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'Fair trade leads to self-respect'
The War Cry, 23 July 2005
Earlier in the year the head of the Evangelical Alliance, the Rev Joel Edwards, spoke to The War Cry about the need for the values hope, trust and respect to be more prominent in society. The War Cry invited a number of people to expand on these values. HARRIET LAMB, executive director of the Fairtrade Foundation, writes about respect.......
Many years ago, I lived and worked in a very poor village in South India. The people lived from day to day with nothing to fall back on. Their food, after a hard day's labour in the fields, was often just a dry, course, roti bread. It was all they had. Yet if I walked past, they always called out to me to come in and share it. It was a generosity of spirit that I have rarely seen matched and was founded on a deep respect for other people.
Anyone who has been fortunate enough to travel in developing countries may, like me, have been struck by this respect shown to others - elders, teachers, strangers. The contrast with our wealthy world is none too complimentary. I was travelling in Europe recently with the softly-spoken manager of an African coffee co-operative. He was shocked by how rudely and brusquely people treated each other.
We don't even notice any more because we have become careless of our impact on other people. While of course there are still poor people in the UK, as an economy we are one of the richest in the world. When we have so much wealth and are not prepared to share it, we are being careless of our impact on the world, its natural resources and its people. It is easy to forget that behind the consumer products, there are people deserving our respect.
Take one example: The prices of bananas recently plummeted by 33% over one year. For UK shoppers it was bargain prices, but the lower price meant misery for those farmers and workers who lost their jobs or had their wages slashed as a result.
Fairtrade products offer shopping with respect. It is forging an alternative way of trading which guarantees farmers and workers a fair deal. For perhaps the first time ever, Fairtrade is putting farmers and workers at the very heart of international trade, insisting that people should earn enough to live and proving that this system can work.
The great news is that more and more people are embracing Fairtrade. Overwhelmingly, when people hear about the problems faced by farmers in developing countries, they find these unacceptable. (Witness the millions of people who signed up to the Make Poverty History campaign, which includes trade justice among its key demands).
Too often when the EU goes into negotiations with developing countries they have a lack of respect, descending to bully-boy tactics. They give aid, trade deals and even debt relef only in return for new concessions from developing countries. This simply perpetuates the inequalities which can no longer be acceptable - and which the public clearly no longer finds acceptable.
People are rejecting the dominant model of trade built on a fundamental disrespect and disregard of others and embracing Fairtrade. Last year in the UK the sale of Fairtrade products rose by 51%.
Not only are people putting Fairtrade products into their shopping baskets they are also putting energy into spreading the word. And that's especially true of young people. In schools, children are teaching the teachers - telling them they should be drinking Fairtrade tea and coffee in the staffroom!
Fairtrade is a vibrant social movement with an enthusiasm which often amazes farmers who travel around the UK to talk about Fairtrade. Once when I complimented Guillermo Vargas of Coocafe coffee cooperative in Costa Rica about how inspiring a speaker he was, he replied 'No, it's me who is being inspired by all that people here are doing.'
A Costa Rican banana farmer, Arturo Gomez, summing up the empowerment which is at the heart of Fairtrade, told me: 'Before I was someone who took a box and loaded it on to a train. That was my only responsibility. I was just a farmer. In this new Fairtrade system, I have become an international businessman.'
There is a long way to go. No one can be under any illusion that poverty will be made history this month or this year. The scale of the need in developing countries is huge - and calls for a huge response from each of us.
But what is clear is that people accross the rich world do hunger for putting respect back into the way we connect with people in Africa, Asia, Latin America. Through Fairtrade people are showing respect to third world growers. And, perhaps, are respecting themselves a little bit more as a result.
Harriet Lamb, executive director of the Fairtrade Foundation