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Tim Costello: Fair trade means a fair go for all

1:00am Thursday, 13th May 2010

The Old Testament prophets were known for their outrage at injustice. The justice of God is a theme that flows throughout the whole Bible. When Jim Wallis, of the Sojourners community in the US, was still in seminary, he and some friends cut out verses of the Bible that had anything to do with poverty and social justice. They cut out about 2,000 verses from the Old and New Testaments. Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, has since found the same and had his life revolution-
ised by God’s concern for the poor and marginalised.
Campaigning for a fair deal for workers in developing countries is a gospel issue because it is about justice and treating people with the dignity with which God has made them. The month of May sees us celebrate Fair Trade Fortnight. This annual celebration of Fairtrade products will allow Australians to recognise the importance of their purchasing options when they buy items such as chocolate and coffee.
In 2008 I visited West Africa where approximately 75 percent of the world’s cocoa is produced. During my visit I was completely shocked to learn that in this part of the world, hundreds of thousands of children as young as seven work in the cocoa fields. A large portion of these children are kidnapped, sold into slavery, or lured with false promises of paid work from neighbouring countries. Most of the chocolate we have just eaten at Easter comes from these West African nations.
Such modern slavery is an outrage and calls for Christians to take the type of stand that William Wilberforce did 200 years ago. I have said previously that the Christian Church has a particular claim to credibility and social relevance when it comes to the issue of slavery. William Wilberforce is one of us; “Amazing Grace”, the song we sing, is our anthem so we’ve been able to say, “that was a Christian out there in the public who did fantastic work”. We need to remember though that slavery has not been abolished.
There are currently 27 million slaves in the world and most of the chocolate we purchase has been made by them.
Modern slavery is driven by those invisible links we call market processes. We as consumers have the right to pressure manufacturers to offer fair treatment for those producing the goods we like to buy cheaply. Fairtrade Fortnight is our chance to go public and make a stand, just like Wilberforce did all those years ago. We know that public pressure will force big chocolate manufacturers to change their practices. Cadbury and Green & Blacks recently agreed to clean up their cocoa supply chains, and this Easter Cadbury has released its first Fairtrade certified product line. This was the result of efforts by thousands of Australians writing letters and making phone calls to those in charge at Cadbury.
Last month, Arnott’s also publicly committed to addressing potential labour exploitation in its West African supply chain following a meeting with World Vision. We have decided to pause campaigning activities aimed at Arnott’s for a six month period in response to the company‘s commitment. World Vision’s Don’t Trade Lives campaign has called on Arnott’s to ensure its supply chain is transparent, traceable and independently verified to reassure us consumers that we are not indirectly supporting the use of exploited labour. We will continue to actively call on the global chocolate industry to achieve the goal of guaranteeing farmers a fair price for their cocoa and to eliminate exploited labour from cocoa production by 2018.
During Fair Trade Fortnight, I encourage you all to be daring and ask your local supermarket why they are not stocking more Fairtrade chocolate and Fairtrade coffee. Write letters, make phone calls and pray. In doing this, you will be doing the work of Jesus.

And Eternity included a report of a dissenting point of view: On the other hand

Some people would regard the fact that not all Christians support the Fair Trade protocols as a too-well-kept secret. Both The Melbourne Anglican and its Sydney counterpart Southern Cross have been criticised for running articles in favour of Fair Trade.
So why are some Christians sceptical of fair trade? Eternity asked one critic, Alan Dungay of Kalgoorlie, to list his main objections. He says Fair Trade is:
l Tokenistic—the amounts of money involved are too small to be meaningful; if you want to donate to charity, give more directly;
l Designed more to assuage the guilt of consumers in the rich world than to help producers in the poor world;
l Worst of all a distraction from what the poor really need, which is free trade - open borders, legal property rights. A good book on this aspect is “The Shackled Continent” by Robert Guest the African correspondent of The Economist;
l We ought to be demonstrating outside WTO meetings IN FAVOUR of the efforts of delegates inside; not buying slightly more expensive bags of coffee.
Like many critics of Fair Trade, Alan wants to make it clear that his is not a ‘Christian’ view but simply reflects how he sees the economics working. John Sandeman