Flowers

As it's Mother's Day on Sunday, thought I'd look for some flowers to send. So I googled Fairtrade Flowers as I figured I may as well do the right thing while I'm at it. What did I get? Virtually nothing! Tesco & Sainsbury's did some Fairtrade roses, but that was about it. What was interesting was an interesting article "Why I won't be giving my mother Fairtrade flowers" by Felicity Lawrence for the Guardian. In it, she argues that the additional cost burden of buying fairtrade flowers falls on the consumer rather than the supermarket and that encourages the supermarkets to increase keep their margins high rather than genuinely supporting the fairtrade idea. Felicity Lawrence certainly knows her stuff when it comes to the power of supermarkets. Her book "Not on the Label" exposes a whole range of underhand tactics employed by supermarkets in general to squeeze the most out of the products they sell. As the fairtrade movement moves into the mainstream, she suggests, they will be forced to deal with supermarkets in a Faustian pact for the greater good and that that may damage the ideals by forcing them to sign up to the supermarkets' production methods.

So a simple task (buying flowers) took over an hour as I was sidetracked into the fairtrade debate. It made for fascinating reading and I still can't decide whether fairtrade is "better", whatever the downside or whether there's an active choice to be made on each product's merits.

So, what did I do? Well, in the end, I figured roses, fairtrade or otherwise, wasn't quite the thing I was looking for. In the end, M&S's "spring bouquet" hit the spot, so that's what's gonna arrive on the maternal doormat this weekend.