If you've got it to spare, money is the easiest thing in the world to give - to the beggar at the corner, the man at the door selling raffle tickets, the students collecting in the street, the postal appeal. You dip into your pocket, find a coin and drop it in the outstretched hand. You stick the raffle ticket to the fridge door and forget all about it. You reach for the cheque book, sign your name and - bingo! - it's done. Famine, floods, Third World debt all dealt with at a stroke. Until the next appeal, the next campaign. The next hurricane. But how much aid is still siphoned off by dishonest entrepreneurs? How much is wasted on official cars, on goods left to rot in storehouses? How much of it actually reaches those in need? And if it does reach the needy, how is it we're still being asked to give and give again? The answer lies in the hard economic fact that when people are paid a fair wage, when their workplace is clean, when they work reasonable hours, when they have the right to collective bargaining - only then will the balance between rich and poor change. Instead of giving, we will trade. Instead of charity, we will give our custom.
So, from now on, don't think charity, think business. Buy goods you know have been fairly traded. To do this, watch out for the Fairtrade Mark, an independent Irish consumer label which guarantees that primary producers have a workplace where minimum health and safety standards are maintained and where they are guaranteed a fixed buying price and not subjected to the vagaries of the stock market.
Take one product: after oil, coffee is the world's most valuable commodity but the price is fixed by futures markets which leave the small coffee farmer out in the cold. Cafedirect, Bewleys Direct, Robert Roberts Fair Trade and machines supplied by Johnson Brothers and Matthew Algie all now sell Fairtrade coffee which means the product is bought direct from farmers' co-ops, thus giving the small producer a chance to make a decent living. Which means they can send the children to school or buy medicine - instead of depending on charity for these things. Most supermarkets will stock such commodities if there is enough customer demand. "At the end of the day, the customer is the final arbiter of what is sold," says Sarah Morris of Tesco. Here in Ireland, we drink 1.5 billion cups of coffee a year. In the Netherlands, 3 per cent of coffee bought is free-traded, which translates into $50 million. Next time, reach for the Fairtrade coffee and if it's not there, ask for it. If it turns out to be more expensive, remember your money is going directly to the producer. A 10 per cent hike may not be much here but to the coffee farmers it could mean a doubling of their wages.
A recent survey has shown consumers are prepared to pay a little extra once they can be convinced their money is making a difference.
And then there is the banana market, which is dominated by the large, multinational plantations in South and Central America, a system which cuts out the small, Caribbean farmer who usually owns about five acres and not much else besides. If you have a choice, avoid the big "dollar" bananas and go for the smaller, Caribbean ones. Unfortunately, here in Ireland the consumer has little choice - though Marks and Spencer is one place where you can get small bananas, brought in from the Caribbean Windward Islands. Hurricane Mitch, of course, has devastated the Honduran banana plantations, leaving 7,000 farmers, many of them migrants, without work. The fear now is that the multinationals may use the hurricane as an excuse to pull out of a market they feel is uneconomical. It's a lot to think about when buying a simple banana. There are other, seemingly innocent products, such as flowers. Most of the cut flowers for sale here are flown in, via the Netherlands, from Colombia where the 70,000 flower workers, mainly women, are exposed to high levels of organo-phosphates. Or they come in from Africa, where growing the crop uses precious water: farmers are encouraged to grow flowers for export to Europe in order to get foreign currency in order to pay off the national debt. Which is where we started.
But in one way at least, the punt is mighty. Christian Aid has an on-going "trolley campaign" whereby shoppers are asked to save all their receipts and take them to the relevant stores to show how much they're spending at the tills, following this up with a request that the store adopt the International Labour Organisation (ILO) code of practice. You start your request with: "I am one of your valued customers," and then flash your till receipts around.
Michael Begg of Christian Aid explains: "Consumers should demand and command attention on these issues. We should ask where a garment was made. Was it in a sweat shop? Were children employed? Retailers do respond to this. We've seen it where things like sports shoes and footballs were being made in terrible circumstances. I think it was shown that it would take a worker in a sports shoe factory several centuries to earn what the company director was getting in a year."
Levis Jeans no longer trades in Burma and Dunnes Stores, too, ceased trading there in 1997 when it was revealed that employers were not adhering to the store's own policy on working conditions. Not that the Fairtrade lobby advocates boycotts. "We only do that if the people in individual countries request it," says Peter Gaynor of the Irish Fair Trade Network, "as the ANC did in apartheid South Africa, and as pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is currently doing in Burma."
"We think it's better to look for alternatives," says Caoimh de Barra of Trocaire. "With the case of child labour in Indian carpet factories, if we said don't buy any more carpets, the child would be on the street and the family would lose that income. Instead, we try to raise awareness of the problem so that buyers here will demand better standards." Which is where the Ethical Trade Initiative (ETI) comes in. "This aims to bring the whole idea of fair trading into mainstream shopping," says David Joyce, of the ICTU. The ETI, which in addition to the ICTU includes Christian Aid, Development Education for Youth (DEFY), the Irish Fair Trade Network and Trocaire, is seeking to bring together consumer, retailer and producer in a three-part commitment to fair trading.
"This will eventually make it easier for the consumers," Joyce says, "because when they go into a store, instead of having to search out individual products, they'll know all the goods there are fairly traded." Which is what you get in an Oxfam shop where you can now buy fairly traded coffee, tea, dried fruit, jam, honey, rugs, baskets and a host of other things.
Mainstream stores such as SuperValu and Centra, SuperQuinn and Tesco are already stocking Fairtrade coffee and are in dialogue with ETI with a view to adopting a code of practice. "We've been very lucky to have the support of Fergal Quinn and he has promised to give a lead to other stores," says Micheal Begg. Not all stores have chosen to participate, however.
"We don't offer any Fairtrade products, because we sell only our own brands," says a Marks and Spencer spokeswoman. "However, we do have 60 technologists who regularly visit our suppliers to make sure everything is produced to our standards and we have a verbal agreement with our suppliers on this." Some members of ETI would like to see more involvement. The Fairtrade Mark, for instance, guarantees independent rather than simply in-store monitoring of standards. Marks and Spencer is now in talks with Christian Aid. Money talks, after all, and shopping ethically, it seems, is another way of voting - for fair trade.
