Will the Taliban stop women working as nurses? Is population growth going into reverse? And are honey fans in a sticky spot? Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days. With Leaf Arbuthnot, Suchandrika Chakrabarti and Irenie Forshaw.
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The Week Unwrapped - with Olly Mann
409. Afghan midwives, depopulation and fake honey
Hey unwrappers, what Christmas gift do you get the person who has everything, including a healthy sense of curiosity about current affairs and culture? The answer, of course, is a subscription to the week, to keep your friends and family up to date on the big issues and also to entertain them with lighter stories they may have missed. Well, this December we're giving Unwrapped listeners a special discount on Christmas offers from The Week. You can get 6 weeks completely free and then save an extra £5 on a quarterly subscription for any package. Visit theweek.com/flash24 to find out more and enter promo code flash24 to claim your offer. That's promo code flash24@theweek.com/flash24. It's the week ending Friday 6th of December and this is The Week Unwrapped. In the past seven days we've seen the toppling of French Prime Minister Michel Barnier after a no-confidence vote in Paris, a short-lived declaration of martial law in South Korea leading to the resignation of the country's president and MasterChef being removed from the Christmas schedules following accusations against host Greg Wallace. You can read all you need to know about everything that matters in The Week magazine, but we're here to bring you some stories that passed under the radar this week. Big news not making headlines right now but with repercussions for all our lives. I'm Oli Mann and let's unwrap the week. And joining me today from The Week's Digital Team is Irene Forshore from The Week magazine. It's assistant editor, Leaf Arbuthnott, and we welcome back writer and performer Sir Chandrika Chakrabarti. Have any of you watched the Jacob Reesmog reality show yet? No, no, no. I have read a lot about it. We were writing it about it in The Week and so I've read every single review that has ever been written and I would be vaguely tempted but it's not on a streaming platform that I have access to so I'm going to give it a miss. I'm guessing from the other two, even vaguely tempted, doesn't cover your enthusiasm. I mean, how is it being distributed? Telegram? It would be appropriate if it was carry a pigeon, wouldn't it? It's on Discovery Plus, I believe. I'm going to watch it. I'm going to watch it. I want to see what he can do with the format and when I go in attacking it, I should know what I'm attacking because it's terrible to give him a platform. Yes, okay. Good point. Right, Leaf, you're up first. What do you think this week should be remembered for? Why this was the week that giving birth in Afghanistan got worse. A video posted to Instagram on Wednesday. Leaf, what is that? What are we listening to? That is the sound of women who have been turned away from their maternity, their midwife courses, wailing and singing as a form of lament for the fact that they're now not going to be educated in these fields. This week the Taliban has banned women from training as nurses and midwives in Afghanistan and it was basically the only path left for women in terms of further education training. Women are not allowed to go to university in Afghanistan and so there's been real concern that it's obviously going to be terrible for women giving birth and for children, but also it could be just bad for the population as a whole. Yeah, and yet they all were together, presumably assembling in the first place so they could take their studies. So how was the ban announced? It was obviously quite sudden. It was announced on Monday during a meeting in Kabul by officials of the Ministry of Public Health and it also was kind of transmitted to the BBC via a separate kind of reporting. So five separate institutions across Afghanistan confirmed to the BBC that the Taliban had instructed them to close and videos online also showed students in different places reacting to the news. So it does seem to have been fairly, you know, abrupt, partly because I was reading a story on the BBC from earlier in the year where it seemed that the Taliban had presented women training as midwives as an example of the fact that actually the options open to women were not as limited as all that. So it seems there's been a kind of reverse ferret on that. Yeah, I really, what will the effect be on women's health in Afghanistan as a result of this? Yeah, so I think this is going to have a devastating impact on women's health care. So last year, the United Nations said Afghanistan needed an additional 18,000 midwives to meet the country's needs. Afghanistan already has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the world. With a report last year coming out, which said that 620 women were dying per 100,000 live births. So, you know, human rights activists are warning that the ban is going to deprive millions of women of essential health care services, especially because it's such a male dominated society. So often women aren't even actually allowed to see male doctors. So without having the female midwives and medical staff available, it's going to stop them from getting access to health care altogether in some cases. Yeah, it's not clear to me, Sichandra, what options will be available for women seeking maternity care at