A quick guide to rainforest alliance fair-trade certified organically grown this-product-was-not-tested-on-animals domestic bleach

As can be proven by the response of pretty much every government the world over to the economic crisis and impending recession, the best solution your average free-market economy can come up with when faced with a problem is to throw money at it and hope it goes away. Similarly, when we as a society were first alerted to the fact that our consumption habits may well be not only wrecking the environment but making poor people in poor countries poorer, our best solution was not to buy less stuff but to make the stuff we bought eco-friendly, people-friendly and planet-friendly. What do you know, apparently you can shop your way out of a crisis.

However, I don’t know if you noticed on your last trip to Tesco, but things have got slightly out of hand. Firstly, you’ve got your organic stuff. I reckon you can probably now find an “organic” version of almost everything Tesco sells, maybe with the exception of their electronics department and shoe polish. I use the term in inverted commas because not everything that says it is organic on the label is actually certified as organic by the UK Soil Association, who are the bunch of anoraks who sit around in fields with clipboards and thermos flasks and regulate the organicness of the fertiliser the farmer uses etc. etc. etc., so watch out. Then, you’ve got your Fair-trade-labelled stuff. This is actually the one label that you can trust fairly well; products bearing it, usually tea, coffee, bananas, sugar or chocolate amongst other things, will have been produced under reasonably humane, eco-friendly conditions, since to gain fair-trade certification, farmers, or farmer’s co-operatives, have to abide by pretty strict rules when it comes to things like health and safety and the right to a decent wage for workers, sharing out the profits in co-operatives and small producer’s organisations, and respect for the environment. Then, as anyone who was around in the 90’s when there was so much fuss about animal welfare will well know, you can usually get your hands on free-range eggs and free-range chicken, or, if budget is a major issue, chicken, eggs and (so I’m told) other meat products that bear the “Freedom Food” label, meaning the conditions in which said product was produced are monitored by the RSPCA. Presumably this means minimal chance of your dinner having lived for only a month, fed growth hormones, never seen the light of day or having spent most of its life treading all over the remains of the chicken with whom it used to share a tiny cage.

You can see where I’m going with this – we’ve already got four labels for four different ways in which food is produced. But hold onto your hats – a mysterious brand is invading a coffee shelf near you. This brand is known as the Rainforest Alliance – it’s the one that those purveyors of dubious coffee-flavoured water, sorry, I mean Starbucks, were championing for so long. A quick Google later and I am enlightened that the Rainforest Alliance “works to conserve biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods by transforming land-use practises, business practises and consumer behaviour”. That’s nice and fluffy. But isn’t that pretty much what the Fair-trade Labelling Organisation do? Another few labels I’ve come across on my weekly shop are FSC, who make sure that the forest your bog roll comes from is sustainably managed, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a label to do with sustainably-caught/farmed fish and I’m not even going to get started on all the different eco-friendly labels that are popping up all over packets of Persil laundry tablets and bottles of washing up liquid.

My point is if anyone did ever want to shop a bit greener, they risk utter bewilderment and confusion when confronted with this minefield of eye-catching labels and slogans. I can only just about get my own head around it all and I’ve been trying to buy green for the best part of four years now. But what is worse, in my opinion, is that, even though there’s a plague of green labels out there, the non-green alternative still exists. People will still happily buy Nescafe’s cheapest, nastiest granules, often because it’s cheaper, sometimes because it’s their only option and sometimes because they really don’t understand where their coffee has come from.

In the case of coffee in particular, people who buy the cheap stuff over here are rarely aware that the farmer over there who grew their coffee for them probably works an obscene amount of hours per day, probably can’t afford to send his kids to school, will probably get injured by the age of 40 in a work-related accident and will probably die not long after as a result of the grinding poverty he is forced to live in, all because we would rather spend the 50p we saved in not buying fair-trade coffee on a packet of biscuits instead. This is not me being melodramatic and having a rant. If you do a bit of digging, it becomes clear how wildly the price of coffee in international markets has fluctuated since the start of the century, and if you do even more digging you realise that this is in part due to the big coffee companies such as Nestle effectively controlling the price of the coffee it buys to turn into those appetising looking jars of gravelly brown dust. If you really want to know more about the highway robbery that is the coffee-producing trade, Google the film “Black Gold”.

So no, sorry, the “someone else will just buy it instead” excuse won’t wash here. I know it’s bloody confusing and costs a bit more, but if everyone who said this actually stopped whining and bought greener products, we would all be able to sleep a bit better at night knowing that our breakfast won’t be impoverishing the third world, won’t be damaging the environment as much as it might have and that our eggs and bacon came from happy hens and happy pigs, and that we all stand a better chance of living happily ever after. The end.

xx