In their youth they are left to grow in the remains of their family members, disease-ridden, downtrodden, barely lucky enough to become a full-grown potato. They are subjected to daily violence and terror – torn from their lands, violated, skinned and boiled alive.
Please help these Potatoes!
(edited, original text sourced from change.org)
It was almost impossible not to laugh out loud when I read the headlines yesterday: Belgians urged to be heroic and patriotic by eating fries at least twice a week. It wasn’t a joke, and the goal is to collectively consume a 750,000 ton potato surplus that ensued during the Corona lockdown and cannot be processed. If you have to imagine the sheer volume of this, we are roughly talking about 30,000 large trucks (lorries).
The Belgian potato growers are the largest exporters of frozen fries, catering to over 160 countries. Even so, the current storage capacities cannot keep up with the surplus inventories, so drastic measures have to be taken, or face an industry loss estimated at over 130 million Euros. Hence the plea that if each person consumes a double portion of fries each week, then it would be a significant support of the potato industry.
The campaign in Belgium is being led by Belgapom, the Belgian Potato Trade and Processing Industry Association, and the report on the current potato crisis can be found HERE, in Dutch, French and English.
It is not just the Belgian the potato farmers who are in trouble. With everyone in lockdown and staying home, the potato consumption has crashed by 40%, so there are mounds of potatoes just going to waste at the moment, what with the closed Schengen borders.
Help save the potato industry and eat more fries!
FrogDiva Thoughts 