all, albeit, you know, clearly, I'm not woman in Afghanistan, so I'm not going to be on the receiving end of the literature about that. But the point of having female midwives was that they have this law that men can only attend to a woman physically when their male guardian is present. So you have female midwives to assist with that. If they're not there, options are obviously going to be limited. It looks like there are very few, to be honest. It's one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. And what makes it even worse is kind of terrain in Afghanistan as well, which is really hard to get across. You don't have great roads, great public transport, according to the World Health Organization, this figure of 638 women dying for every 100,000 viable births that actually conceals a disparity between women in rural areas and women in kind of the cities. And there's many more women in rural areas who are going to suffer hugely. So a space person for the nonprofit Norwegian Afghanistan Committee said that there are 5,000 maternal deaths per 100,000 births if you're looking at just the rural areas so that number gets much worse. And the reasons are, I mean, just this is horrific. Men have to carry women over their shoulders to the local hospital and women will die on the mountain trying to get to the local place of medical care. And once they get there, there's going to be even less medical care than there was before. So it's just a horrifying situation. A lot of gynecologists have left the country because the Taliban has really cracked down on people with certain kinds of education and people who work with women in this way. In a public hospital, a delivery costs 2,000 Afghanis, which is just 29 US dollars, but it's a huge amount for an Afghan family and multiple births are really common. I didn't know this. So medicines and frontiers say that it's really valued to have large families in Afghanistan. And so women take certain treatments to try and stimulate their fertility. This is from medicines and frontiers. I don't know what this is, they don't say, but they're often twins and multiple births. And there's a much higher risk as well. Wow. What's the reaction been from students, Leaf? I mean, as you say, we played in that clip of that one kind of protest, but these are women for whom this was the only option open to them as education. They may not have even wanted to be midwives. It's the only thing they can study to do. Yeah, there's been some really heartbreaking reaction, including a woman who was saying that she just feels that all of her options have been kind of this was her last sort of option. And in the past sort of, you know, three years, we've seen women being increasingly talking about suicidal feelings because they feel like they've got no future. The Telegraph had a very depressing list of the things that the Taliban has said that Afghan women are not allowed to do. It's a long list. I won't go through all of it, but it includes driver car, speak in public, speak loudly inside your house, own a smartphone, wear bright clothes, read the Quran aloud in public, look at men you don't know, attend a protest, go to the park, go to the gym, on and on and on. So, you know, you do wonder how they're finding their sources of hope. It's really heartbreaking. But also, I think what I want to bring out is that sometimes these issues are framed as a kind of, you know, women versus men thing. And to an extent, this is that story because obviously the Taliban is a male institution and using men imposing these rules. But women give birth to boys and girls. And Afghanistan needs a future generation of, you know, of people who've been delivered in a safe environment. And so it's bad for men as well in Afghanistan, in my view. And it's just really depressing that basically there are very few levers that the international community seems willing to pull or can actually pull at the stage to kind of affect any sort of change. There's also, I mean, within the sort of Islamic justification of their system of rule, I mean, even a cursory glance at any major religion will tell you that if babies are going to die as a result of your legislative proposals, then it's probably not worth, you know, forsaking the virtue of the woman involved, is it? There's an obvious debate around that. But Afghanistan is not a country where debates are out in the open. Yeah, they'll say that Taliban officials will defend this kind of thing by saying, oh, well, it's all in line with Islamic Sharia law. But of course, this is really debated, you know, Islamic law isn't something that's just, it's a bit like, you know, the Bible. We kind of have different interpretations of it. And so this, this narrow reading is really causing, you know, actual real world extreme harm. Arini, how have the international community reacted to this? And how do you think we might see the international community react over the next few months? I think there's been a reaction of a lot of kind of shock and horror, but actually it's kind of people are thinking now, well, there needs to be help, there needs to be action taken. And so it's all very well to kind of react with this kind of, you know, obviously we all feel appalled by seeing this happen. But it's now like, what are the practices that people are going to put in place to try and help? The issue with Afghanistan is that Western countries in particular are sort of tired of dealing with it. I think the Taliban are incredibly