If only fair trade issues weren’t so damn complicated. My friend Scott says he took a look at my blog, but that the “coffee stuff” was way over his head. I pointed him to the “Coffee Crisis Series” on the top right hand corner for a crash course. According to him, I need to make that link more prominent.
Anyway — this got us talking about trade and labor issues in general — including the problems we have in our own golden state — a couple weeks ago, LA Weekly reported on the second Grapes of Wrath situation we have going on a little north of where I am. Pretty fucking depressing. (**Update, 9/4/05: UFW’s making new efforts to organize, as reported by the LA Times. Hopefully we’ll get some better news soon. **Update, 9/16/05: An article from the Ecconomist addressing the same issue avaliable here)
Many people don’t even know what fair trade coffee is, let alone care enough to look for it. And even concerned citizens have to look pretty damn hard. As I’ve complained about before, it’s tough to find a brewed cup of fair trade coffee anywhere in Los Angeles — though the next time I’m in San Francisco, I’ll get my morning fix at Coffee to the People.
A surprising number of people I’ve met first learned about fair trade issues through Coldplay — I love what Chris Martin’s doing, despite the overenthusiastic “coachellow”-ing of his already-commercialized songs. Coldplay and other celebrities — mostly British — are working on bringing fair trade issues to the forefront. Unfortunately, loud concerts and soundbyte-plus-one-image ads don’t really allow for much insight into this complicated issue.
I guess the idea is that people will find out about fair trade then go on to learn about it on their own, like Claudia/temporal is doing. But she seems like an uber-motivated concergoer — I think the average person would just sign the damn petition and move on.
Still, it’s a start. My own strategy has been to, um, blog things. How to take down this capitalist skyscraper with a fair trade toothpick…
August 28th, 2005 at 10:48 pm
Whoa… That L.A. Weekly piece must’ve taken up ten pages. I’ll maybe read it, though. David Shipler in The Working Poor and Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas? confront this under-under-underclass of Americans, legal or not. With high rates of undocumented workers, I think a union is out-of-the-question, but an increase in the minimum wage is essential not just for migrant workers but for all the working poor. Maybe they (the migrant workers) could start a Fair Trade Organization right here in the USA.
August 29th, 2005 at 6:53 pm
The LA Weekly piece is really, really long. I like that they still put unsexy yet important issues on the cover page, at least sometimes.
I sometimes wonder if perhaps we should be focusing our efforts on trying to improve things for the people who are actually living in close proximity to us, as opposed to fair trade issues in Kenya, say. On the other hand, similar problems seem to exist everywhere. The challenge for me is trying not to grow resigned despite the immensity of the problem –
August 30th, 2005 at 12:35 pm
I finished the article last night and it seems the problem for these workers lies, for the most part, in lax enforcement of state law. Another indication of law as good intention rather than law as reality. Thanks for the link, though. It did provide me with good journalism for a change. On growing resigned, remember that you’re not ignorant of the problem. A lot of people out there are.