Fair Trade and Ethical Shopping
How You Can Tackle Global Warming and World Poverty
Given the environmental impact of shipping products around the world, is the most ethical choice always to buy locally?
A related article on Suite 101, Green or Hungry, describes the debate between advocates of increasing international trade (including better integrating the developing world) and the ecological perspective, concerned with the burden of trade on environmental sustainability.
It would seem that those who are concerned with the impact of packaging and transporting food and other products around the world (and using pesticides and other chemicals so they last long enough to get to market) should always buy locally-produced items. Here are two reasons why not, and a possible alternative approach.
Ethical Living and the Global Community
The increasingly accepted idea of living ethically is multi-faceted. An article on Suite 101, Costing Quality of Life, surveys the range of quality of life and genuine progress indicators being developed around the world to measure, comprehensively, success and wellbeing. Among those indicators are social engagement and community involvement, the notion that one cannot live a good life while detached from others. To the extent that the world is a global community, issues such as hunger in the developing world are of concern to “first world” consumers.
Increased Trade Has the Potential to Help the Poorest Countries
Trade Aid, a New Zealand- and Australia-based non-governmental organisation, estimates that if Africa, East Asia, South Asia and Latin America each increased their share of world exports by one per cent, 128 million fewer people would be in poverty.
In an article in the D. Kelly- and W. Grant-edited book The Politics of International Trade in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Peter Newell describes an environmentalist position, midway between the liberal and ecological perspectives, which holds that “under certain conditions trade liberalization can be made compatible with the goals of sustainable development”.
The “trick” is what is traded, and the nature of those “certain conditions”.
A “Green” Fair Trade
Advocates of fair trade with developing countries point out that the impact of a product on the environment includes not only the carbon-cost of transportation, but the environmental cost of how the item was produced. For example, a person working in her own home with local sustainable inputs and without electricity to handcraft (for example) a shoulder bag, has a smaller impact than a worker in a factory miles from home. If the artisan’s work is then sea-freighted rather than air-freighted, the carbon footprint is further reduced.
Trade Aid, which works with producer-owned cooperatives and family groups to access food and craft items from the developing world for the western market, promotes the producing and transporting of items with minimal ecological impact.
The organisation points out that in fact developing countries (such as low-lying Bangladesh) are the ones facing some of the worst early consequences of global warming.
Part of the fair trade equation is ensuring that producers get a reasonable price, so that they are not forced into economically damaging activities to support their families. Otherwise, a farmer not receiving enough income from his coffee crop might feel that he needs to clear more land to improve his situation.
Fair trade items are available around the world. Sandra Williams, in her Suite 101 article “Support Fair Trade”, describes North American organisations such as Ten Thousand Villages which have similar objectives to Trade Aid.
Fair trade is a way that ethically-minded consumers might be able to use their power of “demand” to tackle, at the same time, issues of global poverty and climate change.