difficult to negotiate with. I don't think they do negotiate. But something I've read from the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan. So in the 20 years before the Taliban take over in 2021, a lot of work was done to improve situations for women, to improve health care. So the investments in the health care system led to a significant reduction in maternal deaths. It was actually a real step forward the last 20 years. And these efforts included training community midwives, 450 graduated from schools run by the Swedish Committee of Afghanistan, who I'm quoting. So they've actually been gains people have lived through a period in which things have got better. And to go backwards, I think is so heartbreaking. And it's so difficult to know how to discuss these things with the Taliban who won't discuss with the outside world. And also at the moment, there are other areas of the world. There are other kind of there are walls going on, that at this moment, for foreign policy, for a lot of the West, it is kind of about being stretched into different areas. It does feel like with Biden taking either US out of Afghanistan in 2021, that it feels like we did give up on something there. Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm getting at. There's a sense, isn't there, leaf that we we the US lost in Afghanistan. There was an attempt to remove the Taliban 20 years later, they're back. No one wants to get involved in that again, even though clearly, I mean, this is called gender apartheid, isn't it by the UN? In the cases of racial apartheid, you know, our prime minister would be saying something. Yeah, I feel like there's just been a kind of general slumping of kind of willingness to take action because as I say, like, you know, in the 2000s and 2010s, there was a lot of blood and treasures, the papers always say spilled in Afghanistan. And as the Shanna Chris says, you know, there were massive gains filled for women and maternal mortality rates over that period. But now, I mean, what are you going to do? You're going to send troops in and impose midwives like, no, that doesn't seem like a sensible procedure. Well, you could withdraw aid, couldn't you? That's one of the things people appointed to. Yes, and that is that is something that is definitely worth considering. And people often say like, Oh, yes, if this were racial stuff, then we would be withdrawing aid. But the worry is, is that the situation in Afghanistan for both men and women is so precarious. So many people live in poverty. I think it's about 90% of something. It's an extremely impoverished country. So if you withdraw aid, the money will often be taken out of the, you know, the mouths of the women themselves, as it were. It's a really difficult decision to make. We should possibly be trying to sort of support the country, get, you know, wealthier, so argue some. And so that, you know, in the hope that gradually over time, it liberalizes. But to me, it's not an obvious argument that actually, we should just completely isolate them, make them sort of even more like North Korea style, because that doesn't necessarily bear results. And, you know, women will be ultimately the ones who are kind of paying the price for it. Yeah, I mean, there's often this sort of naive hope, I guess, I really like we saw in Iran, that women will somehow rise up against this oppression. But even if there are protests, even if people speak out, even with social media, you know, the Taliban have got guns and they're popular. Exactly. And I think even for the men living in the country, as well, you know, there's, there's, the rules are so strict. There's things like, you know, taxi drivers will be punished if they even agree to drive a woman without an escort, you know, so anyone that steps out of line at all, you know, there's such as the punishment comes down straight away. So it's, it's very, very difficult. And what you have to remember as well is that for these women, I think I read something that nine in 10 are suffering from domestic abuse at home, which isn't surprising at all. But that's just another thing that kind of makes it almost impossible for them to actually protest and, and fight back. Although, if you recently covered this new movie, Bread and Roses in the magazine, which is about a female perspective from Afghanistan, isn't it? It is a documentary. It's not drama. It's a documentary. It was produced by Malala and the Hollywood actress Jennifer Lawrence, who I think should be applauded for taking an interest in the situation in Afghanistan for women. So we covered it in the week. And the reviews suggested that basically some of the films didn't actually happen in Afghanistan. So it basically covered different women, one of whom at least wasn't in Afghanistan any longer to have to leave Afghanistan. And the women were living basically under house arrest and, you know, filming themselves on their smartphones, not that they're allowed to have them apparently. And it was just the film as a real testament apparently to the extent to which their lives have been. They're basically living in prisons. So there are efforts, there is some interest, you know, from Hollywood and there are efforts to kind of lift up the voices of Afghan women. But, you know, as we keep coming back to, basically, there's not very much that the rest of the world can do or seems to want to do to actually change the situation. Yeah. Okay. Up next, why focus in the EU is turning to the delivery suite