Inside Fairtrade

Fairtrade at London Fashion Week by Martine Parry

2011-02-23T09:55:00.000Z

Stunning Fairtrade cotton designer scarves made their debut at the London Fashion Week on Saturday.

Known as the Fairtrade Collective and on sale at Asos from Monday, the scarves were beautifully displayed at the packed Fairtrade Foundation stand at the British Fashion Council’s ethical showcase, Estethica.

Designers such as Ada Zanditon, Athena Procopiou, Carolyn Massey, London Undercover, Tim Soar, Way Perry and Hussein Chalayan’s gang from Puma all popped along to take part in our photocall.

Fairtrade Collective really taps into the next generation of style leaders and fashion followers with its trend-inspired designs.

Jamie from London Undercover and Tim Soar photo: Louis Hull

Using digital print techniques, a combination of established and new generation of talent have created distinct, high-fashion scarves.

So many people tried them on and said they wanted one, it was hard to keep track! Working with fashion photographer Zak Hussein, we snapped the stars wearing Fairtrade Collective items.

The party was packed, due in no small part to the high calibre of designers contributing to Estethica.

Our designer scarves really set the tone for that elusive question, what’s the accessory of the season? Me thinks Fairtrade fashion is definitely one to watch!

Say I do to Fairtrade and Fairmined gold by Gemma Cartwright

2011-02-14T15:04:00.000Z

This Sunday was Juana and Manuel’s rest day, however they took in all the major sights of London, including Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Sqaure and even saw the celebs arriving to the BAFTAs. Sadly they didn’t manage to see Livia Firth who will be wearing a piece of Fairtrade and Fairmined gold jewellery to the Oscars.

Juana was over the moon to see the Daily Mail article in today’s edition which features the details of a visit to Cotapata and mines in Peru just before Christmas. Juana and Manuel are overwhelmed that people are so interested in the stories of miners. The campaigners we met over the past few days explained to us all how unknown but fascinating the lives of artisanal miners are to them and supporters of other Fairtrade products. Later on Monday Juana and Manuel visited the London Bullion Market Association where the price of gold is set internationally twice daily and then toured Goldsmith’s Hall before being interviewed by Croatian documentary makers.

Spending time in Wales with local campaigners, Juana and Manuel has really reminded me what makes the Fairtrade movement great – that we are a movement and as Manuel says a family of people who are working together in each of our own ways to bring positive change to UK consumer habits and the lives of producers and miners in developing countries. For me this has been a massively busy and emotional week, but so much fun – I am really privileged to have worked on the development of Fairtrade and Fairmined gold and hope that is now goes from strength to strength so that people like Manuel and Juana are able to access the opportunities they strive for. Welcome to artisanal and small scale miners and the Alliance for Responsible Mining to our Fairtrade family. Valentine’s Day 2011 is not just a time to celebrate with your loved ones but also to say I do to Fairtrade and Fairtrade and Fairmined gold…

Watch film Gold: Every piece tells a story

'Mining is hard work all over the world' - Juana and Manuel visit Wales by Gemma Cartwright

2011-02-14T14:58:00.000Z

After the excitement of the press launch on Thursday morning, Juana and Manuel had their first day sightseeing in London, which began with a boat trip from Tower Bridge to the London Eye taking in Big Ben and Westminster Abbey. Juana mentioned just how busy she thinks London is and that visiting the sights of London was like a dream – in fact the whole trip has been. Later in the evening Juana and Manuel attended the launch of Ute Decker’s new Fairtrade and Fairmined gold collection. Juana was presented a silver ring from Ute and in return presented her with a scarf. Manuel’s only comment as he rolled his eyes was ‘women!’. Juana says she now feels like a princess with her beautiful new piece of jewellery – Reina de Bolivia!

On Friday morning we travelled to Cardiff to spend time discussing the new Fairtrade and Fairmined gold with local jewellers organised by Elen from Fair Trade Wales, who have been great hosts. Manuel really enjoyed explaining the work of miners in Peru to those in the meeting who had lots of questions about how gold is processed. After a wonderful lunch in Cardiff Bay we headed to Big Pit, a former coal mine. Juana and Manuel felt they learnt a lot from the visit and were struck that mining is hard work all over the world, but felt positive from what they saw that improvements were possible with the right investment and support. Later they met Jane Davidson, Minister for the Environment of the Welsh Assembly Government and asked her to support them in giving artisanal and small-scale miners a voice amongst international governments, whilst enjoying traditional Welsh cakes and tea. Having given his own Peruvian hat to a Welsh miner Manuel is now sporting a bright red Welsh cap!

On route to the mine we passed the coast – Juana has only seen the sea once when she stopped over in Lima on route to the UK, and was very excited as we drove past – we will make sure we have ice cream on the beach tomorrow. In the evening we visited Crickhowell for dinner in a traditional British pub originally built in the 16^th century, where we tried local Welsh food and enjoyed a well deserved beer. Manuel really enjoyed being in such an old building.

After a very comfortable night at a local B&B and Juana and Manuel’s first ever English (Welsh) breakfast (which Manuel argued the potatoes and tomatoes were South American so it should be a Peruvian breakfast), we took in the beautiful scenery of the Brecon Beacons. Next was a visit to Tretower a 15^th Century house and 12^th century castle. Juana gave herself the title of Reina de Tretower and Manuel Principle (Prince) de Tretower. Our medieval experience including bow and arrows was followed by lunch at the home of Katrina and Jeremy Gass in Abergavenny along with other Fairtrade campaigners from the area. The Gass’ were great hosts who gave us homemade soup and cakes which Manuel and Juana really enjoyed. We also had the chance to talk about the work of miners in South America and for Juana and Manuel to decorate their own pieces of Fairtrade cotton bunting to add to the record-breaking attempt in forthcoming Fairtrade Fortnight. On our return to Cardiff for our London-bound train we stopped at the sea for photos and an ice-cream in the beautiful South Wales sunshine. Juana and Manuel are extremely grateful to all their new Welsh friends for being so welcoming.

Fairtrade and Fairmined gold is a reality by Gemma Cartwright

2011-02-14T14:42:00.001Z

I have been working on the launch and development of Fairtrade and Fairmined Gold into the UK market for the last four years. This past week has been a rollercoaster of emotions for me and the whole team who have worked to launch certified gold products.

To help announce and celebrate the launch the Fairtrade Foundation has been joined by Juana Pena Endara, Senior President of Cotapata (the first Fairtrade and Fairmined certified mining cooperative) in Bolivia and Manuel Reinoso Rivas, Vice Chair of the Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM) and miner from Peru. For Juana this week has been her first trip abroad and Manuel to the UK.

We have been visiting the Spring Fair in Birmingham where Juana and Manuel spent time with Weston Beamore and the Assay Office learning about how gold is cast into jewellery and then hallmarked to show the authenticity of the gold content. Fairtrade and Fairmined certified products will now also be stamped with the Fairtrade and Fairmined dual stamp. Manuel mentioned how interested it was to see what happens to the gold once it leaves South America. Another highlight of the day was riding on a fast-tilting train from London – a first for both Juana and Manuel.

Last Tuesday was spent preparing presentations for the press briefing event on Wednesday morning and a practise presentation to the Fairtrade Foundation staff on all the different pieces of work which had to be completed to make the launch possible. The whole team including Juana and Manuel (our star speakers) were very nervous, but they both spoke from the heart.

The press briefing was attended by over 120 people – there was standing room only. There were other speakers including Greg Valerio from Cred and jeweller Stephen Webster who made everyone laugh, but emotions really ran high when Juana unveiled the first ever certified Fairtrade and Fairmined gold bar from her mine. Many in the room felt themselves welling up as Juana received a standing ovation. The whole audience including journalists, NGOs and commercial partners were captivated by the strong messages from artisanal and small scale miners. The gold bar represented not only the hard work of many people including the artisanal miners who helped develop the Fairtrade and Fairmined gold standards but also the challenges which Juana, a single mother of four, has been through to now receive a better price and Fairtrade premium. The premium will be used as her mining organisation choose to invest into their business or social development projects. In fact at today’s price that bar is worth £2,000 in Fairtrade premium and £24,000 according to LBMA – no wonder Juana always kept an eye on it!

Juana, Manuel, the gold bar and several photographers headed off to the London Assay Office, where the first piece of certified gold was stamped with the Fairtrade and Fairmined dual stamp. Juana, who helped to stamp her gold bar, said she never knew that this was done to jewellery and was especially surprised to learn that hallmarking in the UK has been a legal requirement for over 500 years. In the evening the Fairtrade and ARM team celebrated their hard work and the launch with pizza and drinks.

Fairtrade Africa Forum by Toby Quantrill

2010-12-01T10:58:00.000Z

Fairtrade Foundation's Head of Policy, Toby Qunatrill, blogs from the first ever Fairtrade Africa Forum.

Over the last three days I have been lucky enough to participate in a unique event – the first ever Fairtrade Africa Forum.

Members of the Fair Trade movement in Africa, including producers, policy makers, development partners and campaigners have gathered at the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe for four days of discussion on the best way to develop the Fairtrade system in Africa.

There have fascinating presentations and discussions on issues such as creating a market for Fairtrade in Africa, empowerment, and climate change. But these events are as much about the opportunity to meet and talk outside the main meeting and I have been able to learn from representatives of cotton farmers from Burkina Faso, cocoa farmers from Ghana, fruit producers from Egypt, flower producers from Kenya and tea farmers from Malawi amongst many, many others.

And I have been able to witness the discussions that have taken place between these representatives, the connections being made and the exchange of lessons and experience.

It really has felt like witnessing the development of a unique movement first hand.

Because the last year has seen extraordinary progress in the development of Fairtrade Africa, the network of Fairtrade producers in Africa. With support from Fairtrade organizations in Europe and donors such as Comic Relief, Fairtrade Africa has built a strong team, with regional bases in West, South and Eastern Africa, and is now playing an increasingly influential role in the global development of Fairtrade. In the last year Fairtrade Africa led the development of standards for new products (Marula and Baobab) in response to requests from producers and has also developed strategic relationships with other organizations such as VSO and the Dutch development agency to help provide increasing on-the-ground support to producers.

The producer networks are co-owners of FLO, and Fairtrade Africa has representative places on the boards of both the Global and UK Fairtrade certification bodies. But, as one participant in the forum noted, for producers on the ground Fairtrade only becomes real through audit inspections and the use of premium payments. It does not always feel like something that producers own and control.

But what emerged from these, often lively discussions, more than anything, is a desire to make Fairtrade in Africa an African system, led and owned by Africans, in terms of standards, new products and, perhaps most importantly making this a movement of both producers and consumers in Africa. In South Africa there are already 15 Fairtrade labelled products on the shelf, most of these launched in the last year and there is now the opportunity for shoppers in Kenya to buy African coffee.

Fairtrade is too often perceived as a western driven indulgence – but what has come through in this meeting has been the commitment of Africans to the principles and a burning desire to create a Fairtrade system, in Africa, that is uniquely African.

Cardiff celebrates 500 Towns for 500 Miles by Barbara Crowther

2010-11-02T13:46:00.000Z

It’s 6.15 and already dark at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, the UK’s first Fairtrade capital city, when we get the call to say the 500 miles for 500 Fairtrade Towns cyclists have reached the city outskirts, and a local cyclists’ group with beautiful fairy lit bikes head off to reach them. Children grab African drums, the Wales flag and a huge Fairtrade banner and we all head out into the cold dark evening to greet the intrepid riders who have ridden the 104km leg today from Ammanford, Wales’ first Fairtrade Town back in July 2002.

It’s appropriate that Wales should host the final stage of our 500 mile odyssey. Despite having just 5% of the UK’s population, the Fair Trade Wales campaign boasts 12.5% of the UK’s Fairtrade towns, villages and cities, and almost one quarter of the UK’s Fairtrade schools. In the last week alone, two more towns have gained Fairtrade status – Prestatyn/Meliden and Blaenau Ffestiniog, who peaked just a little too soon to gain the 499th Fairtrade Town position! As well as local councils, faith groups, NGOs, schools, colleges and businesses, the campaign has been backed by the Welsh Assembly, who have partnered with the NGO TWIN to support the Gumutindo coffee growing community in Mbale, Uganda on a ground-breaking project linking both Fairtrade and action to combat climate change.

The cyclists, including Fairtrade Foundation’s John Arnold and Toby Quantrill (both with inexplicably scraped and bloody knees), arrive to African drumbeats and cheers of Croeso (welcome)! They’ve come along country roads, met Fairtrade campaigners in Swansea, and even done a Fairtrade product storecheck in the Port Talbot branch of Tesco - handing in feedback to the store manager that there were simply not enough Fairtrade products in store! NB Giving shop managers feedback is even easier if you use one of our special postcards

The moment arrives for us to connect by Skype to the 500th Town – everyone claps as on a large screen on the wall, Fairtrade Town campaign founder Bruce Crowther appears. But where is he?….. drumroll ….. Bicester! One of the UK’s fastest growing towns, this Oxfordshire community has run an amazing Fairtrade campaign over four years, even persuading Chiltern Railways to serve Fairtrade coffee and hot chocolate.

We watch as Bruce Crowther presents the Fairtrade Town award to the mayor of Bicester and talks about all the achievements of our amazing grassroots movement.

The Welsh Assembly’s Environment Minister,

Jane Davidson AM, gives a rousing speech before presenting awards and banners to children from 10 Cardiff schools who have recently achieved Fairtrade status.

A keen cyclist herself, she pays tribute to all the cyclists and organisers who have been part of the 500 mile bike ride, and says that Fairtrade is a journey, and she wants every village and town, school, faith group, university and business in Wales to join that journey.

This 500 mile journey may now have finished, but our Fairtrade journey towards a better future for growers around the world still has a long way to go!

500 miles for 500 towns - Final summary by Phil Broadhurst

2010-11-01T15:50:00.000Z

As we approach 500 Fairtrade Towns in the UK, Fairtrade supporters are taking to their saddles for a 500 mile cycle relay from Aberfeldy to Cardiff. We're blogging about their journey that will conclude in Cardiff on Monday 1 November. Learn more about their route at http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/500fairtradetowns

All went well with Sunday’s event hosted by Amman Valley School, although it lived up to its “Fairtrade Fun Day” title better than its subtitle of “Welcome Event for the Fairtrade Bike Ride” as most people had gone home by the time the epic cyclists from Hay arrived, having taken the longest and hardest route possible just to leave us mere mortals feeling more in awe than ever!

While they’d been cycling 60 hilly miles, we’d been having fun with CIRCUS ERUPTION getting everyone juggling and unicycling (well; trying to!) and ONE PEOPLE PRODUCTIONS leading film making workshops, getting footage for a film we’re planning to show in Fairtrade Fortnight.

Children with cameras and crazy first-time unicyclists zig-zagged across the hall… but we all got out alive!
We didn’t get as many people coming as we would have if it wasn’t Halloween, but the stalls did well as peoples’ attention turned to Christmas, with DRAGON’S GARDEN’s fair trade hats and gloves and OXFAM’s fair trade crackers and cards all selling well.

