FairTrade or Fairly Traded?

This blog is about Sainsbury’s decision to stop stocking “FairTrade” tea and to replace it with” Fairly Traded” tea. As I understand it, “Fairly Traded” is an equivalent organisation to “FairTrade” with two key differences:

• It’s run by Sainsbury’s;
• Instead of the profits going directly back to farmers, they go to a central fund run by Sainsbury’s which farmers have to apply to for grants.

The scheme has been widely condemned on social media – and, as usual, misrepresented (I saw one post claiming Sainsbury’s scheme was called ‘Fairer Trade’ which seemed to treat ‘Fair Trade’ as a second class rival. That name is fake).

At first, I joined in the condemnation. I think FairTrade is a great concept and I couldn’t see the point in setting up a second bureaucracy to do the same job. It seemed like a waste of money. But then I thought about it a little more, and I wasn’t quite so certain that “Fairly Traded” is a bad idea.

Let me explain. The condemnation on social media seems to centre on two assumptions:

• Giving the profits made from selling goods directly to farmers is a good thing.
• Sainsbury’s are a big corporation so their ultimate motive must be profit.

I’ve given each of these a subheading.

Giving the profits made from selling goods directly to farmers is a good thing

This is one of those assumptions that everyone makes because it feels right. People who work hard to grow tea or other crops should not be forced to accept minimal prices so that others in the chain should make money – they should get a fair return for their labour. Local people are the ones who know best how to use the money for good. Central funds with few administrators encourage corruption. Words like ‘empowerment’, ‘investment’ and ‘micro-finance’ get bandied about.

But let’s assume for a moment that some local farmers are actually just as corrupt as (some of) their politicians. Some have formed into cliques and use the money to undercut rival farmers or to overbid for vital equipment.  Some cliques control the local flow of money and will only give it out to those of the same tribe, religion or political party. Some simply use the money to bribe local politicians and regulators.

Is this true? I hope not, but the history of human endeavour suggests that everywhere you find people, you find goodness and evil. So it might be happening. The best way to prevent it  would be for the FairTrade organisation to have some checks and balances in place to see how the money has been used in the past before they give out money in the future.

I do not know whether FairTrade apply any such system. It may be that their remit is simply to pass the money back to the farmers with as little interference as possible. Sadly, the lesson of history is that where a significant quantity of money suddenly becomes available, there is an inverse relationship between the degree of supervision of how the money is used and the amount of money that is misdirected.

There are, of course, plenty of stories of how the money that flows from FairTrade or other sources to the developing world is put to good use by local entrepreneurs. Here we come to one of the really odd things about this debate: how various semi-political groups in our country have flipped their usual position. Our media tend to report the good news stories of how small amounts of finance have produced good results in the developing world, but don’t report the bad news about times when money has been wasted or mis-used. This contrasts with their usual policy of emphasising bad news.

Meanwhile, those who are most vocal opponents of Sainsbury’s because of their supposed capitalist intentions are arguing against having a benevolent central agency to control the distribution of finances, in contrast to their typical socialist approach to UK politics where they want the State to manage everything. Perhaps it’s because the central agency of “Fairly Traded” would be controlled by a corporation rather than a government. Which brings me to the next section.

Sainsbury’s are a big corporation so their ultimate motive must be profit.

This assumption is too simplistic. Two 19^th century firms who were in the same line of business as Sainsbury's – selling food products made from 3^rd world crops – were notable for their commitment to benefitting their communities and the welfare of their workers. Cadbury’s and Rowntree’s were both founded by Quakers, and streets of houses that those companies built for their workers can still be seen. And in the modern day, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are giving away significant amounts of the profits from their corporations. So assuming that a corporation’s only motive is profit is far too simple.

Sainsbury’s do not stand to make any direct profit from “Fairly Traded” given how it is set up. So why have they done it? From a neutral point of view, I can think of 3 possible reasons:

i) They are aware of corruption with funds from FairTrade and want to introduce significant supervision over how the money is used, so they have set up something similar to the UK’s research grants funding system.

ii) They are wary that FairTrade is a monopoly supplier and want to introduce competition.

iii) They want some good news stories from the grants they provide that they can use in their marketing.

Option (ii) is indeed focussed on profit. It could be argued that option (iii) also contributes to profit, but it’s pretty indirect. Option (i) is not about profit for Sainsbury’s at all; it’s about benefitting the farmers.

Summary

I still think FairTrade is a great concept. I still think that setting up a similar organisation with a second bureaucracy is a waste of money compared with making any necessary improvements to the FairTrade organisation itself.

However, I allow the possibility that FairTrade may not be working as well for those in the villages that supply the crops as it ought to be. If supervision of how money is used is needed, and FairTrade won't change their approach to do it, then Sainsbury’s approach is a good idea, even though it adds extra bureaucracy.