too. That's with Mr Chandrika after this. Okay, Sir Chandrika, your turn. What do you think this week should be remembered for? Where will the next generation of people to buy the interraining cards come from? It makes me regret having a kid and I love him to pieces. People shouldn't have to feel like this. Does this get any better once they're in kindergarten? I know the reality of our country, but sheesh. And also, women talking about this in the public square will help the birth rate continue to plummet to hell because other women see the stress and the realities that becoming a mother is in today's current climate. And they'll be like, this is not a good time. I'm bit, I'm barely surviving. Daycare costs and financial ruin, a video posted by YouTuber Berb and Boogie on Friday. Sir Chandrika, what's the story? This is a story that the EU's birth rate has fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1961. And so across the 27 member states in the block, births fell to 3.6 million in 2023, according to figures updated last month by Eurostat. And yeah, like this is the lowest since post-war generations. That's a 5.5% fall from the total number of births in the EU in 2022, and that's the largest decline on record. Okay, what is the impact of that? Oh boy, so we're just not going to have a next generation of the same size as the one that we do now, which means is our generation's age and cannot work. You'll have fewer people to then take care of that elderly generation to work and pay taxes that then go to help everyone in the economy. The economies will shrink. Migration patterns will change as well. So an ideal situation, if you do have these falling birth rates is immigration into the EU, and that is an incredibly thoughtly subject, but that is something people will have to become much more accepting about. And what we'll be seeing in Germany, for instance, that the workforce is aging rapidly, and they've already been dealing with chronic labor shortages with about 1.3 million jobs going unfilled. And so those employers are really looking at a workforce of people aged over 50, who should be thinking about retirement or would have been. But now we're looking at, do I find a second career? Do I go back into the job I used to do? And that's the kind of future we seem to be heading to if trends keep going this way. I mean, when you say trends, it's interesting, isn't it? Because if you were to sort of zoom out from every topic we've covered on this show in the last decade, I'd say this one, in some form, is the one that comes up again and again and again. Birth rates falling in the developed world, at least. People being concerned about it. Irene, is it something that bothers you? I think I can kind of understand why birth rates are dropping. And it kind of annoys me when you have people say, oh, you know, like Elon Musk piping up and saying, oh, we need to have more kids and things like that when it's like, well, actually, for women, like, we're just getting fed up. Like, you know, we're being asked to have more children. We're being a lot of women are asked to like care for their elderly parents. They're having to work. They're having to do the unpaid labor at home. So it's hardly surprising, you know, that women aren't wanting to necessarily have to put a backseat on their career, and that they're not wanting to have as many children. So I guess from my point of view, I can understand it. Yeah, well, this is it, isn't it? It's not about not having any children leave. It's about having not as many as women used to have, maybe drawing the line at one or two, whereas the average used to be above two, didn't it? To put 2.1 or something. Yeah, I mean, the average has gone has been, you know, much higher than two and in the UK, historically. And obviously 2.1 is the replacement rate that you need to kind of make to kind of keep a population steady without inward migration. I really agree with what Irene was saying. She was so right to point out that it's not just the kind of the cost and kind of burden of actually having a child that falls on women. It is also up the other end, the cost of looking after their parents. And so women just absorb all of these responsibilities. I mean, a lot of men are becoming better at it. And I'm sure that, you know, that's that's been a kind of positive change over the past few generations. But there is a lot. But on top of that, you've got women in the workplace now in a way they weren't before as well. Yeah, absolutely. They weren't doing everything before. They're now doing even more. Yeah, and I am pregnant at the moment and I'm having a baby. Congratulations. Thank you so much. I hope I'll have a baby in March. We'll see. I think you've lined up the next three as well so that you can define the statistics and please eat on Musk. I'm going to have 2.1 children. Very, very small 0.1 child, this is the last one. And I've been looking at childcare costs in London and I don't want everyone to get out there small violin. But the two nurseries close to me that offer full kind of year round care, which is what I need because I work at the week and I can't just do term time care. One of them costs £32,000 a year and the other one costs £26,000 a year. So this is pretty brutal, you know, and the government has has these kind of free hours that it's announced. But those only apply to term time and the costs are still completely exorbitant. So the penalty for having children is immense, particularly