Organising an event on Halloween was bad timing for us, but on the other hand the date was good because Henry Olonga was in town that day. Speaking at Ammanford Evangelical Church (One of the most active local Fairtrade churches) in the morning, he stayed on to attend our event. Test cricketer, social justice campaigner, singer, painter, photographer and writer. He could juggle too! But even he couldn’t unicycle! (He probably could really, but didn’t want to make us feel too jealous!!)

The riders arrived 10 minutes before the caretaker was due to lock up, so they didn’t even get a cup of tea until we all got to my house!

They did get a well deserved reception from the loyal legion who’d stayed on though, including town mayor Ray Spencer who was determined to stay until she’d congratulated and thanked them.

At our house we enjoyed re-living the ride and the event, with frequent interruptions from trick and treaters who were fed Co-Op chocolate eye balls and Traidcraft Geo Bars!

The good thing about the Hay riders arriving later than planned was that they got to meet Toby and John from the Fairtrade Foundation who were staying over, ready to get up early to ride the next leg.

The next morning was chaos. Four kids to get to school. Four adults to get to a bike ride. And all by half past 8! But we did it… and had a lovely breakfast made by my lovely daughter Rosa. (I should cover myself at this point by stating that my other 3 daughters are lovely too! But it was Rosa cooking the muffins, teacakes and veggie bacon butties, so she was everyone’s favourite that morning!)

We thought we had a challenge to get to the i-SMOOTH community café by 8.30, but Mike was up before 6am to ride the 26 miles from his home just to get to the start of the ride!

Also there to ride were Ian and Phil from Carmarthenshire Council, and Alan Cram, fairtrade supporter and all round nice guy, and friend of Ammanford Fairtrade Town Group pioneers Annette and Dewi. Among those coming to support were MP Jonathan Edwards, AM Rhodri Glyn Thomas and Town Councillor Jane Potter, showing the widespread political support we’re lucky to have in Ammanford for Fairtrade.
After posing for a bit of a bizarre photo which makes us look like we’re trying to communicate some kind of semaphore message (“Buy Fairtrade”, I presume!) (See attached photo), the riders rode off, and me and Clare jumped in the car to follow. Supposedly a support car, we actually just seemed to be on a bit of a café crawl, meeting up with the riders at each stop. At least Clare was working hard, driving and filming. I was just being chauffered and being fed cake. I felt relieved when I got a call from the Evening Post as we were driving into Cardiff so I could at least say I’d done some media work on the way!

First stop, after a lovely autumn ride along golden leaved lanes out of Ammanford, was at Bikeability at Dunvant Rugby Club. The organisation was set up to enable people of all abilities to enjoy the pleasures of cycling on specially designed bikes, including hand cycles, trikes, go karts, quad cycles, tandems and wheelchair transporters.

David, Colin and Rob joined up with the ride here, but first tried out the Bikeability bikes, which resulted in Rob falling off a bike before he’d even started the ride!

This was meant to be a rest stop for the cyclists, but they couldn’t resist trying out the various bikes on offer. Clare filmed (Sorry, Rob – She did catch you falling off!). I ate cake.

Then on down the cycle way to the beautiful Swansea Bay. A week before, me and Clare were at her sister’s wedding at the Registry Office which the cycle path goes by, enjoying the lovely clear blue skies. To have it so nice for the bike ride as well as the wedding photos seemed too much to ask, but despite the laws of probability and the reputation of Swansea weather, there really were two consecutive nice dry Mondays in Swansea at the end of October and start of November!

We met up with the riders again for more tea and cake and more photo opportunities at the Environment Centre in Swansea, base of many good things, including Swansea Fairtrade Forum.

Phil and Ian dropped off here to get back to Ammanford by train and Alan dropped off to go on a trip to visit family in England which he’d delayed to join in the ride. Joining in here was Brian, to complete the full list of magnificent riders!

It would have been nice to have stopped in one of Swansea’s fairtrade cafes for lunch, but it seemed psychologically important to at least be in Port Talbot before lunch. So we decided to opt for lunch at TESCO in Port Talbot; not for its culinary reputation, but so we could complain about the lack of fairtrade drinks in the café.

I’d used up my supply of Fairtrade Foundation cards saying “Dear Store Manager, Please Stock More Fairtrade Products” at the school event on Sunday, so instead we filled in a customer feedback form and sent a free text to 80072 : “We are part of the 500 mile Fairtrade Bike Ride. Stopped at your Port Talbot store for lunch BUT no Fairtrade drinks in café.” (You can do it too in your local TESCO!)

What a glorious contrast the next stop was : The Living Café in Cowbridge. A dream of a Fairtrade café! Lots of cafes now have the basics of fairtrade tea and coffee. But this café goes much further, with a mouth-watering selection of fairtrade cakes and snacks. Looking back now, I can’t believe all I chose was one of those really thin Cadbury’s bars! Maybe I just felt like I deserved less as the cyclists’ mileages went up! John definitely deserved his two pieces of carrot cake!

Sadly it seems that The Living Café is on a site that WAITROSE want to build on, so they may be pushed out. WAITROSE really had better make sure they’ve got better fairtrade cafes than TESCO if they’re going to force out one as good as The Living Café! (The fight’s not over yet, so hopefully The Living Café will stay alive… but just incase : Go visit now! And tell them if they do get knocked down by WAITROSE they’ve got to open up somewhere else quick!)

It was while we were in The Living Café that John got a call from someone working with sugar producers in Belize. “Tell them about the bike ride” he told him, and the fairtrade link from campaigners to producers and raw product to sales was all perfectly illustrated in one long distance call.

Inspired by that call and that cake in that cafe, on they rode to the lovely welcome at Cardiff’s Millennium Centre.

(At this point I need to mention David Naylor and David Judd who worked out routes, mileages and timings for us; timings which proved correct almost to the minute!)

As Cardiff’s Welcome Event continued, the riders got the pats on the back they deserved… and posed for lots more photos. Clare carried on filming. And I had a fairtrade chocolate brownie!

Phil Broadhurst
Ammanford Fairtrade Group
ammanfordfairtrade.blogspot.com

P.S. The next day Environment Minister Jane Davidson, who was at the Millennium Centre, talked about the ride at a Walking and Cycling conference she attended. The legacy of the ride continues!

500 miles for 500 towns - Hay to Ammanford by Anna Haywood

2010-11-01T12:20:00.000Z

500 miles for 500 towns - The penultimate day by Phil Broadhurst

2010-11-01T10:57:00.000Z

500 miles for 500 towns - Day Eight

2010-11-01T09:06:00.003Z

500 miles for 500 towns - Day Seven

2010-11-01T09:05:00.000Z

500 miles for 500 towns - Day Seven by Alan Morris

2010-10-30T09:10:00.000+01:00

500 miles for 500 towns - Day Six by Bruce Crowther

2010-10-29T10:09:00.000+01:00

500 Miles for 500 towns poem by Mickey Dee

2010-10-28T14:08:00.000+01:00

View this poem with photos at Mickey Dee's website.

What can I say, in a positive way?
How can I sway you to come out and play,
On a lean, clean machine in a beautiful scene?
Who of you will dare to put wind in your hair,
Rain in your face and leave never a trace,
Of having ever been there.
When it's all said and done, what makes cycling fun?
Is it better in winter, or in the hot sun?
Do you like it warm wherever you go?
Or when your tires go "crunch" in the snow?
Do you like racing with crowds that cheer?
Or touring along with with a bird's song in your ear?
I can ride for hours by beautiful flowers.
Mile after mile with bugs in my smile.
I find rolling hills to be so sublime,
And even the hardest, mountainous climb!
Can you tell me why my heart pines,
For quiet country roads with Burma Shave signs?
Sometimes I get thrills from "screaming down-hills",
Or a fog covered road laced with daffodils.
It's easy to see what it all means to me.
I've seen places and faces as fine as can be.
Often at night with stars so bright,
I ride with my love in the pale moonlight.
Past farms with cows and stacks of hay.
Crickets and frogs cheer us on our way.
We ride in the mornings and then at sunsets
And know that this is as good as it gets.
Not even flat tires can alter our mood.
When I'm tired I dine on the best tasting food.
What can I do to get through to you?
Why should you ride? I haven't a clue.
Sometimes after long rides in groups we might sit,
And all will agree, "IT FEELS SO GOOD WHEN WE QUIT."

500 miles for 500 towns - Day Five by Bruce Crowther

2010-10-28T13:59:00.000+01:00

500 miles for 500 towns - Day Four by Bruce Crowther

2010-10-27T10:02:00.001+01:00

500 miles for 500 towns - Day Three by Bruce Crowther

2010-10-26T10:03:00.002+01:00

500 miles for 500 towns by Bruce Crowther

2010-10-25T13:39:00.000+01:00

As we approach 500 Fairtrade Towns in the UK, Fairtrade supporters are taking to their saddles for a 500 mile cycle relay from Aberfeldy to Cardiff. We'll be blogging about their journey that will conclude in Cardiff on Monday 1 November. Learn more about their route at http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/500fairtradetowns

Day 1 Aberfeldy – Strathaven (107 miles)
They’re off! Seven courageous cyclists set off from Aberfeldy to Strathaven on the first leg of the 500 mile bicycle relay to celebrate 500 Fairtrade Towns. This was by far the longest and most enduring leg, albeit through a beautiful Scottish landscape. To the sound of bagpipes the cyclists left Aberfeldy Town Hall at 9am and arrived in Strathaven just after 6pm. Congratulations to all involved but especially the three ‘Hairy Bikers’ (Franny, Bob and John) who cycled the whole distance. Congratulations also go to John Swinney MSP and his wife who gave birth to their baby boy the day before, on National Nut Day as it happens but perhaps best not mentioned? The new arrival that prevented John from taking to his bike was actually not due until November 1st; the proposed date of the 500th Fairtrade Town declaration.

Day 2 Strathaven - Dunscore (57 miles)
A cold and frosty morning saw the cyclists off at Strathaven, which meant another dry and still day ahead, ideal for cycling. Former world cycling champion Graeme O’Bree handed over the parchment to the lead cyclist for the day Guto Williams, watched by local politicians Linda Fabiani MSP (one of the first people to show an interest in adopting the Fairtrade Town ideal soon after the people of Garstang self declared in 2000) and Michael McCann MP. The cyclists rode into Dunscore to a rapturous welcome and a pasta meal prepared by local campaigners. As well as handing over the parchment the cyclists also delivered some homemade cake as a gift from the campaigners in Strathaven to their Scottish colleagues in Dunscore. The last night before crossing the English border ended in true Scottish fashion with a Ceilidh that went on into the night.

Fairtrade and the Millennium Development Goals by Elod Kafaukoma

2010-09-13T12:53:00.001+01:00

Elod Kafaukoma is a sugar cane farmer from Kasinthula, Malawi. He worked as Secretary to the Fairtrade Committee of the Kasinthula co-operative between 2005 and 2007. During this time he learned a lot about the Fairtrade movement and how it benefits producers like him. He was born and raised in the Shire Valley of Malawi, home of Kasinthula, and lives in Chinangwe village with his wife and young child.

Here he shares his thoughts on how Fairtrade has helped contribute to the MDGs in his area.

Today’s generation has opportunity and access to improve the local and global communities through the Millennium Development Goals and introduction of Fairtrade. One of the areas that experiences unreliable rainfall is Lower Shire (Chikwawa and Nsanje) even though there are potential resources like good water of Shire River, good soils and better temperature for various crops. Kasinthula was registered and licensed to sell its product (sugar) on Fairtrade deal. This Fairtrade market has drastically transformed the surrounding community through implementation of development projects like hospital, primary school; bore holes with safe and clean water, electrification and covering school costs.

MDG 1, 3 and 5. The Fairtrade premium funded projects which are implemented in various surrounding areas where producers sell their products on Fairtrade, give job opportunities to more rural people. This reduces poverty and hunger in their households. Men and women are working in these projects. Initially women were considered as people who can not contribute as men. Women have various roles to do at household level. The construction of rural clinics through Fairtrade premium money relieves women of travelling long distance for medication. More pregnant women are readily cared within their rural area compound. This improves maternal care.

MDG 2. Other producers in Malawi and other countries that sell their various products on Fairtrade deal have already almost achieved the Millennium Development Goals. The Fairtrade premium money is covering the school costs like fees and learning materials for the surrounding children. The premium money encourages Universal Primary Education.

MDG 4, 6, 7 and 8. Children in every society rely on elders’ protection. They have no say over whatever harm to them. The Fairtrade standards state more about the child protection on labour basis. More Fairtrade premium funded projects provide children with basic necessities like clinic in rural areas, clean and safe water as well others. Satemwa Tea is also a Malawian producer licensed to sell the product on Fairtrade deal. It was very impressing when Satemwa provided the surrounding community with treated mosquito nets bought through Fairtrade premium money. This encouraged more registered producers to combat on HIV/AIDs, malaria and other diseases. The Fairtrade standards encourage producers to develop more strategies to improve the sustainability of the environment. The standards also encourage unionization of workers to support and encourage partnership of all stakeholders in order to achieve all required developments for the betterment of the societies globally. The Fairtrade premium is the potential alternative to achieve all MDGs by 2015. However, other disadvantaged farmers in rural areas should be identified and mobilized to start selling their raw materials and products on Fairtrade deal for the sustainable economic status in all dimensions.

What's your Ghanaian name? by Barbara Crowther

2010-09-02T17:13:00.002+01:00

Here in

Ghana

it’s common, especially among those who speak Akan, to be called by the day of the week on which you were born. So today I learnt that, as I was born on a Tuesday, my Ghanaian name is Abena. What’s yours? Find out the day you were born here and then check out your Ghanaian name here.

So, Abena was how I introduced myself to the small community of Mensakrom, who greeted us in turn with vibrant music and singing, as well as a taste of their local palm wine. Mensakrom is one of the 1400 village societies that make up

Ghana

’s foremost Fairtrade co-operative, Kuapa Kokoo.

Kuapa is well known to many Fairtraders as the only cocoa farmers’ co-op that owns their own 100% Fairtrade chocolate brand, Divine Chocolate, now sold in both the

and US. Over the last 18 months, Kuapa have increased their total Fairtrade sales each year from roughly 5,000 tonnes to 20,000 tonnes as a result of Cadbury Dairy Milk going Fairtrade. The increased premiums from all of these sales have meant that Kuapa has now got more people providing agricultural training to farmers, a mobile team of doctors travelling round the communities (they’ve visited 1000 farmers already), and this year they were able to triple the end of harvest bonus payment to every single one of their members.