If anyone knows of a decent and fair audit report/survey on the effects and value of FairTrade, I’d be interested to read it. Meanwhile, I shall hold fire on criticising Sainsbury’s until the underlying situation is clearer.

Abortion: Science, Politics, and a bit of Economics

About a week ago (i.e. before the 2017 General Election), I bought a book of compiled blogs by the guys who wrote ‘Freakonomics’ and ‘Superfreakonomics’. I read through several of their blogs, occasionally nodding at some of the ideas.

But there were a couple of blogs where I thought, “No, they’ve not understood this; that idea won’t work.” One of them was about abortion. Their idea was that abortion clinics would be sponsored for every pro-life protester who turned up outside; so the more protesters who appeared, the more money the clinic would get. They predicted that this idea would be taken up widely because it would discourage pro-life protesters from turning up.

My immediate thought was that this was a misunderstanding of why pro-life protesters do what they do. Their primary goal is not an economic one, to put abortion clinics out of business; their primary goal is to save lives. They’re not actually there to target the clinic; they’re there to target the women going into the clinic, hoping to engage them in (gentle!) conversation and to change their minds. Outside the clinic just happens to be the easiest place to meet those women.

So I started thinking about this blog. And then the 2017 General Election happened, and the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party unexpectedly became part of the Government, and the issue of abortion shot up the UK political agenda because the DUP are officially anti-abortion. So I decided to write this blog now.

First, some notes on terminology, because this subject is so hotly disputed that even the words used are under debate. The two sides usually call themselves “pro-life” and “pro-choice”. Neither term is entirely accurate; pro-choice folks usually only favour choice for the mother, not for the father or the grandparents or anyone claiming to represent the interests of the baby. And if pro-life folks support capital punishment, their label doesn’t fit especially well either. Nevertheless, I shall use those terms in this blog.

There’s also the question of what to call the thing that is inside the mother’s womb. Is it a “bundle of cells”; a “foetus”; or an “unborn baby”? I suppose you could describe any living thing as a “bundle of cells”, but such a description is too unspecific to be useful. I’ll use a mixture of the other two terms in this blog.

There are even disputes over basic facts. Below are are two pictures of what a foetus looks like at nine weeks’ gestation; the first comes from a US abortion clinic, the second from a pro-life blog. In this case, photographs of miscarried babies show that the pro-lifers are right, but this illustrates the depth of disagreement on the subject.

Abortion: The Science

To discuss the science and politics of abortion, it’s essential to recognise that there are two crucial questions which must be treated separately. These questions are:

1/ At what point does a foetus become entitled to human rights?

2/ How should the human rights of an unborn baby be balanced against the human rights of its mother (and possibly others too?)

Conveniently, the first of these questions is primarily a scientific one (although there are legal issues too) while the second is primarily a political one.

So: at what point does an unborn baby obtain human rights? The obvious answer is, “When it becomes a human being”. But when is that?

I can think of four possible points when a foetus might be considered to have become a human being:

1/ At the moment when the sperm fertilises the egg.

2/ At the moment when the unborn baby’s heart starts beating (about 6 weeks’ gestation).

3/ At the moment when the foetus can (eventually) survive unaided outside the womb (currently 20-24 weeks’ gestation).

4/ At the moment of birth.

Let’s discuss each of these.

1. When the sperm fertilises the egg. This is the moment at which a new individual is formed, according to embryology textbooks. So if humanity is defined according to individual identity, then this would be the answer. On the other side of the coin, at this point the foetus is literally a bundle of cells, bearing no resemblance at all to a human being.
2. When the unborn baby’s heart starts beating. This fits with the legal definition of death, which was (until recently) the moment when the heart stops beating. (Nowadays it’s defined as the moment of ‘brain death’, which allows for hearts to be kept going by artificial means – and, more controversially, for people whose hearts function but who show no other signs of life to have life support withdrawn). If we decide that humans are entitled to human rights from the moment they are alive, then that’s a good argument for this definition.
3. When the foetus can eventually survive unaided outside the womb (though may initially need medical intervention). This is the basis for current abortion law in the UK (for most pregnancies).
• Unfortunately, defining ‘humanity’ as starting at this point has two big problems. The first one is that, as medical technology improves, babies can survive being born earlier and earlier; in the 50 years since the Abortion Act was passed, the ‘viable limit’ has dropped from 28 weeks to about 20 weeks. How can a baby not be human if medical technology to sustain it is unavailable, but the same foetus be human if the technology is available?
• The second problem is also linked to medical technology. If an adult or child is terminally ill and needs medical help to stay alive, they will never again survive unaided, but they do not lose all their human rights. Human rights are based on the fact that they are alive now, not on whether they will be alive in the future. Applying a different standard to foetuses of less than 20 weeks' gestation is hypocritical.
4.  At birth. From one viewpoint, this is the easiest point at which to declare that a baby becomes entitled to human rights. But from another, it makes very little sense. If two foetuses are conceived at the same time but one is born prematurely while the other goes full-term, why should the premature baby have human rights while the other does not?

