Fair trade - small change, big difference. David Ransom goes for the jugular of consumer capitalism

New Internationalist, April, 2000 by David Ranson

The Canadian journalist Naomi Klein has just published a brilliant assault on consumer capitalism. She argues at one point that fair trade privatizes what are essentially public issues of democratic accountability. She goes on to suggest that the worst problems of labour exploitation could be overcome almost straight away if the International Labour Organization (ILO) were able to implement its basic standards worldwide.(7)

But it can't, because the ILO is part of the UN system and therefore has no teeth. The WTO is not part of the UN system and therefore has a fearsome array of trade penalties it can sink into anyone who steps out of line. Eventually this could affect all public services like health, education and transport. It claims to be democratic because it is supposed to be run by virtually all the world's governments, North and South. But in Seattle the rich countries repaired to the Green Room and cut deals on their own. Market forces prevailed again. What is needed, of course, is a fearsome World Fair Trade Organization run by the UN and accountable to the majority of the world's people who need it, not to the corporations that can fend for themselves all too well.

Trade is the jugular of consumer capitalism, and fair trade in its broadest sense is a very useful weapon, another link in a dynamic new network that has grown from the 1992 Earth Summit and now has to fill the space it created for itself in Seattle. Michael Barratt Brown describes wonderfully well how such networks of people, which fair trade mimics in material form, grow out of localities and regions across national, cultural and geographical boundaries.(8)

My nagging worry is that fair-trade products still cost more to buy and so are apparently aimed at people like me who can just about afford them. In the article that follows (pp 14-15), Mari Marcel Thekaekara mentions the direct links that her project in India has made with Matson, a neighbourhood of Gloucester. That's not far from where I live, and I decided to pay them a visit.

Matson is a pretty bleak area of public housing where 8,000 tenants got together some ten years ago to stop their homes being sold from under their feet. They won. They also set up the Matson Neighbourhood Project(9) which runs the only shop in one corner of the estate. It's been ram-raided (smashed into by a stolen car and looted) twice and the windows are still boarded up. No place for fancy fair trade, you might think.

Far from it. They've been exploring the scope for Matson Tea, imported directly from the growers in India and sold to local authorities, employers, co-op retailers and anyone else who's interested. True, as yet they don't actually have the tea. True, not everyone in Matson likes the taste of it. True, ram-raiding doesn't help. These things take time.

So I asked one of the more sceptical women if she thought she'd been wasting her time with fair trade. She was indignant. `Good lord, no!' she said. `We've had great fun!'

Up to that point no-one had suggested to me that fair trade, with or without the tea, could ever be fun. The very best motive there could possibly be, I reckon.