Reducing consumption and local exchange better than "sustainable consumption"

While it is clear that global trade play a major role as a driver of destruction of biodiversity there is no way "consumers" in the US or other developed economies can be expected to take responsibility for the effect on biodiversity of their consumption. It is a tall order even for the companies trading or the retailers selling the products. Citizens should rather take responsibility by a general reduction in consumption, by favoring local goods exchange and relationships and by opposing policies that further drive international trade.

New research published in Nature links trade to biodiversity hotspots. The production of goods for export often involves logging, mining, fishing, farming or other activities that can damage natural habitats. To figure out where the drive for these goods is coming from, researchers traced the production of goods in one country to consumers in another.  The video gives some insights in this.




I believe the research is very helpful in illuminating the increasing interdependence in the globalized economy.

The researchers write in the paper Identifying species threat hotspots from global supply chains:"Locating biodiversity threat hotspots driven by consumption of goods and services can help to connect conservationists, consumers, companies and governments in order to better target conservation actions." And the recommend: "to initiate direct collaborations between producers and consumers to mitigate biodiversity impacts at those places"


I beg to differ from that conclusion. Their own research show how incredibly complex all these linkages are. The map showing the effect US consumption has on biodiversity in all parts of the world (darker areas indicate areas of threat hotspots driven by US consumption) makes it clear that there is no way "consumers" in the US can be expected to take responsibility or act upon all this. It is a tall order even for the companies trading or the retailers selling the products.

The example in the film from Spain makes this clear. Apparently the habitat of the Iberian Lynx (Lynx pardinus) is threatened by dams. Those dams are built for agriculture irrigation and once of the crops grown is olive, which is processed into oil exported to the United States. So, are consumer expected not to buy Spanish olive oil. But what about the effect of Italian olive oil?, or Avocado oil from Mexico? And what about Swedish paper pulp from mono-culture forest production which harms biodiversity and reindeer herding etc. etc. etc. In addition to biodiversity threats there are effects on green house gases, the nitrogen cycle, child labour, the rights of indigenous people. The global impacts are simply overwhelming. In addition, the research also shows that two-thirds of the impact on the hotspots are driven by domestic factors. Of course, for a few symbolic cases one can have consumer driven actions or boycotts, but in most cases it is irrelevant as a strategy.

Consumers, or rather citizens, can take responsibility by a general reduction in consumption, by favoring local goods exchange and by opposing policies that further drive international trade. Meanwhile, protection of biodiversity must primarily be dealt with by domestic processes and international treaties and conventions. Global policies to reduce inequality between nations and within nations will also counter the fact that a foreign powers can exert pressures on local nature resources.


Read more about this and other aspects of international trade in agriculture commodities Trade in food: It’s the competition, stupid  and Food: from commodity to commons.

Ethics for sale?

Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker, opened a store in Baltimore 1836 which sold only goods obtained by labor from free people. This is an early example of ethical marketing which continued up to the end of slavery in the United States in 1865.

Ethical marketing based on voluntary standards and certification has spread in a rapid pace the last decades, as a result of converging - and interacting – trends. Most notably,
- a trend towards emphasizing the market and consumer choice as important tools to accomplish ethical, economic, environmental or social goals;
- a trend of government de-regulation, which leaves more self-regulation to the industries; and
- stiff global competition which makes differentiation in the market place an essential survival strategy to escape ‘commodity hell’;

When you buy a cup of coffee for €2 the farmer gets 3-4 cents for the coffee in that cup. If you buy a cup of organic and fair trade coffee you are likely to have to cough-up €2.50 - and the farmer will get 4-5 cents. The farmer’s income will increase, perhaps with impressive 20-25 percent. Looking from another perspective, however, you spend 50 cents to increase the farmer’s income with 1 or 2 cents. This example begs the question if the market mechanism is efficient in transforming consumers’ willingness to pay for direct or indirect benefits of a product to an increase in income for producers.

We don’t have voluntary standards for social conditions for labor in Scandinavia – but there is a Food Justice Certified scheme developed in the United States now. Why? Because it is needed in the United States but not in Scandinavia. These systems mainly emerge in the space between what is well regulated by markets and by governments respectively. Whether they are results of “policy failures” or “market failures” or if they should be seen as permanent institutions is a topic for debate – a debate that is kept here.

