The Great Divide

Last night I went to the screening of Black Gold at Planet Bean in downtown Guelph.  The event was held as an information session to gather support (a.k.a. volunteers) to help turn Guelph into a Fair Trade Town.  Something that Toronto just became last Friday.

If you are not familiar with the Fair Trade Town concept, the goal is that a city's stores, restaurants, and cafes would start to offer and have available fair trade products for residents.  The City would source fair trade coffee and sugar for meetings and events.  Once a certain criteria is met, the city or town could become certified as a Fair Trade Town.  The reason this concept really works is that the more and more Fair Trade Towns that exist the more pressure there is for large companies that buy and sell low price commodities, such as coffee, cacao, sugar, bananas, and flowers, to change their ways (i.e. buying products at a fair price that allows farmers to send their children to school).  Already the University of Guelph is certified as a Fair Trade Campus, the first in Ontario, so Guelph is almost there!

Cacao growing in Costa Rica

The reason I'm mentioning all of this is because both the documentary and Bill Barrett of Planet Bean really brought home the reality of the divide we have in our society.  Of course we all know it, but sometimes we forget (or choose to forget).  We here in the global North have cheap access to luxury items such as coffee, chocolate, sugar, and bananas without much consideration given to how they got to us or the cost involved.  And as Bill mentioned last night, often the farmers who grow these commodities have no idea where their products go once they harvest them.  In a society that loves to think of themselves as so connected, it is crazy to think that we are so disconnected from the foods we consume or the products we help produce.  And for me to think that there is a farmer out there who cannot put shoes on his or her child's feet or feed them in lean times while we line up in cars for our morning fix before heading to the office, well, it's sickening.

Luckily there is such a thing as community, what one permaculture farmer I met in Costa Rica referred to as the "invisible structures" of permaculture that are outlined in David Holmgren's Permaculture Flower.  One of the petals of the flower is dedicated to land tenure and community governance and includes invisible structures such as cooperatives, consensus decision-making, and eco-villages - to name only a few.  It is through cooperatives that farmers in countries, such as Ethiopia, are able to take back some control over the selling of their product.  Co-operatives help to cut out the numerous middle-men that exist in the coffee trade and thus receive a higher price for their product.  Instead of relying on a truck to come by their farm and haggle a cheap price, farmers together can purchase their own truck and bring their product to market themselves.  There is strength in numbers and power in community.

Of course, buying fair trade is a bit like recycling.  You feel much better about yourself, but you're not really solving the underlying issues (such as subsidies, consumer culture, inequality) that make successful cooperatives and awesome companies like Planet Bean an anomaly at best.  The great divide that exists between the rich and the poor is only getting bigger.  A recent article from BBC News reads:

"the richest 10% of society in the 33 OECD countries received 9.5 times that of the poorest in terms of income, up from nine times in 2007."    

This is, of course, readily apparent to travellers, especially backpackers from relatively rich countries, who go to poorer countries on vacation.  It can be a shocking experience, especially the first time.  I really noticed this gap between rich and poor at the end of my trip, when I left my home stay in rural Costa Rica for a four-star resort in Cancun, Mexico to attend my very good friend's wedding.  

I went from this...

To this.

From this...

To this.

From this...

To this.

Many of us have witnessed poverty and have probably experienced a similar situation to the one I was faced with about a month ago.  I know my experiences in international development have hardened me to these stark juxtapositions.  However, that's the last thing I want.  These images need to remind us that our luxury is often in steep contrast to the majority of others.  Until we realize that we are one big community and in this together, we're going to need all the Fair Trade Towns, Planet Beans, and small-farmer cooperatives we can get.  

The home stay had one up on the resort though...piggies!