Churches are celebrating harvest festivals.
When I was a young curate in London in the late 1970s, I looked down on such things.
Never having lived in the country, I thought harvest festivals were quaint and irrelevant to modern life (the important thing was to be ‘relevant’).
It was silly to get city-dwellers singing ‘we plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land’, when we didn’t.
Since then I’ve grown up a bit.
From London I was appointed to a country parish with six farms.
I learnt something about life on the land, its risks, its rewards, its relentless hard work.
I learnt that a good harvest was something to be thankful for.
And I realised that the life of those who live in the country and those who live in the city are interdependent.
A good harvest is as important for the people of London or Liverpool as it is for the people of Lincolnshire and Leicestershire.
I began to see how much we owe our farmers, and how easy it is for the rest of us to take them for granted.
The pressures on the modern farmer are immense.
This year there have been not only floods to contend with, but the threat of animal disease – foot and mouth, bovine TB, avian flu and bluetongue.
But harvest festivals don’t stop there.
They remind us that not only are town and country interdependent, but this country and other countries are interdependent as well.
The global village is a global marketplace.
The food we buy or don’t buy, the prices we are prepared to pay or not to pay – this vitally affects the lives of people on the other side of the world.
That is why Fair Trade is important.
That is why it is important that Worcester is a Fair Trade City.
As the Fair Trade slogan puts it: ‘Your workplace can change the world’.