Yes, man

We watched a film on the weekend that has not much to do with the protection of the environment but it certainly deals with the state that our world is in today. It's called The Yes Men - Changing the world one prank at a time. Those men are awesome. They pretend to be who they are not and take off to represent the World Trade Organisation at conferences, talking about all kinds of issues in an outrageous way.  Believe it or not most often the listeners just swallowed the nonsense without asking questions and thinking they might be fooled! The Yes-men even declared the closure of the WTO because the organisation realised that it causes more harm than good in the world. I wished the WTO had actually said that.
So my favourite part was the speech about slavery which has been abolished a long time ago, right?! It has not. They give the speech in Finland so they list what it costs to have a slave/ worker in Finland: $250 for rent, $50 for clothing, $150 for food etc. (numbers not exactly as in film) per month. But if instead of bringing the slave to Finland you can leave him in its own country such as Gabon. Then that slave does not have to adapt to the new environment, can live off the same amount of money for possibly a year and will be happier because he's home. Now, you just need a medium to supervise your slaves on that distance production site and it's all good. They had a rather pervert tool to do so but we'll ignore this for now. What they told us is that globalisation only facilitated modern slavery by allowing companies from rich countries to move their production into cheap labour countries. Obviously, that goes along with often worse working conditions than would be accepted in the very own country of origin of those companies. Otherwise we would not need Fair Trade labels! That's a recent article in the Epoch Times. Which labels can you trust? In Canada there's no legislation on fair trade products, anybody could really call their products fair trade or ethical without that meaning anything. But there is Trans Fair Canada http://transfair.ca/  and the World Fair Trade Organisation http://www.wfto.com/ that you can trust. Otherwise, the article suggest to launch your own investigation - good luck.