I STARTED earning money on a paper round when I was 15. The anti-Apartheid movement was at its height, the women were encamped at Greenham Common, including my mum’s best friend, and Threads (1984), the anti-nuclear film by Barry Hines had just been filmed on location in Sheffield. My friends, who were a year older than I was, were allowed to be extras. I watched them being evaporated on screen in Fargate, the pedestrian precinct in the City Centre where we’d hang out on a Saturday afternoon, learning to be cool.
Call it virtue signalling if you like, but these peace and justice movements of the 1980s, shaped the inner landscape of my youthful soul. At home, we never bought oranges from South Africa. Wine labels were checked and rejected. A woman called Elizabeth, in the parish, started a fair trade stall in church, after service, selling “Campaign Coffee”, a quite frankly undissolvable and undrinkable form of instant coffee under the then new label of “Traidcraft”.
I would determinedly stir the instant campaign coffee in with dried milk powder and a teaspoon of water to help it dissolve, after I’d purchased it from the fair trade shop in the Market Place in Durham, when I went to college.
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It may have lost me some friends. Mum and Dad joined the Fairtrade (kitemarked with an “F”) coffee drinkers when Café Direct launched the merciful drinkable granulated coffee. There’s wisdom for you. Now you can buy scores of brands of Fairtrade coffee for every possible preference.
The movement was born as a sister to the consumer boycott of South African Apartheid products. Over the years, its fortunes have ebbed and flowed with the disposable income in people’s pockets. Many, probably rightly, consider it a middle-class luxury and yet much of what I know about fair trade and thrift and ethical consumption I have learned from a friend who has very little income at all. She is convinced that the money she spends locally and in local shops, on food and cleaning products should be spent on fairly traded products and should do the maximum amount of good and the minimum amount of harm.
She has no “college-level education” but honestly deserves a PhD for her knowledge of fair trade and ethical products. And she is not backward, in coming forwards, encouraging others to follow her example, not least when in her local shops.
As the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in solidarity with the people in illegally occupied Palestine grows in force and pace, it is easy to believe it’s all about what you don’t do; who you are against; which companies are the bad guys with their factories or sourcing in and from stolen land. The list is of course now legendary and increasingly uncontentious.
I’ve been avoiding these outlets and brands since the BDS movement began, probably because I realised after the fall of Apartheid in South Africa, that there was more wisdom in trying to make sure the money that was mine to spend as I liked went to those trying to do good stuff, rather than doing a great deal of harm.
So, avoiding the brands that are involved in nefarious, barely legal activities like modern slavery, or wage suppression in favour of shareholder profits, or destroying local, family-run businesses so a massive chain can sell green-washed coffee is second nature these days.
But alongside this comes a different practice, which is perhaps harder than mere avoidance and that is trying to spend money where it will do actual good. Where business practices have been developed to support small, local, fairly waged suppliers, farmers and producers in the majority world.
It’s where the Scotland Malawi Partnership and fair-trade movement worked together in the 2000s and where Professor John Riches developed a Fairtrade products importer now known as True Origin, with warehouses in Paisley. True Origin are miracle-workers, and trueorigin.org.uk a social enterprise Scotland can be truly proud of: “True Origin Foods works directly with a network of smallholder farmers and producers in the global south to source the finest ethical foods.
“As a WFTO Guaranteed Member, True Origin Foods adheres to fair trade principles. We believe this is the fairest way to do business and as a social enterprise based in the West of Scotland, we also apply these principles across our UK operations, creating employment here and striving to reduce our environmental impact.
“Our purchases of fine foods help farmers and producer communities receive a fair and reliable income, enabling them to buy equipment, education, infrastructure and take care of their environment.”
They supply organisations like Co-op stores, who also recently signed up to the consumer boycott of Israeli goods, as well as from Iran, Myanmar, Sudan, Afghanistan and Belarus, taking a principled stand on Human Rights violations. Their food makes for beautiful gifts and as well as trading with southern and eastern Africa, they also work in partnership with Zaytoun, supplies of gold-plated olive oil, exquisite soaps, herbs and grains.
Every year, True Origin runs rice challenges across Scotland, and schools and community groups purchase Malawi rice, learning and knowing about the good this does and often hearing directly from farmers who are, on occasion, granted visas to visit and talk to groups, by the Home Office.
In the 1980s, I volunteered in fair trade shops and became a bit obsessive about reading the magazine Ethical Consumer through the 1990s. It was a hair-shirt activity then, in the main and a bit joyless, and gritty, like the Campaign Coffee.
I’ve stuck with it, though, and it has become a joyous, part of life – both in terms of shopping and of eating.
With neighbours we set up a small consumer co-op so we can benefit from bulk buying – it’s not for everyone and needs upfront cash which many don’t have – but it’s been a way of supporting cooperative models of wholesale food production and consumption.
Zaytoun products are still my favourite gifts to give because they are stunning and are part of the good stuff, with the good people I may never meet but I know this is an Apartheid-busting way of living well.
When my mother-in-law died, she’d been a fair trader, stocking and running stalls across Shropshire and Birmingham since the very first cohort of Traidcraft’s volunteers began. She’d carried thousands of boxes in and out of church and community halls.
Today, I know she would be at the forefront of positive consumption, actively promoting the work of the Fairtrade Foundation, in this Fairtrade Fortnight, the two weeks with a special focus on at least trying to do no harm as consumers.
Fairtrade Foundation has pulled together a powerful coalition of leading UK retailers, brands and suppliers including Ben & Jerry’s, Clipper, Co-op, Greggs who have joined together this Fairtrade Fortnight to call on businesses to “Do it fairly”.
One way to check out what might at least do no harm is to read the unpaywalled article in Ethical Consumer magazine: www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalcampaigns/boycotts/alternative-ethical-brands-support-palestine.
Another way is to shop in some of the great fair trade outlets across Scotland – Rainbow Turtle, Gavin’s Mill, One World Shop, Hadeel, Loch Arthur Farm Shop and many more.
“At least do US no harm,” says the BDS founder Palestinian Omar Barghouti. At least do us no harm.
I know it’s easier for me to make these decisions, informed by seeking out the sources of information and then seeking out the sources of fairly trade, BDS compliant products. I have a salary and can make choices more easily than many.
But my friend who is on the minimum wage does far better than I do, and teaches me regularly what else and where else to shop, be it second hand or through a happy sharing of another shop that’s opened up in Partick, round the corner, which – thanks to her polite, courteous and persistent requests – is now stocking her favourite fair trade products.
It’s something. At least do the Palestinians no more harm with informed choices you are at liberty to make. And maybe you will find it also does you some good, as I have found, over the years. Win win.
Alison Phipps is UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts at the University of Glasgow
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