Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 17 March 2022
I thank Clare Adamson for lodging the motion and Gordon MacDonald for speaking to it in her absence. I wish Clare a speedy recovery. I apologise that I cannot stay for the whole debate, but I am grateful to be able to speak. I thank the Deputy Presiding Officer for letting me leave early.
Fair trade is not just good in itself as a system of standards for buying and selling specific commodities. It is also a model for how we can do trade better, both globally and locally, and how we can build fairer, healthier and more peaceful and sustainable relationships within Scotland and across the world. The climate crisis, the Covid pandemic, international arms and the conflicts that they exacerbate—all those things remind us that none of us are islands, even those of us who live on them. We are linked together in global relationships of responsibility, complicity, shared history, future possibility and, I believe and hope, solidarity and care. The fair trade movement offers us a way to acknowledge those relationships and to build them together.
Fair trade is an urgent and effective remedy for particular instances of trade exploitation—those networks of oppression that dominate international trade in sectors including the cotton, banana and chocolate industries. Fairly traded supply chains represent a vital alternative to those horrors. However, fair trade is a hugely important framework for a wide range of goods and commodities, and not only the most egregiously exploitative. We have the opportunity in our positions of privilege to make sure that the decisions that we make and those that we influence are aligned with fair trade principles and practice.
The Fairtrade premium is at the heart of the Fairtrade system, and what it tells us needs to be at the heart of how we look at our economies. The premium is paid to suppliers not as individual farmers or businesses, but for the benefit of the communities that they belong to. It reminds us that we are not the atomised actors of traditional economic theory, coldly calculating our maximised self-interest. We are communities, ecosystems and neighbourhoods that are intricately bound together in shared experience. Our economies, like the economies of co-operation that are supported by the Fairtrade premium, are there to enable that shared endeavour, and not the other way round.
Communities in the majority world—the global south—are facing deeper and crueller challenges than ever before. They include the intensification of climate impacts, as we have heard; the health and vaccine inequalities of Covid; fortress nations clanging the gates shut against refugees; and land grabs to feed the rich and fix the net-zero balance sheets. This is not a question of charity; it is a question of basic justice and fundamental human rights. The best fair trade organisations know that. They do not just seek increased markets and better conditions for the suppliers that they deal with; they are looking for transformational change at every level, and we, in the Scottish Parliament, as well as people in our Fairtrade towns and cities across the country, can be a part of making that happen.
I am proud to have signed the fair trade pledge and to celebrate the work of the fair trade movement, not least in the continent of Africa, where I was born and grew up. However, significant as those benefits have been for many in the majority world, fair trade needs to go much further, much wider and much deeper. We need to challenge not only the worst, most brutal and cynical forms of trade exploitation but our everyday assumptions and our unthinking expectation that the majority world will be a giant supermarket shelf, crammed with monoculture goodies to feed our pleasures. In a world where we are rightly looking to feed ourselves more locally and sustainably, we need to ensure that everyone can do the same.
I look forward to the day when we need no fair trade pledges, no Fairtrade certificates and no Fairtrade labels—when fair trade is simply trade and the alternative is unthinkable.
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