In our society there is a negative attitude towards the so-called intermediaries. They are blamed for rising prices, fabulous and unjustified incomes and many other sins.
I want to say a few words in their defense.
What is an intermediary? It is an entrepreneur who buys products from manufacturers and sells them to consumers. A typical rural intermediary is a procurer who goes to villages, purchases milk, meat, wool, skins from the villagers, etc., brings them to the city and sells them to processing enterprises or market traders.
If someone thinks that this business is easy and brings easy money, then I dare him to try to get up every day in the heat and in the cold before dawn, travel around several places, take goods, bargain for each tenge, carry cargo for hundreds of kilometers to the city, worrying that it will spoil on the way, sell it, bargaining for every tenge.
Just try.
The next link in the chain of intermediaries is the market traders. Who are they? These are the people who meet the procurers at the gate of the market every day and buy up the goods they brought from the villages, buy it at their own peril, knowing that they will not sell a part of the goods today, then stand behind the counter till the evening, smiling at the buyers, praises their goods, while earning arthritis and chilling the kidneys from the cold floor.
Does anyone think this work is easy and sweet?
Try it.
All these intermediaries arose not in vain. They are needed. Virtually no villager, having killed his cow, is willing to drive it for hundreds of kilometers to the regional center, to stand there all day on foot behind the counter to sell it. And not everyone knows how to sell. Trade requires very different skills than those needed for breeding and caring for livestock. Therefore, the peasant gives his goods directly from the yard to the intermediaries with pleasure. The procurers also do not want to sell on the market.
Everyone specializes in their business and deals professionally with it. Therefore, if we really remove all intermediaries from the market, first of all producers and consumers will suffer. There will be no one to hand over their products to and a deficit will appear on the shelves in a few days. And the deficit inevitably causes an increase in prices. This is always the case: we are struggling with rising prices, and as a result we get even greater price increases.
All the normal conscientious intermediaries, on the contrary, should be supported. We need to give them loans for the purchase of cattle, milk trucks and other equipment. We need to give them loans for the purchase of raw materials. We must do everything to have more of them, to make them compete with each other, “fight” for customers. Only then will their commissions decrease, and the sale of goods for any peasant or villager will become an easy matter. They will start with pleasure to increase their production, and consumers will always have fresh, quality products on the shelves.
Now let’s talk about a completely different category of people – unscrupulous intermediaries. These are the people who do not allow villagers to sell their goods to other procurers or who stand at the gates of the market and do not let the procurers sell goods to other traders.
That’s who our real enemies are. We must fight against them. In fact, such an obstruction of another’s entrepreneurial activity is an illegal act, and it must be punished by law and public reprimand.
And, a couple of words in conclusion. Of course, everything I said above does not cancel the main work on the production of agricultural products: milk on dairy farms, meat on fattening grounds, vegetables in fields, fruits in orchards, etc. Intermediaries themselves do not feed us or give us drink, they are just blood vessels that connect members of the market.
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