Come Down off the Fence

Have you ever sat on the fence? Well I didn’t literally sit on it when it comes to Fair Trade but I did stand alongside a fence that divided mercy and exploitation and it changed my life.

The day started out as I might have expected. I had been interested in Fair Trade issues since 1995 when the Christian Aid Student worker at Queens University where I am the Presbyterian Chaplain encouraged my students to change the world. His idea seemed impotent enough to me. We were to buy coffee in the local Stewarts Supermarket (since bought over by Tescos who are heading to the US for an eye ball with Wall Mart!) and buy some coffee. After we paid for it at the check-out we were then to sign our receipt and ask the manager to consider stocking Fair Trade coffee. It would never work I thought. When a few months later the Fair Trade coffee appeared I was shocked, elated and still so concerned it wouldn’t work that I bought five jars!

By 2004 the UK had more Fair Trade products available to buy than any other country in the world and the national Guardian newspaper was making Fair Trade catalogues available as suppliments. As we planned t head to South Africa on a bi-annual trip that allowed students to build houses and investigate Reconciliation and Aids projects I asked Christian Aids Intern, the late Lindsay Anderson, to find us a good Fair Trade project to visit near Cape Town. She came up with Sonop Vineyard and after a fifty minute bus trip from Cape Town we arrived.

For the first hour we got exactly what Lindsay, my Assistant Chaplain Lynn and I had planned for. Lola, a female worker on the Vineyard met with us and told us about the benefits of Fair Trade to her, her family and fellow workers. These benefits were very tangible in the education available for all of the employees and their families. There was specific education for their roles on the Vineyard but also the possibility of their children having education right the way through to University, whether they intended to stay and work on the Vineyard or not. Indeed, Lola told us that we would see the little kindergarten that had been built in the workers village for the younger children. They also got to own their own land and houses. Land is a big issue in South Africa and owning their land gave long term security. Instead of living at the whim of a Landowner who could make them homeless at anytime, they could now put down some family roots.

You could sense that Lola herself was a spiritually transformed woman. As she invited us to walk with her the few hundred yards to have a look round the worker’s village that she was so proud of, you could see that her infrequent smile (from shyness more than any fearfulness) was breaking through a face carrying the withering effects of years of oppression and the resulting hardship. She spoke of how her life had been changed by the new Swiss owner who gave the worker’s their place and dignity. “We used to just lie around and do nothing on the Vineyard but now we work hard because we have a sense of ownership.” She also pointed to quite a few hectares of vine that was actually owned by the worker’s themselves. The pride in her voice and gestures were palpable and when she spoke of her teenage son’s success at school she was beaming within and without and it didn’t go unnoticed that this was a distant crazy dream as little as a decade ago. A Fair Trade Vineyard changed lives in a very personal skin, bone and soul sense.

And yet, we had seen nothing yet. As we walked through her village she informed us about the lovely little gardens, the hopes to build a little building for a sowing workshop, the beautifully painted houses and the solar panelled roofs. We went to the school and the children with dirty little noses sang to us and we watched teachers making a few resources go a long, long way; a lot longer a way than when they didn’t have a building or teachers. There were lots of smiles and photographs.

And then... then we turned a corner out behind the school and there it was… that fence. Our eyes widened, our mouths fell open and our minds were bombarded with a whole new prophetic reality. The fence was what separated the Fair Traded Vineyard and the Vineyard next door which had not taken on the Fair Trade mantle. And there were houses, the same as the ones we’d just admired but these ones were dirty and run down, there were no gardens or solar panels. There were no neatly groomed paths just the dusty barrenness of exploitation and lack of care. There were children looking more bedraggled and less secure. There was a fence that divided the world from those who are treated well and those who are still nothing but slaves. We stood on freedom’s side and looked through the gaps in the wire at the very real consequences of the consumerism that we make decisions about every single day of our comfortable western lives.

It was like standing on the border between heaven and hell and knowing that personal decisions needed made right there and then. Those who had been Fair Trade advocates were prodded to another level of commitment and belief. Those who were not quite convinced were converted. Shopping would never be the same again because now you didn’t only believe you might be doing some good by buying a Fair Trade product but you knew you were involved in some unjust evil by being linked with the exploitation that is not Fair Trade.

God advises his people constantly about the dangers of wealth becoming a greed that distracts from the eternal. In Isaiah 3 he sits in judgement on the rich using and abusing the poor for their own decadent comforts, “it is you who have ruined my vineyard; the plunder from the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?” Ezekiel tells Israel what her sister Sodom’s sin was, “She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” The rich/poor divide in our world is something God has raged against for thousands of years. It is not his way and it doesn’t happen in heaven; a heaven that we pray, in the Lord’s Prayer, will come to earth.

In the book edition of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, U2 front man and political activist Bono spells it out, “Shopping is politics. You vote every time you spend money.” He points out that of course trade is good BUT only when it is fair. The Hewson (Bono’s real surname) family are not just talking about trading fairly. Bono’s wife Ali has just launched a Fair Trade fashion line. Edun is a partnership between Ali’s vision of world revolution through what people wear and New Yorker Rogan Gregory’s fashion designs. Street fashion with a story that doesn’t make us guilty of greedy exploitation and a style that is deeper than the outward appearance. So Ali in recent interviews echoes her husband, who I suspect might be echoing her all along, “The revolution is happening in your house, in your purse, in your wallet, how you spend your money...Shopping is politics." The next time you shop come down off the fence, and when you come down ask yourself which side of the fence you are on!

Back