Wednesday, May 14, 2008

UN Cafetaria Campaign

While the youth themselves will focus their efforts on ensuring Fair Trade products in all UN eateries, as they see this as the most pressing issue in regards helping developing countries, the campaign will be collecting comments from us all about what we would like to see change. And so, to kick it off, the letter asking for campaigning permission:

Dear Ms. De Leon (responsible of the UN-catering committee),

We are the children and youth major group attending this year’s CSD on B1 floor. We talked to Rudy Lasher and Ron Beck of the catering service Aramark as we are planning to carry out a campaign to improve the sustainability of the UN-cafeterias (concerning fair trade, organic food, etc.). Our conversation was very fruitful and encouraging.

For the last one and a half weeks, all delegates and stakeholders to the Commission on Sustainable Development have been talking about the crucial theme of sustainability. We firmly believe that this discourse should be reflected by the way the UN provides food within their own buildings. Therefore, we would like to emphasize the promotion of fair trade in the cafeterias. The principles of fair trade exclude violations towards labourers and child labour, while ensuring humane working conditions. Unless a product shows an official fair trade label, the consumer cannot be sure that those fundamental conditions are met. Such a situation should be regarded as unacceptable within the United Nations. Especially within the context of the ongoing CSD, it is important to stress the link between fair trade and sustainable development as it enables local communities to prosper and become self-reliant.

As the representatives of the youth of the world, we are very excited about taking part in the UN-process. Through our participation in CSD, we directly experienced that the world community is concerned about the pressing problems facing our planet. Therefore, we were all the more disappointed to see that even within this honourable organization, words are not followed by actions on a day to day basis.

For example, we noticed that only one brand of fair trade coffee is sold at the World Café (with an obscure label), and no fair trade products at all in the Vienna Café. Fair trade coffee is easily available and sold in large varieties in many places. ONLY fair trade coffee should be sold in the UN buildings. Other fair trade products that are easily available are bananas, lentils, rice, beans, juice, tea, etc.

This fact is actually not the fault of the consumers. Many might even assume that the food they have here, of all places, meets ethical standards. In fact, all the CSD-participants with whom we spoke shared our opinion and encouraged us to carry out an action to raise awareness.

In our conversation with Aramark, it became clear that the current situation does not result from their bad will; the UN seemingly has not instructed the company to meet such standards. Mr Lasher informed us that they already adapted to special demands coming from the UN, in order to fit the delegates’ “gourmet” requests. Given the experience and expertise of Aramark, we do not doubt their capabilities to equally suit legitimate sustainability requests.

However, we understand their business-related constrains. That’s why we want to conduct a campaign to find out if the customers of the cafeteria would rather have fair trade food, even if this implies a small increase in prices. We think the best way to do this is by encouraging people to have their voices heard via comment-cards provided by Aramark. The collected remarks would give the UN-branch of Aramark a concrete basis to legitimise their change in demand towards their headquarters and suppliers.

For this reason, we request you to give us the permission to engage in a dialogue with people in the corridors.

We conveyed with Mr Lasher to meet on Thursday after 2 o’clock to evaluate the results of the campaign. We would like to invite you to join our meeting in order to develop concrete commitments, which we can communicate to the youth caucus on Friday.

Yours sincerely,

The Youth Caucus