Inspiring, Informative and Insightful would be the best way to sum up the book I have just been reading.

Fighting the Banana Wars and Other Fairtrade Battles is written by Harriet Lamb, director of the Fairtrade Foundation , about how the movement started with 3 staff in a tiny office and grew into an international force, improving the lives of 7 million people around the globe.

It is a book infused with hope and pragmatism. It shows how the differences in day-to-day purchases that ordinary individuals make percolate down to have life-changing effects on the farmers and communities in the developing countries. As Tadesse Meskela, General Manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmer’s Co-operative Union explains, ‘Fairtrade is not just about buying and selling. It is about creating a global family’.

The road from ‘crap chocolate wrapped in cardboard’ (as Tony Robinson jokingly put it) with an uncertain future to annual sales of £450million with a range of 3,000 products from 2,000 different suppliers is wittily explained with breath-taking honesty. Full acknowledgement is given to the grass-roots people who actively campaigned to persuade the big companies, and it is inspiring to read how the sustained refusal to take no for an answer from everday people eventually led to such a huge sea change from Big Business.

Harriet pull no punches in describing the everyday horrific consequences of our desire to buy cheap goods. I found the opening story of the mother who had to nurse her deformed baby until it died as a consequence of the chemical used to spray bananas almost too terrible to bear. But Harriet is not out to guilt trip us, she shows how these injustices can be stopped and provides optimism instead.

“Traditionally the banana worker is the poorest person in our society, managed and exploited by multinational corporations… I was someone that took a box and loaded it onto a train… In this new system, I have become an international businessman.” - Arturo Gomez, banana worker and international businessman .

She also doesn’t shy away from the difficult questions which could so easily be airbrushed out of the picture - should multinational companies be allowed to only provide a tiny proportion of their range as Fairtrade, how is tokenism by big companies avoided, what about other oppressive labour practices (e.g. mining, diamond trade, sweatshops, etc.), what about the struggling UK farmers? Each receives a balanced answer along the way and I found myself re-evaluating some of my views and assumptions.

The book ends with how the tide is finally changing and that People Pressure is now allowing the Fairtrade Foundation to ‘encourage companies to move from compliance to commitment’ - to switch whole categories of products to Fairtrade and to tackle ‘the social and environmental issues right throught their supply chains’.

She reminds us that that People Pressure needs to be maintained to keep the momentum going and explains ways in which everyone can get involved. There is still plenty of ground to be won - for example, less than 1% of all chocolate bought in the UK is Fairtrade and no major confectioner has a Fairtrade product yet,

This is an amazing and brilliant book. I cannot recommend it enough.

Have you read it, what did you think?

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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