Occasionally as I stand at a cash till wondering, ‘Can I afford this?’, other disturbing questions intrude —

• ‘Can our planet afford this?’ — what pesticides in its production are now running through our rivers? Where will all the packaging go?
• ‘Can my brother afford this?’ — were those who produced it paid a fair wage and given safe working conditions?
• ‘Can Creation afford this?’ — were animals poisoned, tortured and maimed in its production?

While aid accounts for 5% of the Third World’s income, trade accounts for 80% and the UK’s top ten supermarkets make more money in a year than the world’s 35 poorest countries combined. Which, I suppose, means that shopping is a pretty powerful exercise, even on a student income. It is my faith that consumers can change the rules of this planet which is steadily being poisoned, while a fifth of its population live in absolute poverty and thousands of animals still suffer and die every year to test cosmetics.

When I mentioned to one of my lecturers the other day that I had been encouraging students to try fairly traded chocolate, he said “I’m afraid I’m not at all PC about that sort of thing”. I do not believe that this is an issue of political correctness. It is an issue of love and respect for the human beings, animals and planet to which we are intimately bound by the God who gave birth to us all. The God who feels the pain of chemicals dropped into a rabbit’s eyes, and the anguish of a mother who must send her children out to work to keep their family alive, denying them an education. We are bound up in that pain:

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us walk together.

Lilla Watson, Australian Aboriginal Leader

The food, the clothes, the gifts we choose to buy may seem insignificant items, but for a God who is in all places that cannot be the case. Few moments in our everyday life can be so closely woven to oppression or liberation across the globe as those in which we spend our money. Often it simply does not occur to us that there is a way to tread more gently upon the planet, to support our brothers and sisters by our choice of purchase. It is astonishing how many household items are to be found in charity shops if we but take the time to look (with double the value of re-using resources as well as helping charity). And I have only just realised that Oxfam helps the poor in Britain as well as abroad (eg in their cruelty free, vegetable based soaps and bath foam).

Ethical shopping can itself be a liberation from our tendency to rely on familiar high street stores: just to browse though And Albert, Fairer World, Oxfam Petergate, Shared Earth, upstairs at the Spurriergate Centre, or in Alligator feels rather like walking into a treasure house sometimes — a revelation of the beautiful, the unique, and the everyday in another context. Let us go beyond charity Christmas cards to a meaningful use of our consumer power, to a respectful sharing in Earth’s fruits, and a loving support of each other’s work.

Joanna Chamberlayne