Gifts Today   January 2010-

Is it worth worrying where the products we buy and sell come from? Can the giftware industry really make a difference in the general scheme of things? Jeremy Piercy believes so…

Q: Can we make a difference?

Do our buying decisions matter? Why not just chill out and enjoy our pivileged lives? Ali Mafi believes the gift industry is insignifiant to most of the poor on the planet. I admire his column immensely – he sees humour in life and says what he thinks. But on this I disagree!

Our purchasing decisions make an enormous difference. Fair Trade, which aims to alleviate poverty in the Third World, is tranforming people’s lives.
Take Jagwali Devi, who makes jewellery for Tara Projects in New Delhi. Illiterate, with an alcoholic husband, she earned about 40 Rupees a day (50p) cleaning vegetables for a wholesaler, when work was available, and was often unable to provide even simple meals for her children. “Today I earn 100R a day and I can save money through our self-help group. Tara has taught me to read and now I can read the numbers of buses and see where they are going. My daughters attend school regularly – it is a great  joy”.
Or Chakkali Bal, who works with Shared Earth’s handmade paper suppliers, GET Paper, in Nepal. At the age of 15, she was trafficked to an Indian brothel by her brother-in-law. “A blackish man with long moustache came and asked me to lie down in the bed but I refused but he rudely bit me and pushed with glowing cigarette in the chest and neck…
“Then started my living in hell by satisfying to many clients. Some of them were cruel and rascals. I lived in that for four years. I was rescued from the brothel by the help of local police and they helped me to return to Nepal. I was suffered from various illness and severe fever and diarrhoea. In Kathmandu I was tested blood and found as HIV positive.”
GET Paper (which is the Body Shop’s main paper supplier) gives 40% of its profits to HIV/AIDS charities, and helped Chakkali to settle back into the community. New she works for them, helping to educate people about HIV/AIDS and to campaign against girls’ trafficking – which is all too common in this very poor country.

Such examples are a testament to responsible buying decisions on the part of retailers in this country – and they can be replicated across the globe. On a recent visit to Kolkata, I walked past a room on the streeet where children aged 10 to 13 ware making clothes. To create more space, the room had been divided in half, horizontally, making two “floors”. The children had to stoop whenever they left their sewing machines. They were like battery hen, except the product was clothes, not eggs, and I was looking at children, not hens. I gathered such children are sometimes made to work for 16 or 18 hours a day, when orders were urgent.

If the clothes we wear, the food we eat and the gifts we give cause suffering to children, do we just turn our backs and say, “I don’t care”? Moon Sherma, who runs jewellery and soapstone exporter Tara Projects, is passionate about opposing child labour. She has risked her life taking hidden cameras into workshops where children were employed, to publicise the issue of child exploitation. “In the West,” she says, “you have a different kind of poverty. I had a friend in Denmark who took me to see his mother, who was in a sheltered home. Everyone there just seemed to be waiting to die. Her mother wanted to be with her family. My friend was giving money to Mother Theresa, but she hardly saw her own mother at all. You need people to talk to and love; it’s human relations that make you rich.”

I believe we have a duty to do all we can to find out where and in what conditions the goods we sell are made, and if possible to buy from Fair Trade suppliers. If won’t harm us in the gift trade because so many of our customers would support us if we did! Fair Trade sales are now approaching £1 billion and tens of millions of artisans and farm workers are benefiting. I believe we can make a difference – on my buying trips abroad , I have met so many people whose lives have been transformed.
I don’t like being preached to – but we have to have morals somewhere. I can’t enjoy my privileged life if my conscience isn’t clear.

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