as an export for Ecuador, meaning goods sold to another country.
Supermarkets need the growing countries to produce what goes on their shelves, while those countries need supermarkets as buyers for their harvests. Each side needs the other, and this dependence of countries on each other is called interdependence.
In short: cars, fridges and longer-lasting processed food helped supermarkets replace small shops, and some, like Tesco, became global companies. Every product has a supply chain that starts with raw materials and moves through five stages. The further food travels, the more food miles it gains and usually the more greenhouse gases it causes, with flying the worst. Since many crops grow only in particular climates, the countries that trade them rely on one another.
These are the words that appear as key term cards in the video — worth knowing cold before the test.
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The 3 questions from the video, one at a time. See if you caught them.
1. Which of these is NOT a reason people switched to supermarkets?
Why: Cars, fridges and longer-lasting food drove the change, not a shortage of food.
2. Where does a food supply chain actually begin?
Why: Every supply chain begins when something is grown or taken from the ground, long before a factory.
3. Roughly how much of the fresh fruit eaten in the UK is imported?
Why: The UK climate is too cool for most fruit, so around four in every five pieces come from abroad.
Score: 0 out of 3 —
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