Cotton and peanut case

PEANUTS AND COTTON DEBATES

By Daniela Zuleta.

When someone ask us to issue our concept about a specific case of apparent inequality or foul play (before we are told what the problem is about), we may think “easy: first, take some things away from those who seem being most favored and give them to the other, and the scale will balance itself. And second, punish those whom have been deceitfuland took advantage of their counterpart, and maybe that will teach them a lesson to not do it again”. That seems to be the logic response, and that sentence can be applied in several real-life situations (criminal lawsuits, unsporting behavior, and so on). But then, that “someone” tells us that the problems in question are framed within a marketplace, and is related to world trade.
That solephrases can lead us to weeks of research and analysis, and may require lots of second opinions; because, as the last economic and financial crisis taught us, that famous concept coined by Adam Smith about the “Invisible Hand” of the markets does not work in our current globalized world, and so problems based on international trade cannot be left alone to resolve magically through time.

Well, thatis the case of the debates about the peanut industry (how to handle products containing peanut or peanut derivatives, given the danger it represents to the allergic people), and cotton trade (what to do whit the cotton subsidies given by some governments to their farmers, that unbalance world prices and leave at a disadvantage some poor, cotton-grower countries).
I was asked to present myopinion on these two discussions (not to solve them), and before I start, I want to make perfectly clear that my points of view about all this are not necessarily concordant with the settlements reached in the past classes.

Peanut case
The first topic we put on the table to debate was the potential danger of peanut-based products circulating these days on the world market.
An apparently small,simple, harmless… thingy such as a peanut, is capable of raising global unrest in the health sector, because of the allergic reaction it can cause in some people whose bodies take the proteins of the nut as dangerous substances. And sometimes even an insignificant trace of it can trigger a series of reactions, some may be severe, but most of them are relatively mild.
“Food allergies occur when thebody’s immune system inappropriately acts against a protein within food -known as an allergen-. Antibodies are produced as part of this response and a complex chain-of-events occurs leading to the release of substances such as histamine. This histamine release causes the symptoms of allergy such as eczema, asthma, rhinitis, conjunctivitis and in its most severe form - life threateninganaphylaxis.”

Off course, this is a noticeable concern among those of us who care for the wellbeing of the human kind (although in the case of some people, in an optimistic, whimsical, naïve, and even ridiculous way; those whose desire is to become some sort of hero-mix between Superman, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Oprah).
But the thing is that, a huge percentage of the edible productswe encounter every day at the supermarkets and at the stores, are made (or contain) certain quantities of peanut (either just proteins or actual pieces of the nut), as well as cosmetic products (shampoo, body lotions, make-up…) So, the main claim presented by one of the parties as a “solution” to the argument of this case was: recall all the products out in the market at the present day thatcontain peanut or some of its derivatives (even a minute percentage), so the companies can put on the packing of such “may contain peanuts”.
For me to say something about this first claim would be as irrelevant as it would be redundant, given the fact that such warning is already inscribed in those products containing this nut. But for the interest of not leaving this piece without a comment (and...