Before You Buy

And last but by no means least, consider the positive impact you can have on the world by buying products that support the people, environments and economies that produced them. All around the world groups of men and women are banding together to do things in ways that raise them out of poverty, provide them access to resources and the ability to fight for their own causes, clean up environments and send kids back to school. Today this is a small but growing movement. If we all get behind it by buying the good they produce in favour of other products, then it will grow like a snowball becoming an avalanche.

By being careful about what we buy we can lend or withdraw our support from political structures in other countries and at home. Structures that fuel wars or take land away from people in favour of corporate land ownership or, conversely, support family businesses and encourage high wages.

This argument is as twisted and convoluted as the plot of any murder mystery, but the essentials of it go like this. We desire certain things, like silks from Thailand for example, so we sustain political systems (through voting) that support those desires by providing things like tax breaks for import companies, or regulatory structures that privilege Canadian companies in partnerships overseas. Over time, if we continue to have a desire for Thai silk, our political structures create stronger supports for our desires by making it easier and easier for companies to import silk. In this way, taking care of what we buy has a direct impact on our political system. If, on the other hand, we never want to see Thai silk again, or, to take a more resonant example, British beef, our political systems will put up barriers to make it more and more difficult to import British beef.

The trade systems we use today have decreased our diversity of choice. While it is true that our shops are full to bursting with items, over the past 60 or so years, our demands for ever more, ever cheaper products have been a contributing factor in a staggering loss of agricultural biodiversity. Take wheat farming for example. There are hundreds of wheat strains in the world, but these are only a fraction of what once grew, and only fraction of these are available commercially. According to the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), this has “dramatically reduced the diversity of plants available for research and development. This trend, and the increasing industrialization of agriculture, are key factors in what is known as ‘genetic erosion.’”  In other words, because we focus all our research energy and money on a small number of wheat varieties, we are losing biodiversity. As the climate changes and arable land becomes more scarce, only those varieties that we can conduct research on will survive the transitions to new growing environments.

Wheat is just one example of many plants that are being lost. The “heritage” varieties of tomatoes, potatoes, squash, pears, apples, plums, etc. that are sold at high prices through select catalogues are what used to grow naturally all around, but which are now being carefully cultivated in attempts not to lose them completely because they have been squeezed out of the mainstream market by hardier varieties that survive transportation more easily.