Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  From directives on package holidays to doorstop selling, a good deal of European policy reinforced the growing emphasis within member states on individual choice and competitive markets as the best defence of the consumer interest. One could stop here and only see neo-liberal forces at work. Yet that would be too simple. The European story is ongoing and has also breathed new life into concerns about basic needs and social obligations that had inspired consumer movements in the past. The European consumer is more than the shopper who hops across the border to fill the car with cheap booze. One of them was Yvonne Watts, a seventy-five-year-old British citizen who suffered from severe arthritis in the hip. In March 2003, in constant pain, Mrs Watts abandoned her attempts to move off the waiting list of her local hospital in Bedford and went to France, where she paid the equivalent of £3,900 for a new French hip. When her request for reimbursement from the NHS was rejected, she went to the European Court and won. Waiting times had to be ‘acceptable’ on the basis of a medical assessment of a patient’s clinical needs. Britain was forced to change how it managed hospital waiting lists.114

  ‘Vulnerable consumers’, too, received renewed attention. The European Economic and Social Committee, a consultative body of the European Union (EU) observed in 1999 that ‘not everybody has the necessary self-assurance and assertiveness to make his or her own choices and to come to sensible decisions.’115 At the bottom of society, it noted, many were shut out from housing and other basic goods. For choice to be meaningful to low-income groups and single mothers, they had to be empowered first. Perhaps more than any other problem, climate change pushed the EU to a more rounded view of the consumer as citizen. Consumers were also producers of environmental harm – a topic to which we shall return in the chapter on waste (see Chapter 15). For the European Union, individual choice in the present had to be moderated by social responsibility for the future. This is a noble aspiration, but it also contains a real dilemma. For European integration has been all about the free movement of goods and people. A low-carbon environment requires less driving and fewer flights and lorries. Unless the laws of physics give way, it is difficult to see how the European project can possibly have it both ways.

  The apotheosis of the consumer, then, is full of paradoxes. The more tenants, patients, students and many others came to assert their rights as consumers, the more fragmented and diffuse the identity became. This left consumer advocates with a serious problem. In Britain, for example, the National Consumer Council in 2007 concluded that, in a pluralistic society, it no longer made sense to appeal to a uniform citizen: services needed to respond to the diversity of consumers instead; the following year, the NCC was abolished.116 Whatever we personally may think about this diagnosis, the lesson from history seems clear. Today, in the age of the consumer, it is far harder to organize consumers than it was a century ago. Choice deserves some of the blame, but we must not exaggerate. Tellingly, the same NCC also stood up for the elderly in care homes, and for water users and others who had no choice whatsoever.

  Nowhere has the crusade for choice been louder than in Britain, and this has attracted most attention. Yet the British experience is equally instructive for the remarkable gulf that remains between political ambition and social reality, between what politicians say and want and what people on the ground hear and do. When it came to public services, researchers found that appeals to choice and the customer grated with most users and providers. As a police officer put it bluntly: ‘We are not Tesco’s, Marks and Sparks [Marks and Spencer], or BT [British Telecom]. We are not in consumables or domestic appliances . . . we are the police service . . . we serve the public [as] a public service.’ Calling the police or going to the hospital was simply not like going shopping. ‘If I am in a shop,’ one health-service user said, ‘I am just there to buy something, I don’t have any relationship with them . . . [at the doctor’s] I don’t want to be a customer. I want to be a patient.’ People wanted the local leisure centre to respond to their needs, but not at the expense of others. Decades of policy initiatives and cheering for choice had done little to dislodge a deep-seated commitment to fairness in public services.

  In spite of what many politicians believe, it is not at all clear that affluence has led to political apathy. Media research shows that Britons have a strong sense of public connection and interest in politics – they simply distrust politicians. It is doubtful whether boycotts and other kinds of consumer politics necessarily sap the energy of older forms of civic engagement. To the contrary, history suggests the former often reinforced the latter, as in the radical movements for the vote in the early nineteenth and, again, in the early twentieth century. Today, those most likely to boycott a product are also the ones who are most active in local politics.117

  13

  Home and Away

  Consumption, we have seen, has transformed time. Equally important, it has transformed space. Products and people travel greater distances than ever before in human history. What effect did this have on people’s relationship to goods and those who produce them? This is, obviously, a very big question which would require a full book to answer. The next chapter has to be more modest and tries to provide some suggestive answers by travelling along three spatial axes: the purchase of goods to express a concern for others; the rediscovery of local food and its role for identity; and, finally, the effect of people’s migration on the diffusion of new tastes and products.

