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British journalist Fred Pearce’s book, Confessions of an Eco Sinner: Travels to Find Where my Stuff Comes From took him all over the world in a journey to trace the source of the things he uses. He logged over 18,000 miles to write a book he thought would be about the environment, but led him to think about the human cost of consumerism instead, Pearce tells Labonita Ghosh

How did Confessions... come about?
There were two intention. As somebody who thinks about being an ethical consumer, I wondered where my things came from, and whether they were doing any environmental or social damage. I thought other people might have similar dilemmas. In the old days, you knew where the things you used came from. But in a globalised world, we often don’t because everything comes from far away.

The other thing was to try and find an interesting way to get readers to think about social and environmental issues. I wanted to provide a road map for becoming a more ethical consumer. Not by becoming didactic and telling people what to do, but by providing a way for them to think about things themselves. There is some environmental fascism going around, but I don’t believe that’s the way to go.

What did you find out about the human cost involved?
I traced the cocoa in my Mars bar to the Cameroons; my computer mouse to a single factory in China that makes about two-thirds of the world’s computer mouses; the gold in my wedding ring to a mine in South Africa, and the prawns on my plate to a farm in the mangrove swamps of Bangladesh. Some were good news stories, but many were not.

For instance, tracking my e-waste, I discovered a lot of it makes its way into India. It lands in ships in Mumbai and is then trucked all over, where it is taken apart and sold part by part, or destroyed. In a Delhi suburb I found young Bihari boys boiling down computer circuit boards by dunking them in large drums of acid. It was quite hazardous.
They told me they were trying to extract the copper to sell it to shops down the road.

One of the more destructive incursions has been of European trawlers in Mauritania, on the cost of West Africa, which has a huge natural fishery. A lot of the squid, shark, swordfish, grouper and other kinds of fish and crustaceans that Europeans eat, comes from here. After destroying their own fisheries, Europeans trawlers buy licenses from the Mauritanian government and are forcinglocal fishing out of business.

Which discovery was the most shocking?
The most unlikely story — and the worst degradation — happened in Uzbekistan. I landed in Gujarat in an attempt to trace the cotton in my clothes and found that textile units and cooperatives here are actually doing quite well, supplying to big stores like Marks & Spencer in London. But I also discovered that the Indian companies were further off-shoring to sweatshops in Dhaka. The cotton that comes to Dhaka and India as fabric is grown in Uzbekistan and has certainly helped to dry out the Aral Sea. The plantations around it (including the cotton ones) have made it shrink in just 40 years. And salt storms from the seabed cause cancer, anaemia among the women and led to kids becoming deformed. The story tied up my environmental enquiries about the destruction of the Aral Sea.

You’ve spoken about “the race to the bottom”. What is it?
Many Indian textile manufacturers are fast becoming mechanised, and the processing of cotton, down to the production of fabric, is becoming automated. Indians are great at running large manufacturing plants. But labour-intensive work, like sewing, cutting and finishing, is off-shored to Bangaldesh, Nepal, Cambodia and Vietnam, where labour ischeaper than in India. For some industries, the race to the bottom, economically, is heading out of India. This is inevitable. As India becomes more of a consumer society, and its citizens have better standards of living and improved wages, it will turn to other countries for cheap labour.

Doesn’t this cost India?
You could say that, but it also gains because more of the population is getting paid better. The race to the bottom is a pernicious thing. The women workers at a Dhaka sweatshop told me not to boycott the goods they made, or they would be out of jobs.

Where do you stand in the environment versus social cost debate?
I am practical about both. I am aware there are contradictions. That being ethical in one sense can appear unethical in another. I feel it will be easier to solve the environmental problems than social ones like poverty and inequality. Globalisation seems to be creating more inequalities, and I don’t know the way back from there.