Banana Split

By Thomas Curry, University of St Andrews Student

Yesterday my flatmates and I were idly wandering round the chilled isles of our local supermarket buying a couple of essentials for our weekly shop and, though I’ll admit there isn’t anything particularly striking about us doing just a routine food shop, it did really get me thinking. Whilst picking our way through the fruit and veg section we almost automatically grabbed a bunch of fair-trade bananas, sure they might have been a couple of pence more than ordinary bananas, but it really was only a few pence, and it’s worth it. After lugging it all back home and bundling everything in the fridge however I was struck by the fact that, out of everything we’d bought, as far as I could tell, it was just that one bunch of bananas that was fair-trade. We hadn’t really looked at the packaging when choosing a couple of different teas, and I couldn’t find anything on our wholegrain rice to say that it was fair-trade either. There seems to be a slightly inexplicable focus on the need for supermarkets to source at least one type of fair-trade banana, but when it comes to tea, coffee, rice, or fruit juices I don’t even realise that what I’m buying most likely isn’t fair-trade at all. When I think about clothing too, I try to make sure that what I’m wearing is made of natural fibres, but I wouldn’t even know how to go about checking whether the cotton or linen being used in my clothes is purchased fair-trade. Organic? Sure that’s a bit easier. I can think of a few places that produce organic t-shirts, or make jeans from organically grown cotton, and most supermarkets offer a good mix of organic and non-organic produce, but fair-trade is so much more difficult to get hold of. It’s a bit disheartening to think about how easy a change it would be for companies to, well, pay their employees just a little more change, whether it be per sack of rice, or bag of tea leaves; but rather than letting apathy set in, we, the consumers need to stay positive and create a market for fair-trade products in all we buy. If we start demanding fair-trade rice, if we start asking sales assistants ‘is this shirt fair-trade?’, then hopefully the change that we’ve managed to bring about in the increased availability of organic produce will be replicated in an increased availability of fair-trade goods. We’ve managed it with bananas after all, shouldn’t we have a crack at cotton, rice and a whole host of other essentials?