Picking coffee beans

We are in the middle of Fairtrade Fortnight here in the UK and I find myself feeling somewhat irritated with that phrase. Why do we need reminding to buy fair trade? Why don’t we just choose fairly traded goods all the time? How come there are such things as non-fairly traded products?

There’s a practice in Buddhism known as “deep looking” where we’re encouraged to contemplate an object, say something manmade, or something from nature and to reflect on how it is connected with other things. The intimate connection between things, people, animals, everything, is known as “interbeing.” So, when we read this blog, look at his computer screen more deeply, we might be able to see the oil that was used to produce the plastics, the vegetation that was crushed for millions of years to produce the oil, the metals and semiconductors that were extracted and processed to make the electronics, the power station, wind farm or solar cells that are producing the electricity that power it and all the human beings involved in those complex production and distribution processes.

Think of all the events, people and other living things throughout the world who have been involved in ensuring that we are able to sit here now and read this blog!

If we were to use “deep looking” when we are shopping for food and clothes, for example, perhaps we would never pick up an item that was not fairly traded, because we would immediately be aware of the exploitation we were colluding with. Perhaps we would even begin to see the unfair trade that is happening, not only in third world countries but here in the UK too, where millions scrape an existence on something less than a living wage.

“But I can’t afford to buy only fair trade!” is what I hear some reply to this.

And when we look very deeply, can we really afford not to?