Byline: Marcela Sanchez
Forget the frustrations of free trade. Forget, at least for the moment, the lofty goal of linking producers and consumers in every corner of the Americas through hemisphere-wide negotiations.
Instead, just go shopping -- online. 'Tis the season of giving and a chance for all to explore the full positive potential of globalization from an often overlooked perspective.
Catholic Relief Services this week kicked off a campaign to encourage an estimated 65 million U.S. Roman Catholics to buy coffee sold at living-wage prices by small-farmer cooperatives, especially in Latin America. The coffee is available via the Internet through the Interfaith Coffee Program of Equal Exchange .
The Inter-American Development Bank is about to approve a half-million-dollar program to connect more than 100 Haitian artisans to the Web. Coveted Haitian crafts produced in the poorest and frailest nation in the hemisphere will be a click away for consumers worldwide, thanks to Maryland-based nonprofit PEOPLink.org .
Next week, Worldwatch Institute is scheduled to spotlight the potential of turning cocoa into a tool to help preserve Brazil's endangered rain forest. The vision: to connect chocolate lovers everywhere with producers who use shade-tolerant cocoa plants that can be grown under the rainforest canopy without destroying it further.
These are only three examples of the kind of hemispheric business transactions possible without the need for trade negotiators, high marketing costs or powerful middlemen. Consumers from the United States and elsewhere already have the choice to utilize the Internet to put their money directly in the hands of poor, small and remote producers.
You could call these e-commerce transactions the purest form of free trade. They are unimpeded by big-business pressures that mar today's free-trade talks.
The financial impact of e-commerce in the region is small right now and will remain so as long as small- and medium-size producers in Latin America and the Caribbean struggle to gain a foothold on the Web. Yet Internet usage is surging in the region, and with it will come technical expertise and Web savvy.
The potential only broadens as the digital divide narrows. Three years ago, artisans in civil-war-torn Nepal got together and, using the catalog-generating tool created by PEOPLink, began to offer their products online. Since then, sales have more than tripled, from $125,000 a year to $400,000.
E-commerce analysts at Jupiter Research estimate that online consumer spending in the United States alone will increase to $17 billion during this holiday season, up 21 percent from just a year ago. And appropriately, U.S. consumers seem to be buying more from foreign sellers. At least one of every three users of online auction giant eBay is outside the United States.
Of course, the sort of transactions that aid small businesses are dwarfed by the multibillion-dollar global market, but they can make the difference between keeping family businesses alive and seeing workers migrate with the most powerful economic forces.
An economy in which millions have no hand in their financial future is precisely the one that many fear. In the case of the coffee industry, it was free trade that flooded the market with cheaper, lower-quality coffee, mostly from Vietnam and closed thousands of farms in Latin America. Despite new efforts to respond to the crisis, still today only 5 percent to 10 percent of the product is sold at "fair trade" prices, according to Equal Exchange.
Anyone who has purchased something online, or even considered it, knows that one of the greatest hurdles facing e-commerce is knowing what and whom to trust. Into that gap are now stepping both for-profit businesses business like eBay and nonprofit organizations like PEOPLink to serve as honest brokers, at least initially.
Interestingly it is the same issue of trust that is making so many people skeptical of free trade today. Thrown into a global economy not of their making, they are told to trust the policymakers who pledge that free-market reforms will reduce inequalities. The harvest -- such as for coffee producers -- has been bitter for many and has not warranted trust. But those skeptics might begin to believe in free market if the tools of e-commerce become theirs to use.
We shop in a world economy whether we like or not. The choice some consumers are making -- and hopefully more make in the future -- is to purchase products that more directly benefit those currently left behind.
Happy shopping!
Marcela Sanchez's e-mail address is desdewash@washpost.com.
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