Hadžihafizbegović: I only grab domestic products from store shelves

Socrates' student and Aristotle's teacher Plato, at one of his Athenian lectures, uttered the following thought: “Poverty does not disappear because wealth decreases, but because desires multiply.”, wrote BiH actor Emir Hadžihafizbegović in a column dedicated to domestic producers and the campaign “Let’s turn on the light in BiH”.

The news agency Patria is publishing Hadžihafizbegović's column in its entirety:

- Yes, truly a brilliant sentence - says Hadžihafizbegović.

- A man who lived 400 years before Christ discovered the secret and essence of consumerism in which the “modern man” lives today. This consumerism, this inexplicable hunger for new products, this passion to buy anything and everything, this scourge of neoliberal capitalism, the era of emptiness of the human spirit, has attacked the Bosnian-Herzegovinian man like a tick.

Driven by consumer itch, our man began to take all sorts of delicacies off the shelves of mega markets, increasingly bypassing his own domestic product.

Italian pasta, Slovenian water, Turkish biscuits, Macedonian ajvar, Portuguese wine, Serbian jam, are just a small part of the wide range of products we carry to our homes, while our products, better and of higher quality, remain on the shelves of the same markets and shopping centers.

The catch of such a mentality lies in only one thing - consumerism without awareness of the domestic product.

The possibility of choice and freedom of purchase is a fundamental civilizational postulate, and let there be foreign products in Bosnia and Herzegovina. But it is also a kind of masochism and undermining of our own economic system if, in one year, 300 to 500 million euros of our, Bosnian-Herzegovinian money, the money of our taxpayers, goes to other countries, and other coffers, because it was spent on products that Bosnia and Herzegovina possesses.

It sounds almost like science fiction, but if we had respected and bought what is a domestic product for the last 20 years, we would hardly have any foreign debt. It sounds unbelievable, but it is true. Therefore, Bosnians and Herzegovinians, let's return to domestic products, let's buy domestic, let's strengthen our economy and our country.

No one can help us like we can help ourselves. The context of the comparative advantages of life for all citizens of BiH, which would come as a consequence of buying domestic products, is broad. By deciding to take the domestic product from the shelf where a similar product from another country stands, and carry the former, mentioned, ours, to the checkout in our basket, we do an invaluable service to our children, their future, no matter which nation and place of residence in BiH they belong to.

So, just that, among other motives, is enough for me, when walking past shelves with goods from all over the world, to grab mine, to grab Čitluk, Gradačac, Trebinje. To grab and bring home, and it is immediately good for those in Čitluk, and in Gradačac, and for those in Trebinje, and it is good for me in Grbavica in Sarajevo - concludes Hadžihafizbegović.