Copyright 1996 Wellington Newspapers Limited
Ethics And Edibles For Consumers
November 26, 1996 Down to basics. Issues from this week's Apec summit and earlier World Food Summit are played out in a Wellington couple's fruitbowl " SHIRLENE Badger has a chest-high banana palm growing in the lounge of her Berhampore flat. "I wish it would fruit," she says, but the pot's too small and the climate's lousy.
Her husband, Clayton White, gave her a banana recently as an exam pick-me-up but that's about the only one he's bought in six years.
"Oh, I love bananas," he says, but then he read about workers ingesting chemicals, forests being razed and multinational companies getting fat off what is actually a giant berry that the world eats 22 billion kilograms of a year.
"Once I learned about it I couldn't stomach eating bananas," says White, 26. "I think every time you open your mouth to stick something in it, it's good to know what has gone into producing it - what blood, sweat and tears."
The idea of ethical consuming is slowly spreading in New Zealand, along with the stories - substantiated or flaky - about bananas and beef, police shirts and Nike sportshoes that inform its choices.
Consumers Institute executive director David Russell says the fairness of how things are made hasn't been part of its mainstream research. But "particularly with the freeing up of imports in New Zealand, it should be something we are paying greater attention to".
"This is a growing area of importance to the world consumer movement," Russell says.
Ethics are being dragged into the marketplace by individual shoppers and farflung groups. People like White say fair consuming will encourage fair production, and fair trading as the link between them.
Last February in Mosgiel, Pat Scott began sending out a one-sheet Just Shoppers' Guide giving ideas on how to pressure retailers, and research from such magazines as Britain's Ethical Consumer.
She now sends 90 a month around New Zealand to people who photocopy it and pass it on.
In Auckland, some people plan to rent an empty Queen St shop this Friday and "sell" nothing to mark International Buy Nothing Day, the first time the campaign's action has spread to New Zealand. The idea is that fair consuming requires consuming less.
In Europe, there's the Clean Clothes Campaign, Labour Behind The Label and Banana Link, which has its own protest song. The group Euroban in March presented 150,000 signed postcards to the EU Commissioner to pressure for social and environmental standards in the global banana business.
In Asia, nationalism fires protests for fair trade and against multinationals from myriad small groups in India through to the KMU trade union centre in the Philippines, which this week helped organise marches by thousands of people in Manila against a summit of the Asian Economic Co-operation forum, or Apec.
The core issue is one that divided poor and rich nations at the Rome World Food Summit which ended last week: How to ensure fair business - and not necessarily "free" trade - in a world where 850 million people go hungry.
The US, backed by the World Bank and Australia, urged more open markets. Cuba's Fidel Castro said "the laws of a wild market" were killing the poor. Developing nations backed Castro, though few industrialised nations' leaders had shown up at the summit to witness it.
Everyone signed a diluted non-binding agreement to try to halve hunger within 20 years.
Unrestrained trade gets more attention. In Subic Bay, Philippines, on Monday, caretaker Prime Minister Jim Bolger was weighing in with other leaders at the Apec summit for a free trade zone encircling the Pacific.
The cause of trade deregulation is expected to be advanced further in Singapore next month at the first meeting of Ministers from 125 countries to review a 1994 world trade pact.
New Zealanders figure among the rich but some people want to side with the poor when shopping.
Clayton White says it's about making choices in the supermarket that go beyond price, brand and packaging into questions of justice, though "you can't worry about things you don't know - that's silly".
He says there seems to be growing interest in taking a stand on bananas and other products. "I have good friends who niggle me about it and point out when I'm being inconsistent and we laugh about it. It's just another opportunity to say, yeah, I'm human and I'm part of the problem so I must also be part of the solution."
One of White's friends is Manu Caddie, who came to media attention a couple of years ago when he defaced a billboard advertising bananas in Wellington.
Fair business issues got a prod this month over shirts and shoes. The Clothing Workers Union, angry at New Zealand Police arranging to have 23,000 shirts made offshore, said Indonesian workers would earn just 50c an hour filling the contract.
And it was alleged Nike sportshoes were being made by women in Indonesia working up to 80 hours a week for 40c an hour in unsafe factories, in a report released in Australia by Community Aid Abroad. It said Adidas, Puma and Reebok shoes were made in similar conditions in Asia.
Following that, Eva Naylor of Highbury wrote to The Post last week suggesting journalists help readers find shoes made under good conditions "so that we can boycott the above makes without giving up sport".
Pat Scott of Mosgiel expects New Zealand to follow trends overseas, where ethical consuming "is really growing, just like ethical investing". Britain has fair trade supermarkets in Birmingham and Newcastle, she says. "The big issue is lack of information - people need to be informed so they can make informed choices," she says. So Scott started her newssheet.
Claims and counterclaims commonly cloud trade disputes so it can be hard for shoppers to figure out where to make a stand. Bananas provide an example. White, a vegetarian and information officer with Forest and Bird, says what he's read about bananas in magazines such as New Internationalist and the Ecologist, and on the Internet, convinces him poor farmers have been lured by big companies into growing cash crops for rich markets instead of food to feed their own people.
Pesticides and fertilisers damage workers' health and the rivers and soil, he says, and multinationals' methods encourage deforestation and erode traditional societies.
New Zealanders are among the biggest banana eaters in the world, averaging 176 each a year. Most are imported from Ecuador.
Michael Dosser of importer Turners and Growers says bananas are good for Ecuador, where he's often been. There is a Government-decreed price that must be paid and farms are locally owned and workers well treated.
"We are very comfortable with the Ecuadorian situation, though I don't know of the other situations quite as well," says Dosser, international division general manager.
It complicates things that bananas make money - even for hard-pressed workers - as do other controversial products swirling about in the global trade mix.
It seems shoppers must risk being wrong sometimes if they're to make any sort of stand for human rights and conservation considerations in commerce.
The Consumers Institute - which says it ignores the popular press when it does its research - might be able to reduce confusion or compile the sort of list Eva Naylor is looking for.
"If we had the information there was genuine exploitation, we would not be afraid to speak out," David Russell says.
The institute works increasingly with overseas agencies, including those in developing nations traditionally more focused on social issues. The Indian Consumer Association and Consumer Association of Penang, in Malaysia, are both outspoken, says Russell.
"It becomes an area of judgment, and we have to be very careful that we maintain our political neutrality, but nevertheless should we become aware during our research that exploitation is taking place in some manufacturing or processing plant we would certainly have something to say about it."
Just Shoppers' Guide is available from Pat Scott at 55 Riccarton Rd, Mosgiel.
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