Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Trade justice received a lift from several forces. One was a religious turn towards global solidarity. In the 1950s, Catholic and Protestant youths organized fasts and action groups for the starving people of the world. From here it was a short step to the sale of Third World goods to raise awareness in the battle against hunger, as Protestant youth did in their hunger march in 1970. Trade justice received significant support from Church leaders. Fair trade would eliminate the need for aid, the Bishop of Recife said. Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical letter ‘Populorum progressio’ (‘The Development of Peoples’) in 1967 questioned the basic principle of liberalism. ‘Prices which are freely set in the market’ produced mutual gains if the parties were in relatively equal positions, but in an unequal world they had ‘unfair results’. ‘Freedom of trade,’ he wrote, ‘is fair only if it is subject to the demands of social justice’;32 as a cardinal, he had seen poverty in Brazil and Africa with his own eyes. Fair trade was a global extension of the right to a just wage. Crucially, such critiques linked material poverty in the South to moral poverty in the North. Love of possessions was displacing love for one’s fellow man. In Britain, Christian Aid held harvest festivals similarly critical of ‘consumer society’ at this time.

  Secondly, alternative trade could be linked to a struggle for an alternative society at home. This took a number of forms. For some, it was a rallying cry for simple living. In Germany, the group Kritischer Konsum organized special campaigns in the run-up to Christmas in 1969 and 1970 in which they attacked the seasonal churchgoer who gave a few marks for ‘bread for the world’, yet at the same time enjoyed chunks of chocolate ‘which he can only buy so cheaply because the farmer in Cameroon or Ghana is paid a famine wage’.33 Christmas revealed poverty in the South and ‘the organized orgy of wasteful consumption’ in the North to be two sides of the same coin. Trade justice, consequently, was not something external but required Westerners to break free from the dream worlds and manipulations spun by advertisers and producers.

  Both of these developments gained a good deal of their momentum from a third factor: the growth in student activism and anti-colonial politics. Like the peace and social movements of the 1960s and ’70s, fair trade benefited from the unprecedented expansion of higher education in these years. Colonial struggles gave the Third World greater public visibility, beginning with the solidarity campaign for Algeria in 1954 and reaching its high point with support for the Sandinista liberation movement in Nicaragua in the 1980s. World shops were extensions of this milieu, boycotts their recruiting ground. The Dutch network led the boycott against Angolan coffee in 1972 and the solidarity movement for Vietnam and Suriname the following year. World shops mushroomed as a consequence, their number reaching almost two hundred by 1974.34 The German campaigns for ‘Nica coffee’ and ‘Jute instead of Plastic’ (Jute statt Plastic) had a similar effect in the early 1980s. Across the West, apartheid was fought with boycotts of South African fruit. Dutch fair traders took the name ‘Max Havelaar’ for their label from the hero of the eponymous 1860 novel about the struggle against colonial abuses in Java, a curiously local choice for a movement with global ambition. It was not all about opposition from below, however. Interest in the Third World was actively supported by West European governments and churches, initially to counter the Red Peril and keep the young on side. By the 1970s, ‘development’ had its own state department in Germany.35

  Simple living had its followers in the United States, but here attention to the problems of the Third World also gave rise to movements that looked for change in political structures. In the wake of the oil and food crises of the early 1970s, the ecumenical network ‘Bread for the World’ connected famine relief and trade justice abroad with support for workers and the poor at home. A ‘more modest style of life can be a powerful witness in the struggle against hunger’, its director, Arthur Simon, wrote in 1975, but only if it was accompanied by better government policies of production and distribution. Lifestyle ‘can . . . lull us with a false sense of fulfilment’. Eating no meat or throwing out the television set might be ‘morally satisfying’ to the individual. By itself, however, it did not put more food on the table of the world’s poor. Worse, it ‘may do nothing more than put people out of work’. What was needed were international and domestic interventions that complemented each other. The West had to lower its tariff barriers and, in addition, give the poorest countries preferential treatment and minimum-price agreements. At home, the United States government should guarantee its citizens work and a basic ‘economic floor’. ‘The appeal that is primarily needed is not for less personal consumption, but for a greater share of per capita US growth,’ Simon said.36 In Western European welfare states, radical students founder it easier to dream of simple living: they had a secure ‘floor’ under their feet. In America, with fewer benefits, redistribution could not be ignored.