I was also delighted to meet Kuapa Kokoo’s first ever woman President, Christiana Ohene Agyare, who was elected in a landslide victory at Kuapa’s recent AGM, attended by more than 2500 representatives of the village groups (thanks to Divine Chocolate for this pic of the inaugural moment). She told me that what she hopes to achieve in her four-year term of office is for the volume of quality cocoa to ‘grow and grow and grow’ and is confident her own crop this year will be 25% up on last year. She also hopes to empower all the women cocoa growers both in their village communities and at every level of Kuapa’s work. Her own election seems a pretty good sign they're already well on the way to doing that. In fact in everything they do, from cocoa growing to running democratic and inclusive village cooperatives, Kuapa aim to be 'papa paa' - the best of the best.

Shortly before I left, I was chatting to 17-year-old Stephen Tawiah who wanted people to know the difference Kuapa is making in the villages. Stephen wants to be a journalist – and has sent you all a short video message here.

Barbara Crowther has a heart to heart with Akoma women's coop in Ghana

2010-08-27T02:00:00.002+01:00

When I’m travelling, my name Barbara is very apt, because it means stranger or foreigner. On my first day in

Ghana

, I met another body that is truly living up to its name – the Akoma Cooperative Multipurpose Society. Akoma means heart – and this enterprising group of women have plenty of that.

Akoma specialises in the gathering and processing of organic shea nuts into butter – you can find them in Akoma’s own raw organic butter and soaps, as well as Visionary Soap Company products and Bulldog moisturiser in the

. I’ve never seen a shea tree before – inside a green fruit (looks like a hard plum), there’s a smooth shelled nut, and inside that the kernel that produces this luscious oil and butter.

The process from nut to butter is incredibly complex –
involving parboiling the nuts before shelling, drying, crushing, roasting, milling, kneading, washing, boiling, skimming, and twice filtering before finally cooling to butter. It’s a wonder how anyone ever worked it all out. The kneading alone requires a full 45 minutes of elbow grease – it’s a proper aerobic workout, made easier if you do it in pairs. Singing really helps to keep up a steady rhythm, and a bit of dancing every now and again keeps energy levels high. I try it, and am tired after five minutes – although my hands feel wonderfully soft for hours afterwards....

In the last three years, the women here in the community of Puso Namogo, in the north east of Ghana, have taken what is traditionally a small scale domestic activity and turned it into an export enterprise, with both organic and Fairtrade certification. Akoma means the women have access to labour saving machinery to speed up the processing. A large basin of shelled nuts would have taken three or four hours in a mortar at home, but takes just three or four minutes to crush here using Akoma’s machine.

“We encourage each other to pack good quality nuts,” coop member Agnes Combeso tells us. For example we tell each other not to store the nuts as we sometimes used to, but parboil them early, so they don’t turn black. We encourage each other to do the right thing. Before, we would take our nuts to the market, and we often had to bring them home again because they didn't sell. Now we have a ready market and we don’t want to disappoint.”

But it’s worth it, as the coop’s ebullient President Juliana Sampana, tells us, as the women are earning three or four times from their shea nuts than they used to. Fairtrade premiums from their first year’s sales were modest, but have enabled the coop to provide each member with free health insurance, as well as new school uniforms for a child from each member's family. They've already bought the material to make up the uniforms..

Akoma has already expanded from 45 to 73 members but they’re reluctant to take on more members until they know there’s a bigger market for their products. There’s plenty of shea nuts around as well as lots of women wanting to join. The women of Akoma are brimming with ideas of what they could do, if they could increase their sales – buying computers and setting up a library so their children can study, wellingtons and gloves to protect them whilst harvesting the nuts, a crèche, a new health clinic and even ambitious talk of improving their kids’ access to secondary schooling. Their message to us as we prepare to leave is as heartfelt as their name – we want Akoma to grow and grow and grow - so please get more people buying our natural products. But hey, before we go there's still time for one last dance...

The newest farmers to join Fairtrade by Harriet Lamb

2010-08-23T16:02:00.000+01:00

A couple of hours outside Nairobi, we turn off the tarmac road onto a bumpy rough track. A long way further on, lurching around ruts and deep puddles, we pull up outside a small wooden hut where three old farmers have gathered to meet us. These are outgrowers, who grow green beans on their small plots with considerable support from the exporter Homegrown. In the hut, they show us the rough aluminium tray running down one side on which they sort out their beans. While the hut may be simple, the quality control is strict; if a bean bends too much, out it goes. The beans must be straight as a seargeant-major’s back - and as unblemished. Once sorted, they are stored in a small lean-to which is an improvised cold storage system – water is poured over pieces of charcoal packed behind chicken-wire covering all the walls, so keeping the beans cool until the lorry comes to pick them up for Nairobi. Record books are beautifully kept, everything noted down in careful hand.
A supervisor and two technical assistants explain how they support the farmers – constantly checking for any signs of disease or pests and offering the right assistance. In another wooden shed, chemicals are safely locked away.

These are probably the very newest farmers to join the Fairtrade system. In May, theirs were the first Fairtrade green beans ever sold - in Marks and Spencers. It has taken a long time to work out how to enable such outgrowers to participate in Fairtrade. In the end, they are organised into local groups, working through the exporter and certainly still very dependent on them. In six years time, say the standards, they should be exporting direct. At the moment, the scale of logistical and technical back-up provider by the exporter Homegrown makes that seem a tall order.

In other ways, the beans seem a great crop for the farmers who start harvesting only two months after planting and are getting good yields. But, they say, ‘We need more market’. So far, only a small percentage of their beans are being sold as Fairtrade. The good news is that you can now buy them in Sainsburys as well as M&S.

That evening we stay with an old school friend of mine in the hills outside Nanyuki. She’s also hosting hordes of teenagers who have turned up unannounced. So I am balancing piles of shopping including a huge chocolate cake and innumerable eggs on my knee as we swerve along a rough track to her house. The landscape is breath-taking here in Laikipia which, according to a local leaflet, is second only to the Maasai Mara in terms of wildlife numbers. Which is not altogether comforting to know when my friend’s mobile phone rings – a neighbour warning that there has been a torrential downpour and one car is already stuck in the mud. Before long, we’re stuck too, the wheels spinning hopelessly with the axel sinking ever deeper into the mud - until a local tractor lumbered up effortlessly to pull us out without blinking so much as a headlamp.

Hannah Harris back in London, new website launched!

2010-08-17T14:59:00.000+01:00

Just in the nick of time, the website is finished! http://www.fairtradeafrica.net/

Great timing as the AFN (Fairtrade Africa) were facilitating consultations on the New Standards Framework during the last week of July. I managed to highjack the agenda for 10 minutes to give a quick overview for the producers about their new website. They are particularly excited about the prospect of traders being able to access the new product catalogue and pleased to see that they will be able to edit their own profiles and have a page to directly market their business.

Next job is to ensure traders are aware of it.... that sounds like a job to do back here in London!

'A house to call my own' - Panda flower farm, Kenya by Harriet Lamb

2010-08-17T10:11:00.000+01:00

If Tambuzi flower farm is one of the newest to join Fairtrade, Panda is one of the most established, their Joint Body famous for their proud record of investing their premium. It’s no wonder that so many Joint Bodies on other farms go to visit Panda to get ideas and inspiration.

They have built a ‘Posho Mill’, outside which workers are queueing to buy the subsidized maize. On the notice board an official letter has been signed and pinned up: ‘Due to the global financial crisis and rising costs, the Joint Body is pleased to announce that we will be subsidizing maize......’

In the line we meet Sarah Njaeri, a single mother who works in the green houses and whose boy, Alan, is now in the third year of university at Naivasha. He has had his education subsidised right through secondary school by the Fairtrade premium and plans now to train as a teacher. In 2004, the Joint Body bought small plots of land for 221 workers, who are gradually paying back the loans. Then, in Phase 2, they borrowed again now to build themselves houses. One of the first to finish is Leah who cannot stop beaming with pride as she shows us round. ‘On my own, I would never have had the money to do this,’ she says. ‘It was my dream to build a house to call my own.’

The house is spotless with white net curtains hanging to decorate the walls. Her sister is staying with her and is washing clothes outside, her little girl hiding round her legs. Rent in town keeps rising, comment the other workers, and is so expensive ; ‘You are always fearing the landlord’s knock. But paying back on the loan on your house is more friendly.’ There’s no electricity yet and no water – that will only come once they have saved enough.

All the flower farms are acutely aware of accusations that they are drinking up too much water. Arguments rage on both sides. The detractors say the farms consume vast amounts of water, sucking Lake Naivasha dry and lowering the water table. The farms themselves reply that they are self-sufficient in water, keen to show how they harvest all their water needs themselves, that the lake has been shrinking for decades, that the problem lies further upstream with deforestation and climate change to blame for falling water levels. But all the farms accept that perception is nine-tenths of reality, and so are working hard on their environmental credentials.

The other big argument is around working conditions. There are of course, as in every industry, the rotten flowers and just a few weeks ago a TV documentary in Kenya exposed bad conditions on a farm. But most of them are among the country’s leading employers, generating jobs in a country hungry for employment. Around 100,000 workers are directly employed on flower farms with a further 1.2m indirectly earning a living from the industry. Indeed, flowers are now the third largest export earner in the country after tourism and tea, bringing in around $500m a year. Many farms recognise the unions and pay above the minimum wage. At Panda, the minimum they pay is Kenyan shillings 5,228, as compared to the national minimum agricultural wage of Kenyan shillings 3,600. Which is why many workers travel from all over the country to get a prized job on a flower farm.

That poses a problem with which the Fairtrade system is constantly grappling. Under Fairtrade rules, the premium cannot be used for purposes such as wages which properly belong with the employer and would undermine normal collective bargaining by trade unions. So the Joint Body uses the funds for other investments such as educational bursaries for their children, building schools or putting in drinking water for the local communities. But often the workers come from far away and want to invest in their own home communities – or they want the cash; but then the premium would soon disappear and would be meaningless divided between all the workers’ different communities, unable to achieve any lasting change......

The arguments go round and round. At a meeting of African producers in Nairobi at the end of July, a new solution is proposed: that a certain percentage could be allowed to be distributed to individuals. The proposal is not yet fully framed but will be fed into the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation’s international standards committee for full deliberation.

A light bulb moment at Tambuzi by Harriet Lamb

2010-08-12T12:37:00.000+01:00

Sometimes, reality disappoints our expectations. Not so Tambuzi flower farm, in Kenya’s central Highlands, which is everything a flower farm should be. You are greeted on arrival by a gentle purple swathe of lavender, next to the green patch of mint and with bubbly warmth by the chatty owners, Maggie in a blue flowery dress and her husband Tim, who as we walk is constantly plucking off buds for us to smell the different sweet scents. In among the rows of roses, the supervisor sports a wonderful tall, white bonnet with an extravagant bow – which would win her first prize in the Easter bonnet competition and would look at home in a Caribbean Sunday church outing. She has gathered the workers together to plan a day off for the referendum on 4 August when Kenyans are voting for or against the proposed new constitution. At the reception, there’s a stunning bowl of special new crinkly pink roses.

Tambuzi has only just become Fairtrade certified and they have had, as Tim laughs, their road to Damascus-conversion. You can buy their Fairtrade roses online with Interflora – and I know that I will be tapping in my orders. The company are most excited about having proper written contracts for the first time – they cannot believe it - while the workers formed their Joint Body at the end of last year. They have gathered to meet us in an open air hall, next to the ‘Fairtrade suggestion box’ on the wall. It was full, they said, with workers’ proposals about how to use the Fairtrade premium and they show us the typed out list of needs.

For them, as for so many workers and farmers in Kenya, electricity is a major issue. People were using up to 10% of their income on paraffin the price of which has risen by 9% a year for the past 5 years. So on many farms, such as Panda flower farm, the Fairtrade premium has been invested in buying solar panels and lamps. These give light, save the expense and hard work of going to town to buy paraffin which also gives off unhealthy fumes, and can be used to power a radio or, critically, charge-up mobile phones.

Everyone in Kenya has a mobile phone, and in every village, houses are painted with the bright green adverts for Safari.com, the dominant local supplier. But with no electricity, people take turns collecting the villagers’ phones, walking to the local phone-shops and queueing to recharge them. It’s a day’s enterprise. Now, says Maggie at Tambuzi, just as mobile phones have enabled Africa to leap-frog technology generations, so solar-energy may cut out the need for laying expensive electricity lines. It’s certainly been her light bulb moment.

Introducing the South West Fairtrade Website

2010-08-02T14:48:00.001+01:00

The first ever regional website dedicated to Fairtrade has launched.

In a collaboration between more than 20 Fairtrade Town groups and over 600 supportive businesses in the South West, the South West Fairtrade website went live today, proving that the South West is a leading region for Fairtrade in the UK.

The site, designed by ethical web designers, Green Hat, and sponsored by the South West Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership and the Co-operative membership, provides Fairtrade shopping information, good practise ideas and news and events from across the region. You can also find your closest Fairtrade campaign group and get involved with action and events in your area.

The aim of the site is to raise more awareness of Fairtrade across the region and benefit more farmers in developing countries who are guaranteed a fair price and a premium to fund community projects with Fairtrade. Recognising the natural links between farmers in the South West and in developing countries, it's hoped that the area will embrace the ethos of Fairtrade and the rights of farmers to receive a price which covers costs of production and basic living costs.

Launched ahead of the ground breaking Fairtrade Procurement Conference, the first of its kind, to be held at the Eden project on 19 October, the site will enable all areas in the region to access ideas and information and link with other local campaigners.

Blooming with enthusiasm by Harriet Lamb

2010-07-27T15:53:00.000+01:00

Ever been shopping in Asda, picked up a bunch of beautiful Fairtrade roses and wondered where they came from? Well there’s a good chance that they were grown at Valentine Roses, just an hour or so outside Nairobi, depending on the state of the traffic jams. The Joint Body members who show me around are the most enthusiastic that I have ever met in my long Fairtrade life! The Vice Chair, Florence Onyango, says she loves her job: ‘Working with flowers is everything to me’. Everyone agrees that ‘Having a job in Kenya is a privilege’. The workers here, she says, were all scared during the volcanic ash week when no flowers could be sold.

When we go over to their new tree nursery, the unbelievably tall and lanky gardener Stephen enthuses about the 30,000 saplings under his care: ‘Advertise our work’, he calls. Then the Joint Body member who leads the tree sub-committee comes shooting over to share his vision of greening the plantation. As we leave, there’s no mistaking his house - it is hidden in a forest of beautifully tended trees and flowers! ‘He cannot stop decorating everything’, laughs Florence. His neighbour got a loan from a revolving fund run by the Joint Body; he bought one cow and sold the milk – now he has three cows and is employing someone to help.

We pass workers clustered around getting big bottles of gas. The Joint Body sells them at cost price (1,690 Kenyan shillings as opposed to 2,000 in the shops) on a hire purchase basis which the workers pay back in three instalments, interest free. As we leave, the gateman turns out to have a 16 year old son, Dominic, at secondary school now thanks to an educational bursary from the premium. He is planning to be a chemist.

But for the young Chairman, it is the capacity building that is their most important achievement – the way people have grown, learnt new things, learnt to think in new ways: ‘I wouldn’t have dared to do this before’. So they are planning much more training next year. The smiley Vice-Chair has also surprised herself. She would never put herself in the front light before she says. Now she is positively blooming with calm self-confidence.