  ETHICS FOR SALE

  We live in the age of ‘fair trade’. There are some 27,000 ‘Fairtrade’ products today,1 assuring consumers that distant producers in the developing world receive a fair deal for their sweat and toil. In 2007, 20 million fair-trade roses blossomed. Two years later, global sales of fair-trade products reached €3.4 billion, benefiting over a million farmers and workers. Fair-trade towns have mushroomed – Garstang, in Lancashire, England, the first in 2000, has since been joined by over 1,000 in twenty-four countries. In 2006, ‘Fairtrade Fortnight’ put on some 8,000 activities across Britain, from meetings with banana producers to fashion shows and ‘ladies pamper nights’. There was ‘Mango Mania’ in Lothian, and toddler and senior meetings in Dorset.

  A fringe movement when the label was first introduced in the Netherlands in 1988, fair trade has entered the citadels of capitalism. Even the discounter Asda began promoting fair-trade oranges in 2006. In the United States, you can dunk a doughnut into fair-trade coffee in the popular chain of that name. Global brands such as Starbucks and Cadbury’s Dairy Milk made 100 per cent commitments. There are few aspects of life and leisure that are untouched by fair trade these days. In 2007, the Dutch National Bank started using fair-trade cotton for its €10 banknotes. Those so inclined can be buried in a fair-trade bamboo coffin made in Bangladesh. Film stars give their time as ambassadors on well-publicized visits to cotton growers in Burkina Faso. Ethical trade has even entered the football pitch: on 4 March 2011, the German soccer giant BVB Dortmund used its home game to promote the campaign ‘Fair Play Meets Fair Trade’. In the family wing, fans had a chance to acquaint themselves with the ‘high quality of fair-trade products’. At half-time, stars joined in a penalty shoot-out and the stadium screen was given over to the principles of fair trade. The Dortmund coach, Jürgen Klopp, posed with a fair-trade banana in his living room. Not to be left behind, the local rival in Gelsenkirchen offered its very own ‘play fair/drink fair’ Schalke-Kaffee.2

  What does this fanfare for fairness mean? Advocates and critics alike have emphasized the importance of individual choice and markets. For the former, fair trade has taken off because millions of shoppers have come to realize the ethical power of their purse. Some commentators have announced the coming of a ‘new moral economy’.3 Critics, by contrast, see little more than an ethical fig leaf that allows consumers in the affluent North to feel good about themselves but leaves global trade and inequality effectively as they are. But fair trade is about more than individual choices, whether self-serving or not. It has been shaped as much
by politics, religion and social movements as by shoppers.

  Fair trade is a hugely diverse phenomenon, by product and by country. Its success has come from a handful of articles, especially coffee, chocolate, bananas, flowers and sugar. Expansion in other commodities and higher-value products has been disappointing. Sales in fair-trade cotton, for example, declined in the late 2000s. Even the advance of fair-trade coffee on Western high streets looks less impressive when put in a global context. In 2009, it made up only 1 per cent of the world coffee trade. In part, fair-trade growth looks so remarkable because it started from a very low level, but the reality is that fair-trade products still rarely find their way into shopping baskets. Swiss consumers lead the world but even they spend a total of only €21 a year per person on them. The average Briton spent €11 in 2008, a German only €1.70, the equivalent of a dozen bananas in a whole year. It is instructive to place these figures alongside the general price of food. The period between 1975 and 2007 was the golden era of cheap food; overall cost fell by a third. Western households made huge savings at the check-out: the ethical premium got the small change. Since 2007, food prices have escalated. Initially, fair-trade products continued their forward march regardless. In 2014, it came to a halt. For the first time in twenty years, fair-trade sales dropped, by 4 per cent. Whether it has reached a plateau or in future will be able to regain momentum and withstand the pressure from discounters remains to be seen.

