50 Reasons to Buy Fair Trade
By Georgina Roberts
I won’t lie to you.
This book sat on my bookshelf for weeks, looking down at me with a self-satisfied expression. Making me feel guilty by its mere presence. Because if I am honest I’ve been a bit slack at buying fair trade – I don’t even buy organic.
What’s my excuse? I guess I’ve never known where to buy it and probably always thought that it was expensive. But, like most people, I have been meaning to get around to it. I am fully aware that, aside from the other forty-nine reasons, there is one good reason to buy fair trade: it’s fair.
50 Reasons to Buy Fair Trade has allowed me to engage more personally with the fair trade movement It provides a thorough introduction to the industry, bringing clarity and transparency to the journey between the supermarket shelf and rural farming communities around the world – a relationship that falls tragically low down on our list of priorities when we are tired, distracted and pushing a trolley around a crowded supermarket trying to remember whether we have run out of bin bags.
50 Reasons can empower us as consumers by enabling informed purchasing decisions. Presented in an accessible narrative, it stresses our power as individual shoppers, whose seemingly trivial choices can have a direct effect in helping to end human suffering throughout the global south.
The most interesting are the revelations of the economic impact of the activities of transnational corporations – something we hear surprisingly little about in the media. 50 Reasons explores the failing theory of comparative advantage and presents succinct evidence, including touching personal accounts from small-scale farmers, for the merits of a fair trade future.
50 Reasons highlights that fair trade is not only a humanitarian issue; it is also a gender issue and an ecological one. Success stories of fair trade communities emphasise the huge steps forward in education, healthcare and pensions brought about by the fair trade social premium. It also identifies the key fair trade values of fair treatment of employees, developing businesses that are sustainable and offering a minimum price for crops, bringing consistency to frighteningly unstable markets. Aside from all this, the book presents well-researched arguments for the commercial viability and necessity of fair trade.
For some, 50 Reasons to Buy Fair Trade will be an eye opener and a steppingstone towards integrating fair trade into their shopping. For fair trade fans, it will be a comprehensive guide to the movement. But for all it will undoubtedly inspire
Stoke Newington Murder
By Lee Jackson
I have gutted a clergyman in Stoke Newington, as well as burying an infamous actress, and disinterring a fraudster – fortunately, all in my fiction.
However, despite being fairly steeped in Victorian vice, it was only recently that I discovered that N16 can boast (if that is the word) a genuine Victorian tragedy –‘The Stoke Newington Murder' – a case that gripped the capital in the first few days of 1884.
The details of the crime were sketchy at first: a young man had simply gone missing in the early hours of New Year's day, his coat, hat and shirt collar found on a patch of waste ground between Queen Elizabeth's Walk and the western reservoir of the New River Company. The water was swiftly dragged – the Company being all too familiar with finding bodies, due to either suicide or accident – and a corpse was recovered. But what had actually happened?
Suicide seemed unlikely: the deceased, one John Broom Tower, a lodger at 109 Dynevor Road, was an insurance underwriter, 'a young man of quiet and steady habits', who had done nothing more on New Year's Eve than attend a church service in Highbury with his fiancée and her family. A drunken mishap was an impossibility: a fence surrounded the reservoir's grounds; and the nineteen-year-old had imbibed only a single glass of claret to usher in the New Year.
In fact, there was every indication of a mugging gone wrong: a ring, watch, and money had been taken, with the young man's clothing lost or torn in the process. Moreover, the place where Broom's hat and coat were first found (other items were found by the reservoir) was a dead-end, obscured by trees, the neighbourhood being described as a 'lonely one... undergoing the change from country to town'. Queen Elizabeth's Walk was, in fact, a building site, with houses on the western side of the road still under construction. Thus, newspapers speculated that Broom had been lured to the spot by his attackers; the discovery of an earring nearby even prompted rather spurious reports that a prostitute might be involved.
The Coroner's verdict was 'wilful and malicious murder by persons unknown.' Minute examination of footprints by Scotland Yard detectives suggested that Broom was assaulted by two men, then ran towards the reservoir, in a desperate bid to escape, only to be caught, strangled and dumped in the water.
What I find fascinating about this case is the light it throws on London life in the 1880s. It caused something of a panic... was no-one safe in these new 'lonely suburbs'? A Times editorial felt obliged to urge calm and contemplate comforting statistics – 'For one slain by the garrotter or burglar there are dozens killed by the fast bowling hansom cab'. The police even offered a £200 reward – twice the young man's annual wage (or, indeed, twice the wage of a police inspector). One wonders if rents in Queen Elizabeth's Walk plummeted.
But what happened next, you may ask?
The murderers were never caught. This is fact, not fiction, after all. There were, however, complaints, on hygienic grounds, that the New River Company refused to drain its reservoir. And, two years later, a lunatic confessed to Broom's murder. Police did not believe him and concluded his (limited) knowledge of the facts was because he was 'among the thousands of visitors who came to inspect the scene of the crime’. The Victorians loved such grim tourist attractions – four years later, the sites of Jack the Ripper's crimes would be visited by parties of West End sightseers. Still, I cannot begrudge a little morbid curiosity – I make my living from murder, after
all.
Lee Jackson is a local author and runs the website www.victorianlondon.org. His latest novel is A Most Dangerous Woman (William Heinemann April 2007). |
