Right, but the alternative in certain situations is having no businesses at all, as was the case in my home country.

>Are you making the argument that the west is generally over-regulating food safety and public health? If so, on what basis? Looks to me like a variant of the old "when i was young we didn't have [seatbelts|gun regulation|hard hats on construction sites] and i turned out just fine!"

No, and again, it's offensive that this is legitimately the first thing that comes to mind when somebody from a developing nation says that it's local population has reasons for doing things the way it does. Nowhere was I arguing that public safety is a bad thing, and don't appreciate having words put in my mouth. I was merely stating the fact that businesses down there almost unanimously don't have the resources to be hiring lawyers, or whatever other services that they would need in order to guarantee compliance with overly strict regulations like you see in the west. If such regulations were in place, and they were strictly enforced somehow, what would happen is that nearly all entrepreneurship would disappear altogether, except possibly for the wealthy (which are often the most corrupt down there), or outside investors with potentially dubious motives for dealing with the local population. It would literally price-out the very people you'd be trying to help with your regulations.

I never said that situation was better than the west, or that things were somehow better "back then" (I much prefer living in the US today), I was saying it was better than nothing, and that these entitled western sentiments can't feasibly be applied everywhere to positive effect. Has it come to the point now that small villages will be needing to apologize to westerners for liking the convenience of having some semblance of commerce in their neighborhoods, due to all the benefits that brings, like not having to worry about cooking dinner in equally poor conditions every night at home? It's not an attack on the west, it's annoyance with the west's over-the-top moralizing of the choices different people make under constrained circumstances that westerners seem to forget exist.