Ben & Jerry's Nuts about Fairtrade Sundae by Barbara Crowther

2010-07-26T12:18:00.008+01:00

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who created their ice cream company with a difference, always say ‘If it isn’t fun, don’t do it’. For the 25,000 people attending this year’s Ben & Jerry Sundae on the Common, that’s certainly true as it tests just how far you can stretch an insatiable appetite for free ice cream whilst simultaneously challenging you to toe wrestling, carousel rides and sack races.

This year, there was a real Fairtrade twist to the whole festival which literally went Nuts about Fairtrade, as a celebration of the company’s commitment to go 100% Fairtrade across all 39 flavours and 121 different chunks, swirls and ingredients across Europe by the end of next year.

Wandering round all the attractions, the passion for Fairtrade is clear to see – not just in the 6 flavours of Fairtrade icecream on offer (Vanilla, Vanilla Toffee Crunch, Chocolate Macadamia, Chunky Monkey, Chocolate Fudge Brownie and new flavour Fairly Nuts) on offer, but the bar is serving Fairtrade wines, spirits, juices and Ubuntu cola, and even the cotton in this year’s festival T-shirt is Fairtrade.

At the Fairtrade tasting tent, a growing queue inches eagerly towards a cornucopia of Fairtrade goodies, from Equal Exchange’s delicious walnuts and brazil nuts to Harry’s Nuts, to the newly launched Sainsbury’s fruit bars – containing delicious pineapple and apricot, or banana and mango sourced from dedicated Fair Trade brand Tropical Wholefoods. There are free samples of Fairtrade breakfast muesli from Traidcraft and Dorset Cereals, whose chocolate and macadamia crunchy cereal seems less of a breakfast health food to me, and more of a seriously decadent treat. The breakfast theme continues with Cafedirect regular and decaffeinated coffee samples, and I have to stop one particularly eager punter from stocking up for a month!

Most popular of all are the various chocolatey treats on offer, from Traidcraft’s newly launched chocolate coated mixed nuts, and chocolate coated raisins, and of course, the scrumptious range of chocolate bars from Divine Chocolate. Handing out the samples gives us a great opportunity to tell people about how Divine is the only UK chocolate company owned by Ghanaian cocoa farmers, or about the work Tropical Wholefoods have done to pioneer solar drying techniques with the apricot farmers of the Hunza valley in Pakistan. There’s a new rush of popularity on our stall when we start giving people tasters of some fantastic Fairtrade wines, including one of my personal favourite, Stellar Organics, as I have visited the farm and winery, and met many of the workers over the years, who now have a 26% shareholding in the winery and are working towards a 50% ownership of the farm.

Across the field, kids are battling it out in the Banana Wars – using giant inflatable bananas in a symbolic struggle for supremacy in the global marketplace. For us it’s a game, but for Caribbean Fairtrade farmers, the struggle for fair prices and market access is all too real, as my colleague Aurelie recently pointed out in the Guardian. Backstage, hardworking Fairtrade volunteer Amaya is busy charming all the bands with Fairtrade goodie bags, and we’re delighted when the drummer of Frightened Rabbit wears a Fairtrade cotton t-shirt onstage. Afterwards the whole band dons the t-shirts.

All the bands we meet show a genuine interest in Fairtrade, and many of them talk about it in between songs. But the best moment for me comes when the legendary Billy Bragg performs his entire set wearing a bright blue pair of Pants to Poverty y-fronts, and is then joined for a final Drop the Debt version of Bob Marley’s ‘One Love’ by his newly dubbed backing dancers, Pants People! I bet Ben and Jerry would have loved it too – it’s exactly the kind of fun with a serious social justice message their company was always meant to be about.

Ben & Jerry's video look back

View our Facebook fan page photos

Watch the Ben & Jerry's dancing cows

The Fairtrade Family Gets Everywhere by Harriet Lamb

2010-07-20T12:41:00.000+01:00

It really is all over. On Cape Town High Streets, the workmen are taking down the endless football-themed lights; the kids are back to school after a special extra month's holiday to watch the matches and when we go to Fair View vineyard they declare 'Beat the Post-World Cup depression, buy this wine.' But the vineyards are far from depressed. It seems that the World Cup has given a welcome boost to South African wines overseas. Until now, they say, many people in the West had no idea that South Africa was a distinct country from Southern Africa. In fact, they've all been killing themselves over a foreign TV news programme which had the World Cup emblem all over South America!

Fair View is the home of the eccentric Goats do Roam (which could just possibly sound like Cote Du Rhone) wine. There really are goats roaming the farm and award-winning goat cheeses. But the French were not amused and took the company to court. Beating them at their own game, the vineyard workers turned up outside the Embassy for a 'toi-toi' or demo with plenty of placard-waving. Finally the courts ruled in the South African's favour. So they've kept the joke going. Try for example their 'Bored Doe'.

Fair View now also own a number of Fairtrade wines. Look out for their Six Hats, for Hope's Garden in Asda and the Fairtrade Pinotage in Sainsburys - they all come from Bergendal, one of the Fairtrade certified farms that we visit who grow a range of crops. The sun is out, shining on the beautiful mountains and orange groves, and the sheep are grazing round the roobois tea bushes as the charming owner shows us round the creche, the pre-school, the community hall, the school facilities, the sports fields - all built with the Fairtrade premium. Everyone is off to play in a local rugby tournament, this being South Africa, but we catch up with Leizel, one of the Joint Body workers who has worked her way up to be a supervisor at their roobois tea factory. She tells us that her next ambition is to learn to drive. We talk about Fairtrade as a global family.

On the way to Fair View's restaurant, we stop to admire the breath-taking view across the vast valley and the unique flora and fauna of this area including the Proteus flowers that are such a symbol of South Africa. At the viewing point, a family have set up a 'braai' - or the ever-popular barbeque - the kids are playing around the steep slopes watched nervously by their mother. We get chatting and it soon turns out that the man markets Fairtrade citrus to the UK! Soon, the braai is interrupted by talk of minimum prices and the need to increase sales of Fairtrade oranges. Meeting the Fairtrade standards is difficult and expensive for farms, especially in South Africa where Fairtrade insisted on farms linking into the Government's Black Economic Empowerment scheme to transfer ownership and management to the black communities. So, they need enough sales to make it worthwhile and so far, apart from bananas, Fairtrade fruit isnot so well known. He's pleased to hear that we are launching a Fairtrade fruit campaign in the autumn.

Amazed at the coincidence, we go on to have a delicious lunch of goats cheese and, obviously, wine at Fair View. Before long, the young man on the next door table comes shyly over: 'Do you remember me.' he asks. 'I once volunteered at the Fairtrade Foundation. It was five years ago when I was a student travelling around Europe and I spent a few months in the Fairtrade office'. This Fairtrade family certainly gets everywhere!

Harriet Lamb visits Cape Town's Township Trades

2010-07-19T11:24:00.001+01:00

Cape Town has to be the coolest city on earth. I am staying at the Daddy Long Legs Hotel which is part of a Fair trade in tourism scheme, so the coffee's good. Each room has been decorated by a local artist. I am staying in 'Open' next to 'Please do not disturb' and 'Phone Booth'. My room is wallpapered with hundreds of photos of African sun-rises and has a round bed on the floor. It makes you feel like a model or a movie star, except that there are also mirrors everywhere on the walls and ceilings offering a painful reminder that I definitely am not and never could be.

A short way from the centre of Cape Town is a painful reminder that it's not all 'chilaxing' and trendy art. Khayelitsha is the second largest township in South Africa, after Soweto. A terrifying 30% of its people are HIV/Aids positive. That's why Township Trades was established here, making the beautiful hand-made Fairtrade certified Visionary Soaps you can buy in Oxfam shops, Traidcraft and Waitrose among others. There's just five people working there and they are an utter joy to meet. Vusu from Zimbabwe is the father figure, who is pouring geranium rose oil into the mix in a big plastic bucket, stirring it with an adapted power drill. It looks like he is whipping cream and in much the same way, the mixture suddenly goes thick and is poured into crates to harden.

Neatly stored in one corner is a huge container of Fairtrade olive oil from Palestine, just one of the many Fairtrade ingredients from across the world that make the soap. I describe the difficulties of the farmers in Palestine and the workers shake their heads in disbelief. They are also using cocoa and shea nut butter from Ghana. There's a shipment of coconut oil from Fair Trade Alliance Kerala on the water as we speak and the two women are patiently cutting with scissors an order of lemongrass.

They all love the bag made with Fairtrade cotton that I've brought with me. Soon Blessings is prancing about, posing. We have a laugh about how great it must be to work in a soap factory. All the other men in factories come home smelly and dirty but the soap guys must gather a following of women seduced by the sweet smell of soap that pervades their little building.

Sandy is the woman brought in to turn the company round. She's from a straight corporate background, more used to going out with bankers and enjoying fifty pound bottles of wine. But she wanted to take on a social enterprise and now her capable hands are more than full. She cannot believe how impossible it is to get any European bank to invest in a business in South Africa, her profit margins are too tight and she needs more orders badly. But they are all pretty determined. As Blessing says: 'Maybe one day we will put on a suit and tie and go overseas to get to present our soap business overseas'.

Photos.

Top: Township Trades make sure they don't create any waste so produce egg shaped soaps that can be purchased through Visionary.

Bottom: A member of the Township Trade team using a powerdrill as part of the soap production process.

A visit to Fairhills, South Africa by Harriet Lamb

2010-07-16T12:50:00.006+01:00

Today we met up with Mkhululi, the widely respected regional coordinator for Southern Africa. With him we go to visit Fairhills, whose wines you can enjoy in the Coop and who have used the premium to run a creche, among much, much more. On the way Mkhululi tells us that the joke doing the rounds in South Africa is: If only England had won! That way, given the fuss they still make about the last time England won, they would have talked about the World Cup in South Africa for the next 50 years, which would have been good for us...

It is shocking and inspiring to talk to the people at Fairhills. Shocking to learn that it was only in 1996 that white South African wine farmers finally stopped paying workers partly in wine. The legacy is still all too strong: many, many workers are alchoholics. So Fairhills runs special schemes to help such people. To date, 47 people have been on their programme with a 97% success rate.

They explain how important the Fairtrade standards are - the sad truth is that too many workers in South Africa do not know, let alone get, their basic employment rights. At least, they say, Fairtrade ensures that the employment laws are met. So that is the starting point. Next, most workers are illiterate given that one of the many terrible legacies of apartheid was an education system shot to pieces. Today Fairhills claims to run the largest adult literacy program in the Western Cape with workers from 19 years old to 72!

Fairhills as a wine brand is 25% owned by the workers. Their vision is that one day, as well as owning the brand, the workers will also be part-owners of the farms growing the grapes. So that one day very soon, sitting round the Board table of the farmers' cooperative growing the grapes, along with the 21 white farm owners will be the first black representative of the workers - who will then also own a farm. The vision is almost within their grasp, as the workers' Joint Body seeks to build the capital and the knowledge to buy a farm and take their rightful place at the table.

It's also totally shocking to go through the figures with Fairhills. They reckon that if you or me pay 3.75 for a bottle of wine, only 35p goes for the wine itself! The rest is swallowed down mostly by the taxmen who take about 2.50 (including both VAT and an import duty imposed on wines from South Africa by the EU, an inequity that has the South Africans' blood boiling) and the retailers... As ever, talking to the farmers and workers reminds me to fill the To Do List many times over... And yet it is always so inspiring that so many people are ready to give their energy to finding solutions.

Photos. Top: Harriet with Mkhululi at Fair Hills at one of their hand craft shops that use space where wine was once stored. Bottom: Mkhululi at the Fair Hills computer lab set up using their Fairtrade premium.

Visit the World of Fairhills blog

Harriet Lamb visits South Africa's first Fairtrade cafe

2010-07-15T17:07:00.002+01:00

South Africa is slowly waking up from its long football party. There are fewer fans prancing the streets in bright colours, vast television screens are being taken down and the vuvuzela sellers are trying to shift their remaining stock. Mind you, one shopkeeper tells me that he sold 700 yesterday as departing fans snapped up the year’s most popular present!

Apparently Vuvuzela has been voted the word of the 2010 World Cup by global linguists who said that the tournament will be best remembered for the naem of South Africa's trumpet. Meanwhile, in a post-party reflective mood, the papers are full of articles such as in today's (13.7.10) Times: 'The World Cup has accustomed us to achieving grand dreams'. The success, writes journalist Raenette Taljaard, means that there is a new found intolerance for mediocrity, calling on the government to apply the same success to all Government projects.

I’m troubled by how unfair it all is. No, I’m not talking about the daylight robbery of Ghana – or even about international trade. But rather the fact that I have left London glorying in a heat wave while in South Africa I am shivering in my cotton dresses that so rarely get an outing. As a self-confessed sun-junkie, it’s not very funny. In fact, things so are so bad I decided I’ll have to buy some tights so trek off to Woolworths, which is the South African reincarnation of Marks and Spencers – but minus the Fairtrade commitment. I’m getting a warm glow from covering my legs in nylon but it is disappointing to see that there is not a Fairtrade product in sight. Not one. A far cry from M&S in England with all its tea and coffee, sugar and jams being Fairtrade. But maybe that is all set to change.

To warm up we go to visit Bean There which has to be one of the nicest cafes in the world. It is also the first company to offer Fairtrade coffee in South Africa, and one of the few Fairtrade coffee roasters in Africa. The cafe is in a trendy revamped old building, with the coffee beans piled up in sacks in the corner. Stamped on one is Coopac, one of the cooperatives that they buy from. And the coffee is roasted right there, with steam and creamy smells pouring out all around you. The brother and sister dynamic duo behind the company join us over a really very delicious cappuncino and tell the story of their love affair with coffee and Fairtrade. It all with the departure from a corporate job in favour of back-packing around the world. In Canada someone was running a Fairtrade coffee shop and combining work and fun seemed the way to go.

Now they are leading the way for Fairtrade in South Africa, they are trying to get their coffee on to the supermarket shelves too.

Freeman, one of their baristas, brings over our coffee. When Bean There hosted a day for Fairtrade campaigners and volunteers, the cafe was very quiet. So Freeman sneaked in and sat listening to the training programme. That was it. He was hooked. He stayed the whole day and is now a signed up campaigner, proudly wearing his Fairtade badge and off to a wine promotion this week.

In fact, wine is the main Fairtrade labelled product available in South Africa. The labelling organisation only got going a year ago and already has 13 companies signed up with more on their way soon. There’s enormous interest in getting Fairtrade going in South Africa – among companies, Government, NGOs and trade unions alike. No-one is doubting the scale of the challenge as Fairtrade is pretty much unknown here. But the public seem up for it – Bean There has 6,500 people on their mailing list and 2,500 active Facebook debates on all things coffee and fair.