  Fair trade today comes in two dominant forms. One is commercial, with rising sales in supermarkets but with weak grass-roots activism – Great Britain is a pronounced case. The second is as a social movement, where sales are small but made in local ‘world shops’, Weltläden and botteghe del commercio, with their devoted volunteers who try to raise awareness for trade justice as well as selling handicrafts and foodstuffs from the developing world; these are more widespread in the Netherlands, Germany and Italy.

  These two sides reflect an ideological divide within the movement about the best way to make trade fairer: work with the market or fight for an alternative? When the multinational Nestlé adopted the fair-trade label for its Nescafé Partner’s Blend in 2005 it caused a lot of soul searching among ethical consumers. For some, the spread of fair-trade products in supermarkets was an act of betrayal. For the twenty-seven-year-old Matteo in Italy, Nestlé was the ‘very antithesis’ of what fair trade stood for: ‘Big supermarkets were one of the things we should be fighting against.’ Their fair-trade products were ‘mere consumerism’ and distracted from the fundamental question of global inequality and the causes of poverty. Andrea (thirty-five), by contrast, was more pragmatic. Supermarkets were a ‘double-edged sword’.4 True, they did not give shoppers the full picture of trade justice they got in the smaller botteghe. At the same time, they might help spread fair-trade products. For him, goods bought in a bottegha were of a higher quality, but, he acknowledged, the hypermarket was more convenient, and that is where he bought fair-trade products when he was short of time. Elena, a working woman in her fifties, agreed.

  The ambivalence about brands and supermarkets articulated a more fundamental disagreement about what ‘fair’ meant. Was it about giving farmers a fair deal, or should fairness extend from farm to fork, along the entire food chain, including processing, shipping and distribution? In 2006, the French government’s standards agency (AFNOR) made an effort to define fair trade, and failed. Big companies were unlikely to agree with the small Minga Fair Trade Imports, for whom fairness had to include small-scale local exchange between producers and consumers. In practice, it has been ‘Max Havelaar’ and ‘Fairtrade’ – the main Dutch and British labelling organizations – which since the 1990s have increasingly defined the issue as one of fair wages for producers plus certified health and safety standards. The label was a crucial step in the commercial advance of fair trade. It made it ready for the supermarket shelf. Corporate brands were able to strike selective deals for certain product lines without having to renounce capitalism all round. People no longer had to change their entire lifestyle. Fairness was for sale piecemeal.

  The label shifted the balance within the movement. This is not because world shops have disappeared or churches have stopped selling fair-trade products. Far from it – most churches in Bavarian towns have regular fair-trade stands. Rather, since the late 1990s, the labelling organizations have outpaced everyone else. By 2007, less than 10 per cent of sales were still done via ‘alternative trading organizations’. Even in Germany and the Netherlands, where a thousand-odd worldshops did respectable business at that time, they were now outflanked by over 30,000 supermarkets that carried ‘fair-trade’ products.

  Diversity extends to the uneven uptake of what is the most popular article: coffee. No one drinks more coffee than Scandinavians – Finns have a statutory coffee break – but so far they have largely shunned the fair-trade variety. It is mainly Brazilians, Americans and Britons who sip it. In Finland, a mere 0.4 per cent of the 12kg of beans consumed per person per year is fair trade. Are Finns less ethical than Anglo-Saxons? This is doubtful. National tastes have been moulded by retail environments and drinking habits. Spontaneous acts of choice have less to do with it. Finns, for example, have long been accustomed to a light-roasted blend of Colombian and Santos beans from Brazil, a mix that is claimed to be uniquely suited to Finland’s soft water. In the twentieth century, it was marketed as ‘Finnish’ coffee by the ‘Paula girls’, who toured the country for the Paulig company in national Sääksmäki dress offering advice on how to prepare a decent cup (see Plate 18). Here is a legacy of the Western rebranding of distant ‘exotic’ commodities as part of their own national identity that we observed earlier.5 The more aromatic, hand-picked Arabica beans preferred by fair trade simply taste ‘unFinnish’ to many. In Britain and America, the diffusion of fair-trade coffee has been driven by coffee chains and supermarkets. They make the choice for the consumer. In these countries, the new taste for espressos and speciality coffees, drunk in cafés or on the go, offered an outlet for small roasters and fair-trade beans. In Finland, by contrast, most coffee is brewed and drunk at home. Heavy discounts favour the big ‘Finnish’ blends which are regularly on promotional sale. In general, where big discounters dominate the retail landscape, as in Norway, there is less breathing space for fair-trade products and the smaller shops that give them an initial foothold.6

