JustThinking | liberate your latte

Fairtrade rant by Danielle Strickland

I can’t really get over the fact that fairtrade is such a hard sell to western Christians. It’s actually quite irritating. I mean – it’s about developing world labourers receiving a fair price for their product… it’s about a hand up instead of hand out… it’s about equality and re-distribution and about modeling a different way to do business. How could your average Christian not support it?  It’s basically the Kingdom lived out… yet, here is a sample of responses I get as I promote fairtrade as one way (albeit a small one) of acting justly:

• It doesn’t taste good. This is rubbish (this is Australian for silly, dumb-witted, nonsensical and idiotic). There are many different brands of fairtrade… now, if the one you’ve tasted was from about 20- years ago or so when fairtrade was blatantly a martyr type action, then I would relent but now, there is such a variety of fairtrade blends that you’d have to be willfully ignorant to miss them.

• It costs more. Ummm, I’m never really sure how to respond to this one. OF COURSE IT DOES… get over it and pay the extra 10 cents and buy yourself a little cup of justice. Go on – liberate your latte.

• It doesn’t make a difference. There’s a new idea – pessimism… wow – what a novel thought. I met a twelve-year-old in Brisbane, Australia who sets up a fairtrade stall every Sunday in her corps lobby… that corps has completely changed over to fairtrade because no one (even the grumpiest of the lot) has the heart to tell that little girl that her efforts are of no use! Could we lay down our pessimism and try to think of a better world?

The Salvation Army has a rich heritage of getting people out of the cycles of poverty and oppression and giving them opportunities to contribute to society. We shouldn’t be measuring our progress on how many people we help… but on how many people we help out of the cycle. Fairtrade is a means of doing that on a global scale. I’m praying that God will re-establish our urgency for justice… even if it means we have to sip it slowly – one cup at a time.

Writer: Capt. Danielle Strickland is currently the Social Justice Director of the Southern Australia Territory. She digs traveling, reading, running, speaking, basketball and movies. Her passion is Grace, Mercy and Justice… and all the stuff in between. Her favourite question is ‘how hard can it be?’ and most of her days are spent answering it.

8 Comments to JustThinking | liberate your latte

1. I think the main issue is convenience — when I go looking for beans it’s not always easy to find anything in the shop that my conscience can cope with.

   This is becoming less of an issue though. Every time I shop for coffee there’s another brand bearing a FairTrade or Rainforest Alliance sticker. And I think I hit the holy grail last week — a bag of FairTrade beans that cost less than everything else and also tasted better. In my town, at least, there are no more excuses!

   Chocolate, on the other hand is still a problem. That issue doesn’t seem to have the exposure that coffee’s had over the last few years, and it’s just about impossible to find conscience-lite stuff on the shelves.

   I suppose nothing will change if I don’t try changing it, though…
Cameron Horsburgh on October 14th, 2008

2. Great Post Danielle!! We have a Coffee Nook in our new Thrift Store where we’ve been serving Tim Horton’s coffee ( go figure !! ). As of late though, Karen and I have decided to go with a Fair Trade coffee instead. We love Tim’s , but we love the idea behind Fair Trade even more.God bless and keep you, and yours, His!!

   Peter Eason

   P.S.: Which reminds me , we’re long overdue for a coffee together aren’t we?!
Peter Eason ( Major ) on October 14th, 2008

3. I don’t buy fair trade coffee, but maybe you can talk me into it:

   What’s the matter with regular old trade?
Catherine W on October 15th, 2008

4. The simple answer to the question is that more money gets into the hands of the growers of fairly traded produce and goes into improving the communities in which they live with things like running water, healthcare and education projects.

   With old trade the money tends to go into the pockets of the big multi-national conglomerates and their shareholders so they can have bigger cars and better houses in the affluent West!

   I’m sure someone else will come back with a far more eloquent and persuasive argument though so feel free to disregard my simplistic one if you like!
Graeme Smith on October 16th, 2008

5. The coffee I drink is really great. Really, it is better than Tim Hortons or Starbucks, whatever your standard is… And it is DIRECT fair trade [http://www.jjbeancoffee.com/]. How about an article on different fair trades and what might be labelled fair trade or rumoured to be [cough * starbucks * cough]. I think we be better consumers if we know the products.
Jonathan Evans on October 17th, 2008

6. Thank you for elucidating me. I was under the impression “Fair Trade” mostly meant some first-worlders relocated to the tropics to annoy coffee farmers and jack up prices needlessly, so I’m glad to hear my friends shelling out the extra cash for ethical joe are not being ripped off. Running water — that’s a good thing!

