Think of the marketing that you may have seen over Fairtrade fortnight for supermarkets, it wasn’t about the ethics or provenance of our food, it was about the number of products that you could buy for £1, or feeding your family for a fiver. I think it’s safe to say that the supermarkets are not losing out and many are announcing expansion and the opening of new stores. At this time consumers need to be encouraged to shop with their hearts, acting out their ethics.

This all made me think of a trip my husband and I made a few years ago. We were travelling through Mozambique on a local bus that was (literally) tied together. Every-so-often we would stop at a village and people would rush up to the bus with basins laden with fruit, juice, biscuits and the occasional chicken. The sellers would lift their goods above their heads to the tiny windows, we would grab what we wanted and throw some change into the basin. At one stop I noticed a little boy with a basin of scruffy-looking bananas, when the bus stopped he ran forward, but as he was so little, he had no chance of getting his fruit to us, he was never able to trade. His bananas, blackened by the heat were ruined, he had missed his chance to make some cash. At that moment the quote by Dr Robert Aboagye-Mensah (General Secretary, Christian Council of Ghana) was made tangible:

‘International trade between my country and the West is like an antelope and a giraffe competing for food which is at the top of a tree. You can make the ground beneath their feet level but the contest will still not be fair.’

We need serious change in our world economic systems, and perhaps we have a massive opportunity at this time to truly speak up for the poor. We can try to change the system, and as this takes a long time, Fairtrade can offer a stop-gap, until this age-old issue is addressed:

Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. (Isaiah 10: 1-3)

But, more than offering producers a fair price for their hard work; Fair Trade expresses our respect for the human behind the products we buy. Yahya Msangi (a Tanzanian Union official) spoke in Belfast last year about the international flower trade. He spoke of how, approaching specific time of the year, such as Valentines and Mother’s day, women in Tanzania are forced to work horrendous hours, are subjected to sexual harassment and suffer miscarriages in the fields due to the chemicals spread on the plants. He ended his talk with this: ‘And these flowers are your gifts of love?’.

1 http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/

2 http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/09/business/econ.php

To do:

Buy mum some Fairtrade roses for mother’s day (from Tesco/Co-Op) OR if you can’t find any ask a manager why