Sucke(red)?

This is a follow-up on a post I made about U2's Bono a few days ago. As I'm wont to do, occasionally I check my bookmarked sites. Today, while looking at the webpages of my former parish in London, St James's/Piccadilly, I cheked out a link to Pressureworks, and found this this about Product (RED). I'm sure you've seen the adverts for this trendy fashion line. The NYT ran a series of full page ads of celebrities promoting the cause a few months back. (I've got a photo of ever-so-sexy US speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno on my fridge.) But did you know.... if you

[s]imply buy a product from the RED range – a T-shirt, or a pair of shoes – [...] a percentage of the profit will go to The Global Fund, established in 2002 to channel money from various sources to AIDS programmes. Except we can’t know exactly what percentage, because the companies involved are so busy marketing themselves as saviours of the world that they’ve forgotten to give us the figure (the exceptions being Gap: 50%, from one line of products, and Amex: 1%). [...]

RED is not radically different from any of the other private sector initiatives that surround us. These days a company only has to stick an ‘ethical’ sticker on one of their products to be allowed to continue to make vast profits at the expense of the poor.

Corporations spend millions promoting the tiniest gesture, not because they care, but because it’s good for business and it keeps the regulators off their backs. So Caterpillar can continue to supply the Israeli army with bulldozers to carry out violations of international law, as long as they donate a few thousand to an educational project.

And where do these products come from?

Converse, one of the RED partners, has been owned by Nike since 2004. The latest research from Labour Behind the Label shows that although Nike have improved since the peak of their child labour infamy, up to one half of Nike’s factories currently pay wages below the legal minimum and most have been found to expect a working week in excess of 60 hours. It also shows that Nike has stopped placing orders with several factories in which trade unions had been established.

As a mobile phone company, Motorola depends on coltan, a rare mineral used to make phones. Much of it is mined by militia in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to fund the prolonged civil war that has claimed millions of lives. Of course, Motorola are keen to dissociate themselves from this, stating that they 'regularly require all of our suppliers to verify in writing that materials sold to Motorola do not contain tantalum derived from illegally mined Congolese coltan.'

The problem is, it’s extremely difficult to know exactly where this stuff has come from: like Chinese whispers, the longer the supply chain the more sketchy the details become. And business is business – maximising profits means using the cheapest materials available.

The fundamental problem -

Like the roots of war, the roots of disease are in poverty. The reason HIV/AIDS is such a massive problem in Africa is because people are poor. RED has at least got this bit right.

But, being the private sector, it fails to ask why they are poor. Or rather, it knows very well why they are poor, but would rather not draw attention to it thank you very much.

When an unregulated free market is allowed to rule the world’s economy, corporations can – and need to – keep the global South in poverty, and no amount of special T-shirts will change that.