Made on Earth

Contents

1 How a Fleece Became the Star

2 Can Money Really Buy Everything?

3 Oil Tankers: The Whipping Boys of Globalisation

4 A General Strike in Chittagong: Bangladesh Hangs By a Thread

5 Tuk-tuk Races, Floods and Fleece: A Day in Bangladesh’s Textile Industry

6 A World of Floating Metal Boxes: A Container Ship Heading for Europe

7 From Surplus to Talisman: Something Unwanted Becomes a Lucky Charm

8 The Fishing Industry and People Trafficking: A Journey to West Africa

9 Some are Thirsty, Others are Not: A Showdown in Tenerife

10 How We Could Change the End of This Story Together

About the Author

Glossary

Further Information

1

How a Fleece Became the Star

It was
not
love at first sight, no way! Bright red fleeces are for young girls, or Liverpool FC fans. They are definitely
not
for tough journalists. When I first saw the fleece, hanging there in the department store, I immediately knew it wasn’t for me. I wanted a brown one, though a green one would have been okay, or even blue. But they only had my size in red.

It was late autumn, 2005, and I didn’t have the time to look in many shops. I was bogged down in the final phase of writing a book, and I hadn’t yet received an advance from my publisher, so I didn’t have the money to buy a decent jacket. Winter was approaching, and I was stuck in my office working on the manuscript for eight to ten hours a day. If I didn’t want to freeze to my chair, something had to be done.

Two shops and one special offer later, I was the new owner of a bright red fleece. I’d never have guessed that one day I’d write an entire book dedicated to this item of clothing. So how did it come about? Well, in 2007 my publishers wanted me to write a book about globalisation, and although I had had an idea for a long time, I didn’t have a main character. To keep them happy, I told them I would come up with a protagonist by Christmas. A character that would take us around the world at breakneck speed, through Asia, Europe and Africa, travelling on ships and sailing across oceans.

Without realising, the days had slipped past and it was already the 21st of December. I needed to come up with a character, and fast! The next day, I hosted an audition to find a star for my book. But the contestants weren’t singers or dancers. They were the kind of products that make our lives more convenient and interesting, for example: toasters, computers, MP3 players, vacuum cleaners, bread makers and televisions.

Products like these have done a lot of travelling. But how can we find out where they’ve been? Their first official destination is the country where they were made. This information can usually be found somewhere on the product, on a sticker, label or stamp. Take my toaster, for example. Where is it from? Hong Kong. My alarm clock? From China. Where did my computer come from? It says, ‘Assembled in Taiwan’. Many books written in English are made abroad. My atlas was printed in Slovenia. What about my kettle? This is an exception. It says, ‘Made in Germany’, which is pretty rare these days! So rare in fact, that the manufacturers have made a big deal about it. However, the country where a product was made is only one step in its life story. Each product’s journey starts with the sourcing of raw materials, and inevitably ends with the product being recycled or turned into landfill.

But for now, back to the audition. I had lined up a few interesting products and had already picked a favourite, my laptop. It had an American brand name on it, the processor was made in Germany, and the whole thing was assembled in Taiwan. It sounded like it had been on a very interesting journey. But I really wanted to tell the
whole
story of a product, from sourcing the raw materials to disposal and recycling. If I chose something made out of so many individual parts, I would have too many materials to trace. That would be difficult and time-consuming, and probably boring to read. I needed a different lead for my story. But what?

The next day I was sat in the living room in front of the television. Every year at Christmas, there are lots of news stories about people in need, from the homeless and people who are financially disadvantaged to refugees. One particular story was about African refugees trying to escape to the Canary Islands. Over 60 people were squeezed inside a tiny boat for ten days in the wind and the rain, without any drinking water. Dramatic footage had been recorded by a tourist on camera. The refugees lay on the beach together. There was a quick close-up of a boy wearing a bright red fleece. A red fleece! It was as if a gong had sounded in my head. Was that
my
bright red fleece? I was sure I had put that
exact
same fleece in a clothes-recycling bin where I live just a few months ago. The clothes from that bin, I had just found out, had been sent to West Africa to be sold.

Watching the TV, I thought I recognised a stain I had made on the left hand side of the fleece. Or was it the right? The footage was too poor to tell. I could barely concentrate for the rest of the day. Had that been
my
fleece? Could that have been the same item of clothing I had once owned?