  Today, Britain is among the world leaders in the fair trade market (£26 or Euro 35 per person in 2014), but in that earlier phase it was lagging behind the Netherlands and Germany. Why? After all, like the Netherlands, it was a commercial society with an imperial past and had, if anything, an even stronger line of critics of colonialism to draw on. It had affluence, radical students and a counter-culture, like the rest of Western Europe. True, Britain had Traidcraft and Christian Aid, but it was not until the 1990s that fair trade came into its own. The reason was that the return of the ethical consumer coincided with the crisis of the social movement that had been its natural champion in the past: the co-operatives. In the 1960s and ’70s, the Co-ops were losing members and closing shops, squeezed by the supermarkets. When, in 1973, a television programme revealed how a cup of tea was so cheap because of the appalling conditions on tea plantations, including Co-op ones, some members were outraged. Yet, the Co-ops went on cutting prices further. It was only in the 1990s that they rediscovered that ethics did sell, stocking fair-trade products in all their stores by the end of the decade.37

  What do we learn from placing fair trade today in a longer historical context? Fair trade has only been the latest wave in a longer ebb and flow of efforts to moralize the economy. It is quite misleading to think moral economy was killed by industrial capitalism, as the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson famously argued,38 or to treat the present as a sign of its sudden resurrection, in reaction to neo-liberalism and individual choice. The modern world has always had moral economies. Caring for distant others by way of buying (or boycotting) their goods has never been entirely selfless, though. It has always been linked to caring for one’s own community – be it to save one’s own soul, create jobs, build a strong empire or promote justice at home. It is worth recalling that ‘fair trade’ was not originally the slogan of shoppers but of manufacturers and farmers who in 1880s Britain campaigned against ‘unfair’ competition from foreign producers who benefited from tariffs and subsidies. In the United States, fair-trade laws in the 1930s were about helping small businesses against the big chain stores by allowing producers to fix a minimum retail price.

  There are intriguing parallels between our own times and that earlier era of globalization in the years around 1900. In both, consumer activism flourished alongside the greater flow of goods, in Europe as well as in America. There is a major difference, however. In the earlier period, boycotts and white lists sought to bring fair wages and decent working conditions to local shopgirls and sweated labour. Today, by contrast, fair trade is resolutely international in its focus. There is little sense that shoppers should do for poorly paid seasonal farmhands picking their local strawberries what they do for coffee farmers in Tanzania. Fair trade operates in the wake of welfare states and labour regulations which their historical predecessors could only dream of.

  For farmers in the South, tensions persist between the ideal of fair trade and reality on the ground. Liberal economists warn that the premium paid by Northern consumers (however well intentioned) props up Southern farmers in unviable sectors already suffering from overproduction. Nor
is ‘fair trade’ the monopoly of small farmers. Picking coffee is labour intensive. In Costa Rica, the fair-trade harvest still depends on landless labourers and seasonal migrants from Nicaragua; whether well-run plantations qualify as fair trade has divided the movement in the United States. Moreover, the elaborate certification process has created a layer of middlemen and can act as a barrier for small farmers.