   My research indicates I can get a lb. of coffee, on sale, for as low as $1.84, with an average price of somewhere in the $2.50 range. Fair trade runs closer to $10 a lb. (At Target, Starbucks: $10.67; local health food store, house blend: $13.00; Wal Mart, Green Mountain: $8.77)

   Since coffee is a luxury item, I try to spend the bulk of my grocery money buying nutritious foods, and I give at least part of my tithe to groups that do international/environmental work, I have a few more questions:

   First, who staffs the fair trade certification group? If it’s indigenous people, why should I believe they are more concerned about work standards than are the local bureaucrats charged with enforcing local laws? If they’re first world do-gooders, what percentage of the extra charge are they skimming and why should I endorse them imposing external standards? If a farmer fails the fair trade test, how does he appeal the decision? Can he vote out the certification agency staff?

   Second: Coffee comes from the tropics; in my town, we make gas and steam turbines to generate power. If I pay four times as much for coffee to improve conditions in the third world, are tropical peoples going to shell out four times as much for turbines so we can clean up the brownfields in my town? (We still have a lot surrounded by barbed wire where the DOE supposedly got out all the gunk from early work in support of something called the Manhattan Project — usually, you expect some level of filth out of Manhattan, but you would not believe the dust these people left behind!)

   Third, would a coffee boycott be just as acceptable, if some Salvationists really can’t afford coffee at $10 a lb.? Or does marketplace righteousness necessarily involve making a sale? And if it is righteousness you are really selling at your church house door, what would Martin Luther say?
Catherine W on October 18th, 2008

7. It is definitely crazy that even in our own “developed” countries, big corporations are allowed to destroy the environment and our own communities to serve their own ends [see doc: Refugees of a Blue Planet]. Catherine - I am sure that if people in third world countries heard about your situation they would be concerned.

   But the difference is that those people are in no way responsible for the way we are imploding, whereas we really do have a lot to do with a lot of their poverty and oppression. Most of us (as we read this on-line magazine on our computer screens) are part of the societies that take advantage of those in the developing world. As Christians, we should be like the son that Ezekiel describes (18:14-20). No matter how our fathers and their fathers have treated others, we are still responsible for the choices we make NOW.

   Even the poorest of us is still richer than most of the world. When we say we can’t “afford” fair trade, do we mean we will starve if support those companies? Or will we just have less to spend on other luxuries. If it does mean we’d starve, maybe it’s worth considering the option of buying less. (eg. Maybe we don’t NEED to eat 7 chocolate bars a week. Maybe we could just take that $7 and buy 2 fair trade bars. Then maybe we’d save on the gym membership too).

   Danielle - thanks for sharing that story about the girl in Brisbane, it was like a refreshing spring in the middle of those salt-water excuses. Dion Oxford just wrote a note a few days ago about his experience at a Me to We event (started by Craig Kielberger, connected to Free the Children) - 8,000 young people rallying together to change the world through their daily choices. Radical. And most of these people don’t even know Jesus. They have caught the vision because they have been struck with compassion, and because they know in their hearts that it is right to love your neighbour. James might wonder why we haven’t hopped on that neighbour-loving wagon, when we know that faith without deeds is dead.

   I admit, I have often struggled with that last excuse myself, the excuse of feeling small and insignificant facing such a gargantuous issue. There are still questions about how fair fair trade is (with the certification process, etc). But I like what you said at congress: we need to start off by imagining that a better world is possible, and then do everything we can to walk toward that.

   I’m typing right now, but when I’m done I’m going to close my eyes and imagine a world where every Christian cares enough about acting justly that we will spend the extra buck, learn to appreciate the new taste, and believe that God can use even the smallest of our actions to make a difference.
Sharon Hann on October 23rd, 2008

8. One of the objections that I get to the Fair Trade argument is the cost. “How can I spend $10.00 on Fair Trade coffee when I can get (insert name here) for $2.50?” Everytime I hear it, it boils me. As if our budgetary concerns compare with the injustice going on in coffee-producing countries.

   The problem here is perspective. We are so used to paying so little that the thought of paying more for this “new” alternative turns us off. Perhaps we should consider that the price we pay for Fair Trade is what we should have been paying all along. If you went to an electronics store and a stereo was $200, but you could get it for $75 if you bought it “hot” off the street, would you do it? Paying the lowest price doesn’t always equal good stewardship.
Juan on October 24th, 2008

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