How Ethical Gifts Can Change the World

It seems like hardly a week goes by without that we hear something, on radio, television, or in the papers, about how this could change the world; or how that should change the world; or about why the thing that was supposed to change the world last week is actually evil and should be banned. Well, there’s a kind of counterculture movement occurring in, of all things, the gift trade, which might actually make the grade for real. Ethical gifts, it’s called – and it could just make a difference. A real one.

How? Ethical trade has previously been the province of a very small market, a kind of alternative pound. It’s made the mainstream, though, in the last year or so – a time frame that coincides it quite nicely with a general realisation that corporations are not very nice and that all that money, so often flippantly vilified by consumers all over the country as lining the pockets of fat cat merchants, really is damaging the lives of millions. Consumers have started to translate the ease and availability of corporate products into the financial misery they’re seeing daily, as people who can’t afford to keep up their business fight in a crippled economy go belly up. Ethical gifts, which are really the first mainstream evidence of an anti corporate trend that has long been running through the more affluent portion of the British consumer market, are starting to make themselves known across the scale as people turn their backs on the kinds of companies that they feel have put farmers out of business, or destroyed the local character of an area by replacing all the little shops with a big, white, fluorescently lit food hall.  

Are gifts really able to change all that? Not as such – but they can surely make a dent. Ethical gifts are broadly defined as any product the money from which is parcelled out fairly to the people involved in its making. That means the women who weave the silk in beautiful ethnic scarves being given decent working conditions and a proper salary. That means that the ethical presents market, which has become hugely fashionable because it won’t act like the big companies we’re all so fed up with, is forcing those same big companies to change the way they act, too.

It’s all very well for a hyper global corporation to produce good handbags, for example – but, now that the popularity of ethical gifts has outlined the less than moral conditions in which those handbags are generated, one is finding that other companies are popping up who manage to make the same quality handbags without stealing someone’s livelihood. Result – any consumer with a conscience (and ethical trade has made having a conscience superbly fashionable) starts buying from the morally comfortable supplier of handbags instead.

It’s not a dramatic change, but it is a dent. And it’s a dent that would never have been made unless the ethical gifts market had become as popular as it is. Next time a person buys a present for someone, they’d do well to think about where it came from. If we all did that, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are.