week 38 - Feedback to: Romée de Blois

Feedback to Romée de Blois (Original post: assignment 1. Tomatoes & Business)

Part 1: Ecology-inspired puzzle

I like the choice of topic because of its timing and local relevance with real-life situation. The author made a clear point to addresses the limitation of the choice of crops. I very much agree with the beginning of the first point about the variety gives consumers more options. The argument is convincing to me since price could be an important deciding factor (could even be the most important factor for the majority of consumers)for purchasing. However, there are also other deciding factors when consumers make their decisions to buy tomatoes. For this case, if would be helpful for readers to create a scenario in our head as a consumer if the author can address the relative importance of purchasing factors. If the author can provide the assumption that the most important factor is price, it also helps the readers to focus on the argument.

The second point about the limitation of shelf period and the stress to sell leads to price cut down is well addressed and convincing. The third point about one farmer’s action impacting the market is also well-established. I find the three points all have different aspects. The three theories are also well arranged in order because they are from local scale to a bigger scale of impact. However, I can’t seem to see the correlation between the conclusion in the last paragraph with the rest of the article. The three theories were well developed in the previous paragraphs. The last paragraph addressed the issue of volatility of tomatoes market value and overall impact for farmers. It was good information but I feel that it looks more like another observation that can be independently discussed.

Part 2: “the business of business is to increase its profits”
The way that the author uses biology as an analogy for business is interesting. Using the achievements in the nature to compare with profit is a brand new perspective to me. In this article what I like the most is the non-traditional definition of profit because it takes the long term (positive) impacts into consideration instead of the traditional definition that only involves the monetary value . In that sense the author works with a different basis than Friedman.

What Friedman considered as social responsibility might have been incorporated into the definition of profit in this article. Under the author’s definition, The externalisation of environmental cost would probably be considered as non-profitable based on the author’s position. Therefore achieving improved sustainability performance would perhaps be more common during the process of profit-making according to the author’s definitions.