Eric, a reader of mine whom I have had the pleasure to meet in person, sent me a great question by e-mail the other day:
So sorry to hear about your insurance troubles. What a mess. The financial pinch you described in your blog post reminded me of a question I had about fair trade, buying locally grown food, etc.
How have you and your wife decided when these concerns present a moral issue, and when it is more a matter of preference or aesthetics? If buying fair trade coffee is morally required, for example, then I do not think I may choose to buy cheaper coffee without sinning. Do you catch my drift?
These issues are always present, but the issue really comes to the fore under pressing financial circumstances. Taking for granted that it is “better” to by locally grown foods, may I shop at Wal-Mart if I have a big family? The answer lies, I think, in what we mean by “better”.
I think these are great questions. I’ve thought about them before, but only tangentially. The reality is that we live in an economy that makes doing what we ought far more difficult than doing what we can, in terms of where our goods come from.
If I could, I would buy nothing from China, purchase mostly local food, etc. I can’t, though. There’s just no way. And when it comes to things like electronics, most of what I get is from Asia. (Even American cars have parts made in Mexico, China, Japan, etc.)
Globalization has destroyed the real prospects of local economies, but that’s why I think it’s good to do what you can, where you can, because then it’s a financial incentive for those people - local farmers and CSAs, for example - who are trying to provide this service.
There’s another component to this - stewardship - that’s also been lost. In the depression era, people learned how to fix things. Planned obsolescence didn’t have quite the hold it does today. The expression, “they don’t make things like they used to” is entirely true. Some products are designed intentionally to become obsolete or break after a certain amount of time, and the corporate marketing machines behind consumer goods spend billions to get us hooked on novelty, on the best, brightest and newest things.
The question of fair trade coffee is interesting to me. Coffee farmers absolutely deserve a decent wage for their work, and many of the cheap coffees either fail in that regard, or fill in their blends with cheap Robusta beans from places like Vietnam - beans that provide caffeine but not much in the way of good taste.
For me, it’s a foregone conclusion that the only coffee I want is coffee that tastes good. That means I’m going to pay a premium for it, because cheap coffee rarely tastes like anything other than cheap coffee. I’d rather go without. The notion of Fair Trade, though, is a bit misleading. In a 2006 article in Reason Magazine on the topic, Nick Cho, proprieter of my favorite coffee shop in the universe, Murky Coffee, talks about this a bit:
Global Exchange, an international human rights organization and Fair Trade retailer, has adopted this stance in its marketing and politicking. In 2002 it pushed Measure O, a Berkeley ballot initiative that would have legally required that all brewed coffee in the city be certified as Fair Trade, organic, and shade-grown. In defense of the measure, the group’s Web site declares, “Almost all coffee that isn’t Fair-Trade, shade-grown, or organic exploits workers and our environment.”
That assumption, absorbed by at least some of the coffee-drinking public, drives roasters and retailers nuts. They say the idea that coffee without the Fair Trade label is based on coercion penalizes independent farmers who don’t conform to the Fair Trade vision. (They also say consumers who drink only Fair Trade coffee are missing out on some of the best roasts available.) Nick Cho, owner of Murky Coffee in Arlington, Virginia, says customers often ask whether his coffee is Fair Trade, but quality-conscious coffee shops like his would never deal in coffee bought for less than $1.26 a pound. He finds the very suggestion that he’s dealing in cheap beans grating. “You don’t walk into a four-star restaurant and demand to know whether they pay their chefs minimum wage,” says Cho.
Specialty coffee roasters have always paid above-average prices, but that hasn’t stopped activists from launching smear campaigns against high-end retailers who resist the Fair Trade model.
In the end, I think the issue is trying to do whatever small part we can to encourage sustainability in local economies and pay fair prices for whatever we can, even if it’s a bit more than at a big box store that gets its shipments straight from sweatshops in Guangdong. The moral impetus falls somewhere below things like whether or not we can give our kids the Chicken Pox vaccine (the Church says we can, with reservations) which has no other variant than the one derived from fetal cell lines. After all, one of the sins that cries out to heaven for vengeance is injustice to the wage-earner.
I’d invite anyone who’d like to chime in on this to do so in the comments. It’s a great topic for discussion.