“Do you really believe that it was yours?” asked my girlfriend.

“I’ve no idea,” I admitted.

“Those kinds of fleece body warmers are mass-produced.”

“Yes, of course,” I replied. “I don’t know whether it
really
was my fleece. I have no way to tell it apart from others except by the big stain on the front. Do you want me to pick it out of a line-up?”

“You don’t actually want to fly to Tenerife to visit a refugee camp to find a refugee and see if there is a stain on his fleece, do you?” she asked.

“I’m not that stupid. Anyway, I currently lack the necessary funds.”

“Thank goodness for that,” she replied. “Those people have barely escaped death and you’re looking for an old fleece!”

I didn’t
really
want to know whether that specific fleece the young refugee was wearing was mine. The fact that it
could
have been mine was more important. After seeing the young man in the red fleece on television, I didn’t need to think about what to use as the focus for my book any more. This was much better than a laptop or an alarm clock. The tale of my globe-trotting red fleece would be the perfect way to explain how everything is interconnected.

How did a young man in Africa end up wearing a red fleece that was recycled in Europe? Where was the fleece made? Where did the raw materials come from? Why do people from poorer countries leave their villages to try to get to richer countries? And why are some countries so poor and others so rich in the first place? The answer is . . . globalisation.

Examples of Globalisation

Seventy per cent of all cigarette lighters are produced in a single province in China called Wenzhou and then shipped around the world.

When people in America order a tuna fish pizza with extra cheese (or any pizza for that matter) from a local pizza company over the telephone, the order goes through a call centre in India and is then directed through the Internet to the local takeaway in the USA.

Crabs caught in the North Sea are frozen immediately. They then travel by truck through Europe and across the Mediterranean Sea to Morocco (North Africa). The crabs are then processed and brought
back
to Europe.

This may seem crazy to you, but this is how crab sellers in Europe, pizza companies in America and cigarette lighter sellers all over the world save a lot of money. On top of this, the minimum wage in less developed countries is not even a tenth of the minimum wage in industrialised (more developed) countries.

The term ‘globalisation’ comes from the word ‘globe’ – a spherical ball that represents planet Earth. In 1983, the American science professor Theodore Levitt tried to find a word to describe how all of the economic activity on the entire planet was connected. Never before had so many people exchanged so many things across the world. Not just objects but also ideas, fashion, music – and above all,
money
. No one was truly isolated from these exchanges, not even rural farmers in the most remote parts of Africa. What we choose to produce and sell has consequences for
everyone
on this planet. Industry is no longer contained within a town, a city or a country, but also spread across the whole globe. This is how ‘globalisation’ got its name.

24 December 2007

While everyone celebrated around the Christmas tree, I sat at my computer and opened a new document. I tried to remember everything I could about my fleece. The first thing that came to mind was its rich, bright red colour. It was made of a fluffy, warm material, as soft as a rabbit’s fur. However fleece fabric is not actually made from natural materials, such as cotton, silk or wool. Fleece fabric is actually made of artificial fibres made from polyethylene – a kind of plastic. And how do we make plastic? Out of petroleum. So where does the story of my fleece really begin? It begins with an order . . .

10 May 2005

The head office of a chain of German department stores is situated near a motorway on the outskirts of Gütersloh, Germany. While the spring sun shines outside, a storm rages in the meeting room. The ordering period for the next season’s stock is a stressful time for everyone who works there.

The head of purchasing, Mr Werner Wittkowski, and the new head of marketing, Ms Elfriede Unruh enter the meeting room. They are not getting on well. Mr Wittkowski doesn’t want to make any big changes to the purchasing plan, but Ms Unruh wants to shake things up. On the table in front of them is a range of seasonal clothing. There are winter coats made from various materials, heavy denim trousers, woollen knit and polyester jumpers, overcoats and sleeveless body warmers made of corduroy and fleece. There are also piles of clothing brochures advertising hundreds of other garments. Many of the clothing descriptions are written in broken English as most of them come from China and the Far East.

Chinese clothing manufacturers have been flooding European wholesalers and retailers with products that are cheaper than their competitors in Bulgaria, Bangladesh and Turkey for some time. At this particular chain of department stores, many orders for shoes, skiwear and tailored shirts have already been awarded to Chinese manufacturers based on the low prices of their products.