Concerned consumers looking to support fair trade farmers and challenge the horrific Israeli attack on Gaza these past few weeks might have found their “ethical shopping” choices more than a bit difficult. This is because several of fair trade’s newest corporate licensees can also be found on the list of the Boycott Apartheid Israel Campaign.

Starbucks, Sara Lee, Nestlé, and even McDonalds, have in recent years all began selling fair trade certified coffee. They are also major targets of the Israel boycott for supporting Israeli occupation and military action in Palestinian territory. This support ranges from significant financial investment in Israel to direct diplomatic support, such as that provided by Starbucks’ founder and CEO, Howard Schultz, who, according to the Boycott Apartheid Israel Campaign website, is a long-time Zionist fundraiser whose efforts have been “praised by the Israeli Foreign Ministry as being key to Israel’s long-term PR success.” It’s enough to make a person choke on their fair trade coffee.

Perhaps one of the most notorious corporations on the Israel boycott list is the Swiss giant Nestlé, one of the most boycotted companies in the world, which is targeted for investing millions of dollars in the snack food industry in Israel. Nestlé began offering a new line of fair trade certified coffee in the UK in 2005. This event came under serious criticism from social justice activists, in particular those from Baby Milk Action who have made Nestlé the target of a major international boycott since the 1970s.

According to the Baby Milk Action website, “Nestlé is the target of a boycott because it contributes to the unnecessary death and suffering of infants around the world by aggressively marketing baby foods in breach of international marketing standards.” Nestlé has a long history of aggressively marketing its infant baby formula despite the fact that, “according to the World Health Organisation, 1.5 million infants die around the world every year because they are not breastfed.”

Perhaps the worst of Nestlé’s tarnished record has occurred in the South, where poor families have frequently used insufficient quantities of infant formula with contaminated water, causing malnutrition and death among babies. In the 1970s and 1980s, Nestlé sent salespeople into poor communities in the South, dressed as “mothercraft” nurses, to give out free samples and get mothers hooked on formula at the start of feeding. These days, having abandoned the use of mothercraft nurses, Nestlé continues to aggressively target mothers with misleading advertising campaigns and by handing out free “gifts” to new mothers.

Baby Milk Action’s response to the decision by the UK-based Fairtrade Foundation to certify Nestlé’s new fair trade coffee has been to place the product “straight on the boycott list” for fear that Nestlé will use the fair trade label to divert criticism from its “baby food marketing malpractice.”

Similar issues now begin to emerge for Palestinian-solidarity activists, who seek to take on giant corporations employing support for fair trade as part of multi-million dollar marketing campaigns designed to improve and protect their brand images.

The fair trade network itself is far from the typical top-down “corporate social responsibility” programs that have emerged in rapid numbers in recent years as corporations have sought to divert criticism from global justice activists. Since its inception in the 1940s and 1950s, fair trade consumerism has been driven by the efforts of North-South solidarity groups and small farmer organizations in the South. These groups have heavily criticized the corporate-driven global trading system and sought to pressure both corporations and governments for a better deal for small farmers and rural workers.

Central to fair trade activism have been fair trade “buycotting” campaigns, which many fair traders themselves favourably compare to conventional boycotts such as the one targeting Nestlé. In buycotting campaigns, fair trader activists organize a variety of protest, information and letter-writing campaigns to compel giant corporations to begin offering some quantity of fair trade coffee to consumers in their stores.

Unlike conventional boycotts, fair trade buycotts offer corporations the prospect of increasing profitability by tapping into “ethical consumer” demand. They also make relatively incremental demands. Whereas the Nestlé boycott demands that the corporation change its entire marketing strategy, fair trade buycotts insist that a corporation buy only a limited quantity of fair trade coffee. The result is that one of the largest corporate supporters of fair trade in North America, Starbucks, only buys around six percent of its coffee beans as certified fair trade.

Due to the incremental demands of buycotting, these fair trade campaigns have been relatively successful and more and more giant corporations sign on to fair trade each year, leading to a significant sales boom for the fair trade network. This victory, however, comes with a paradox for those concerned with global social justice. Limited demands mean that fair trade certification is vulnerable to being used by corporate spin-doctors as part of a public relations campaign to mask the broader political and moral agenda of giant corporations.

In the case of Nestlé, this means that the corporation can attain positive publicity for token support for fair trade coffee, while at the same time being accused of malpractice for its infant formula marketing and supporting the Israeli government’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. To some, this hardly seems “fair” at all.

It also raises significant questions for those fair trade consumers who are interested in showing solidarity with Palestinians. Can fair trade really change the behaviour of giant corporations? Or, is the other more likely to occur: that giant corporations with their spin doctors and multi-million dollar PR campaigns will, in the end, change the meaning of fair trade.

The reality of fair trade-certified companies being among the top corporate supporters of Israeli occupation makes this uncomfortable prospect ever more present and alarming.

 

Gavin Fridell is an Assistant Professor of Politics at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, and the author of Fair Trade Coffee: The Prospects and Pitfalls of Market-Driven Social Justice (University of Toronto Press: 2007)