I'm paying off a student loan. Eventually I want to get a house with my husband and you know we'll have to pay a mortgage. So it is really brutal in the UK and I know we have the one of the highest childcare costs in the OECD. So it's an unusually bad situation. But there are other things that are affecting other costs that kind of land on mothers or would-be mothers similar to it in the EU. So on a cost perspective, I really understand it. But at the same time, I'm, well, inevitably, I think having a baby makes you pro-natalist to an extent. I hope that it's not something I'll regret. You have to explain that word. So pro-natalist, I mean we can understand the linguistic construction of it. But there's actually a movement, isn't there, of pro-natalists? It's a thing. Yeah, there is a movement and it's particularly kind of American led movement. In a way it's a very old movement because lots of, you know, world religions have historically been kind of pro without even thinking, pro-children. But this is, this word pro-natalism generally refers to people in the US who are basically trying to encourage people to have many, many babies. So, you know, maybe you might have eight if you were in a quiet and old school way. But this movement has been criticized by people sort of, you know, putting lots of pressure on women to have children. I mean, to Chandracharya, I thought we wanted fewer people because of climate change. I mean, exactly. We have conflicting ideas on projections for the future. What population change would even look like. We're conflicting ideas on how many people are the right amount to have on the planet. And how do you even police that? There's so many conflicting ideas on everything. And I think why this is happening now, it's worth kind of looking at right at this moment, what the kind of all of the fears and the problems that people have that might be stopping them from having children or be less interested. And what Leaf has said is really important. And surely what Leaf's been thinking about, you know, going into thinking about pregnancy now, you have so many different things to think about. Although, that said, I mean, we're talking about the EU and there are parts of the EU, particularly East and Europe, where those things about student fees and the cost of property, that actually doesn't apply, does it? So you can't, you can't say our experience in London can tell you about the whole of Europe. No, that is true, actually. And some of the worst affected EU countries had a double digit percentage fall in the number of children born in 2023, as opposed to 2022. So these countries include Romania, fell by nearly 14% in one year, Poland, nearly 11%. And that that's very Catholic country, and like, been quite pronating this for quite a long time. And the Czech Republic is 10%. In one year, those are huge numbers. And so it is worth thinking about what is going on now? Is there a bit of a perfect storm going on? And for lots of people that there is, you know, the worry about climate change and the next generation having to save the planet, like in quotation marks, is that is that viable? Is that too much asks of children? Intense political and job uncertainty? I think both those things are very, very true. The lasting effects of the pandemic. So kind of economically, we've not fully recovered across the globe. And health wise, there's long COVID. We don't exactly what that means. COVID is coming back. So if every winter, there's lots of issues around that. And then the worst surge in inflation in a generation, the inflation that we've dealt with, let's kind of post the Ukraine invasion, has been beyond what anyone can imagine. That's affected people's mortgages. That's affected food prices. How do you then add on the kind of costly for saying yes, in London, those are very high, but they're high across the country as well. And childcare when you do not have a welfare state that works is exorbitantly high. Well, I suppose one answer to that question. I'm not saying this is my view, but leave just to answer your critique about the cost of nurseries near you. One answer would be we'll move somewhere else then. If you really wanted a family, go somewhere else. Mate, you've got to get your priorities right. People used to suffer to have children and people being selfish. Exactly. I mean, I, as I said, not my view, just putting it. I mean, look, I actually have a certain amount of sympathy with this argument because some of my wealthiest, wealthiest friends who are really, really amazingly comfortable, they've been given houses by their parents or whatever are worried about the cost of bringing a child into the world. And you, you know, you zoom out, you think, but you are going to be completely fine. There's no world in which you're not going to be fine. So I do think there is an extent to which we are masking our reluctance to have children under kind of slightly as concerns that aren't actually that realistic, like not all of us, you know, for most people that the costs are real. But there is a sense of like, I don't want to sacrifice my lifestyle to such an extent in order to have, you know, a huge family. And it's something that certainly, you know, ideally, you know, maybe I'd have like five children, but realistically, I don't actually want to leave London because my friends are here, my family's here, my workers here. So I am making a lifestyle choice there. And sometimes when we talk about lifestyle choices, it's