Boudewijn Goossens is keen that Fairtrade should be an African Affair – with products sources on the continent as much as possible. He points to the excitement that united the whole of Africa around the World Cup: everyone was cheering Ghana. And in the same way he’s convinced everyone will get behind Fairtrade goods from within Africa.

You certainly feel that, as the world cup slogan has it, Ke Nako – meaning Celebrate Africa's Humanity.

Meanwhile, an email comes through from the UK: The race horse Fair Trade came second in his race last week! Go, Fair trade, go... I'll just have to celebrate with a glass of Fairtrade South African wine....

Keep up with the latest news from Bean There Coffee at www.twitter.com/beantherecoffee

The Big Lunch 2010 by Ruth Bruce

2010-07-15T11:28:00.002+01:00

Fairtrade Garstang's Chairperson Ruth Bruce talks about preperations for this weekend's Big Lunch.

On Sunday the 18th July at 1.00pm, the group behind Garstang Fairtrade Town will once again be celebrating the Big Lunch. This year we’re hoping for clear skies to go with family fun in Cherestanc Square, just outside Booths in Garstang, Lancashire. As with last year, we’ll be celebrating people, food and fun, bringing our community together and celebrating the communities behind our fresh fruit, cola and chocolate by choosing Fairtrade. Come join us and bring your picnic to our picnic! We’ll bring the music and plenty of Fairtrade themed fun including al fresco snakes and ladders and pin the Fairtrade tea on the teapot. There will also be plenty of Fairtrade goodies, from cotton wool to wine, for you to try, enjoy and try again and again… Any Big Lunchers out there looking for fabulous Fairtrade recipes and possibly a few, last minute ideas for events, have a look here!

Bring your family and friends and relax in the open air, whilst we prove once again what a people friendly place Garstang is. The Big Lunch is an opportunity to celebrate people, place and food – we’re also celebrating ten years since we became the world’s first Fairtrade Town and that over 800 communities in 19 countries have followed in our footsteps. Most of all, we’re proud to join Britain for a great Big Fair Lunch and that the farmers behind the Fairtrade goodies we’ll enjoy on Sunday have been paid a fair price – enough to build a brighter future for their own communities. So roll on Sunday 18 June and let’s all raise a glass or two of Fairtrade bubbly to what really makes the world go round – people, place and making the best possible connections within and between our communities.

Find out more about The Big Lunch 2010 here.

Visiting tea farmers in Kenya by Harriet Lamb

2010-07-14T10:55:00.003+01:00

Next day, we drive miles to visit groups of tea farmers. On the way Amos, who works for Fairtrade Africa, tells me about the Government’s problems getting to grips with malaria. In one area, they gave out free mosquito nets – only to find the farmers used them to protect vegetables in their small garden plots or to create runs for their chickens!

At Michimimkuru, which luckily is nicknamed Michi as otherwise my tongue was twisted, we meet Captain Andrew Ethuru, who sits on their Premium Committee and on the Board of the dedicated Fairtrade company, Cafedirect. Although their tea is sold to a wide range of companies’ Fairtrade products from Asda to M&S, he is effusive in praising Cafedirect for all their extra support. In particular, they have been working together on projects to protect the environment – from fuel-efficient stoves to planting trees. Currently, they are assessing whether they can put a windmill. By their current calculations, they could power the tea factory, meet the people’s needs and still make money selling to the grid.

They are in a different position to the Machakos coffee farmers. Indeed, says the Captain (who served in the Kenyan Airforce): 'Poor people make this golden thing for you to enjoy. They are out picking in the cold and wet and the returns are very little.’ But with Fairtrade, he tells how the farmers have used the premium to upgrade and improve the tea buying centres scattered across the hills, where farmers take their tea to be weighed and collected: ‘As farmers we are supposed to be running after getting food for our family; but the buying centres need upgrading...so that’s where the Fairtrade premium comes in. You can invest in the business and the farmers still have money to buy books for the children to go to school’.

Then we're off again to Iriaini where the whole air around the tea factory smells of drying tea-leaves and soon we’re enjoying the inevitable cup. The charming and gentle, but very entrepreneurial manager, Mathew Ngenda tells how the smallholders depend too heavily on tea, and how as each generation keeps sub-dividing their plots among their children, it is becoming harder to make a living. So the cooperative have created their own Iriaini tea brand which they are selling locally, making one and a half times more than they do in the auction.

Now, the support from Traidcraft and Africa Now, they are diversifying. They have invested their premium in 400 beehives – generated from Fairtrade premiums, which should soon generate their own premiums, a sweet extra source of income for hard-pressed families, as well as providing nutritious sweetener for the family to eat. They are planting passion-fruit trees whose fruit will be sold to a local pulping factory and then on to Traidcraft for their juices. And they've got into rabbit-keeping – again providing food and income for the families. 'What’s more', smiles Mathew, 'these extra projects have roped in the men – and the bees will help pollinate the pomegranate trees, and we have opened a local shop to sell our tea – and soon our honey'.
‘So you see', he says softly leaning across the desk, ‘Fairtrade is about the whole person. We used to just think of selling tea, tea, tea. But when you bought our tea for just a little extra, we started thinking. Who would have thought of rabbit-keeping or bee-keeping before?!’

Mathew is so right. No development manual would have thought that learning to drive was a top priority. But when we move on to visit Finlays tea estate, we discover that that has proved the most popular adult education class offered by the Fairtrade Joint Body of workers and management who decide on use of the premium. George Gesora is the clean-cut, dynamic young Chairman of the Body, who has just been elected for his second and last three year term. He explains how the thinking of the Joint Body, and the workers, has evolved over the short time that they have been selling on Fairtrade terms – from a more individualistic to a more community perspective.

With pride, and with all the detailed expenditures neatly laid out on sheet of paper, the Joint Body members enumerate their achievements from sending children to school to bringing solar lighting to villages. When Kenya erupted into violence following contested elections in 2007, they used the premiums to buy blankets and food for refugees fleeing trouble. Because most workers left school young, they are also majoring on adult education, giving the workers the chance to add to their skills. And that’s when learning to drive came up as the most popular demand. The first 100 have now got their licence and 300 more are in the queue.
But now, like Iriaini, they have hit on the idea of using the premium to generate income so that the Premium Committee's income becomes self-sustaining. So they are going to buy two vans which will collect the tea from different weighing stations, where the workers bring their tea, and drive it to the factory – providing a service for which the company will pay them. Then they plan to use the vans to buy in bulk maize, people’s staple food the price of which normally fluctuates wildly. They can sell to the workers for a small profit while still being cheaper than normal. Their colleagues over at the Finlays flower factory are thinking of investing their premiums in Government bonds, building up a community resource and using only the interest. Everyone we talk to is spilling over with ideas and, as they find their feet and their confidence, with income generating initiatives to build on the premium and lever far greater change.

But these are very early days for such schemes and everyone has only one question for me – why can they not sell more of their tea as Fairtrade? What is happening in the market? Can we encourage more people to buy Fairtrade? The farmers and workers alike need increased premiums to fund their schemes, while other groups are queueing to join the system. At Finlays, everyone is thrilled when I get a packet of Sainsbury’s Red Label tea out of my bag. That’s where most of their tea goes, mixing into a blend with teas from across Africa, and amid cries of delight, they recognise the photo of the tea worker on the side as coming from Finlays! ‘The workers are all interested in the outcome of the product’, explains George. ‘We are all concerned about the market and we need it to grow so we get more premium.’

Everyone crowds round when I explain about how we are trying to raise awareness of Fairtrade in the UK – laughing at photos of campaigners prancing about in Strictly Fairtrade tea dances or dressing up as Fairtrade bananas. They are also excited to hear of Fairtrade Africa’s plans to start selling Fairtrade in Kenya itself. I am with some of the new team at Fairtrade Africa - Amos who co-ordinates producers in east Africa, and the vivacious marketing manager Wangari who is plotting how to launch Fairtrade products within Kenya. All the producers we meet are keen to back the idea, enthusiastically suggesting how they can help - with this contact, or that celebrity or supermarket contact. It will mean badly needed extra sales. But it will also be so empowering for the farmers and workers to see their own products on their own shop shelves, changing the endless reliance on exports and bringing Fairtrade back home.

In this ambition, Kenya will be following in the footsteps of South Africa where there are producers exporting to Europe as well as selling on the very new local Fairtrade market. And that's where I travel to on Saturday. Strangely, the plane is full of Flying Dutchmen resplendent in orange. When we land at the spanking clean new Johannesburg airport, the air itself seems to be grinning at the football. it is absolutely infectious - you feel that all of Africa is excited. There are vuvuzelas everywhere, photos of footballers from the world over at every corner. And yes, a lot of Dutchmen......

Harriet Lamb in Nairobi, Kenya

2010-07-13T12:59:00.000+01:00

It’s been quite a week in Nairobi, Kenya. Watching the pennies, I’ve been staying at the Seventh Day Adventists guest house where there’s no tea or coffee on offer at breakfast – though strangely hot chocolate is, even though it must be a stimulant too. Then I’ve been spending all day with tea and coffee farmers – which is stimulating enough to keep me going for weeks.

We visit a group of coffee smallholders at Machakos, less than two hours from Nairobi. Yet they have no electricity in their area which is very poor - so poor in fact that only two years ago they faced famine. The Chairman of the Kaliluni group explains: ‘Two years running there was a drought and so the crops failed. It was a famine. When the farmers came together to decide how to use the Fairtrade premium, they could only think how hungry they were. So they used the premium as famine relief.’ The management had wanted to invest the Fairtrade premium in new tables on which they dry the coffee, so improving productivity and quality - but how could they do that when people were hungry, he said - we just didn’t have enough premium to do both so we put the plans on hold until they've sold enough on Fairtrade terms.

Even normal times are tough times. The Chairman says: ‘Most farmers here are below the poverty line. It’s very tough when they come needing money. They can't even get work and if they do get work on a farm, it’s only 100 Kenyan shillings (about £1) a day – imagine feeding a family on that!’

Harriet Lamb speaks with Ndumberi Coffee Farmers Co-operative

2010-07-12T12:19:00.002+01:00

The Fairtrade Foundation Executive Director catches up with the Co-operative's chairman to learn more about its work.

Amid the muddy red earth of a Kenyan farm, stands a modest wooden meeting room full of the coffee farmers who sit on their cooperative's management Committees. But there is nothing modest about the trophy cabinet on the wall. It is bulging with cups and trophies that the cooperative has won: the second best cooperative in the whole of Kenya; the best managed coop in the District, the best loan recovery record, the highest payment rates to farmers... it's a proud record.

I've come to spend time in Africa, to listen to the Fairtrade farmers and workers and to the dynamic new team of their umbrella body, Fairtrade Africa. After ten years in Fairtrade, I want a longer time to hear from the producers about what is working well and less well and how we need to adapt and change Fairtrade for the future. And what better place to start than with the award-winning Ndumberi Coffee Farmers Co-operative Society Ltd. When I ask what they put their success down to, they say it's about hard work, leadership, transparency and accountabilty to their members.

They also talk of leadership and certainly that's a quality that shines from Raymond Gitau Wanjugi, their charismatic Chairman. Only two weeks ago I met him in the Fairtrade Foundation office in London as he came to represent Fairtrade Africa at the trade show, Caffe Culture. Now he tells me how the cooperative faced tough times over the past decades: the global coffee market was liberalised, prices collapsed, farm sizes were shrinking as plots were subdivided among children, productivity went right down. Gradually, the cooperative has turned all that round. They have organised intensive training for the farmers so as to improve productivity and, thanks to a Fairtrade grant, to build capacity of the managers.

They've made huge strides. Before, one coffee tree was yielding less than one kilo of coffee; now that has risen to 6 kilos - their plan is to get to 10 kilos before long. Then explains Raymond: 'We have put in a quality control lab so that we now know the grades of the coffee before we take it to the mill. Before, there was a lot of cheating - we'd take good grades and they would swap them for poor coffee and we couldnt do anything.'

Now they have ambitions plans to add more value to the coffee - they want to build a dry mill and market their own coffee in Kenya. Raymond says: ' Fairtrade has really opened doors for this cooperative'. He is certainly hoping that his recent visit to London will have opened a few more, so the cooperative can sell more of their coffee on Fairtrade terms. Certainly, the coffee farmers couldn't wish for a better ambassador.

Hannah Harris in Nairobi - Visit to Kaliluni Farmers Coop Society Ltd [Fairtrade certified for coffee]

2010-07-01T11:24:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to go on a field trip with Amos, the AFN regional co-ordinator for Eastern Africa. Kaliluni is a very small coffee co-operative located just outside of Machakos, a town about 2 hours from Nairobi. We got terribly lost trying to find it, being hidden deep in the hillside, but the view once we found it was well worth the wait.

We were lucky enough to arrive just as all the coffee was being delivered. Streams and streams of people carrying red cherries in sacks on their backs kept walking past us. The place was brimming with people sorting, washing and weighing their coffee cherries; an amazing sight. Amos and I had a tour of the facility before heading into a meeting to discuss Fairtrade and AFN issues. A good opportunity for me to practise my Kiswahili (I followed a little of what they talked about, but they were kind enough to stop now and again and summarise in English for me!). Great that AFN have local staff on the ground able to use relevant languages when meeting producers. A key challenge facing this small co-operative is the lack of any electricity at the main processing site or within the surrounding communities. This is something they hope to be able to invest in should Fairtrade premium funds permit. Fairtrade premiums have so far been used to provide piped water to the central facility. More info about this co-operative will be displayed on the AFN website; we’re still set to launch this in July, keep looking out for it!

Amos with the General Manager and Assistant General Manager of Kaliluni

Hannah Harris in Nairobi - the new view from my office!

2010-06-02T08:49:00.001+01:00

I thought it about time I gave you all a little update on things with the AFN - it has been a while. The office moved from Moshi, Tanzania to Nairobi, Kenya a few weeks ago. Things have been a little hectic setting up our new work space but we are getting there. The office is a nice shiny new building where we have 2 rooms – one will be a board room, one our workspace.

At the moment these only have our desks in it and some new Fairtrade tea towels from London dotted around (like them!), but the design plans look pretty good so I hope it will be finished before I leave. I must say that it is a stark change of pace of life from Moshi to Nairobi. There's no view of Kili out of my window anymore - just the relentless lines of cars and buses in gridlock. It is certainly very different, but I am loving it nonetheless. Activity abounds, new staff have arrived and are busy meeting people and establishing their new roles. They are all great; it is nice to work within a bigger team.

I left my bike in Moshi after taking advice that I wouldn’t be safe on the madness of the roads (a wise decision) so I travel to work on a matatu (bus) listening to the local radio station at max volume trying to find some Zen in the noise before I start my day. This doesn’t normally work. I end up laughing at my attempt to do so.

I’ve been storming away trying to get everything ready for the new website – content, images, French translation etc. Things are on track and the new staff have been great at inputting into the project to make it a team effort. All should be ready for a launch in mid July. Watch this space.

