According to CNN, traffickers are taking advantage of the current instability in Haiti to take children and organs out of the country. Many children have been orphaned and the massive displacement of people, in makeshift dwellings, make them extremely vulnerable:
Haiti is trying to locate displaced children and register them so they can either be reunited with other family members or put up for adoption, Bellerive said.
But, he said, illegal child trafficking is “one of the biggest problems that we have.”
Many groups appear to be legitimate, “but a lot of organizations — they come and they say there were children on the streets. They’re going to bring them to the [United] States,” he said.
(source: CNN.com and @STOPTHETRAFFIK, photo: United Nations)
As I’ve mentioned here before, the industry juggernauts are beginning to notice. They’re beginning to tap into the growing target group that is the Fairtrade consumer. It’s been creeping in for a long time, ever since the pioneer brands (Traidcraft, Cafédirect, Divine, etc.) created enough of a presence to force supermarkets to realize we exist: we who care who produces, and what goes into, the food we eat.
So in the UK we began to see Tesco and ASDA branded Fairtrade-certified goods. At the time these changes were seen as a breakthrough, a sign that at last consumers were having an influence. The idealists among us imagined that eventually we would visit a supermarket and not have a slave-produced alternative, that it would all be fairly traded and that we would even hear reports of fewer countries classified ‘developing’, as they gain economic power themselves. But the supermarkets continued to stock the other products and they continued to fly off the shelves.
This year we have seen a spate of the big players decide to accommodate the ethical consumer in their product ranges: Cadbury have committed their Dairy Milk line to certification, Mars have announced that by 2020 they will be more ethical, and Kraft Foods, who want to buy out Cadbury, are taking steps towards working with the Rainforest Alliance. Sadly, on Monday when Nestlé announced that their four finger Kit Kat will be Fairtrade certified we got another whiff of the target group mentality – “we’ll create a line which is Fairtrade, so that we can tap into that niche.”
When this fair trade journey began, the goal was to play the capitalist game in a way that would benefit the poor. It wasn’t about charity: for people to throw money at the poor while they pretended to be interested in the product. We actually wanted better products that would be desirable for more than just their sense of conscience. That’s how Cafédirect came to be, and why Nestlé (Nescafé) were forced to pay a little more for their coffee (because apparently the farmers were giving their best produce to the highest bidder).
With this in mind, why does it leave a nasty taste in our mouths when we hear of a Fairtrade version of the Kit Kat, or a Fairtrade line of Nescafé?
Maybe we were hoping that the soul-less superpowers would grow souls? Or perhaps there was an idea that we would be proven right and that the oppressors would repent of their wrong doings and confess to being modern-day slave barons?
Of course, there’s no reason why Nestle can’t take the profits from their Fairtrade line and invest them in another less-than-ethical enterprise. There’s nothing stopping Mars from back pedaling before 2020 (as they have before). But, as Stephanie Celt points out, there are 8,000 farmers who will be affected, for the better, by this (Kit Kat) decision.
We must celebrate this, but also recognize that there will always be people who face injustice, and it is always our responsibility to fight it. Wearing our “consumer” hats and fighting on an economic level is not our only option. As George Monbiot reminded us recently:
“We cannot change the world by changing [only] our buying habits…our power comes from acting as citizens – demanding political change – not acting as consumers.”
And so the fight goes on. Yes, we’ve won a tiny fraction of Nestlé’s overall output, and yes, we will continue to long for a day when their whole product line represents our consciences. But until then we must allow these small victories to fuel our steady movement forwards.
This post is part of a larger debate on the mainstreaming of Fairtrade curated by Shared Interest on their Blog. Click here to read more.
(photo by Ahron De Leeuw)
It’s a disturbing thought that a market established on the dreams and imaginations of children could be profiting from the widespread use of sweatshops and unsafe working environments. According to Tim Hunt, of Ethical Consumer Magazine, this is today’s reality and ethically conscientious manufacturers are in the minority:
Up to 80% of the world’s toys are made in China, where human rights are often overlooked. The report “Nightmare on Sesame Street” by the US-based National Labour Committee last year highlighted many of these problems.
It found that in the Kai Da factory in Shenzhen city, which supplies Hasbro, a hundred 16-year-old high-school children and several younger children were working. Conditions in the factory were said to be dangerous, with potentially toxic solvents and paints routinely handled by workers with only rudimentary protective gear. Shifts were allegedly routinely over 12 hours long, seven days a week, with no days off for many months, plus mandatory 19- and 23-hour shifts at busy times such as the pre-Christmas rush.
(Source: The Guardian Online, Image: Katherine)
Answer: they all scored very poorly in a recent survey designed to find out how high street retailers treat their foreign workers. The survey, carried out by Labour Behind the Label, reported that:
“The scandalous truth is that the majority of workers in the global fashion industry rarely earn more than $2 a day in an industry worth more than £36bn a year, in the UK alone.”
For more on this, visit Money Central.
(source: Money Central. Image: Dan Lockton)
Rowan Williams, The Archbishop of Canterbury, has been directing attention recently to environmental issues and our responsibility to reduce our ‘footprint.’ One of his suggestions (in a recent interview with The Times) could take a serious toll on the livelihood of many African farmers:
He said that the carbon footprint of peas from Kenya and other airfreighted food was too high and families should not assume that all types of food would be available through the year.
As James MacGregor points out in The Guardian today:
Stopping this trade would make hardly any impact on climate change but would harm over one million people in sub-Saharan Africa who depend on it for their livelihoods, and to pay for healthcare and the education of their children, girls in particular.
He adds that:
Air-freighted fruit and vegetables contribute less than one-tenth of one percent of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.
This is one of the great tensions between international development and environmental sustainability.
It’s no recent news, but the EU, China and the USA provide their farmers with subsidies which allow them to compete in a world market. These subsidies mean that the farmers can charge far less for their produce than they are actually worth. Any surpluses are then dumped on developing markets at a much lower price than local farmers can afford.
Are we to continue with these structural injustices and at the same time cut back on consumer spending on African produce?
(Source: The Guardian Online, The Times. Image: Steve Punter)
Time reports that in Kenya a seed that was recommended by scientists and the government as an ideal Biofuel for growth in arid areas is actually heavily dependent on water.
“Convinced they could reap large profits from the plant in the global craze for alternative energy sources, hundreds of farmers turned over acres of their small farms to jatropha. But it didn’t take them long to realize what scientists have come to realize in recent months: what was once touted as a miracle plant that needed almost no water has turned out to be anything but that.”
Read full article here.