Some sector wide commodity schemes, such as the Roundtables on sustainable Palm oil, soya and biofuels have the ambition of being “floor standards”, that is de facto a license to make business. The impact of such standards on trade is substantial. And if they are de facto compulsory, one can of course ask if they should not be subject of regulation and thereby follow the same lines of accountability both nationally and internationally. Many, in particular developing countries, see these voluntary standards as barriers to trade.

In most cases they are dictated by the strong actors in the market place. The most notable example of that is the GLOBAL GAP standard, where supermarkets dictate standards which effectively exclude millions of smallholders from the market place. The same supermarkets which market fair trade products intended to help smallholders.

In Sweden, like in most countries, governments say that it is consumer choice that will determine if farms will farm organically or not. But governments could prohibit, or impose prohibitive fees, on chemical pesticides if they so wished. They could ban factory farming, it they so wished, and if we demand that as citizens.

There are some 100,000 chemicals in use. Certainly, I didn’t make any conscious choice if my computer should be soaked in this or that flame retardant or which chemicals are in my new sofa. To have to select “environmentally friendly” products means that the government authorizes the sale of products that are harmful for the environment. I don’t think it should be a matter of consumer choice if there is Bisphenol A or not in our food.

My conclusion after working with this for some thirty years is that the market mechanism is not efficient in dealing with problems that are rooted in fundamental structures of society, the market itself and the economy. Which is why the buying of fair trade coffee never will end poverty. This was also realized by those fighting against slavery in the United States. The market for products from free labor didn’t abolish slavery. It was political action, and even a Civil War, that led to the abolition of slavery.

Our acts as consumers and our acts as citizens can be linked, and one can bear the seeds for the other one. For instance:
-For a while ethical consumers boycotted eggs from layers in cages, until there was a public ban.
-For a while environmental activists refused to buy refrigerators with CFC, or Freon, as it was called. Then governments agreed to phase it out with the Montreal protocol 1 January 1989.
-There were massive consumer and academic boycotts of South Africa for the apartheid policy. These lasted twenty years until most Western countries agreed to international sanctions.

Clearly this is not an either-or discussion. Most people, including myself, don’t want a nanny state where the government tells us in detail what to do, what to buy or not buy. It is also not a question about the market or the state only. There are many more, non market and non-state, ways of organizing our life and our food. The most apparent is of course to produce the food yourself. But new initiatives such as community supported agriculture are also based on non-market relations, even if they use some of the tools of the market, such as money.

In my view, it is a good thing to make educated and ethical consumer choices. It is not only a good thing - it is our responsibility. But in many cases it makes more sense to have those choices made politically. It is mainly the not so important things and matters for which there is a lot of disagreement that are best left to the market.

Telling consumers that they will change the world or eradicate poverty by shopping is to deceive them.

(notes for my introductory talk at the panel Ethics for sale which was part of the 11th EURsafe conference, The Ethics of Consumption: The Citizen, The Market, and The Law)

Are we consumers or citizens?

The video Story of Change is a nice attempt to make clear why Green consumerism falls short of inducing the radical shift needed. More than 20 years of the business model of "sustainable development" show how little can be accomplished by just relying on consumers and businesses to make the "right choices". For sure, to make the right individual choices are important - but not enough. And it is a dangerous illusion that we will select a good future by how we consume (i.e. shop). Gradually, the consumerist paradigm takes over also the political sphere and patients are treated as customers in hospitals instead of patients or citizens.

The video is perhaps a bit naive, but less naive than the idea that we will change the world by consumer choice.....





In the end I also wonder if "citizen" is the right term for what we ought to be. It has a connotation of nationalism (as citizenship is linked to a nation), and its link to the "city" as an organism is dubious, but that might be the subject of a later blog post.

Don't buy organic instead of changing the world - do it as part of changing the world

Are there really any benefits for the farmers in developing countries that engage in organic or fair trade schemes?

A recent literature review casts doubts on the merit of "sustainability" certification systems. It includes studies of Fairtrade, Organic, Rainforest Alliance and the Forest Stewardship council. The authors Allen Blackman and Jorge Rivera note that rather few studies have a rigorous control against non-certified production, which is needed to form a scientific basis for claims that certification is beneficial for producers.

