These days we hear a lot about fair trade – how it’s better for the environment and better for farmers. Fair trade helps producers in poorer countries to make a fair wage for their work, which is why many of us are happy to pay a little bit extra for products with the fair trade mark.
Fair trade usually means coffee, chocolate, bananas, sugar – all those things produced in tropical countries that we can’t grow in Ireland. It is not usually a phrase that springs to mind when we think of drug trafficking, but if we are concerned enough about coffee farmers to buy fair trade coffee, we should think about coca and poppy farmers in the same way.
In parts of South America, where most cocaine is produced, farmers have been forced by criminal drugs gangs to farm coca instead of food crops. Like the mafia idea of ‘protection’, they are expected to produce a certain amount of coca or face the destruction and murder of their property and families. Children as young as four are involved in the production and transport of coca and cocaine. Families are trapped in cycles of drug production and debt.
Many people in Ireland use cocaine casually – at weekends it’s just part of a night out. I wonder if they give as much thought to what their drug use does to the people who produce the cocaine as they do to the farmers who produce their daily cup of coffee.
The drugs market exists on supply and demand – what part do you play in sustaining it?
