A renowned professor has criticised Fairtrade for its stunted ambition and support of low nutrient-content foods.
Tim Lang, professor of food policy at London City University, in an address to the Ethical Shopping conference last week, said: “I have major problems with the use of sugar and coffee in Fairtrade. It has no nutritional value.”
He told FPJ: “Getting the coffee trade to improve workers’ conditions is morally sound, but that doesn’t make it a good thing to use the land for coffee.”
Land usage is becoming a key factor in the emerging food order, said Lang, who also argued that the Fairtrade movement had achieved a lot, but needed to take advantage of the financial climate to instil ethical spending as the normality.
He said: “Fairtrade can only get larger by doing what it does: pushing, organising, delivering. It should think bigger and acknowledge that it is only part of the picture now emerging for the 21st century. It is a discussion that was private but is now going public.
“It is actually going to be very easy to keep ethics on the agenda. The west has had an orgy of wants and now has to look at what it needs.
“We need to build movements from our small projects to work together, otherwise they will be smashed apart. The next 20 years are crunch time.”
Lang also acts as food adviser to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and is lobbying the government and food retailers to start introducing “omni-standards” on health, quality, environmental and ethical factors in food.
In an interview last week, Lang also raised the issue of “embedded water”, labelling the amount of water it takes to produce food as “an impending catastrophe”.
Water is becoming rapidly scarcer and climate change will affect drought-prone countries disproportionately, Lang said.
“If you thought about water protection you would eat a different diet,” he said. “You definitely would not eat rice, because you would say that it should only be eaten in areas where that is the only staple they can grow. It has got huge amounts of embedded water.”
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