3 of the new staff managed to visit the Fairtrade Foundation in London for a week. They came back very inspired – thanks to all at Fairtrade Foundation staff for looking after them and sharing with them what you do. Let the links continue!

Reinstating 'development' in the 'Doha Development Round' - Aurelie Walker

2010-05-28T17:15:00.004+01:00

Aurelie Walker is the Trade Policy Advisor at Fairtrade Foundation

In his interview with the Today programme on Radio 4 yesterday morning David Cameron‘s fleeting reference to concluding the Doha Round of trade negotiations in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) as a stimulus to growth in the Eurozone roused little excitement in the interviewer. However, for those working to cushion developing countries from the negative effects of trade liberalisation, ears pricked up.

Cameron rightly pointed out concluding the Round is a complicated matter. He is clearly well briefed on the intricacies of commercial diplomacy. The intricacies of international development may be equally as difficult to overcome.

The Development Round has stalled because of the disparate definitions of ‘development’ among the WTO membership. The G8, emerging economies, least developed countries and small island states rarely see eye to eye on this – the central objective of the nine-year-old round of trade negotiations. Without a common consensus on development, the Development Round cannot be revived, let alone concluded. The Treasury perspective expressed in the interview, that concluding the round would be a stimulus to growth that ‘does not cost anything’ and that ‘doesn’t put up the budget deficit’ does not present the full picture.

Questions of migration, conflict and poverty reduction are inextricably linked to a country’s economic and trade policies. This is recognised by the new ‘post-Lisbon’ EU in its revamped commitment to ‘Policy Coherence for Development’. For some reason, the trade experts are the last to concede what every other social scientist has acknowledged; that unfettered trade liberalisation is not a synonym for ‘development’. In fact, the more the trade policy tools available to developing countries to manage their economy are restricted, the greater the income inequalities that will arise from any growth; as attested by India’s, Brazil’s, as well as Sub-Saharan Africa’s experience. If the European position in the Development Round is not development oriented and leads to increased inequality and pushes the marginalised further into poverty - at home and abroad- it will be paid for in other ways as the consequences unfurl - Greece and Jamaica are the most recent tragic examples. The Treasury should be aware that pushing trade liberalisation as a stimulus to growth without a consensus on development in the WTO can indeed be very costly.

A meeting in Malawi by Annette Muller

2010-05-27T09:48:00.003+01:00

Annette Muller is the Video Officer at the Fairtrade Foundation

Next week I will be visiting some Fairtrade farmers in Malawi. As you can imagine I'm pretty excited. Yet there's so much to plan so I have to say I'm also a bit tired and slightly stressed making sure as much as possible is in place! But of course, overall I am very excited.

This visit will continue research for a new project to increase the opportunity for farmers to tell their own stories to us here in the UK. Earlier this year I, along with workmate Richard, visited Malawi and spent an afternoon at Kasinthula Cane Growers in the Chikwawa region - a hot and humid district coloured by brown dirt and referred to by some as the dustbowl.

During our visit, a relentless sun burnt down on us causing never ending beads of sweat to form on our faces and run down our backs. And for me, visiting Kasinthula felt like going home. Having grown up in Bundaberg, Australia, and spending much of my time playing in the sugar cane fields as a kid, I felt a particular connection to the people I met at Kasinthula as we shared memories of childhood games running through the towering cane stalks...

But while some of the locals and I had similar lives growing up, in other respects there were certainly differences from my childhood to the children of Kasinthula producers. When talking to Alfred Butao, a Kasinthula farmer who lives in the Chinangwa village, he told us his continual burden was how he would provide breakfast for his eight children (aged between 3-15 years) every day. Despite this Alfred is a very positive man and explained his dream for the future is to be able to send all of his children on to professional studies. He personally hopes part of any future Fairtrade premium may fund a junior primary school in his village so the small children don’t have to travel 5km on foot each way to school and back.

Alfred with his wife and seven of his children

I came back from our visit with no doubt that the Fairtrade premium is extremely important to and has massive impact on the lives of the producers, but I was also interested to hear from some of the Fairtrade Committee members that they felt the relationships and new opportunities were the most important part of their involvement with Fairtrade.

A very lively young man named Aubry M Chilenje (the current Secretary of the Fairtrade Committee) told us that 'Fairtrade is an innovation. Fairtrade has meant meeting other cultures. For example your visit has brought access for me to see you and talk to you and learn about your culture - even just by looking at you it is interesting to learn about you. Fairtrade has brought us together which is very interesting. It is not just the Fairtrade premium that has a positive impact.'

Some of the Fairtrade Committee members - Aubry is the man holding the baby :)

Aubry's comments were particularly interesting as the purpose of our visit to Malawi was to meet with Fairtrade farmers there and discuss ways in which we can work together to create a better way of connecting the farmers more directly (and more frequently) to a wider group of interested shoppers in the UK. We experimented with ideas about how this may be done and I can’t wait to meet with the groups again on our next visit there in June to get the ball rolling on some new media project plans. There is much more work to be done yet so all I can say at this time is... watch this space!

Our guide during the visit was a very friendly man named Elod Kafaukoma. We were excited to discover that Elod is currently blogging about life for himself and the wider community of Kasinthula farmers. To read about daily life in the Chikwawa region see Elod's blog: http://www.ubuntu-trading.com/blog/

A free weekend of Fairtrade family fun by Simon Howlett

2010-05-20T17:50:00.001+01:00

Simon Howlett is a volunteer of Fairtrade Foundation's Supporter Marketing Services

It will be a lie to say that the weather was excellent for those three days of the festival. That the weather was fantastic and everyone was in T-shirts complaining about the heat.

In actually fact it was cold, windy and the sky looked like it had woken up on the wrong side of bed.

However being a happy bunch of Fairtrade staff and volunteers, we didn’t let this get us down. We drank coffee from the CaféDirect stall, had Fairtrade mulled wine from the bar (when we had finished our duties of course) and listened to the live music coming from the stage. We were they to promote Fairtrade as well as to celebrate Dubble’s 10th birthday – we were having a party.

The Fairtrade festival took place on Potters Fields on the South Bank of the Thames right beside Tower Bridge. As well as celebrating Dubble’s 10th birthday (in case you do not know it is an excellent Fairtrade chocolate bar- yum!) It was also to celebrate World Fair Trade Day. http://www.worldfairtradeday10.org

Stalls selling crafts, books, nuts, dried fruit, ice cream, beauty products and pants were all present; many of the stalls also had free samples. Though if you felt your kids should do something more active than just eat, they could get their face painted, play some football, compete in the banana jousting, do some singing, drama and drumming workshops or just sit back and listen to the author Tom Palmer read from his book Foul Play.

We cannot forget the live music upon the stage. A wide variety of acts appeared - from samba to rock, hip-hop to folk. There was no reason for anyone not to dance to at least one genre of music over the three days. If you still did not feel like dancing then the banana people made sure you did!

What can be said about the Fairtrade festival is that it was fun, joyful, musical and cold – those working had high spirits, those that were there got stuck into the activities, whilst those that stumbled upon us on Potters Fields looked bewildered, then delighted, then amused by the variety of products and entertainment – not bad for a cold windy weekend.

Fairtrade boston beans first taste!

2010-05-18T15:56:00.002+01:00

How did other Fairtrade Foundation staff get their chops round the newest Fairtrade product – boston beans from Kenya –last night?

Gemma and her husband Dave enjoyed theirs in a stirfry with noodles and Liberation’s Fairtrade cashews and peanuts – it was yummy, and Dave said ‘it tastes better because it’s ethical’.

Jenny munched them steamed and added to a curry accompanied by Fairtrade rice, with leftovers for today’s lunch. For pudding, Fairtrade icecream. It was Cream o’ Galloway if you’re interested. ‘Er, there are no pictures - I was too hungry.’

Meanwhile, John was busy cooking for the family. Here's his run through of proceedings:

“Preparing supper started on the 17.54 from Waterloo with a ‘text’ discussion between various family members for recipe ideas - without agreement or conclusion. Sam Stern’s ‘Cooking up a Storm’, cookbook for teenagers, came to my rescue (as it always does!) – ‘Salmon – no bones’ – which used up readily available ingredients in the fridge & larder. Organic salmon supplemented by Fairtrade basmati rice and ‘Bobby’ beans from Kenya – delicious. Even my teenager son, who ‘does not like fish’, admitted it was ‘tasty’. Happiness all round!”

Learn more about Fairtrade certified vegetables

Coconut curry by Tony Wright

2010-05-18T09:25:00.017+01:00

Tony Wright's the Digital Marketing Officer at Fairtrade Foundation.

With great excitement last night, I rushed home via the supermarket to check out the all new Fairtrade certified boston beans that went on sale. After flicking through a few cook books to see what I could do, I decided I'd stick by my own curry recipe of coconut curry, but this time round, throw the new Fairtrade product category into the mix.

An easy and straight forward recipe, this coconut curry's a great way to enjoy a great range of Fairtrade products all at once. From the gentle crunch of Fairtrade cashew nuts suggested by my colleague Emma, to the creamy coconut sauce, it's filled with nutrients and if you can muster the self control, is perfect for the next day's lunch.

Ingredients

Curry base: cooking onion, garlic cloves, Fairtrade tumeric, garam masala, chilli powder, grounded coriander, cumin, chopped tomatoes, coconut milk.

Vegetables: butter beans, baby potatoes, Fairtrade boston beans, Fairtrade Mango chutney, Fairtrade cashew nuts, vine tomatoes, courgette, fresh corriander, Fairtrade basmati rice.

Firstly, take a tea spoon of each spice and blend them on a small dish. Add a little chilli powder if you prefer curries hot. Warm a frying pan slightly and place the spices onto the heat for half a minute so they toast, infusing their flavours.

Chop and begin steaming the vegetables in a pan of a little water. Don't add the quartered tomatoes until later if you prefer them to be less soft.

Dice the onion and garlic and fry in a saucepan with a little vegetable oil. Wait until the onions have turned golden brown and add the toasted spices, moving the contents of the pan around steadily to coat the onion and garlic with as much spice as possible.

Continue for a few minutes, then add a can of chopped tomatoes, constantly mixing as the contents become a flavoursome, thick paste. Add the steamed vegetables, including the liquid that remains in their dish, stirring them into the curry sauce.

Continue cooking the vegetables, continuing to stir regularly. If you haven't already, now pop the diced tomatoes into the mix along with a handful of cashew nuts. Stir in half a can of coconut milk and leave the curry to keep on bubbling so the vegetables continue to soften and soak in all the flavour.

Dice the fresh coriander and sprinkle into the curry pot before continuing to stir. Keep cooking whilst the contents becomes thicker and less runny depending on your preferred consistency. Use some of the remaining coconut milk if you need.

Boil the rice, place it on a plate, spoon the curry on top and make sure you serve the dish with lots of sauce. Place a little Fairtrade mango chutney on the side of the place as a dip for those tasty beans. Pour yourself a glass of Fairtrade orange juice (or two if you got carried away with the chilli) and enjoy.

Find out more about Fairtrade vegetables and locate your nearest stockist.

Garstang celebrated 10 years as the world’s first Fairtrade Town by Bruce Crowther

2010-04-28T10:44:00.000+01:00

On Saturday 24th April the people of Garstang, Lancashire celebrated 10 years as the world’s first Fairtrade Town. This small market town with a population of just 5,000 has given rise to a grassroots movement made up of 480 Fairtrade Towns in the UK and a total of over 800 in 19 countries worldwide, including cities such as London, Paris, Rome Copenhagen and San Francisco. Over 100 guests attended what was a truly international celebration with over 50 congratulatory messages from the nearby Fairtrade city of Lancaster to the largest Fairtrade City of London; from Jersey to Japan looking East and Belgium to Brazil looking West.

Unfortunately the volcanic ash cloud filling the UK airspace left some British people stranded abroad and prevented most international well wishers from attending the event. But no volcano could dampen the fiery spirit of Ms. Shoko Akashi who is leading the campaign to make Kumamoto the first Fair Trade Town in not only Japan, but the whole Asian continent. Shoko braved the airport chaos and arrived in Garstang the day before the event. She was to read out messages from the campaign group, Mayor and local authority of Kumamoto and then perform the traditional Japanese dance ‘Sakura Sakura’ about the springtime cherry blossom. But again disaster struck as all her luggage, including ceremonial Kimono was left behind in Helsinki. Nothing would stop Shoko however and by some small miracle a Japanese dance group staying in the same hotel was able to come to the rescue. With a new ‘cherry blossom’ Kimono the dance could go on. International links were also made via webcam with Media, the first Fair Trade Town in the US and Garstang’s community link and Fairtrade cocoa farming village of New Koforidua in Ghana.

Another highlight of the evening was the launch by Ian Agnew of the Lorna Young Foundation of the new directly-traded Mzuzu coffee from Malawi, that will first be sold in Garstang’s One World Shop the Mustard Seed. The Director of the Fairtrade Foundation Harriet Lamb CBE was full of praise for Garstang’s pioneers and delivered a highly motivational and inspiring speech. Former Chair of the Garstang Fairtrade Steering Group Elaine Gisbourne said, “I was deeply moved by Harriet Lamb's address; it will stay with me for a very long time to come”. Following her speech Harriet Lamb cut the Fairtrade chocolate cake made by budding chef and 14 year old Fairtrade supporter Anna Crowther before giving a toast to Fairtrade Towns, using Co-op Fairtrade bubby of course.

Guests were also treated to a 15 minute slide show giving the history of the Garstang Fairtrade Town campaign as well as many stalls and displays from local Fairtrade traders together with Ubuntu Fairtrade cola and the Cooperative Group.

by Bruce Crowther, UK Fairtrade Towns Advisor and founder of Fair Trade Towns.

10th anniversary of Fairtrade Garstang by Harriet Lamb

2010-04-26T11:48:00.005+01:00

If you haven’t ever visited Garstang, in Lancashire, I would put it on your to do list now. The countryside is beautiful, the town interesting, the people friendly and the Garstang Blue cheese is worth a visit alone. But for Fairtrade fans, Garstang is a legend and yesterday I joined them to celebrate ten years since they declared themselves the World’s First Fairtrade Town – a momentus milestone in the Fairtrade movement.

Today that movement spans the globe. There are now an astonishing 802 Fairtrade Towns across 19 countries and it's growing by the day. Arriving with me is Ms. Shoko Akashi who is leading the campaign to make Kumamoto the first Fairtrade Town in Japan (and indeed Asia) and later in the evening we link up live with Media, the first Fairtrade town in the USA and with New Koforidua in Ghana. But first Bruce Crowther, the passionate man behind the movement, takes us on a guided tour of his home town. One thing is for sure: you cannot miss Fairtrade in Garstang.

Strung across the High Street, a banner declares its Fairtrade credentials; there are road signs and history boards and Ghanaian flags flutter outside the town council offices. LBT Motors is the place to get your car fixed – and they have a sign letting you know that they drink Fairtrade tea and coffee. Pipers Restaurant will serve you Fairtrade wine with your gourmet meal. Across the road at the pub, they’ve got Fairtrade coffee too, or you can pop round to the Coffee Pot, picking up all the Divine chocolate money can buy at Market Place News on the way.

