ETHICALLY TRADED FURNITURE AND HANDCRAFTS

BUYING IN BALI

Some of you may have read in the EDP about my husband Stephen’s recent trip to Bali, where he was meeting some of the producers we work with, and sourcing new ethically-traded items for our showroom in Poringland.

Two weeks in Bali sounds like a tough assignment, but this was no holiday - he was there to see that part of the island’s economy that doesn’t rely on tourism.  And it’s more important than ever that we support this now, because the double whammy of the tsunami and terrorism has hit Bali’s tourism industry - the mainstay of its economy - very hard indeed.

When you get away from the resorts, any country can be a culture shock, but this what makes travelling so rewarding, provided you approach it with an open mind.

This point was brought home to Stephen during a visit to one workshop where a group of Balinese workers were busy making batik kites; resplendent in bright colours and patterns, they were being assembled with great skill and dexterity by the workforce. 

On thing puzzled him, though.  why, when there were clearly chairs available, was everyone sitting or squatting on the floor to work?  To his western eyes, this image brought all sorts of thoughts about sweatshops and poor working conditions.

The workshop’s owner explained: many Indonesians find working in a chair uncomfortable, and prefer to be on the floor.  Because Stephen has the western view that he’d rather be on a chair, he naturally assumed everyone else would as well.  He was wrong - and it’s a good example of how we have to take cultural factors into account when dealing with trading partners across the world.

It’s too easy to impose our own values on everyone else, usually with the best of intentions.  Initially, fair trade rules stated that suppliers had to be organised into co-operatives, something which we might think is the fairest way of trading.  But why should we dissuade an entrepreneurial spirit in those in the developing world, when we encourage it so much in the west.  Surely this is just a recipe for holding back development and widening the wealth differential, the very antithesis of what fair trade is all about.

Instead, encouraging an entrepreneurial culture in the developing world, so that it can start to trade on an equal footing with the developed world, coupled with a commitment on the part of British consumers to buy products which are ethically produced, will go a long way to giving the developing world hope of obtaining prosperity in the long term.

But we have to let them do it in the way which works best for them.