Debating was again the winner
On Tuesday morning I received, as part of another conversation, an e-mail from Mr M-B saying “think about why you think fairtrade is a bad thing”. Later on that day I was furnished with the reason for this: our entry into the Mace debating competition, a formal, rigorous competition in which the final prize is a mace, was falling apart. Out of three people involved two had pulled out, leaving a blank space in the team. I was asked to step in with forty-eight hours notice and so tonight the battle commenced. And again the real intellectual atmosphere was what I took away most, the whole idea of meeting to competitively discuss issues that are so important. Additionally, working with the ’squad’ rather than the team the night before preparing at school and on the journey, the the teachers: I don’t get the intellectual atmosphere at home where debate is boring and unimportant. Our motion was ‘[t]his house believes we should all buy faritrade [sic] products where we can’ which was a facinating topic to oppose – I learnt an awful lot about fair trade and am now sitting on the fence very much if it is a good idea or not.
For this debate I was working with Conor, someone who I have not really worked with before but am glad I did – we seem to do well together. Conor won a public speaking competition recently and really can deliver the information. The big differnece that we had to cope with for this competition was interruptions during speeches in the form of points of information which is something we have not really had the chance to practice for, meaning that we probably didn’t handle these as well as we should have done. Really though this style of debate is so much better than the others we have encountered. The cut and thrust of real debate are there and this is not experienced in other settings. The debate is interactive and real. After watching the first debate on compulsory national service it was our turn, and we were stepping into a strange situation. We had little preparation due to being informed late of the details and we had been put off a little by the exceptional work of the home school in the first debate. But it was pointed out by our teachers that once we got into the style things were very fluid and debating did become theatre. Rebuttal is vitally important: I turned the proposition’s drop in a bucket argument on its head which I was quite pleased with.
We split our opposition into two areas: Conor took the economic issues around why fair trade is not a good thing, and I attacked the moral and human aspects, and then proposed a solution. We uncovered a lot of information and analysis. Firstly, Conor explained how fair trade does not address the reason that third world producers are paid so low for their produce and that is a saturated market – fair trade encourages more production and thus makes the situation a lot worse (worse not just not helping was a fundamental point of our side). He also explained how fair trade suffers from subsidy and import restrictions in first world countries and this led on to the proposition that cutting out the middleman of sending cocoa beans to the first world to be made into chocolate bars to be sold back to the third world would really help the situation in developing countries. I went on to talk about branding and how there is a real psychological element to the debate: fair trade is a fashionable brand at the moment and there is always the concern of complacency. We used the analogy of a sticking plaster for a much larger wound. The next point was the patronising of the African farmers that occurs. I used the illustration of a business meeting praising the African coffee and how this patronises those who have produced it: the pride in their produce is lost. So the solution came about from this argument. Take the extra fifty pence spend on fair trade and put this into developing the infrastructure in the developing countries to produce their own goods from the raw materials in order to allow them to compete. Remove this feudal situation between the first and third worlds where the subservant serfs are producing our raw materials, and if we must work within this capitalist system then we must allow the third world countries to compete rather than be below us if they are to lift themselves out of poverty.
After the debate the judges retired to consider the winning team to go through to the next round and a runner up in case illness or other misfortune should stop the winners attending. Firstly they did the most valuable part of the evening for the longer term: feedback on each individual debater and combined team. This information is absolutely invaluable in improving as the judges can compare teams and bring in their experience. According to the judges I have a voice that must be listened to without any shouting and I used my facial expressions well to emote my points. They particularly liked my point on why dependence on fair trade is particularly dangerous when I said that instant coffee could become instant poverty given an economic slump. We had a strong and coherent argument between us and Conor was praised for his solidity of economic research. Then the judgement came, and I was actually not too concerned for we had had a good time and had improved our skills. And then it came: we won – apparently the choice of winner for the judges was easy, and the runner up took more thought. On to the next round!
Well done Comrade. I forgot, OK.