Vijay Prashad writes[1]:
A billion people without shoes in the
21st century. Hundreds of millions of them children, many unable to get to
school for lack of shoes. Yet the global footwear industry produces 24.3 billion pairs of shoes a
year, namely three pairs of shoes for every person on the planet.
There is big money involved in the
footwear industry: despite the Covid-19 crisis, the global market for shoes
was estimated at $384.2 billion (2020), which
is expected to grow to $440 billion (2026).
The major consumers of shoes live in
the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy; the
major producers of shoes live in China, India, Brazil, Italy, Vietnam,
Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand, Turkey and Spain.
Many of those who produce shoes in a
country like India can neither afford to buy the shoes that they produce nor
even the cheapest flipflops available in the market. There are more than enough
shoes in the market, but there is not enough money in the hands of hundreds of
millions of people to buy these shoes.
COMMENT
Vijay Prashad pretends to be a great advocate of the world's poor, but when he complains about
a billion people walking barefoot, he says that many
poor people cannot afford even
"the cheapest flipflops available in the market". Flipflops are manufactured by complicated apparatus out of
petroleum products. So Vijay Prashad is
proposiong that poor people wear footwear manufactured by means of
complicated apparatus out of petroleum products, thus driving
global warming. Manufacturing
simple footwear, like the Mexican ojotas or huaraches, is a low-tech handicraft that can be up and runnning in a week with a minimum of capital investment. While I was living in
"socialist" Nicaragua and I saw that many people couldn't afford
shoes, I thought of importing huaraches from Mexico,
or bringing Mexican craftsmen to establish huarache workshops in Nicaragua. However, when I searched
for Mexican manufacturers of
huaraches on the web, bu I couldn’t find a single one.
When I was
searching for huarache manufacturers on the web, I found lots of Mexican
companies that claimed to be selling huaraches. But it was a lie. None of them
sold huaraches. The same thing happened when I looked for a picture of a
huarache on the web for this article.
There were lots of pictures, but they weren't pictures of huaraches.
They were pictures of industrial footwear that only in a handful of cases
vaguely resembled a huarache. The only picture I found of a real huarache -- shown here -- is from
the article in the Spanish Wikipedia called "Huarache". https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huarache_(calzado)
This is a fairly
sophisticated model. There are much simpler ones, which are cheaper and more
rugged. Traditional huaraches vary
by region.
[1] Solely Because of the Increasing Disorder, by Vijay Prashad, Consortium
News, September 13, 2021
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/09/13/solely-because-of-the-increasing-disorder/
[2] The Network of Global Corporate Control, by S. Vitali, J.B. Glattfelder
and S. Battiston, Zurich Federal Polytechnic 2011 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0025995&type=printable