in a kind of derogatory way. But essentially, we're all making lifestyle choices all the time. And, you know, yes, I could go and live in Wales and reproduce like crazy. But like, that doesn't sound like it would be a good, a good life for me. We've got the title for the podcast episode right there. I don't know. I really look at poorer countries in the world, where people do not have the opportunity to, you know, live and work in a capital city and have a relatively comfortable life and go on two old days a year and all the rest of it. And yet they're having loads of children. Yeah, well, it's interesting though, because I think it's actually only Sub-Saharan Africa where the majority of the population is still actually growing. If you look at kind of pretty much the rest of the world, the US, Japan, South Korea, even China's birth rate has dropped for two consecutive years. And you know, it's now there's a three child role instead of a one child role. And there was this study by the University of Washington published earlier this year, you know, that hit the headlines and kind of caused a bit of an uproar when they said that, you know, the whole world is heading towards this low fertility future. And by 2050, more than three quarters of countries will be below the replacement rate, which is what Leaf was talking about earlier. And in kind of a hundred years, that will be up to 97%. So this is something that's really happening kind of across the world. The thing is, though, Sajandra Kurt, the story keeps coming up again and again, I appreciate it is important in terms of macro trends. But, you know, for a listener to this now, what can we do about it? You know, the whole point that we were just discussing in the last story is that we live in a society where we want people to be able to choose to procreate or not. I appreciate there are tweaks around, you know, immigration and the cost of property and whatever. But actually, is this something we should be worrying about? How much of our brain space should we be paying attention to birth rates? You know, in your own family, you can control it. You can't really control everyone else's. Just let's have a return to bit of socialism, maybe, just that's miles from most things, isn't it? What do you mean? What do you mean by that? If we don't support parents to afford the cost of having children, if we don't spread that cost throughout society, because having a new generation benefits on society, whether I personally have children or not, having more, having another generation benefits me, we need to spread that cost throughout society and not be asking people to spend the equivalent of the rent on a couple of flats on a nursery place, for instance. Also, when that child grows up, they're not leaving home at 18 and saying goodbye. They are coming back until they're 30. You know, because they can't afford a flat, they might like their parents as well, and that is an added bonus. But we're looking at it becoming just something that doesn't stack up to other life experiences now, the idea of having children. If you've got choices, it might be that something else appeals to you more. We're kind of relying on people's maternal, paternal, parental urges to reshape our economy or to give us a new generation. I don't think economists like relying on that. I also think that one of the questions that's kind of underpinning this whole conversation, and it's a deep and sort of a deep bond that's really hard to get your hands around, is whether we want as a society to value children and babies. I think that future generations are a good thing, and I'm pro raising the birth rate. Also, I like British culture, and I would like to see a thriving British country carrying on over the next 100 years, 200 years. Well, when you say you're pro raising the birth rate, it's not a policy, is it? How do you do that? I mean, I'd be sure it was a challenge because they make it easier for people, but you can't make it happen. Well, yes, and unfortunately, a lot of the evidence suggests that even when you do kind of throw money at women in order to support them to have children, that doesn't necessarily translate to an increase in birth rates. People are not having babies because they basically don't want to. And even in countries like China, where the state has an enormous amount of control over the way people consume information and things, people are still voting with their feet and not having babies and increasing numbers. So, I think that policies to support parents and mothers are good, just they're a moral good, so we should be enacting them. But I don't think that the link is necessarily strong between those policies and the actual results of the birth rate being going into going in the way that some of us want it to go. Yeah, and it's also worth thinking about Singapore, which is one of the fastest Asian countries in the world, what they're doing instead of thinking about kind of migration to kind of stop them ending up relying so heavily on the Asian population. But they're actually just focusing on things like raising the retirement age, encouraging companies to hire older workers and also making sure that their health care is much better so that their older workers have a specific doctor. So, they're kind of focusing more on the population they have making that population healthier. Okay, next up there's a buzz around honey. Well, not honey, but something that looks a bit like it. That's next after