Poverty is overcome with South-North Fair Trade
Eradicating poverty through Fair-Trade
Fr. Shay Cullen
For much of my life as a Columban missionary in the Philippines I have tried to develop a model of Fair -Trade based on honesty and justice. It is a model that finds customers for the poor and that trades by buying and selling products at just and fair prices for the products made under fair and conditions respectful of human dignity. It is a relationship to bring human, emotional, and economic development to the poorest communities.
It has been a challenging journey for me during the past forty years and Preda Fair-Trade has emerged as an agent of change in the lives of hundreds of poor farmers and indigenous people. It is a powerful sustainable way towards poverty reduction if not eventual elimination and eradication. After all people are poor because they lack education, opportunity and community organization and the rule of just law. But also because of greed oppression, exploitation by powerful people and groups.
In the Preda fair-trade projects we have tried to bring these positive values to the relationship with hundreds of producers so that their lives will change for the better and for their children’s children. We have also tried to oppose and reduce the harm of the hostile forces of runaway unfettered capitalism
Not only have hundreds of craft workers prospered over the years but the farmers producing mangos, pineapple and other fruit have also tasted the fruit of their encounter with Preda Fair-Trade criteria and practice. Bringing justice into a very unjust world is the goal and purpose of Preda Development fair trade.
Development fair trade gives community projects, training, organic information and profit sharing through bonus payments to the small farmers. Not all Fair-Trade organizations do development projects constantly or profit sharing with the producers’.
Unjust and unbridled runaway greed of liberal capitalism causes much of the poverty and in the world today. To be sure, producing food or goods with costs and labor and selling them for a profit is trade. The world survives on it. But when it is abused and twisted unfairly then it becomes something else — a system that ignores and circumvents fair pricing, fair wages, ignoring or controlling unions, manipulating labor laws and violating workers’ rights and their dignity to earn bigger profits. It is using people for profit without respecting their human and economic rights.
The beginning of all this is the long history of slavery when human beings were regarded as commodities to be bought and sold. The system of trade had no humanitarian values and it is that system of managing the resources of the planet, controlled by a few, that causes suffering for the many.
The system is so oriented toward maximizing profit that it does so by exploiting the poor. It is responsible for trade that leaves workers without shelter, home, land and food to survive. Capitalism is irresponsible when it has no social conscience, no concern for humanity. Even children, women and men are sold into the sex trade, sold to gratify the sensual desires of corrupt people and what could be a worst trade than sex slavery, where the bodies of young children are traded like commodities. Even human organs are extracted from people and sold for huge sums of money and the poor are left disabled or dead.
How can these problems be addressed? Should more novel approaches, political theories and ideologies be adopted? No! The answer is fair trade. This is the way to give jobs and earnings and sustainable living by paying just wages from work in agriculture in the provinces, to jobs in the towns and cities. How unfortunate it is that the nature of production and trade, that which satisfies demand and supply in the world economy, has changed greatly in recent years!
The days when small towns and rural communities produced the food and clothes and all their needs and sold in local shops in the village or town are gone. In recent decades, goods are mass-produced in huge factories in faraway countries owned by a few very rich people or companies who monopolize manufacturing and trade. The costs are lowered by the huge scale of production and are supplied at low prices in huge supermarkets.
The huge profits earned are accumulated because of low labor costs. Witness the thousands of factories in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and the Philippines among many. Clothes and shoes are made in factories housed in decrepit buildings with no safety feature, poor sanitation, lighting, and ventilation and sub-human working conditions.
The life of the rural farmers tilling the soil in prosperity and peace are also gone. Globalization means that massive corporations spanning many countries dominant the world’s agricultural and food production. They are so powerful that they are hardly accountable to any government. They mass produce staples in large plantations in developing countries and reduce the small farmers to agricultural workers owned by the corporation or a rich elite class that favors illiterate poor. The rural poor in many developing countries remain poor and hungry and marginalized.
The heart of fair trade is to challenge and address this evil system and prove the alternative in Fair Trade and counter the exploitation by good fair trading and high moral values, respect for producers and dignified working conditions in all business dealings.
We have now a role model and great teacher of these moral principles of justice and fairness one who is unafraid to expose the unfair trade and exploitation that causes so much poverty and deprivation. To fight poverty we need the truth and a prophetic voice on behalf of the poor. One who can counter powerfully the propaganda of the multinational corporations and the regimes that support and enable them to abuse and exploit the poor? Pope Francis is the prophet of the poor, he has stepped onto the stage of history with such a voice.
“Let us not be afraid to say it: we want change, real change, structural change,” the pope Francis told the cheering crowds referring to the unjust globalization of the economic system that “has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature”. He said,
“This system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, laborers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable. The earth itself – our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say – also finds it intolerable,” he said.
The world economic trade system is constantly depriving the poor of the land and livelihood and fairness is excluded and corruption and exploitation takes over the world.
Fair-Trade, the movement that opposed this evil system is growing as awareness of the real damage caused to poor families by unjust trade policies and practices becomes clear.
Awareness is knowledge and if the analysis and conclusions are true and right we are morally bound to act to change the inequality. As Pope Francis has told us we have to change the system that is based on unjust trade. This is what is what Pope Francis condemned in no uncertain terms.
At one stage he spoke against the unbridled capitalism that runs roughshod over the rights of the poor. This he called a new form of colonialism. And the named it the “dung of the devel”, quoting a bishop of the first century church. History shows us that the Spanish empire, regrettably backed by the church damaged native peoples and culture in the name of king’s, emperors and big traders. Many other empires shamefully and unrepentant did the same.
“The new colonialism takes on different faces. At times it appears as the anonymous influence of mammon: corporations, loan agencies, certain ‘free trade’ treaties, and the imposition of measures of ‘austerity’ which always tighten the belt of workers and the poor,” he said.
The gospel values of fairness and economic and social justice are so important today. We need to know how and why this is happening and what it means in the daily lives of the discarded and unwanted people. We need to wake up from apathy and fence sitting and become involved in a mission to find and implement positive solutions.
Fair Trade is one way to do this .It is a movement that tries to do this by creating an example of alternative way of doing business; with fairness, honesty, profit sharing and positive empowerment of the poor so that they can be educated and break the cycle of poorness.
The developed countries and in developing countries also more people are producing good and food under fair trade conditions of fairness and dignity and for fair earnings and social development projects. Fairly trading brings together the producer and the customer in a positive respectful partnership where the buyers know the producer and how the food or the product is produced.
This is the way fair-trade changes the life of the poor ,it is honest and just exchange, a way to be human together by helping each other in economic enterprise. Preda Fair-Trade has championed this for so long, so hard that it is today a leader in the field an and a brand name for advocating justice and social development and above all a supplier of the delicious Mango products grown and traded in justice.
