Fair Trade

Yesterday I’ve been in a fair trade shop for the first time. I wanted to buy some presents for Christmas. Most of what they have is coffee, tea, wine, toys, pottery and some clothes. Really nice stuff, made in Guatemala, India or Vietnam, and fair trade shops are certainly needed now and in the future, as something to thwart away the politics of global economy. But it is not enough.

Staple foods like wheat, corn, rice or potatoes are not fair trade. For every fair trade shop there are hundreds other around it full of fruits and vegetables produced by literally poisoning the environment. Billions of people are wasting away their health and lifetime to fill up these other shops. We leave the shops and walk on streets, and not deep beneath the pavement, the soil is choking to death because she can’t breathe, and every night she’s dreaming about nurturing life again. While the soil is dreaming this, we live in concrete-made houses, we sleep in beds made of timber, surrounded by wardrobes made of timber also, and there’s no real forest around us in any direction, no forest but a few trees and bushes and clearly confined parks. The wardrobes are full of clothes we are bored of already, and not a single dream we had about people who made those clothes. Cars, plastic bottles, tin cans, leather shoes, mobile phones, perfumes, flowers, central heating, light bulbs and electric light, jewelry, none of these are fair trade, yet they are more than 99% of the objects that make our life. 

I think that people who put up fair trade shops are doing a wonderful job. Most people say that it is a start, and in the coming years more and more fair trade shops will pop up. But I wonder how many years does it have to take to make all trade fair. What if fair trade shops act more like a social sedative, something to appease the people from Western countries, make them hope that change is possible, while they can continue with consumerism?

In a holocaust that was started hundreds of years ago, we gave colored beads to natives from other continents, in exchange for food, shelter, guidance, gold, friendship, their land and their identity. They liked the beads, or an iron axe, or a rifle or a mirror. The natives thought it was a fair trade, but the colonists knew it wasn't fair. They knew it all the time.

Why are we lying to ourselves?