My September brightened like tropical sunshine when I found Equal Exchange bananas at Stop & Shop in Norwood, Massachusetts. There they were, occupying display space beside the ever present Chiquitas. The Massachusetts-based co-op, Equal Exchange, continues to advance fair trade food production internationally. It’s great to see evidence of it at a major grocer.
Fair trade products and a broader food movement taking place are not only improving how we eat, they’re increasing political and economic freedom. This month, a thought-provoking article on CounterPunch by Jonathan Latham recounts a worldwide food movement in an article titled, Food Liberation: Why The Food Movement Is Unstoppable. The article describes food as a basis for economic thought. As the co-op movement brings to light, there are alternative ways to consider business interaction besides competition. The food movement brings with it a “philosophical shift” challenging food as a commodity and business. Food as an industry, descendant from western enlightenment thinkers, has become disconnected from natural interconnection.
“Enlightenment thinkers laid the groundwork for a meritocratic and commercial society to replace feudalism and their ideas justified the necessary concepts that the founders of the new society came to rely on: mechanization, individualism and competition. Nowadays, their ideas are used for preserving this order, even as the intellectual flaws of that understanding are increasingly manifesting as ecological crises, not least in the form of global climate change — a crisis that the food movement could play a critical role in addressing.”
The food movement has lessons for us all:
“Food philosophy thus replaces the neo-Darwinist narrative of life-as-competition with the idea that life thrives in the presence of other life. There is perfectly good evidence for this — we know, for example, that the tens of millions of species on Earth are interdependent.”
In Brazil a food movement is benefiting millions of children and small farmers with a top-down approach. Thomson Reuters Foundation reports on the world’s largest universal feeding project. A law dictates that 30% of school meal budgets must go to small farmers. Farmers and co-ops are benefiting: the predictable income allows them to obtain deeded land rights and reinvest in the land.
Equal Exchange buys from co-op farmers around the world. They buy cashews from Tomy Mathew from the southern India state of Kerala. At an August event, he explained how fair trade has created a market in that region allowing a higher standard of living, including good wages. Equal Exchange is now looking to connect farmers and citizen-consumers with an initiative called the Action Forum. As Equal Exchange says: small farmers, big change.