The conclusion I draw is that a foetus should be entitled to human rights either from the moment of fertilisation or from when its heart starts beating. Options 3 and 4 just don’t make sense from a scientific viewpoint.

There’s a bit more science in the next section, but it’s mostly about politics.

Abortion: The balance of human rights

The second big question relating to abortion is how to balance the rights of the unborn baby with the rights of the mother and others. I’ll focus on the mother’s rights, as many do. I’ll assume that the foetus does indeed have human rights.

The effects of pregnancy and giving birth on a woman are undeniably life-changing. It is likely to cause her discomfort and eventually severe pain. It may permanently change her body with anything from a Caesarean scar to a reshaping of her pelvis. It may affect her career and will certainly affect her finances and free time. It may affect her relationship with the father or with other members of her family, positively or negatively. It may change her circle of friends. It will bring a new person into her life who is utterly dependent on her, is very cute, and has no manners whatsoever. So forcing a woman to go through with a pregnancy is a very big imposition on her human rights.

If the pregnancy is truly unwanted, the woman may become emotionally desperate and threaten suicide. This is touted as a major justification for abortion by some pro-choice folk, on the grounds that it’s worth losing the baby’s life to avoid losing both the baby’s and the mother’s. Unfortunately for this view, a scientific study (actually, a combination of eight studies) concluded that giving a woman an abortion “does not reduce her mental health risks of unwanted or unintended pregnancy” [1]. But even without this argument, is it right to place such a big imposition on the human rights of women?

The answer lies in one’s view of human rights. If you take the view that the right to life supersedes all other human rights, then yes, it’s right to ban abortion after the point when the foetus becomes human. From this viewpoint, even in cases of pregnancy due to rape, abortion should not be permitted – for if it is, then rape becomes the only crime where the penalty for the crime includes capital punishment for a person who wasn’t even present!

If you take the view that human rights should be modified according to a person’s value to society, a different view emerges. Hardly anyone officially holds this view because it can lead to all kinds of inequality and discrimination. But in practice, if you ask people to decide whether a woman who plays a highly valued role in society which would be severely curtailed by pregnancy (say, an athlete who represents the national team) should be permitted to abort a foetus which currently plays no role in society, some folk are more likely to answer ‘Yes’ than they would in other cases. This ‘social value’ attitude also manifests itself in our current laws about aborting disabled babies; it’s legal in the UK to abort such foetuses right up to birth, and it's hard to think of a reason for such discrimination apart from the view that the disabled are of lesser value to society. So while the ‘social value’ view isn‘t officially acknowledged, it’s prevalent.

You may hold other views. My own view is the first one: the right to life outweighs everything else. But this raises a new question: how should society deal with women who are required to go through with unwanted pregnancies? I’ll come back to that at the end of the next section of this blog.

Abortion and current politics

I’ve demonstrated above that the UK’s current laws on abortion are a bit of a mess. I believe the reason is that they are actually biased towards women’s rights rather than foetus’s rights, for the stark reason that women vote and unborn babies don’t.

There is a historical analogy that is very appropriate here: it’s the analogy of slavery. It was once legal to own slaves in this country. Slaves were human beings, but were often viewed as sub-human and had very few human rights; it was legal for a slave-owner to kill a slave in many circumstances (though not all). Slave-owners and those who benefitted from slavery could vote; slaves could not. Courageous individuals sought to rescue the few slaves they could, and were roundly condemned for doing so.

Slavery was ended by long-term lobbying challenging the view that slaves were sub-human. Once it was accepted that slaves were fully human, conscience and public opinion turned against the whole idea of slavery. I look forward to the day when we look back on the days when we didn’t grant human rights to unborn babies with the same horror as we now look back on our ancestors’ attitude to slaves. I also wonder whether those pro-life folk who protest outside abortion clinics would do well to take tips from the anti-slavery campaign and to show images of healthy unborn babies with the message “I am human”, rather than displaying gruesome images of aborted foetuses as they often do now.

We can also take tips from the anti-slavery campaign on what we can do for women who are required to go through an unwanted pregnancy. When slavery was banned in Britain, slave owners were compensated for the loss of their slaves. There was a transition period for slaves to find new opportunities or even study for a new career. Similarly, I wouldn’t want to see pregnant women – particularly pregnant single women or girls -- treated as pariahs but  instead given financial and other support during pregnancy; and if they choose to give their babies up for adoption rather than to raise them, to have a transition period and maybe even stay in touch with the adopting family. In short, treat all concerned with as much practical love as possible.

Coming back to economics (finally!), it will cost money -- but isn't life worth more than money?

