Thought for the Week: Fairtrade Fortnight
Laurie Michaelis reflects on Fairtrade Fortnight
A few weeks ago I attended the Saturday morning service at a reform synagogue – my first in many years. It was a small, friendly congregation, quite different from the formal Judaism I grew up with. It felt particularly homely though, because of the posters declaring that this was a Fairtrade synagogue.
Until about ten years ago Fairtrade products were only bought by a minority of consumers. Now the Fairtrade symbol – that friendly little waving person – is on bars of Cadbury Dairy Milk, bags of Tate & Lyle sugar, and all the bananas sold by Sainsbury’s and Waitrose. It gives us the message that, by buying these products, we are doing good.
The Fairtrade label doesn’t just tell us what’s in the packet. It also tells us something about the person who chooses it. Where did my warm feeling in the synagogue come from? Perhaps it’s partly just the familiarity of words and images I’m used to seeing in Quaker Meeting houses. But it’s also the message that we care about some of the same things, and the underlying implication that we are part of the same community; we belong.
Fairtrade promises ‘better prices and decent working conditions for farmers and workers in the developing world’. Producers of crops like coffee and cocoa get a premium above world market prices and a guaranteed minimum so that they do not suffer from the volatility in these markets.
Fairtrade certifiers have a long list of criteria for producer organisations – often cooperatives of small farmers. They must be democratic and they have to guarantee nondiscriminatory practices. Child labour and corporal punishment are prohibited. They are also required to pay attention to sustainability, for instance by training producers in integrated pest management and minimising the use of chemicals.
Some critics point out that Fairtrade can create dependency, and that it’s yet another way for Europeans to impose their values on their ex-colonies. But independent studies have found that Fairtrade does benefit producers – improving financial stability, empowering women and enabling small farmers to get out of debt and pay for their children to be educated.
It can be a relief to have a simple label telling us it is all right to buy this product, rather than worry about which country or manufacturer we are supposed to boycott this week. A simple choice of tea can witness to our testimonies on equality, justice and sustainability. But is it that straightforward? Should we buy Fairtrade green beans air freighted from Kenya? What about Nestlé’s KitKat? And is all that coffee and chocolate really good for us?
Then there are other things we buy, perhaps without thinking of the human rights implications. Fairtrade now accounts for about one per cent of UK household spending on food, but only a tenth of a per cent of clothing. So far you can’t buy Fairtrade mobile phones or petrol.
If we are committed to developing a moral economy, we need to look at all of our choices about spending, investing, earning and borrowing. Perhaps the hardest choice is to address the essential fact of our global inequality and to reduce our consumption to a fair and sustainable level.
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