  Other inequalities persist. On the page, fair trade stands for gender equality. In reality, a study in Guatemala found that benefits are disproportionately reaped by men who control cash-crop farming and household income. Women on co-operative boards, like at the Asociación Maya de Pequeños Agricultores, continue to be rare exceptions.39 Northern consumers might see their premium as the font of fairness, but for farmers in the South it is often the coffee roaster who decides their fate. In Ghana, it has been the government which fixed the price of cacao, and there is some evidence that farmers who operated outside fair trade benefited as well.40 None of this is to minimize the benefits fair trade has brought to many communities, from greater security to education, health and co-operative institutions and access to high-value markets; without the fair-trade premium, coffee farmers in Tanzania and Uganda would have been swept away by the collapse in prices in 2001.41

  Fair trade has left behind a curious split in moral geography and how consumers see themselves in relation to the people who feed and clothe them, and the consequences this entails for an ethical lifestyle. Never before, perhaps, have people learnt so much about global commodity chains and how their choices affect the lives of distant others, thanks to the work of fair-trade groups in schools, shops and churches – an interest manifest in the popular biographies of sugar and other exotic foods. At the same time, we are more prone to forget that our choices have local as well as global consequences. London, New York and other world cities struggle to give workers a living wage, but there is little sense among their residents that this might also be their personal responsibility. Compared to the original world shops of the 1960s and ’70s, fair trade today is both bigger and thinner. Entering supermarkets and coffee chains on the high street has boosted sales and helped many more farmers than ever before. At the same time, it has lost the earlier ambition to build an alternative world of getting and spending. The labelling organizations continue to fight against unfair trade barriers but no longer strive to build a parallel trading system, let alone a new society at home.

  A TASTE FOR THE LOCAL

  ‘We people in the city have lost touch with the soil and the people, from whom comes what we need to live.’ So commenced a Thanksgiving service in Munich’s Heilig Geist church in 2003: ‘Bananas from a banana freighter, tomatoes from a container-lorry . . . pork chops from the slaughter-house – but where does it all really come from?’ It was time for a change of ‘lifestyle’: ‘to maintain the natural basis of humans, animals and plants and to improve them with the help of a regional cycle [Kreislauf] of producing and consuming.’ God had placed man in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it. Regional food would fulfil this divine mission. ‘It is important that consumers and farmers know and appreciate each other as humans . . . The greenhouse in Holland has no face and no name.’ For this purpose, the church had invited members of UNSER Land (OUR Land) to stand at the altar next to the harvest crops. They were ‘no saints’. They did not give away their bread for free but sold it. Still, they symbolized God’s grace. Locals bought their bread from local bakers who received their flour from local mills. UNSER Land was solidarity in action, uniting local producers, retailers and consumers – not forgetting the animal kingdom, with dog food made from local beef and chicken, untouched by genetic technology.42

  The Bavarian UNSER Land network, which originated in Fürstenfeldbruck in 1994, is just one of a large number of regional and local food initiatives that have sprouted across the West since the late twentieth century. ‘Slow food’ has radiated outwards from its original home in Northern Italy to over a hundred countries. From New Mexico to New England, America is now peppered with community-supported agriculture (CSA) groups. Unknown in England before 1997, today, over five hundred farmers’ markets set up their stalls, week after week. Urban gardens in Paris and New York, food-box deliveries in Bristol, award-winning restaurants in Copenhagen that serve locally foraged mushrooms – the quest for authenticity in local food appears unstoppable. Those who really want to know where their salami comes from can adopt their own suino nero (black pig) in Puglia’s Monti Dauni for a modest €100.43

  We know a fair bit about these concerned foodies. The typical shopper at a British farmer’s market, for example, is female, over forty, retired or in full employment, and comfortably off.44 Local, for them, means fresh, healthy, quality food. Although, strictly speaking, local and organic (or ‘bio’) food are separate categories, in practice the two are often joined or confused, and it would be impossible to treat the career of the former in isolation from the latter. In the 1990s, more and more people turned to organic food, free of chemicals, for a healthy diet, notwithstanding scientific doubts about the connection between the two; in the United States the market for organic foods jumped from $78 million in 1980 to $6 billion in 2000. For some it was part of a wider lifestyle change, to vegetarianism or alternative medicine. For most, however, it was the arrival of a child that put food in a new light. Unsurprisingly, it is mothers who have been the organic consumers par excellence.45 On their own, though, these facts do not offer much of an explanation. Mothers have always wanted to raise healthy children. Why all the interest in local food now?

