There is a rule of thumb on the subject of “conscious consumption”: someone always pays the difference. This is also known to most buyers. Anyone who dresses up at a clothing discounter promotes low-wage work in third-world countries. Anyone who buys cheap meat should feel responsible for factory farming. And anyone who reaches for one of the many, many products in the supermarket that contain palm oil supports slash-and-burn agriculture and animal and human suffering in Indonesia and Malaysia.
Even as a conscious consumer, you can’t always think of everything, and even if you do: the problems are usually more complex than they could be solved with a purchase decision. The workers in Bangladesh want namely sewing T-shirts together, the alternative would be worse. Farmers on Borneo also prefer to grow palm oil palms rather than sugar cane or rubber, which would be the agricultural alternative – and ecologically more questionable. The result of such considerations: Those who shop consciously often get a bad conscience for free.
Roughly speaking, the very funny and therefore highly recommended Netflix series “The Good Place” is about people getting plus points for every good deed and deducting them for every bad deed. The points decide whether you go to the “good place” after death – or to hell. During the course of the series, warning: Spoilers!, a demon realizes that no human has made it to the “Good Place” for a very long time, although most of them want it very badly. And he finds out why: With every purchase decision, even if it’s just one tomato, they collect so many negative points at the same time that it’s become impossible to keep his account in the black. The world has become too complex, but good intentions don’t count. What counts is the effect.
However, good intentions are what consumers have been conditioned to in recent years. Spend pennies more on free-range eggs, separate garbage, ride more bikes so Putin stops making money from fuel. This is all decent, meaningful and important as a symbol, but at the same time moral problems are shifted to private households. They don’t really belong there. And you don’t go to paradise for that.
After all, elections are held to put people into positions of authority, who then employ advisory staffs in ministries with which they can deal with such highly complex issues. These people are called politicians, and for most of the past few years they have been so intent on keeping the so-called economy running that they tended to turn the lights on green when it came to doing business. Even if the profits then mostly stayed with those who did the business – above all with the processing food and cosmetics companies. There have always been attempts to regulate the palm oil business, but these ended in relatively tame certificates.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo has now issued an export ban on palm oil because the substance of which his country produces the most worldwide has become too expensive there. This can be interpreted as an over-excited measure by a politician who pays too much attention to his poll numbers. But it also offers an opportunity to think about why consumers in German supermarkets actually have to look around for products to find out whether they contain palm oil, and why it doesn’t say which country it comes from.
And why is it not ensured that countries that cultivate sustainably receive a better certificate than those in which land grabbing and slash and burn are common. There are big differences, and they have been known for a long time. The Greens, who currently have much more complex issues to resolve, have found so many voters, among other things, because they promised competence in these issues. Consumers can only control, but not take responsibility.