References

[1] Abortion Has No Benefits, But Does Have Risks, New Research Shows. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, April 2013. http://afterabortion.org/2013/abrotion-has-no-benefits-but-does-have-risks-new-research-shows/

A Day In The Life

3.36am Awoke, at home in Derbyshire. I had gone to bed at 9:30 planning to wake up early, but not THAT early! Shaved and dressed as quietly as possible.

Pre-dawn Derbyshire

4.45am Left home for York, for the second day of a conference on cybersecurity. There was a queue on the M1 already (!) so I took Speed Camera Alley – the A619 from Chesterfield to the M1, seven speed cameras in ten miles. Survived that.

Up the M1 and onto the M18. I’ve NEVER seen so many lorries at once. I was on the M18 for ten minutes and I must have passed at least a hundred.

Onto the A1(M) – the traffic finally stopped being busy past the M62 -- and into York. Parked at York Racecourse, where the conference is, at 6.15 am and promptly fell asleep in the car.

7:30am When I awoke I wanted breakfast and I wanted to see York. There wasn’t time to see the normal tourist sites (and they were closed that early) so I just walked to the edge of town looking for a breakfast café. 

River Ouse

River Foss 

 Google told me that most of the cafes were also closed. But The Hilton Hotel opposite Clifford's Tower was open, so I treated myself to a slap-up breakfast in there. Very nice it was too.

Clifford's Tower

On the way back, I found myself amongst the housing that must have been built by Joseph Rowntree for the workers in his sweet factory. Photos are of Rowntree Park, Terry Street, and a nearby Methodist church.

9:30am The conference was pretty good in content (with 8 parallel sessions, it ought to be!) and unusually well organised. First conference I’ve ever been to where the schedule arrived not in a website but in an app; first one I’ve been to where they scanned your badge to register you as having attended a talk or visited an exhibition stand; and first one where one of the exhibitors turned up not with a few posters and tables but with an entire bus! Photo below. (By the way, if your work has anything to do with keeping personal data about people, and you don’t know what GDPR is, you *really* need to find out…)

Oh, and on the unofficial measure of how good a conference really is – the quality of the freebies – it got very high marks. Adam was overjoyed when I presented him with a handful of mini torches, a multi-highlighter pen and an executive toy yesterday.

1:30pm I quit at lunchtime – the talks in the afternoon has interesting titles such as “What Cybersecurity managers can learn from an Olympic Gold Medallist” but weren’t directly relevant to my own work, and I needed to get away because I had to drive from York to Croydon! So it was back on the A1(M), and then the A1, and then a detour to avoid a traffic jam on country roads and the A606, and then getting stuck in a 20 minute traffic jam on the M11, and then over the QEII bridge at Dartford which I love driving over (photo below – no I didn’t take it!!!) and then more traffic heading towards Bromley and Addington in rush hour. It’s a trickier drive than taking the M1 – both the A1 and M11 are two-lane rather than three-lane in most places, which means that whenever a lorry wants to overtake another lorry, all the cars in the outside lane have to slow from 70ish to 50ish. There were times when I chose to drive in the inside lane doing 50 with the lorries because it was easier and safer than playing concertinas in the outside lane. But there are no ‘smart’ motorway restrictions to worry about, and the only speed trap I saw was an old-style one; when I did my detour, there was a country lane shortcut that was very straight, and halfway down it there was a police car parked among the trees – entirely invisible until you got close to it. No, I wasn’t speeding.

6:15pm I got to Mum’s house where she had provided me with an evening meal – but I had done so well at breakfast and at the conference lunch that I couldn’t eat much of it. Then I logged onto Facebook…

…and found that one of my long-term friends, who I remember as an enthusiastic Christian but who has political views far to the left of mine, had put up a post about the Manchester bombing that offered the usual far-left perspective on who is to blame for terrorism (Western governments) and then added comments from the Old Testament suggesting Christians/Jews were no better than Muslims at being people-destroyers.

It made me feel … ‘bad’ is way too shallow a word, but I can’t explain it. It was so far away from what we should be concentrating on, so ungracious, so… wrong. It made me feel attacked and wounded by someone who I would have expected to be supportive. Admittedly this friend now lives abroad so the most charitable interpretation I can give is that he has woefully misjudged the prevailing mood in the UK. But even so...

Last night I was at a prayer meeting at our church in Chesterfield which concentrated on the incidents in Manchester (which isn’t far from Chesterfield). At the end, our pastor encouraged us to be positive on social media this week, especially regarding this topic. So how do I respond to this?

I’d love to end this story on a strong positive note, but real life isn’t always like that. I wrote ‘goodbye for now’ on his post and used Facebook’s ‘unfollow’ button so that I don’t have to read anything more that he posts for a while. I figured that was at least better than using the ‘unfriend’ button; if I can't say anything positive, I won't say anything at all.

And now for an early night!