To mark this year’s fairtrade fortnight The New Statesman held a debate on whether UK consumer choices actually make a difference in the Third World. Perfectly reducing UK consumer choices into a single location, it was held at a Starbucks on Oxford Street. Amongst the fairtrade coffee, bananas and brownies a loan voice dared to question the sanctity of fairtrade. Believing it to be little more than a conscience salvaging measure, he argued that we need to ‘focus on our duty as citizens and not our impact as consumers.’

Arguments against fairtrade are not new, although they have grown in number and intensity as the brand has become mainstream and endorsed (with little qualification) by all major parties. To its critics fairtrade is at best a sop, with most of the premium being eaten up by retailers or going to relatively affluent countries like Mexico. At worst it is believed to act as a barrier to trade liberalisation, diversification and development.

What is new here then is the appeal to our ‘duty as citizens’ to recognise fairtrade’s inadequacies and take different action.  This suggests a larger, but much less concrete, obligation. Helping the developing world is not, in this analysis, part of our everyday action of buying produce from the supermarket but a demonstration of civic virtue underpinned by good character. 

But as the recent Building Character illustrated, people are only likely to apply themselves to pursuing positive outcomes if they feel they are to some extent in control and can influence events. The fairtrade critic’s idea of civic duty was to lobby governments to support trade liberalisation. Such a proposal, however needed, seems to strip away all individual agency and will never resonate with the masses.

Solving the many intractable global problems we face, from trade disparities to global warming, requires a mobilised population. People should be encouraged to go further and this should be pitched in terms of their civic responsibility. But clear and tangible solutions need to be offered or people will just resign themselves to the status quo.

At Starbucks political representatives from left and right sipped their macchiatos and stood firmly behind fair trade as the answer. Whatever your views on its merits, it is clear that it does not go far enough. Now is the time for a government that recognises the need for change in so many areas and effectively communicates what people can do to achieve this. They do not lack character, but direction.

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