Should our clothes be more like our veg box?

If you wished (and particularly if you have a vegetable box), you could find out which farm produced your meat or cheese, where your vegetables came from, who grew your fruit and how they all reached you.

You could even ring up the farmer and have a chat. You would be hard pressed to do the same with any item from your wardrobe.

You can buy organic, Fairtrade food in the supermarket, in your local corner shop, at motorway service stations, in farmer’s markets, from veg boxes; any coffee you pick up in Dunkin’ Donuts or at the Hilton will be Fairtrade, as is every banana on sale in Sainsburys and Waitrose, along with every chocolate chip in a Ben and Jerry’s chocolate chip ice cream.

But if you want the clothes on your back to be organic or Fairtrade you have to work a little harder. I estimate that the state of ethical clothing today is where food was 15 years ago.

In 1999 you could not buy a Fairtrade banana; now the majority of the population recognise the yin-yang-esque logo and know that buying Fairtrade means that more money will be paid to the farmer. In 1964 the first Fairtrade organisation and shop was created by Oxfam but it wasn’t until 1988, over twenty years later, that the first Fairtrade product was launched: coffee in the Netherlands.

I remember the rise of Fairtrade in the eighties: bitter coffee and dusty biscuits, chocolate clouded with a dull bloom, handed out at church fetes by sandal-wearing Christians or women in blue rinse perms in polyester floras.

How far we have come: Green and Blacks organic chocolate is now a multi-million pound business, their slickly branded bars in every supermarket and corner store; that high temple to gourmet food, Daylesford Organics, with its nectarine compote and Manuka honey cake, is a world away from the Traidcraft fêtes I attended as a child.

Thanks to a host of telegenic cooks we’ve become obsessed with food, scouring stores for pomegranate syrup and aged balsamic, coveting cranberries and sour cherries, drizzling and splashing extra virgin with wanton abandon.

As a result over 569 producer organisations representing 7 million people in 57 countries benefit from Fairtrade produce. Today global sales of organic food and drink exceed £23 billion and grew by £2.5 billion last year. Ninety per cent of UK households buy at least some organic products.

How does this compare to organic and Fairtrade cotton? The good news is that sales of ethical clothes are growing. The latest market report from the Soil Association reveals a significant rise in sales of organic cotton, which increased by 40% in 2008: total UK sales of organic clothing and textiles reached £100 million.

In an omnibus poll of over 1,000 people conducted by Market Tools in February 2009, 18.5% of respondents said they had bought organic clothing, bed linen or other products made from organic cotton in the past year. The Organic Exchange says the global organic cotton market was worth $3.2 billion in 2008, a 63% increase on the previous year.

It predicts that sales will top $4 billion by the end of 2009 – a further increase of 24%. Yet positive as this all sounds, in the UK, we buy £34 billion worth of clothes every year and the organic sector is only worth 0.1% of this. William Lana from Greenfibres predicts that we won’t even hit the 1% mark until over 2013.

Moreover it is currently almost impossible to find out where your clothes originally came from. A single pair of jeans can travel 40,000 miles round the planet and involved labour and materials in and from Tunisia, Italy, Germany, France, Northern Ireland, Pakistan, Turkey, Japan, Korea, Namibia, Benin, Australia and Hungary.

Similarly, your average T-shirt will have flown round the world once as it is being made. And along the way, no high street store can, at this point, confidently claim that child labour was not involved. I’m hoping that, long before 2024, buying organic and Fairtrade clothes will be as easy as shopping at the supermarket and as conventional as picking up a latte. Lee Holdstock, textile consultant for the Soil Association, is optimistic. He thinks fashion will catch up with ethical food within ten years:

Consumers are arguably more aware now and the general organic infrastructure (certifiers, traders, producers, retailers) is arguably more sophisticated.

Fingers crossed.

Sanjida’s latest novel is The Naked Name of Love, published by John Murray. For more from Sanjida, go to www.sanjida.co.uk