No shoes

 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.  

That shows what a turd Vijay Prashad is. He’s not interested in helping people wear shoes, he just wants to attack the world capitalist system.  I agree that the world capitalist system sucks. However now that the China Petrochemical Group Co. has become one of the top 50 financial corporations[2] China is becoming one of the biggest crooks in the world capitalist system. However Vijay Prashad wouldn’t dream of criticizing Chinese imperialism.

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. 

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[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