A consumerist manifesto

IN a world of superpowers and transnational corporations, it's easy to feel that the influence of individuals is diminishing, that our ability to change things is ever more restricted.

Yet there remains one area where everyone has a say. In the era of global markets and multinational supremacy, the power of the consumer is greater than ever. As Feargal Quinn puts it, "the customer is king".

Consumers can make or break a brand. "You are what you buy" is truer than ever - yet the last people to wake up to this fact seem to be the very customers who make international companies so rich.

Consider the workings of global trade. The Western world makes billions of pounds a year from trading with developing countries. Out of the goodness of our hearts, we plough back a tiny fraction of this windfall and call it development assistance.

Some of this money goes into supporting local farmers and entrepreneurs to develop better produce and sell them overseas. Yet manufactured goods from the South are often subject to heavy import duties or quotas which protect Northern markets; for example, exports of instant coffee to Europe are heavily restricted.

Furthermore, the West frequently dumps its unwanted - and heavily subsidised - agricultural produce on local markets in the South.

It is this unsatisfactory situation which has prompted calls of "trade, not aid" for the South. Substitute the freight container for the begging bowl, the exchange for the donation. But for small producers from poor countries, getting onto the first rung of international commerce has proved difficult if not impossible.

To help them, the fair-trade movement, a loose coalition of pressure groups and trading houses which aims to level the proverbial playing pitch between the rich and the poor countries of the world, has sprung up in Europe.

It's now almost 30 years since the first Third World shop was established in the small Dutch town of Breukelen. Today, there are more than 3,000 such shops in Europe.

Fairly-traded products give producers a decent return for their labour, enough to guarantee a minimum standard of living, according to John Daly of the Irish Fair Trade Network. They also provide farmers with access to credit, payment up-front, long-term contracts, and a bonus for community development projects in education and health.

In Ireland so-called "solidarity products" grabbed most attention during the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua almost 20 years ago. Right-thinking liberals flocked to support the revolution by sipping Nicaraguan coffee and chewing on Nica bananas.

There was only one problem. "I have to admit it; the coffee was putrid. It set us back a decade," says Daly. Buying Nicaraguan coffee became an act of charity, rather than solidarity.

Older and wiser, the activists of the 1990s know that quality is an essential prerequisite for fair-trade products. When Bewleys launched its fairly traded brand late last year - "Change the world on your coffee break" - Patrick Bewley travelled to Costa Rica, personally to select the coffee beans to be used.

Bewley's Direct is the first Irish brand to be awarded the Fair Trade Mark, but Daly is hoping others will follow.

The US firm Ben and Jerry's, which makes the best ice cream this side of Mongolia, has shown that fair trade and fine profit can go together. It has an alternative marketing policy, and pays guaranteed prices for raw materials, in advance. Esprit imports fairly traded cotton, and the Body Shop claims to trade fairly. So there are numerous role models for success.

In Ireland, both Quinnsworth and Superquinn sell Cafe Direct, the best-known fair-trade brand. The availability of fair-trade tea and chocolate is largely limited to wholefood and charity shops, though the IFTN is pushing supermarkets to extend their range.

Eamonn Quinn of Superquinn says fair-trade coffee sales "haven't been particularly high", and better marketing is needed. However, he believes they could follow the example set by environmentally-friendly products in establishing a niche market. "But it's the same problem; people said they would opt for an environmental product, but when it came to choosing one off the shelf, they didn't."