Ben Miller of Edinburgh Uni P&P argues that conscious consumers actually need to think about consuming less.
We are told to consume thoughtfully, but what about consuming less?
Shoppers in the UK spent almost £500 million on Fairtrade goods last year, a massive 80% increase on the year before. According to The Fairtrade Foundation over 7 million people in developing countries are now directly benefiting from our changing shopping habits.
Fairtrade has ridden a wave of public support in recent years, and this is increasingly reflected in big announcements by big brands. Last week Tate & Lyle, iconic British sugar company, announced a 100% switch to Fairtrade sugar, with immediate benefits for 6000 farmers in Belize. The Co-op is switching all its tea, coffee and hot chocolate to Fairtrade and has led the way in bringing new Fairtrade products such as wine to the UK. Everything from peanut butter to fancy knickers can now be bought with a warm glow inside. Even cans of coke made with Fairtrade sugar from Malawi are now on sale in EUSA shops.
As Fairtrade becomes more mainstream, it faces new and greater challenges. The move to approve a Nestle coffee as Fairtrade a few years ago created considerable heated debate. In the end it was decided that the if the stringent Fairtrade standards were met by the particular product, then the Fairtrade Mark could not discriminate against Nestle, despite it being one of the most widely boycotted companies in the world. The pioneers of Fairtrade, such as Cafedirect and Edinburgh-based Equal Exchange, are quick to point out that Nestle’s commitment to Fairtrade only extends to 0.02% of the coffee it buys every year. Have Nestle truly embraced a better way of doing business?
In the last couple of years cases such as these have become far more common, but much less contested. Huge brands such as M&S, Topshop and this week Debenhams have all launched lines of clothing made with Fairtrade-certified cotton. This can only be a good thing for the desperate cotton growing communities of India and West Africa where Fairtrade cotton is sourced. Between 1998 and 2005, over 4500 cotton farmers committed suicide in just one Indian state, Andhra Pradesh, owing to the rapidly falling world price of cotton and rising costs in intensive production. Fairtrade has brought hope and practical support, enabling them, among other projects to convert to organic production. However, it is easy to see why accusations of tokenism and greenwash are levelled at high street retailers. The vast majority of clothing in these stores is still a product of the grossly unfair world trade system; characterised by subsidies and tariffs and stubbornly resistant to reform. Under the economics are real people. Half the world’s cotton comes from Uzbekistan, a vile, torture-ridden totalitarian state where 200,000 children as young as seven are forced to work on state cotton farms. Is it clear that Fairtrade can help with this?
Understandably, the Fairtrade system is focussed on farmers right at the start of the production line. With cotton and other commodities, though, there is the glaring issue of labour standards in ‘sweatshop’ factories across the world. Topshop’s multi-billionaire owner Sir Philip Green has refused to sign up to even the most basic industry agreement, the Ethical Trading Initiative. Recent newspaper investigations have found his factory workers in Mauritius, Sri Lanka and many other countries working 12 hours a day for as little as 20p an hour. What does Fairtrade do for Philip Green?
Similar arguments can be applied to supermarket support for Fairtrade. Headline-friendly moves on the part of retails giants such as Sainsbury’s have literally transformed the lives of, for instance, Caribbean and Latin American banana growers. With our four biggest supermarkets now accounting for over three quarters of the entire grocery market in the UK, any efforts to use their strength in a positive way is welcome. What people must realise, however, is that the centralised, cost-cutting, price aggressiveness of the supermarkets is largely responsible for so many of the problems that Fairtrade seeks to combat. In June last year, Asda started a price war on bananas, forcing the price to 59p/kg against a 1997 price of around £1.08/kg. This may not seem of great consequence to the cash-struck student shopper, but the impact was described by NGOs as ‘devastating’ for those at the other end of the chain. One in four bananas sold in this country is now Fairtrade, but what about the thousands of other products in the supermarkets and those farmers in Britain and low-paid migrant workers across Europe living in the shadow of supermarket whims. What about the homogeneous aisles and over packaged products? The local shops closing down and the traffic queues to ‘out-of-town’?
You can, of course, get almost all Fairtrade products in smaller shops around Edinburgh. The point is, though, that if we claim an interest in “fair trade” we need to look again at our attitudes to food and shopping more generally. Should we even support clothes retailers and their promotion of disposable, throwaway fashion when almost three billion people live on less than $2 a day? We gorge on chocolate, wine, coffee and exotic fruits but almost 800 million people are classed as ‘chronically undernourished’. We are told to consume thoughtfully, but what about consuming less? It is well known that if the whole world lived at UK standards of living, we’d need three planet’s worth of resources (at US levels, we’d need eight). Fairtrade is vitally important because it is creating a sizeable bubble of dissent within the world system, but those of us inside it must shout loudly and clearly that we reject these inequalities and look for a better solution.