  For activists and supporters, it is a battle between David and Goliath. Local food is a revolt against an industrial food system that is big, fast, anonymous and tasteless. Slow food seeks to rediscover regional tastes and traditions that have been all but erased by an ‘alimentary monoculture’, to quote its founder, Carlo Petrini.46 Such views tend to cast local and modern food as cultural and historical opposites, one traditional, authentic and full of pleasure, the other industrial, artificial and cheap but essentially dull, with the latter making mincemeat of the former in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  There is no question that farms, supermarkets and fast-food chains are bigger than ever before. Yet, ultimately, this way of looking at it is too simple. It draws on a foundational myth of modernity which sees community (tradition) being progressively eroded by commercial capitalism (modernity) – it is the moral cousin of the idea we encountered earlier that ‘moral economy’ died with modern capitalism. It is worth stressing here that Ferdinand Tönnies, the late-nineteenth-century thinker with whom these concepts are most associated, never saw Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (commercial society) as sequential stages but as social systems that interacted with each other in any given period. Sometimes the former predominated; sometimes the latter.47 Local food cultures, similarly, have been shaped by modernity rather than existing outside it.

  What counts as ‘local’ is a complicated matter. In Belize today, treasured local dishes have their roots in imperial trade, which prized imported fish and tinned fruit over the local catch. The new local is the old global. Notwithstanding the rise of processed food, most food in the world is still cooked at home, mostly by women, and is subject to local habits, technologies and cultures of eating. As anthropologists have shown, cola in Trinidad is a distinctly local drink; bottled on the island, Coca-Cola is treated by locals as Trinidadian not foreign, naturalized with rum. It competes with a range of other ‘red’ and ‘black’ sweet drinks that carry particular local associations, such as the soft drink produced by the Muslim Jaleel company which thrives on its ethnic connection in the south.48 Across the world, plenty of foods carry local or regional labels, but what this means varies enormously. Unser Norden (Our North), a brand of the German coop, specifies that food must have been processed in northern Germany, but its ingredients can come from almost anywhere; alongside Hamburger Labskaus and apple juice, its products include banana chip
s and salted pistachios. Unsere Heimat (Our Homeland), an in-house brand of the EDEKA chain, by contrast, puts origin first and requires all ingredients to come from south-west Germany.49 Which local products are fit to carry a certified label and which aren’t has never been so complicated. A chicken or cut of beef reaching Italian tables must have its origin declared, but pork and lamb needn’t. Puréed tomatoes announce ‘Made in Italy’ even if the fruit was grown in China, as long as they were processed in the bel paese.50 Agro-businesses are happy with territorial certification as long as the criteria are not too stringent. This is one reason for the simultaneous proliferation of regional products and their ambivalent nature.

  Farmers’ markets are similarly riddled with ambiguity. In English provincial towns, for example, local farmers might come from 25 miles away. In London, the radius is a generous 100 miles. And these are the remits for the farmers, not necessarily for the produce they sell. There is no rule on how long a cow has to have stayed on a local farm before it qualifies as ‘local’. Stall-holders can sell pork even if they do not have pigs on their farm. Industry and restaurants have stretched the geographic imagination, offering ‘Devon ham’ and ‘Welsh lamb’ that hailed from Denmark and New Zealand. British inspectors in 2011 found one in five restaurants was offering fake ‘local’ foods. When it comes to what ‘local’ means in an integrated global food system, there are plenty of bones to pick. Is a fish caught off the coast of Devon still ‘local’ if it is then filleted in China before ending up again in a Devon shop? The regulators thought not. There is a code of practice, but, significantly, the law is silent. When traders were asked to define ‘local’, answers ranged from ‘less than 5 miles’ to ‘within the country’.51