"Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father; prepare to die"

- Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) "The Princess Bride"

Last weekend, we went to a convergence with Inigo Montoya. This was not a convergence about scaling the Cliffs of Insanity or fighting off ROUSs, apparently Inigo is no longer interested in such things. Rather, Señor Montoya is very concerned about the issue of Fair Trade.

Admittedly, this is a bit of a stretch. Inigo Montoya’s counterpart, actor Mandy Patinkin, was present at the United Students for Fair Trade International Convergence this past weekend in Chicago that his son helped to organize.

We, members of Macalester Students for Fair Trade (MSFT) left the convergence with different experiences based largely upon which workshops we attended. Some of us felt that the convergence integrated anti-racism and anti-oppression, as well as focusing more on domestic Fair Trade than the past year’s convergence, but the movement still has a way to go. Furthermore, there has been a focus on consumption as an avenue for Fair Trade activism–that is, emphasizing buying and gaining access to Fair Trade products as a means of social change. This way of supporting Fair Trade, while important, plays within the boundaries of capitalism and should not be the only focus of our activism.

At the same time, based on feedback from last year’s convergence, USFT opened up dialogues about domestic Fair Trade, anti-oppression and direct-action tactics. We view this as an important step in critical self-reflection within the movement. A dialogue has also begun at Macalester about how we wish to view the environmental movement and environmentalism. Traditionally, environmentalism has been viewed as an exclusive movement, and to an extent traditional environmentalists have held a privileged middle-class white male view of the natural world. This is visible through the National parks System and other projects that force indigenous and local peoples off their land in order to preserve nature. Activists at Macalester have been working to redefine environmentalism as a movement that takes into consideration all views and opinions and shows how humanitarianism and environmentalism are inextricably intertwined. We believe that Fair Trade also needs to be redefined if we want it to remain a positive system for everyone involved.

We departed the convergence with a new definition for Fair Trade, and we are hopeful that the process of redefining will be carried on throughout the movement. Rather than seeing ourselves only as participants on the consumer end of this trade and becoming "advocates" or "charity workers" we need to becoming internally involved in revitalizing the current economic system and simultaneously creating and promoting alternative economic relationships. Students involved in this movement must include the domestic market and critically look at the elitism of a capitalist-based approach in order to ensure the movement’s longevity and sustainability. Furthermore, we must make sure that our action are being solicited by the people who are producing consumer goods, and that we are actually addressing the requests of the people with which we are involved as opposed to imposing our own theories of development and sustainability.

What do we bring back from this experience? Because both environmental and labor/human rights are fundamental to the Fair Trade movement, without prioritizing one over the other, it offers important lessons about the connections between these two issues. Fair Trade integrates many of the issues that are addressed by various student organizations here at Macalester. We at MSFT would like to work with these organizations to accomplish fairer trade both here, domestically, as well as abroad.

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Read about United Students for Fair Trade in the March 2004 issue of Fair Grounds.

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