  All this does not mean we can ignore choice. Choice as the instrument to promote trade justice has dominated fair-trade campaigns since the 1990s, when labels took off. There were political as well as cultural reasons for the apotheosis of the ethical consumer. The collapse of an international architecture of coffee agreements (1962–89) and marketing boards left behind a vacuum.7 Shoppers were asked to fill it. With their wallets, they would help small farmers let down by global politics.

  But fair trade also tapped into a more general decline of trust in companies and the state. Corporate health, labour and environmental standards were scrutinized and found wanting. Jonah Peretti’s 2000 battle with Nike to get the company to personalize his sneakers with the word ‘sweatshop’ was just one of several causes célèbres that registered the new mood. In demonstrations, fair-trade activists resurrected the old, radical image of the big, fat boss to personify the raw, selfish force of neo-liberalism. Unlike in earlier muckraking exposés, consumers now felt less confident in looking to the state for help. They took consumer protection into their own hands, rewarding ‘good’ companies and boycotting others. Ethics became a regular part of shopping; according to a 2011 survey, two thirds of Germans routinely applied ethical criteria in their purchasing decisions.8 Significantly, this trend has not been shared by all rich societies alike. The sense of consumer power is high in liberal countries like Britain. In Norway, by contrast, fewer than one in ten consumers feel their voice matters: most rely on the government to deal with any problem.9 Paternalism does not nurture ethical consumers.

  Choice promised empowerment. ‘People who feel disempower
ed by the political system,’ the editor of New Consumer, a monthly magazine championing ethical living, wrote during the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign in 2005, ‘know that they can make a difference by purchasing fair-trade goods . . . We’ve shopped our way into this mess and we can shop our way out.’10 Shopping was the new democratic politics. And, on top of it, it was fun! The call to conscience increasingly mobilized the joy of shopping. Fair trade presented itself as a ‘lifestyle’ movement. It made peace with consumption. Adverts came to mirror those of mainstream consumer culture, tickling a desire for exotic luxuries and cheap deals. Brilliant Earth, for example, gives its customers the chance to enjoy ‘luxury with a conscience’ by ordering their own conflict-free diamond ring. Attuned to the German love of Schnäppchen (bargains), GEPA (the biggest fair-trade company, founded in 1975, which supplies world shops) offers ‘treasures of the world’ at ‘fair discounts’.11

  The fair-trade consumer, then, was a perfect fit for neo-liberal times. This does not, however, mean that choice was the direct cause of success. The link was more indirect. In campaigns to promote fair-trade towns, the figure of the ethical consumer was a way to win over public providers, retailers and food producers. Given the focus on individual choice, it was, ironically, corporations and public bodies that gave fair trade the decisive boost. In 2008, Tate & Lyle, the big refiner that had invented the sugar cube, switched all its retail sugar to fair trade. Morrisons, the supermarket, started stocking fair-trade sugar only. A year later, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk also switched. Lovers of Britain’s most popular chocolate now automatically ate fair-trade cocoa. More often than not, shoppers had ethical products chosen for them. Of course, in return, companies used these commitments to signal their ethical credentials to consumers and shareholders, but, at the point of purchase, individual choice had little to do with it. Similarly, in fair-trade towns, local authorities switched their collective procurement. Some residents were not even aware of the change.12 In the Netherlands, most ministries, municipalities and schools serve fair-trade beverages. In Sweden, the Fair Trade association receives government subsidies; in France, preferential rates to advertise in public media. In 2003, the city of Munich supported a ‘One World’ initiative with fair-trade tea and coffee in municipal buildings, the Olympic park and the zoo. It was now that shops and restaurants started to take notice and to offer more fair-trade beverages. Across the Alps, in Switzerland, government support has been crucial for the high level of awareness.13