The 11 rigorous studies provided very weak evidence for the hypothesis that sustainable certification has positive environmental, social, or economic effects at the producer level. Only four of the 11 provided evidence of such benefits (Table 3). Of these four, all tested for economic effects. In two of these four studies, both on coffee, the authors remark that the benefits are either idiosyncratic or inconsistent (Arnould et al. 2009; Bolwig et al. 2009). The results of the remaining seven rigorous studies (two studies of environmental effects and five of social and economic effects) did not show that certification benefits producers.

As the authors note "the hypothesis that certification benefits the environment or producers is limited. More evidence could be generated by incorporating rigorous, independent evaluation into the design and implementation of projects promoting certification."


One of the few studies that show economic benefits is the one of Bolwig and others, The economics of smallholder organic contract farming in tropical Africa. I was personally engaged in those projects studied, in the EPOPA programme. It was successful mainly because it was designed with the explicit purpose to be commercial and increase farmers income (and hopefully because it was well implemented).It spoke less about sustainability and smallholder empowerment than most similar programs, but generated more direct results in terms of increased income, and with low costs compared to many other projects.

It is worrying, however, that there is so little result coming out of so big efforts, even more troubling considering that the vast majority of all situations with certified smallholders are in to form of "projects" where substantial external funds are used to support them. As a matter of fact, I have yet to come across any small farmer project with sustainability certification which has not benefited external support; most of them are even established by external actors.To include even more rigorous evaluations and scientific monitoring of the projects, as suggested by the authors, will make the projects even more donor dependent and consultant dependent, and decrease the efficiency of the deployment of resources substantially.

I think the jury is still out regarding the direct and indirect benefits of the sustainability schemes. But what should be clear, even without more scientific studies, is that the economic benefits, and environmental benefits are limited. And that is not because the schemes are bad. There is simply no way such schemes can shift global economic relations fundamentally. Not even Fair trade, which has this as it's focus is more than a marginal adjustment of fundamental factors such as unjust trading relations and an ongoing exploitation of smallholders; limited access to resources and therewith associated low labor productivity; and inequality. As a matter of fact there is no particular evidence that fair trade farmers have any higher income than organic ones.

Note that this study is about farms in developing countries, there are numerous studies about farms in developed countries that show environmental benefits for organic farming. When it comes to economy it is a more complex picture. But clearly, organic farms in developed countries are exposed to the same commercial pressures as non-organic and respond in more or less the same way: more specialization, larger farms, more input buying etc., because that is the logic of the competitive market economy, whether you like it or not.



My suggestion is not that we should throw the sustainability schemes overboard, but that we should realise that they will not make the Big Difference which is needed to reach a fair(er) world. Go on and buy organic, but don't do it instead of changing the world, but as part of changing the world. 

Read also:

How Fair is Fair?

Guilt Free

What gives value to an ecolabel? 
Agriculture: How cheap energy (and capitalism) increased the gaps between rich and poor 
Traditions, Western Union, Churches and Taro 
Green Economy a win-win-win?

 

How fair is fair?

"Fair Trade was established to enable producers to improve their livelihoods and communities through trading with buyers whose behaviour was governed by an agreed set of principles. Over time though there, has been an unfortunate change of emphasis whereby it is now the producers (artisans and farmers) whose actions are under the microscope rather than the buying organizations. In effect, the certification systems have changed Fair Trade to such an extent that sales of products are the main measure of success instead of the welfare of producers. The WFTO believes the interests of producers, especially small farmers and artisans, should be the main focus in all the policies, governance, structures and decision making within the Fair Trade movement."

says the World Fair Trade Organisation 

and it is probably true. And unfortunately I believe that most of the systems for environmental or social labeling end up like that. Not because of that the people managing them are bad, and also not really because they are taken over by "big business". No, it is just the "natural" logic of the market place to work like that.

I have written about these things before
Guilt free

What gives value to an ecolabel
and sometimes the system just become self-serving and inward looking
How quality Management can result in low quality...

My point is not that we should stop buying eco labeled or fair trade products, but that we need to have a lot more critical view on them and constantly watch where they are going.