It’s Friday the 13th, or what I believe to be my lucky day 🙂 Yesterday I loved being at the market, but today I need to stock up on some things that can not be bough there – so it’s time to hit the stores.
Just before I moved to South Africa years ago, all big shopping centres and supermarkets in Bosnia and Herzegovina were foreign- owned- French, Slovenian, Croatian… over the years, a number of local supermarket chains have sprang up – Bingo, Hose, Amko… all with a wide variety of local products, and catering for all socio-economic brackets of society.
Although I do shop in these big supermarkets when I need things I can’t get elsewhere, my vote always goes for small, family-owned neighbourhood stores. Supporting small local businesses makes a big impact on the economy – they provide much-needed employment and are a source of income for many families. These micro and small enterprises continue to survive in spite of a very tough competition from big multinational companies. They also manage to stay in business despite, rather than thanks to business environment in the country, which in practice tends to discourage rather than promote local entrepreneurship.
The US Embassy diplomatically describes Bosnia and Herzegovina to potential investors as a place with “opportunities to well-prepared and persistent exporters and investors”… This basically means that you need time, energy and resources if you’d like to work here. And the smaller you are as a business, the more difficult it is to maintain a healthy and steady dose of all three.
Yet, as important as it is to support these local businesses, both big and small, in our everyday shopping, what I am looking for in these are locally produced goods. The number of local brands has been on the rise, but every time I go shopping I wonder “how local is local?”
Recently, one of the large supermarket chains started “I love local” campaign – brilliant! It was a big hit and it certainly increased the awareness of the need for local consumption (as well as the company’s sales). Yet the criteria for determining what is local seems to be slightly skewed.
While searching for some sunflower seeds for my salad, I found three “local” packages. What an amazing start! The idea of sunflowers brought me back to my childhood days, when I raided sunflower fields with my friends, in an attempt to reach what seemed to be sky-high flower heads full of tiny black seeds stacked together in a perfect black-and-yellow harmony. I also remember being chased away by people who put an effort into cultivating them and sporting a few scratches from these escapades.
However, in spite of the fact that sunflowers can and do grow here, the “local” seeds in these packages came from China, India and Canada. Now, surely, while buying products packaged and sold by Bosnian and Herzegovinian companies makes economic sense, in order to support creation of local jobs – a product itself does not become local just because it is packaged by someone with a Bosnian passport.
So, in my quest for local food, I will be making a clear distinction between local brands (which I do support!) and local products, which are grown, made and cultivated here. This means that I’ll be doing a lot of reading in the supermarkets (stores just love this!), but I believe it will be worth the effort – for both, local production, and well… let’s be a little selfish on my favourite day of the year – me and my own health.
Written by Lana Pašić at https://locallivingbih.com/