this. Okay, Arina, you're finishing the show. What do you think this week should be remembered for? Honey's sticky sake crap. This picture is so complicated and multileveled. It's so difficult to fake this and I don't write this. So, if it was, say, just a pure syrup and somebody thought, oh, I'm going to cheat the system, I'm adding in a bit of polish from here. Then, it would be missing in most of those things. Chair of the Honey Authenticity Network UK, beekeeper Lynn Ingram, speaking to scientist Kerry Rame in a video posted by Clean Up the Honey Market to YouTube on Thursday. Arina, what's the story? So, news came out this weekend that for the first time in its history, the World Beekeeping Awards won't be giving out a prize for best honey at its congress in Denmark next year. So, the announcement was made by the International Federation of Beekeepers' Associations and on Saturday, they said that the decision had been made because they were concerned about massive fraud in the global supply chain and the fact that they just couldn't fully test the honey for adulteration. What? I mean, if the International Federation of Beekeepers can't test honey, who can? Yeah, so this is a story that's big kind of rumbling on for some time. There's been a few damning reports that have come out recently. The European Commission last year found that 46% of imported honeys were fraudulent, including all 10 samples in the UK. So, pretty much when you go to the supermarket and buy some honey, pretty much most of it is fake. Hold on, fraudulent is a big word. Fake is a big word. Are you talking about, because I think as a relatively savvy consumer, if I'm buying a large pot of squeezy honey from my kids supporting their goneflakes, I kind of know that's probably cut with a bit of syrup or something. It's only 5% isn't it? Is that fraud? I mean, that's just bulking it out and making it cheap, isn't it? Well, the reality is, is that because it's so difficult to tell, because honeys look so different from each other, there's no baseline of what a honey actually looks like. And some of them are hugely bulked out with sugar syrups, which means actually they don't have, you think of honey as being like a relatively healthy thing. But actually, if it's just filled with cheap sugar syrups, you know, it could be a corn syrup or a beetroot syrup or something that's hidden in there. There's none of the health benefits, and you're essentially just kind of drizzling loads of sugar onto everything you're eating. Yeah, I mean, there's loads of sugar in there, cereal anyway, but I take your point. I mean, are there effects on wildlife as well leaf? Well, yes. Basically, the UK government says that honey officially has to be made, you know, with bees going outside and kind of using pollen and so kind of natural process. But fraudulent honey can also be honey in which bees have just been given loads of kind of glucose and made to convert that into into honey. And that honey doesn't have pollen in it. Yeah, the concern is that basically a lot of, well, one of the concerns with this story is that if you've got all of these producers who were spiking their honey with, you know, with the sugar syrup, then the price of honey goes down because that honey is therefore less expensive to make. A lot of this kind of fortunate honey is coming from China. So the concern is that the European honey market is being flooded with kind of cheaper honey, and then the price for honey goes down, and then the honey producers in Europe suffer. They can't, you know, sell their honey in the way that they used to. And the honey that, you know, good honey beekeepers will be making, will therefore there'll be less of an incentive for them to make it, and therefore the bees will, you know, be sent out less to kind of do their thing around around the European countryside. So it can seem like a bit of an obscure story, but actually it could lead to fewer bees doing good things in the kind of countryside across Europe. Which makes me sad, it's a chantra kit, but we've all seen Manuka honey on the shelves for 30 quid. I mean, that's the reality, isn't it? People want a cheap bottle of honey. I mean, it is a customer demand, which is why it's led to honey, which is a thing we can make here being imported from China in the first place. I think there is partly that kind of market demand, but I think what you have as well is like the misrepresentation on labels. Yeah, I should say what it is. Yeah. And I think so if you can't trust those labels, particularly like in stuff you're giving to children, you want to know exactly what's in there. And we've got to a place where we sort of have good food standards, we feel, and we can trust what's on the label, but actually it feels like we can't. And so there's this National Food Crime Unit, which I didn't know existed, but they are doing good work in the UK, and they've got two active operations into food fraud, and like honey isn't even one of them. So they firstly got one on premium quotation marks, premium grade potatoes. So investigating adulteration potatoes? With what? It's still a potato, but it's not the potato it's claiming to be. Yes, or the supplier, because the potatoes stay silent, but maybe potatoes say nothing, but maybe it's different seeds, I imagine. So it feels to me like maybe different grapes being used for wine, but then the wine sold a single grape. And so, but possibly with healthy implications, we don't know. And then the other one, which