We are in a climate crisis. The things that we have been talking about as climate campaigners for decades, which, until recently affecting the poorest nations: extreme weather, storms, droughts, intense rainfall and flooding, are now starting to be seen across the nations which draw the headlines: the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, the hottest temperatures ever seen in the USA, towns catching fire, unprecedented floods.

This isn’t new to those who have been campaigning and working with those in the global south. They have been experiencing climate related crop failures, unseasonal weather, droughts, floods, hurricanes for decades. But now it has come to us, even in the UK, which makes it much harder to ignore.

This brings to stark reality that, this is not just a climate crisis, it is a crisis of justice.  For those working on Fair Trade, the justice element will be particularly stark – we all know that those countries who have created the most emissions have suffered the least impact. And we know that those countries suffering the early impacts of climate change have had the least resources to deal with it while contributing the least to the issue. The emissions may be one-sided but the impacts are global.

What are the solutions?

So what are the solutions being put forward? Are they going to achieve an equitable, sustainable and liveable planet?  And where does Fair Trade fit into this? COP is a key space where climate solutions are discussed in an international area. And as to the question of whether they are putting forward solutions that will achieve an equitable, sustainable and liveable planet the answer has to be – not really….

There is a lot of trying to maintain the status quo, to make sure the winners in our current situation stay the winners. The solutions are always more of the same. ‘We just haven’t done capitalism properly’ is a reaction to the crisis. Are there too many emissions? …’Well that’s because no one owns the atmosphere, We just need a market in carbon credits…’

I’ve been to two COPs – one in Madrid, when COP26 had just been announced as coming to Glasgow, and COP26 itself. Fair Trade is also a long-time regular at COPs so some of you may know firsthand what I am talking about here.

In the official COP spaces the ‘blah blah blah’ – as Greta Thunberg so accurately described it – is all about the economic opportunities to be had in the climate crisis, new technologies that will save the situation, and about incremental changes that will save the planet, and how marketisation is the answer and ‘net zero’.
And what is Net Zero anyway? A phrase that was conceived by scientists to describe that the earth needed to reach a global balance of greenhouse emissions, and enshrined as a principle in the Paris agreement has become a buzz word used by everyone.

It has become meaningless as ‘carbon credits’ have flooded the market meaning that businesses can declare themselves net-zero but just purchasing credits that are of dubious value. Net zero, for responsible small business, like Fair Trade businesses, can also become a real burden.

Yes it is important for everyone to cut down emissions where we can, whether individuals and small business, but to actually achieve the vast reductions in emissions needed, fundamental changes in the economy, energy transport and tax and subsidies need to be made which are not in the gift of small business and individuals to make. By framing this mainly as a problem for everyone to solve, governments and fossil fuel companies can get away without making the massive changes and the massive decisions that they need to.

In a COP there is no stepping back to look at what has caused the problems, to objectively look at what needs to change and humbly acknowledging what a mess the ‘status quo’ has caused.

But I'm being unfair – not all the spaces at COP are like that. In the IPCC pavilion you will hear the urgency. I went out for dinner with a friend who I did my PhD with and now authors one of the IPCC chapters. The desperation in her colleagues – thinking that they wouldn’t be able to make a difference before it was too late- was palpable.

And in the side meeting rooms were indigenous people are talking about how everything needs to change – we need to see value where it really lies. But everywhere else the talk was of the economic opportunities to be grasped, the medicine for the planet is more of the same – marketisation, the role of capital, financing.
 
Inside COP a city of pavilions, representing countries, and specific interests, has grown up around the negotiations. Everyone is there in the peripheral spaces to sell their products or their ideas. COP26 had more delegates than a cop ever had (nearly 40,000) – despite being the covid COP. And the vast proportion  weren’t there to be part of the official negotiations – there was also the most representatives of fossil fuel interests – 500 making them bigger than any country delegation.

The pavilions felt like a huge and no-expense-spared trade fair. While using the free wifi and coffee at the UK Pavilion during COP26 I overheard a conversation where a man was evidently trying to sell his ‘net zero fighter jets’ to someone from the UK government pavilion…

But outside the security perimeter of COP were the civil society spaces. In my role at SCCS we played the part as local hosts and provided venues for civil society and campaigners, accommodation in people’s homes and in these places the talk wasn’t of opportunities, status quo and incremental change – talk was of ‘justice’ and ‘systems change’.  Climate was seen as just one symptom of a wider malaise.
The talk there was about the extractive nature of our global economy– taking from the poorest to deliver wealth to the richest. A zero sum game where one is the winner and the other is the loser.

But trade was never supposed to be like that. The first economists saw trade as a way that everyone benefits from the exchange. Adam smith has been badly represented. Trade has always happened and it was successful when it benefited both parties.

What trade has come to mean is that benefits accrue to the side with the power to set the rules of the game and the externalities accrue to the communities with the least power and to our planet.

But in those outside spaces of COP the talk was also about how we change the structures that perpetuate injustices and exploitation of people and of our home planet.

So if we want to change the system what can we do? We’re not likely to overthrow capitalism soon. So we need some working models of how to do things differently - how does Fair Trade strike you as a possibility for this?

David Graeber, the anthropologist,  defined direct action as ‘living as if you are already free’ – that is, using your own actions to bring about the future freedoms that you want to see. And, of course, Gandhi said something like this almost exactly a hundred years ago which has been paraphrased as “Be the Change you want to see in the world” - the theme for this year’s Fair Trade fortnight.

What ‘living as if you are already free’ meant to us at COP was to counter the overpricing of accommodation by hotels and Airbnb with our homestay network where 1200 Glaswegians offered space in their homes to activists. And by creating a platform for events that we open to everyone doing events from NGOs, faith groups, activists and other civil society groups. By bringing together groups that had venues available – upstairs rooms in pubs, church halls, community meeting rooms, and unused offices , if only for an hour, to offer them at cost price to campaigners and other NGOs. Repurposing unused shop front space as artist galleries. And by hosting a welcoming space for activists wherever they had travelled from to gather, discuss and also to plan action. 

Having read David Graeber since then I would recognise this as ‘living as if we were already free’ - seeing the ways the world worked, inflating hotel and AIrbnb prices, no venues affordable, and starting to do it differently. And of course the Fairtrade movement have been doing the same thing with trade for more than 30 years. Reframing trade as a mutually beneficial relationship of equals. Back to its origins you might say. 

Fair Trade resets the balance – Fair Trade is transgressive of capitalist norms of operating – it is something that is beneficial to both parties and is explicitly not exploitative. Where people come before profits (and not just in the marketing). Trade that is not extractive of human potential and our planetary abundance. We can see the economy that we don’t like and we can remake it – that is what Fair Trade has done.

Bringing back principles of partnership and equal partners – where both sides benefit and it adds value to communities and to planet.  We need a new model for trade for the future that will enable us to navigate the scale of change that is needed to deal with the climate crisis. What better than Fair Trade?