Speech
Speech by Gareth Thomas, Minister for Trade and Development, to the Ethical Consumerism conference hosted by the UK Cooperative Forum
05 December 2007
I would like start by thanking [Dame] Pauline [Green] for the invitation to speak at the conference today.
Ethical Trade is truly at a crossroads. Fairtrade has put development on the shopping map.
I want to use this opportunity to talk about the different ways in which we can all support fairer and more ethical trade with developing countries as consumers and as government.
Trade matters hugely for us in the UK and indeed for every country around the world. Without buying and selling – without trade between one person and another or one country and another – we would all be poorer.
In Britain, we would literally starve if we did not import large volumes of food.
Our wealth is built on the breadth and choice of the markets that we can sell to- or buy from.
For many people their poverty is rooted in their inability to trade.
Trade is a vital route out of poverty
As government we are therefore working to increase trading opportunities for the world’s poorest people: for trade justice in the Doha round of world trade talks
An ambitious, pro-development deal on Doha would deliver gains to the global economy approaching $200 billion by 2015.
Trade negotiations are only part of the picture
But trade negotiations are only part of the picture. Let’s not forget that shoppers are powerful people.
Every two years for the last eight, UK shoppers have doubled the amount of
Fairtrade
Labelled goods they buy.
Growth in the value of Fairtrade products sold in the UK has been over 1000 per cent in almost ten years.
And this growth is not restricted to the UK, it’s worldwide.
Buying food and clothes with the fair-trade label makes a difference.
The extra that we pay has been put to good use.
Sakinatu Razak lives in Aboabo Camp, a village in Central Ghana, with her five
children. She works on a cocoa farm. Its hard work but she has to do it.
Sakinatu has belonged to KuapaKokoo
cooperative for five years. The cooperative sells cocoa toDivine
Cholocate in the UK. Sakinatu sends her children to the village school that
was built with the premiums we pay for Fairtrade chocolate . She says the school
is “the best in the area, and my children can now speak English,”
Export certification a key to huge profits
Bob
Malichi is a third generation bee keeper in the North of Zambia.
Since Zambian honey has been certified for exports to European markets, livelihoods in his community have improved significantly.
The difference in the price that export certification has made is huge.
Last year they sold their uncertified honey for £700 a ton, this year they can earn over a £1000 for certified organic honey
and over £1200 for fairtrade labelled honey. This means parents now pay for their children to go to school and they can buy medicine when they need it.
Sakinatu and Bob are some of the thousands of farmers who benefit from shoppers in the UK who buy products with the Fairtrade Label.
But there are millions of other farmers who are looking for good prices and steady demand. And, there are lots of products on the shelves of your supermarket that have been grown by poor farmers around the world.
There could be more.
Fairtrade Labelled, Organic and other certified products from developing countries can make real difference to farmers’ incomes but we want to go further. We want more trade with developing countries and we want more of it to be fair and ethical. We need to try harder. I don’t think we can rely on labels alone.
The Food Retail Industry Challenge Fund
That’s why today I am announcing the Food Retail Industry Challenge Fund – or FRICH for short.
This challenge fund will help design business models that have the potential to bring millions of farmers in to fairer and more profitable trading relationships with UK shoppers.
So that more farmers in Ghana can make a living from cocoa without having to keep their children out of school to help with the harvest. So that farm workers across Africa can make a living without having to choose between their pay cheque and the environment.
The fund is designed to encourage new thinking.
To develop and test new ways of adding value to African food exports to the UK
And new ways for increasing the market for food that has been sustainably produced by small-scale farmers and farm workers in some of the poorest countries in Africa.
The fund will make £2 million available for grants to partnerships that bring retailers and African farmers together to test new ideas.
The partnerships will be expected to match fund the value of these grants.
We want to see new products that tackle the challenges that face African farmers selling to UK shoppers.
The sort of thing that the FRICH fund could support is a ‘Low Carbon Pineapple’. Pineapple exporters in Ghana are keen to respond to concerns about climate change in the UK and they are worried about the impact of the ‘food miles’ campaign on pineapple farmers like Kweku Ayuba. Kweku Ayuba is from Techiman in Ghana. He has been farming pineapples for 19 years and supports a family of seventeen children. His pineapples are cut and packed and then flown to supermarkets in the UK.
The low carbon pineapple would showcase how the pineapple export business can measure the carbon it emits and reduce it, saving costs and improving the competitiveness of Ghanaian pineapple exports.
African farmers are facing strong competition from Central America and the Far-East. The Challenge Fund is designed to help African farmers innovate, add value and compete in our globalised world
But fairer trade is not just about food.
A huge range of businesses are selling a huge range of products that they buy in developing countries.
ActionAid
estimates that poor countries earn £2.7 billion a year from selling food and
clothes to British supermarkets.
The sad fact is that the conditions for the workers that supply us can fall way below what we would expect. That simply is not good enough.
Our appetite for fast fashion means thousands of jobs in Bangladesh, in Lesotho, in Sri Lanka, in China. Those are jobs for poor people who have few alternatives. We should make sure that those jobs are decent jobs.
UK retailers have a responsibility to make sure their suppliers pay a living wage.
We need UK retailers to give their customers more information about where the things they buy from and how they are made.
The Ethical Trading Initiative which has brought business together with trade unions and organisations like ActionAid together seeks to tackle poor working conditions in developing countries. And they have made progress.
The success of ETI is shown by the fact that year on year assessments show that companies that have been members of ETI for longest have some of the best policy and practice on labour standards.
Last year in Bangladesh, ETI members worked with others and succeeded in almost doubling the national minimum wage.
In India, as a result of the ETI almost 1500 workers have received health and safety training. They have received training in record keeping, quality control, health and safety and primary health care issues. The outcome? The outcome has been fewer days off sick and this means real increases in their incomes.
In Sri Lanka the ETI is piloting a worker complaint system for 4000 workers.
But the ETI needs to be strengthened. Major British retailers are still not
members of the initiative. Arcadia – BHS and Burton are not part of the ETI. B&Q is another. TheJohn
Lewis Partnership is one of Britain’s most respected retailers – now I know
that John Lewis does check its supply chains and does a lot of good work but
other members could learn a lot. I am calling on all three companies to sign up
to ETI today. I hope that all three will join the ETI soon.
Shopping for development
I want to finish by returning to the customer.
Ultimately it is they who decide. Shoppers are powerful people and we are asking them to shop for development. Buying labelled products is good. Shoppers should buy more of these but that still won’t be enough.
We want shoppers to ask where their food and clothes come from
We want shoppers to buy products from developing countries
And we want shoppers to find out about the living and working conditions of their producers.
I want to congratulate the Cooperative College on the launch of their Food and Development project just now. This project will play a key role in supporting cooperative members to shop for development.
There’s no getting away from it, there are products in our shops where farmers haven’t been paid enough, where working conditions are not good enough, where the environment has suffered. But boycotts aren’t the solution. If shoppers don’t buy they don’t have a voice. We want the UK to use its shopping power and create a fairer world for all of us.