We drop into the Co-op and have a chat with Betty, the hard-working store manager who has put her weight behind Fairtrade from day one. There’s certainly an impressive display of Fairtrade goods in store: ‘It’s popular’ she says. ‘Otherwise we couldn’t stock it’. And there’s no doubt that throughout the country, the Co-op have been staunch supporters of the Fairtrade Towns movement.

The genius of that movement is that it gives everyone the tools to get involved, and simple steps to take in their local community. Everyone can talk to their Town Council or school, and everyone can offer Fairtrade whether they are a major employer or the local hairdresser. And so Fairtrade is being taken up by an ever growing group of people who become as it were part-owners of the idea – feeling every bump along the way, struggling to overcome hitches, celebrating all successes. And the growing sales of Fairtrade in Britain is absolutely down to the growing Fairtrade movement now topping 480 Towns, 400 Fairtrade schools, 6000 faith groups and 118 universities.

Certainly Saturday night was a time to celebrate with some Co-op Fairtrade bubbly and with messages of support from nearby Lancaster to London, Jersey to Japan in the East and Belgium to Brazil in the West, not to mention our own Prime Minister who salutes Bruce as one of his Everyday Heros. Bruce always said that what they had done in Garstang only mattered if the idea could spread. And spread it has. Like wildfire across the country. And now the world. And everything is still to play for.

And all this started by one man who is still a working vet, operating on cats in the day while fielding calls from Ghana to Germany out of hours. Really it shouldn’t happen to a Fairtrade Vet.

Thinking of animals: On 18th April, a horse called Fair Trade won its maiden race at Newbury, ridden by Jimmy Fortune. Now three years old, from the stallion Trade Fair, the horse has a bright future. I don’t want to encourage gambling, but I know for one that I am going to be backing the winning horse, called Fair Trade.

Find out more about Fairtrade Garstang and Fairtrade Towns

The Fairtrade Garstang cake was baked by budding 14 year old chef Anna Crowther.

All photographs © John Sargent of the Haworth Fairtrade Town campaign.

Visiting Rwanda by Harriet Lamb #2

2010-04-09T11:01:00.001+01:00

Visiting the Maraba farmers with me was Mark Price, the bubbly boss of Waitrose, nick-named the ‘chubby grocer’. He was impressed, saying: ‘Visiting growers in Rwanda reinforced my view that through Fairtrade there is a more morally just way of sourcing from developing countries. I was struck by the Maraba cooperative’s pride in producing excellent quality coffee – so the Fairtrade premiums can drive a virtuous circle. Fairtrade is now a proven model to raise the most disadvantaged out of poverty and I hope that one day all developing world commodities will be traded in this way’.

It was a similar story when together with the Starbucks team, I visited with the farmers of the Dukunde Kawa cooperative. They told us how they used to sell their coffee to the first middle-men who came round their villages at harvest time until they discovered that they were ‘being robbed’. So they organised themselves and started selling as a group. Then they realised, that if they washed the coffee themselves (the first stage of coffee processing) they could make more money. Today, many years later, they have a major washing station, have invested in schools and health clinics and bought wonderful special bikes with a long carrying section at the back on which farmers carry the huge bags of beans sometimes miles from their hilly farms to the collection points.

We asked the women farmers about their dreams for the future. One woman was hoping for a cow, to give milk to her children and so she could sell the rest. Another woman suggested that Starbucks launch a Woman’s Coffee. As she said, women do all the work on the coffee but get none of the rewards. The Starbucks team clocked the idea. So who knows? We may be able to enjoy that too one day. Certainly, there’s no shortage of ideas for future developments in Rwanda. As even the President of Rwanda, His Excellency Paul Kagame, said: ‘Fairtrade offers new opportunities for small-scale producers in Rwanda, and we have made great achievements in this respect, especially in the coffee industry. As a country where most people depend on agriculture, we must figure out how to move faster in this direction, in order to positively impact the economic well-bring of rural communities.’

Visiting Rwanda by Harriet Lamb

2010-04-09T10:56:00.000+01:00

At the Foundation, still full from all the Fairtrade Easter eggs we’ve enjoyed, news is still pouring in from companies and campaigners about the biggest and best ever Fairtrade Fortnight. Our producer partners who went up and down the country talking about Fairtrade were blown away – they couldn’t believe what ordinary people are doing to raise awareness and sales of Fairtrade. And what a nation of swap-a-holics... Not just a million and one swaps to Fairtrade were made but a whopping 1,062,220!

Among the companies, the Top of the Swaps included Traidcraft and Starbucks who swapped mountains of free brownies made with Fairtrade chocolate to go with their Fairtrade coffees. I popped into a local store and was so excited to see the lovely new single-origin Fairtrade coffee from Rwanda, launched during Fairtrade Fortnight. I bought a bag of the heavenly scented beans to enjoy at home. It brings back so many memories of when I visited the farmers in Rwanda last year – once with Starbucks and first with the dedicated quality coffee company, Union Hand Roasted.

Before going, I watched the film ‘Hotel Rwanda’. My daughter kept checking: was I crying? Or hiding my eyes from the horrors of man’s inhumanity to man during the 1994 genocide, the anniversary of which was marked last week? Instead, she was amazed that I had a stupid soppy little smile on my face. No-one watching that film can fail to be humbled and inspired by its true story of how hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina, saves over 1,000 refugees from the murdering mobs, showing endless ingenuity and a deep well of common humanity. That really is having the courage of your convictions.

Today, in that small country, with its lush rolling hills and rich red earth, it is equally hard not be to humbled and inspired by how its people – from senior civil servants to coffee farmers – are now pulling together with remarkable focus and ingenuity, to tackle the poverty that blights lives and feeds so many conflicts, to regenerate their economy and rebuild society.

I visited Maraba village, a bustling market, busy bank and a choice of hairdressing ‘Salons’ are all lively testimony to the economic revival stimulated by the villagers’ coffee cooperative. Ten years ago, this village was recorded as among the country’s poorest with people literally dying of hunger; their coffee was sold as the aptly named ‘café ordinaire’, fetching less than ordinary prices. Today, the Maraba villagers are commanding handsome premiums for their speciality coffee which has won prizes for the best coffee in Africa. Ten years ago, Angelique’s family sold raw coffee berries to passing middlemen; today, in a white coat, she is the first generation of cuppers in the cooperative’s own cupping laboratory, constantly testing their coffee’s quality, feeding back to the farmers, improving constantly. Today, they even roast and sell their own coffee locally in Rwanda, and export to, among others, Union Hand Roasted who sell Rwanda Maraba Fairtrade coffee in our UK shops shelves. The farmers are rightly full of pride for all they have achieved, excited showing their visitors everything from the Californian worms they have put to work on their compost in an experiment to the little kinder garden they have built for the community... With such farmers, Fairtrade is building an architecture of hope.

Promoting Fairtrade on my bike - Hannah Harris in Moshi

2010-04-06T09:27:00.000+01:00

Trying to keep pace with the Masaai just wasn’t working so I have purchased a bike. I like to think this is the Fairtrade green, however, in Moshi the colour is better known to represent the mobile company Zantel. Everyone has therefore suggested I get a Zantel t-shirt and start doing marketing for them. I'm not so sure, please send me a Fairtrade t-shirt instead!

However, the bike might not get much use for a while since the rains have now started and when I say rain, I mean it REALLY rains. Bucket loads. I bought some wellington boots from the Farmers Association, so when I am not promoting Zantel, I look like a farmer. The rains are definitely a good thing for farmers, travelling on the roads out of town you can see everyone busily planting.

The visit to the KNCU Fairtrade coffee tourism tour a few weeks ago was enlightening. A real diversification project in action. KNCU has 67 primary societies in total. 7 of which have a tourism project. I visited a village up the slopes of the mountain called Uru Msuni. 3 primary societies benefit from this particular project which started in 2005. They have a campsite, a restaurant, a coffee tour as well as other guided walks. 70% of the income from the tourism project goes directly to a community development fund which is farmer owned. The rest is used to run the tourism office at KNCU level.

It is well advertised in Moshi, you can’t miss it and as a result lots of tourists do visit. Something I found very encouraging is that according to our guide, all the tourists ask about Fairtrade and want to know why they can’t buy Fairtrade KNCU coffee here in Moshi. The guides also wanted us to help them understand more about Fairtrade so that they could advise tourists better. The AFN is aiming to work on value addition so that coffee and other products can indeed be labelled in Africa, bringing even more benefits to farmers.

Tackling child labour in the cocoa industry

2010-03-25T00:11:00.010Z

Harriet Lamb, Director of the Fairtrade Foundation, shares her thoughts on Panorama's Chocolate - The Bitter Truth.

How shocking is it that in 2010 there are still families so poor that kids are trafficked to work on cocoa farms? That farmers in West Africa don’t get enough for their cocoa to make ends meet. That is a scandal. It still makes my blood boil. And it’s just plain sad to see the kids shown on last night’s BBC Panorama – The Bitter Truth. It is to bring an end such injustices that so many people across the world – from visionary leaders among cocoa farmers in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire through to members of the public in the UK – have taken Fairtrade to heart. Exactly because Fairtrade will not walk away from these real and deep-rooted problems. Rather, we have a system to deal with them. Only through Fairtrade, can you know that the cocoa comes from a group of farmers, who have committed to organise democratically and to meet a range of rigorous standards including a promise stamp out child labour, and in exchange they get a fair price and premium.

Sometimes, it is true, that individual farmers fall down on the standards. But the Fairtrade system means the farmers’ coops themselves and the Fairtrade auditors are checking. And on the odd occasion that we find any children who are trafficked or forced to work – then care of those children must be our first concern. After that, we take action to sort out the problem, and prevent it happening in the future. And to invest in positive moves to build a different future for the children.

At the start of the programme, the presenter promised to tell viewers what Fairtrade really means. Well – if he had wanted to do that, he should have told you that what Fairtrade means above all else, is not only the rigour of standards but also the promise of a better deal for the farmers which enables them to make poverty history for themselves. And time and time again the farmers are deciding to invest that extra premium in the education of their kids. Among the farmers of Kavokiva in Cote d’Ivoire, a utterly shocking nine out of ten farmers are illiterate. So guess what? They’ve invested the Fairtrade premium into education – adult education classes, especially for women but also into scholarships so kids can go to school and even building make-shift schools in areas where there are none. I salute the leaders among the cocoa farmers who are tackling these problems for the long term. Kavokiva agreed a Charter against child labour years ago, and have a programme of raising awareness among the farmers about why forced child labour cannot be tolerated.

Panorama is shocking and sad viewing. But if you want your spirits lifted, just read the farmers’ responses to the programme and hear what they are doing, day in and day out, to tackle the problems. Until last year, most Fairtrade cocoa groups in West Africa could only sell one in ten bags of cocoa on Fairtrade terms – so that really limited what they could do. Now, thanks to major commitments by Cadbury Dairy Milk and Kit Kat, those groups can sell serious volumes on Fairtrade terms. And that will make a serious difference.

Fairtrade never guaranteed a perfect rose-tinted world. We do guarantee a fair price and premium to the farmers’ groups – that badly needed extra resource to start tackling problems like child labour. We do guarantee clear and rigorous standards. We do guarantee that we will check against those standards and take action if we find problems. Who can say fairer than that?

Read a statement by Fairtrade Foundation following the BBC Panorama Report.

Share your comments about the broadcast here.

My first Fairtrade Fortnight as a volunteer by Marzia Manconi

2010-03-17T16:37:00.000Z

Marzia Manconi volunteers for the Fairtrade Foundation's Fairtrade Towns campaign. Here's a blog she's written about her first Fairtrade Fortnight...

What an amazing couple of weeks! I am still coming to terms with the fact that my first ever Fairtrade Fortnight has come to an end and I can’t wait for the next one! I had the most enjoyable time campaigning alongside my fellow ‘Fairtraders’ in an attempt to increase the awareness of Fairtrade across the country. These intense two weeks have represented a great opportunity to be catapulted from the day-to-day buzz of office life into the wide range of events organised in London, the largest Fairtrade City in the world, to celebrate Fairtrade Fortnight.

For me, it was great fun as well as a massive learning experience. I marched up and down central London dressed up as a Tea Lady, I took part in the amazing ‘Strictly Fairtrade Tea Dance’ event in Spitalfields and I volunteered at a Fairtrade stall during the ‘Fairtrade Chai: an Islamic Perspective’ event in Whitechapel. More than anything else, it was incredibly inspiring to get the chance to meet, speak to and attend the presentations of the Fairtrade producers who travelled all the way from their countries to the UK to report on the impact that Fairtrade has within their communities.

This Fairtrade Fortnight has been an incredible success and I genuinely feel that a massive ‘thank you’ should be given to all the Fairtrade campaigners around the country. Over the course of the year, they give up part of their free time to promote the principles and values of Fairtrade. They represent the main reasons why we have so many Fairtrade Towns, Schools, Universities and Faith Groups all over the UK.

Personally, this experience has furthered my belief in the saying that ‘knowledge means power’. This is why we must keep campaigning to sensitise the general public on trade justice and persuade them to switch to Fairtrade. This gives them the power to make the difference for disadvantaged communities in developing countries and gives these communities the power to socio-economic self-determination.

A long and winding road...by Richard Anstead

2010-03-11T15:42:00.001Z

Fairtrade Foundation's Head of Product Management Richard Anstead has blogged from Nicaragua where he attended a meeting of Fairtrade certified coffee producers.

A the end of the second week of Fairtrade Fortnight and whilst in Nicaragua I witnessed firsthand the start of the long road coffee beans have to take if they are to make it into our cup of Fairtrade coffee!

I spent Friday as the guest of Prodecoop Cooperative Union in Estelli and travelled up into the mountains to see one of Prodecoop’s members groups - the Cooperativa Heros y Martires de Cantagallo.

We arrived in time to see the co-op’s board handing out backpacks, books and pens to children from the local primary school that had in part be paid for by the premium from Fairtrade coffee sales. About 850 people live in the community around the coop and are all either directly or indirectly dependent on its success for their livelihoods. Apart from maintaining the roads to make transporting the coffee to market easier, improving education is the biggest priority for the use of the Fairtrade premium by the co-op.

We had already driven for three hours on dirt roads to get to the community and still had a further half hour drive on some of the worst roads I have travelled on to get to the co-op’s ‘wet mill’ which was half way down the mountainside and set in a deep valley – where there is access to water.

Although the picking season is over at this altitude just now (around 1400M) we were able to see where the co-op mills its cherries, filters the water before recycling it for further use, dries the beans and also where they are growing new coffee plants in their nursery.