seems even worse maybe, is the misrepresentation of RSPCA assured Scottish make salmon, and they're actually using an Norwegian substitute. And then also in terms of the industries behind them, what happens to Scottish make salmon manufacturers if the Norwegian substitutes being put in there? So the fact that we've got this National Food Crime Unit does say to me that we've got issues with people cutting into supply chains, and also the labeling not being what we think it's saying. We don't know what it's saying. And olive oil as well, Leaf, I know this is a passion of yours. Yeah, well, olive oil has become exceedingly expensive. Ever since you brought it up on the show like a year ago, I've noticed when it when it had doubled in price, I hadn't noticed. Now it's traveled in price. It's hit even me in the pocket. And I'm like, yeah, I'm buying honey stocks right now. Right. And in the interest of when this this subject was proposed, I looked up like why actually our honey's blended? Why is the honey that we're buying in a jar? Why doesn't this all kind of come from one supplier? And Rows, which is a kind of quite a good honey producer, its website told me that basically because it's a natural product, unless it's been adulterated, the kind of its subject is sort of seasonal variations and availability. And so often, if you're buying a bottle of honey, you kind of want it to basically taste like it tasted last time. And so they create a blend to kind of maintain a sort of steady flavor and also a steady supply. So that's quite interesting. So just because honey's a blend doesn't necessarily mean that the honey is terrible, it can be fine. It's indoctrinated by the Rows website to me. I was going to say, yeah, it feels like because I actually, that was the honey I was looking at, I thought, well, I'm paying like three pounds for this Rows honey. That was my bottle that I was looking at this morning. And on the back, it literally just says a blend of EU and non-EU honey's. And I think they kind of almost feed you that idea of, oh, you want it to taste the same every time. But what all the beekeepers are saying is, no, the amazing thing about honey is, that is its complex flavor profile and that throughout the year it should change how it tastes. And also, I think it's really important to note that the UK in particular has been really lax on this. Like, yes, they're now, after all of these news stories, they're kind of being forced into doing something, but they've left it so long. And so there's no wonder that actually now, you know, studies are coming out saying nine in turn of our honey's effect. How do you spot a real honey? So yeah, there's a few things you can look out for things like if it has the British Honey Association label. Also, if it says a single origin on the back, that's a good thing to look out for. And also, real honey is often thicker, takes longer to pour and won't separate as easily. Obviously, the only way at the moment that you can really guarantee that you're buying real honey is to go to like a father's market and probably spend about like 10 times the price buying honey straight from a beekeeper. Obviously, I buy honey from my local, it's a cafe, but it's next to the farm and the cafe, I think they charge six pounds for a jar. And I know that comes from the hives that are in the field around the back of my house. Well, yeah, but I wouldn't even know where to go. I mean, I've just moved out. So maybe I need to figure out where my name is. I'll buy you some local honey next time. Where my nearest like honey suppliers. But, you know, for most people, like they don't want to pay six pounds for a jar. You can always steal it from the hive, but that comes with its own risks. Famously. Do you ever watch Winnie the Pooh? Before we go, I want to ask you actually, whether you have any views on what you do with honey, I do put honey in builder's tea. Is that a no-no, Sajandra Kit? Oh, number one, I would check with the builders first. Consent is important. Honey in tea. Yeah, for me, English breakfast tea with a spoon of honey. Oh, I had a friend around who was like, well, that's fine if you're using dodgy link, but not when you're using builders tea. And I was like, well, why? Is there anything in it? It's all sugar in the day. I wouldn't have sugar in my tea unless I was ill or a child. Okay, so you're judging me. No, no, no. Am I wrong to put honey in my tea? No, I think it's quite eccentric. I think I quite like this practice. I'm very, I'm really surprised that you do that. I only really use honey when I'm having it on toast, I guess. Although occasionally I'll make a nice kind of turmeric hot milk with honey in it that makes me feel very healthy, but I know it's just basically a hot chocolate. I know I really are thinking the same thing as me, which it is time for a tea break. So let's do it. My thanks to Leaf, Irene and Sajandra, remember you can follow this show for free and get every episode as soon as it's released. Just search for the week unwrapped wherever you get your podcast, then tap follow and also remember you can now get six weeks completely free and save an extra fiver on a quarterly subscription to the magazine just for listening to this podcast. All you need to do is visit the week.com/flash24 and use promo code flash24. In the meantime, I've been Ollie Mann, our music is by Tom Morby, the producer Ollie Piot at Rethink Audio, and until we meet again to unwrap next week, bye-bye. [BLANK_AUDIO]