James5

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In a similar veign to my earlier post on Coca-Cola in India, earlier this year the University of Michigan made some good moves by banning the sale of Coca-Cola products pending an investigation into their labour practices in Columbia and India by the ILO(more info here). While since then things haven’t been moving quite as well as would be liked, it is heartening to see a big uni care about corporate social responsibility and ethical consumption.

Being involved with Hooked: Students for Trade Justice at Melbourne Uni for a number of years now, I’ve been in a number of conversations with cafes, uni officials and student rep officials, and heard reports from different uni’s from around Victoria/Australia. It’s taken about 3 years for Melbourne Uni to really make some ground in getting about half our cafes to just have Fair Trade options, it seems a world away from the actual university body banning the sale of unethical options like Michigan did. I guess it all depends on the context you are in as well, I think Michigan soft drink must be centrally controlled/influenced by the university whereas as most cafes and stuff at Melbourne are independent and barely influencable (?) by the university or student union policy.

So at Melbourne we’ve focused on creating demand by educating the students about what they are buying. We’ve had to slowly start a grass roots sort of campaign for fair trade, and it seems to be working. Whereas 3 years ago not many people would even know what fair trade or no sweat is, now I think if you are in the know at all at Melbourne you know what fair trade - and perhaps even would prefer buying if you knew where/how to get it. Our next step is to make people realise how easy it is to get on campus - they just need to ask!

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