Fair or unfair trade.
Préparation de cours (quelques pistes pour 4 ou 5 séances)
I-
Coffee production in the world
What countries? (What about other products such as chocolate or bananas?)
II-
Documents: Jeans / coffee jar / chocolate bar / bananas
Who gets most of the profit?
– Jeans: Most of the profit is for retailers (54%).
(It is expensive to run a trendy shop to pay taxes / wages)
– Coffee jar: Imagine the life of the coffee from the producer to the consumer.
– coffee beans are grown (examples of countries)
– coffee beans are exported/shipped/roasted/retailed
A tiny part of the final price goes to the people who have:
sewn jeans
grown and collected coffee beans
picked coca beans
grown/picked bananas
(cf Voices 1ère)
4 équipes
(team work)
→ jeans
→ coffee jar
→chocolate bar
→ bananas
Compare:
What people are the most exploited?
(Banana growers)
Where do they come from?
(They all live in the South).
Growers/producers in the South as opposed to consumers in the North
North
What characterizes consumers ? (wealthy…)
What characterizes companies? (profits, sales
in the hands of… )
How far are they in control of the world’s
riches?
South
What characterizes producers? (poor…)
They only get a tiny part of the final price
What accounts for the plight of farmers and
producers in the South?
III- Fair Trade Coffee
Words to explain: “toil” / “sweatshops” / “stringent” / “plummeted” / “pocketing”…
What is meant by “sweatshops in the fields”?
What are those “workers’ conditions of life”?
What forces them “into a cycle of poverty and death”?
What are the benefits of “fair trade coffee”? :
Who should benefit? To what extent should they benefit?
What are the implications for consumers? / for companies?
Who are the importers? What sorts of criteria must they meet?
What does Fair Trade mean for producers?
Follow-up work
Choose other products (chocolate / tea / bananas…) and compare to coffee.
Where are they produced?
What are the plights of producers and farmers?
How far could they benefit from fair trade?
Why is fair trade more and more popular in Britain?
Can the same be said of other Western countries?
IV- Invasion:
A tropical island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean (Sand and the sea)
Is it paradise? (or hell?)
Invasion by green soldiers and black boots
Mickey Mouse/Donald Duck, the commander in chief…. and Goofy.
What are they attacking with?
What equipment?
Marines
Landing barges
Troops
Man of war
Infantry
U.S. air force
Armed forces
What are they doing?
They are shelling
the island with tins of coke
bombing
landing
dropping TV sets
Look at the natives
– they look scared, frightened
– they are raising their arms
– they surrender to the enemy
– they have been defeated/they’ve lost the fight,
which means they have no alternative but to give in to modernity / globalization…
What’s the problem?/Are there any casualties?
One man seems to be lying dead.
Focus your attention on the logos.
Which ones do you recognize?
Classify them.
– Shell and Texaco (oil)
– Coke (all over the world) → globalization
– Microsoft (computers)
– Motorola (mobile phones)
– Mc Donald’s (junk food) → golden arches
– Nike (shoes, clothes)
What are they afraid of?
– Globalization
– Loss of identity/roots
They are made to/compelled to adopt those new technologies.
TV sets are thrown to the people as if they were ready to explode like grenades.
Coke cans are like dynamites.
What does the cartoonist want to expose or denounce?
Globalization
The people whatever their culture/their way of living have no alternative but adopt
certain patterns of western civilization or the American way of life → consumerism
How far is it a satire of western values?.
Green, a symbol of hope has been turned into a nightmarish colour.
The red of coke, Texaco, McDonald’s is a symbol of danger, blood, death (death of the
islanders’ identity, way of life…)
The military are dressed the same / all identical whereas the natives are different (women,
men, children). They have different T shirts.
All people wearing uniforms must be alike.
Mickey Mouse must be wearing a mask.
V- Cartoon: “See what a godsend globalisation is for these people.”
(cf “freetrade cartoon)
A slum/shack made of bits and pieces, billboards.
What do you recognize?
- the American flag;
- Sony (TV/Hifi equipment)
- GMC (cars: General Motor Corporation)
- Canon (cameras)
- Gap (retailers)
- Nike (retailers)
- Shell (dustbin)
- Adidas
- Mickey
Do those products make the local people any wealthier / happier?
Where does the scene take place?
- a country in the Southern hemisphere;
- a tropical place (palm-tree cf. Invasion”)
What can be said about the people,
Poor/destitute, bare-footed.
Two visitors:
One gentleman is fat, arrogant, cynical, carrying an attaché-case; the other one
walking with him is smiling.
Helping poor countries to survive
Pretending to help
They despise those people
imply that people should be grateful to globalization.
They believe these people should be helped.
The boy seems to resent them/to resent the situation. (He is glaring at them /
frowning…) bears them a grudge.
These billboards only help to cover the badly damaged roof.
VI- Evaluation
- The farmers of Piura in Peru (cf document from Oxfam web site)
What difficulties did they have to face in the 1990s and what solutions could be brought
about by fair trade?
- How far does this cartoon reveal the urgency of the world’s free trade problems?
www.faireconomy.org
www.faireconomy.org
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Martin Luther King once said: “In the morning we drink coffee provided for us by a
South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African. Before we leave for
our jobs we are already indebted to more than half the world.”
What does this remark reveal about the role the Third World or emerging countries
play in our lives?
What should be done to reduce the gap with the richer countries and alleviate the
plight of millions of farmers and producers all over the world?