3071-The political economy of new slavery

Ivan Manokha 229
example, act as meeting points for women learning how to stitch
and thread beads to make jewellery in the morning, with children
being taught in the afternoon. Usually, students are originally from
other areas and have migrated to Delhi to seek work. The skills they
acquire through TARA-initiated schools enable them to make their
own clothes. TARA also organizes meetings in villages where issues
such as boycotting glass bangles made by children are raised. Finally,
TARA directly supports craftspeople, and the survival of indigenous
craft skills.
One of TARA’s buyers is Traidcraft, the UK’s largest Fair Trade organization.
Traidcraft’s experience is important in assessing Fair Trade results.
According to Traidcraft, their suppliers around the world emphasize
again and again that by getting a fair price/wage for their goods they are
able to educate their children, rather than having to send them out to
work (Traidcraft, 1999).
In 2002, the Fair Trade market in the UK was worth more than
£60 million. For example, Sainsbury’s alone now sells 1 million Fair Trade
marked bananas a week. The Co-op supermarket chain has seen sales of
Fair Trade products rise from £100,000 a year to £5.5 million a year since
1998. Cafedirect, a Fair Trade licensee, is now the sixth-largest coffee
brand in the UK. The Fair Trade tea that they produce – Teadirect – is
the fastest growing tea brand in the UK. In 2001–2 Traidcraft sales rose
by 24 per cent to exceed £10 million for the first time, providing vital
income for producers from over 30 countries (Traidcraft).
As regards Fair Trade statistics worldwide, the sales of Fair Trade-labelled
products total $400 million each year. The value of unlabelled Fair Trade
products is unknown. Of $3.6 trillion of all goods exchanged globally,
Fair Trade accounts for only 0.01 per cent (Fair Trade Federation [b]).
The above examples show that Fair Trade does help the individuals
and communities involved, and it plays an important role in addressing
socio-economic conditions which facilitate slavery and slave-like labour.
It aims at ‘fighting poverty through trade’, as Traidcraft’s slogan states,
and each one of us by choosing products with the Fair Trade label may
contribute his/her bit to the prevention or alleviation of slavery, child
labour and slave-like conditions of work.
But is Fair Trade a solution good enough to combat global poverty
and growing inequality between the rich and the poor? In the next
section we will examine Fair Trade critically and we will see that it is
a ‘problem-solving’ measure which does not deal with structural causes
of poverty and underdevelopment, leaving the world’s unfair division
of labour intact.