Your Fairtrade swap still counts

2010-03-09T10:14:00.000Z

Fairtrade Fortnight is finished for another year, and what a two weeks it has been. We’ve seen tea ladies dancing their way to Downing Street, human tea bags hurling themselves into the sea, tea dances in their hundreds and baboons swapping their usual bananas for Fairtrade ones. Even Paolo Nutini got in on the swapping, switching his usual band for The Big Ghana Band. The nation’s swapping added up to over 800,000 by Sunday evening, including swaps from schools, workplaces and companies.

We’re busy totting up all the swaps and we’re so close to our target of one million and one Fairtrade swaps. We’re sure there’s loads more swaps out there just waiting to be added to the swap-o-meter, so don’t forget to register them. It’s not too late to join in and make them count towards the target, each one proving that the UK supports a better deal for developing world producers

Hannah Harris in Moshi, Week 7

2010-03-08T12:54:00.000Z

Wearing the shoes of another

I have watched with interest as a sudden flurry of blogs has appeared on this site over the last 2 weeks. All the activity and events taking place over Fairtrade Fortnight. I was sad to miss the excitement, but also found the time useful. Viewing things from a different angle.

Turning the grand old age of 30, I took the opportunity of going on a weekend away, where I suddenly experienced what most tourists must feel. Inflated costs, just because you are on safari! Now I have been here for 7 weeks, I know how much a soda should cost. Although frustrating to be charged more, I suddenly realised that this must be how producers feel when they know they are not being given the right money for their crop. A lesson in wearing the shoes of another.

My shoes need to be cleaned, the rains have started and the roads are muddy.

The new AFN website is going well. A producer search facility is a big part, basic facts and figures to promote African producers and make it easier for traders to get in contact with producers directly. Pole Pole (slowly, slowly) we are getting some completed profiles sent back with some good case studies on them. Inspiring to read. This week I am going to see coffee farmers at work. KNCU are pretty innovative on these things and not only are they setting up a coffee shop, but they also have a Fairtrade coffee tourism tour. Will keep you posted...

On the Fairtrade Fortnight producer tour by Fran Morton

2010-03-07T09:53:00.006Z

Fran Morton is the Fairtrade Foundation's Mark team administrative officer. Here, she blogs from her journeys on the Fairtrade Fortnight 2010 producer tour...

On Saturday morning, I woke up in a very cosy room in a house in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. It is the last 2 days of the producer tour and I am here with Diana, a Pineapple and mango producer from Ghana. Our hosts are May and John and they are spoiling us with kindness! May and John are both very active in their community and run from one event to another to support local charities and international campaigns, including Fairtrade and it’s a pleasure to be staying with them. Myself and Diana spend a relaxing morning baking a pineapple upside down cake, ready for a Fairtrade Funday that May is organising tomorrow in Gainsborough. The recipe tells me to peel and slice the pineapple but I have no idea were to start... Diana comes to the rescue! Of course, we’re using a Fairtrade pineapple from Ghana and May has bought many other Fairtrade ingredients to make the cake with.

We drive to Spalding to be greeted by a team of Fairtrade campaigners that have arranged a Fairtrade Fortnight event at the local church. Diana gives a brilliant talk – telling us all about pineapples and how they grow and then telling us about all the projects that have taken place in her community thanks to the Fairtrade premium that they have received by selling some of their pineapples through the Fairtrade system. The projects include building a maternity ward and Kindergarten as well as part-subsidising meals for farm workers at the pineapple farm. After the talk, there are numerous goodies to taste all including the important ingredient: Fairtrade pineapple. The local Fairtrade steering group have made pineapple tarts, cakes, smoothies and much more so that visitors can sample the Fairtrade pineapple. We then return to Gainsborough (the scenic way and stop off at Lincoln cathedral on our way home). May is still busy preparing for the Funday tomorrow!

Sunday arrives and it’s been a freezing night but the sky is clear and it looks like the sun will be shining! Myself and Diana arrive at the Fairtrade Funday and its turned into a glorious day. The turn-out is amazing – There’s lots of children and their families and plenty for them to do: cakes to try, a Fairtrade fruit trail, a skate park and much more! What a great end to a fabulous producer tour!

Going swap-tastic at the Fairtrade Foundation by Emma Huntly

2010-03-05T17:25:00.005Z

Emma Huntly is the Marketing Manager at the Fairtrade Foundation.

It’s the last working day of Fairtrade Fortnight and staff at the Fairtrade Foundation had a final chance to swap their favourite Fairtrade products this afternoon. It’s been an incredible two weeks, staff have been everywhere, tea dancing with brazil nut gathers in Dundee, accompanying producers to packed out village halls, accosting commuters at London Bridge while dressed as tea ladies, or talking to design students about Fairtrade cotton.

Our Mad Hatter’s Big Swap tea party was a chance to chat to other colleagues and find out their Fortnight highlights.

The swapping itself was animated and excited. I swapped my Barts spices organic black pepper corn grinder (from small holder farmers in Sri Lanka) with a colleagues’ lavender Fairtrade soap (containing Fairtrade olive oil from Palestine, and shea butter from Burkina Faso) . Others swapped wine, Fairtrade cotton socks, Harry’s nuts, and of course, (it’s Friday) lots of yummy Fairtrade chocolate!

No Friday afternoon get together is complete without cake, and a selection of busy bees had made everything from Fairtrade chocolate cake to scones with Fairtrade raisins to share. Within seconds Alison’s glorious profiteroles were demolished and a clear winner emerged. Hats off (or should I say mad hatters hats off!) to Alison. On hats, us Fairtraders love a chance to dressing up. Annette’s hand fashioned spectacular made from a recycled poster was a hands down winner! But James got 10 out 10 for effort, creating a Fairtrade Mark out of chocolate icing!

If you haven’t yet swapped, there’s still a chance to register yours at www.thebigswap.org.uk

The Belgians come to town by James Picken

2010-03-05T16:37:00.005Z

Fairtrade Foundation's Supporter Marketing Manager James Picken blogs about his day out in London showing Fairtrade Belgium colleagues Fairtrade Fortnight in action...

It’s 08:56 in the morning on Friday 5th March and Fairtrade Belgium’s train pulls into the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras exactly on time. Ben and I meet them at a prearranged meeting point – an impressively well Fairtrade Fortnight branded outlet of Starbucks. Laurent and Stephane are bowled over by the fantastic Starbucks POS materials and other co-branding.

So as not to waste any time we immediately get subterranean on the Piccadilly line and head to Tesco’s flagship Earl’s Court store. Oddly we find ourselves in the wine section first off. Having checked out (but not sampled) a few Fairtrade reds we then suss out the Easter egg isle. Ben can’t resist but my himself a Fairtrade Maya Gold Easter egg! “It’s not for me, it’s for someone else!” he exclaims. We believe you, Ben.

Working our way around the Fairtrade bus stop banners in the store we clock up tea, coffee and an especially good Fairtrade chocolate section. With Tesco’s Finest organic Fairtrade chocolate on special offer at £1 per bar Laurent and Stephane fill a basket full of the stuff.

Onwards to Sainsbury’s on Cromwell Road and we’re welcomed by a sign reading ‘Thank you for helping us become the biggest retailer of Fairtrade products’ – all Fairtrade branded of course. Bus stop banners are all over the place for tea, coffee, sugar, wine as well as the usual Sainsbury’s range of other Fairtrade products. Stephane and Laurent stock up again on as many different products as possible, however this time to make room in their bags we were forced to eat some of the chocolate we picked up at Tesco’s. It’s a hard life sometimes.

Meandering our way through the Kensington Ferraris, Bentleys and Range Rovers we arrive at Whole Foods – an absolute stonker of a store. Not cheap but it’s ethical credentials are out there for all to see with window displays inviting customers to ‘Meet our producers’. Inside there are various forms of POS, leaflets and other info. Fair Vodka was widely available, but we were very disappointed to have missed out on the Fairtrade Fortnight Cocktail Master Class which had gone on the previous evening.

Down in the basement there were Fairtrade products all over the place, producer stories and a dedicated, manned Fairtrade chocolate tasting station from Maestrani chocolate, which had apparently been sponsored by the Maestrani importer in the UK. The representative was very well informed and had been through briefing sessions on Fairtrade and the Fair Trade movement. Very impressive indeed.

At this point it was time for me to head back to the office to fit some work in before the Fairtrade ingredients cake bake off. Our Belgian cousins couldn’t resist but turn up for the bake-off taste testing so fortunately we were able to bid farewell to them properly, ensuring their stomachs were lined with our homemade concoctions. The diet starts Monday, I promise.

On the road for Fairtrade Fortnight by Anna Bullock

2010-03-05T13:28:00.000Z

Fairtrade Foundation Marketing and Promotions Officer Anna Bullock has spent several days traveling around the UK with tea producer Vinay Devaiah for Fairtrade Fortnight's The Big Swap...

I've just come back from a great few days on tour with tea producer Vinay Devaiah from South India. We travelled to Reading and Slough (both Fairtrade Towns) to tell the crowds there all about the benefits that Fairtrade is bringing to the 422 workers on Vinay’s tea estate (Thiashola in the Nilgiri region of Tamil Nadu).

After an early morning school assembly at Leighton Park School we chatted to a class of 13-14 year olds. Kids really do ask intelligent questions! One of the best was 'Why do the workers not just get given higher wages from the Fairtrade premium they get from selling their tea as Fairtrade?' Well, the standards set by Fairtrade say that the Fairtrade premium can only be invested in things that bring social, economic or environmental improvements for the community; it cannot be given out as cash, thereby ensuring long term sustainability and development. As Vinay told them (from the old Chinese proverb): ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’. We then had a great presentation and Q&A session at Reading University (a Fairtrade University), followed by a radio interview for Reading Community Radio. Tune in if you live in Reading!

Hearing first-hand the benefits that Fairtrade brings really does drive home the message that we cannot afford not to support Fairtrade. For the little difference that we have to make to our shopping habits, the impact brought to a whole community is incredible: from the Fairtrade premium that the Thiashola tea estate has received for selling their tea as Fairtrade over the last two years the workers have managed to pay for a doctor to come to a clinic on the estate every other day rather than having to travel 3.5 hours each way to the nearest hospital; they have also provided scholarships for 40 students to go to university (when otherwise they would not have afforded the fees to do so); and they are currently investigating a hydroelectric power project where they will utilise a waterfall on the estate to provide one bulb of electricity for each worker’s home on the estate (they currently experience power cuts for a number of months per year, which means the children have no light with which to study and do their homework after school).

If helping school kids do their homework and enabling them to go on to a better future doesn’t give you incentive enough to swap to Fairtrade then I don’t know what will! Get swapping! www.thebigswap.org.uk

Red Cafe meets in Matagalpa, Nicaragua by Richard Anstead

2010-03-05T12:02:00.001Z

Fairtrade Foundation's Head of Product Management Richard Anstead has blogged from Nicaragua where he attended a meeting of Fairtrade certified coffee producers.

In this second week of Fairtrade Fortnight I have been fortunate enough to ‘swap’ a week in the UK for a week in hot and sunny Nicaragua!

Here I am representing the Coffee team in the UK and the Fairtrade Foundation at an annual meeting of the Red Cafe.

The Red Cafe represents Fairtrade Certified Smallholder Coffee Producers from all over Central and Southern America and has been meeting this week to discuss ways of growing sales of Fairtrade coffee and increasing the impact of Fairtrade across its members. We have had two days of meeting in Matagalpa and a further day spent in the field visiting coffee growers.

It has been an inspiring meeting with people attending from Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia, Mexico, USA, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, UK and from Kenya!

It has been clear that Fairtrade is having a positive impact amongst these producers and the support and input from everyone at the meeting will help both deepen the impact for existing producers as well as make it more accessible for other producers who want to enter the Fairtrade market.

The strongest message I will take back to the UK though is that Fairtrade’s strength and future is being defined by some of the most inspiring and passionate women and men from across producing countries who want to use every opportunity they can to trade their way out of poverty.

Watch out for another blog at the weekend when I will be sharing news from some of the coffee growers here in Nicaragua.

Strictly Fairtrade Tea Dancing – Cymru Style by James Picken

2010-03-02T10:25:00.003Z

Fairtrade Foundation's Supporter Marketing Manager James Picken blogs on his time in Cardiff to mark Fairtrade Fortnight 2010: The Big Swap

Day six of my first Fairtrade Fortnight and the marathon takes us to Wales – the self proclaimed ‘first Fairtrade Nation’. The evening before, Wales had lost their Six Nations rugby match against France at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium, however the defeat was quickly forgotten and the Welsh spirit rose again with enthusiasm for the Cardiff Strictly Fairtrade Tea Dance.

I rocked up at 8 am and the magnificent Fair Trade Wales team were already in full swing with the set-up. I was immediately set my allocated tasks – balloon blowing up, poster putting up, attaching Fairtrade roses to the stage pylons and stocking all the info stations with materials and freebees. Once this was done the Foundation reps (Cheryl, Nilufar, Heidi and me) were dispatched to the nearby pedestrian precinct to hand out flyers and lure the unsuspecting public to our event with the promise of free chocolate. For some reason flyering is so much easier when free chocolate is involved....

The first dance commenced at about 11 o clock with a local Salsa group. They wooed the shoppers and an enthusiastic audience quickly gathered around the stage, ready for us chocolate-wielding swap registerers to make our move. This was followed by equally popular street dancing, Indian dancing and rounded off with Ballroom dancing. The wide range appealed to all different age groups.

In total we gave out over 3,000 Kit Kats, Dairy Milk bars and Divine sampling chocolates as well as Fairtrade tea bags. All we asked in return was for them to fill out a Big Swap card with their name, email address and products they’re going to swap – a pretty good deal I reckon. Many in the crowd wondered why we were giving out Kit Kats and Dairy Milk bars not knowing that they were Fairtrade certified products, which gave the perfect opportunity to explain what those chocolate bars going Fairtrade meant to the livelihoods of thousands of cocoa farmers – loads more Fairtrade converts hopefully!

When offering ‘a cuppa on us’ as we handed out Fairtrade tea bags, a few of the older generation thought we were offering to make them a cup of tea there and then and asked for milk and sugar. Most weren’t too put out when we explained that they’d have to make their own tea at home and free chocolate and cakes where enough to focus them again.

Towards the end of the event the manager of the local Starbucks came over to chat to us and expressed what an incredible success Fairtrade Fortnight was for them too. “We’ve never had so many people asking for ‘coffee – the Fairtrade one please’. We then had to explain to them that all our coffee is Fairtrade....” she said. Clearly lots of new people being educated and hopefully converted/swapped to Fairtrade.

All in all the event was a great success and we got massive exposure to Welsh consumers. It was also a great opportunity for us as Foundation staff to bond with Fair Trade Wales. Lots of good relationships were forged with the local campaigns team and we are all looking forward to seeing them again soon.

Looking forward to the coffee liqueur tasting evening at the Lancaster hotel on Thursday evening – see you there!

On the fourth day of Fortnight, my true love said to me... by Harriet Lamb

2010-02-26T14:52:00.009Z

...let me make you a cup of Fairtrade tea!

Yes - all the focus was on tea today. A gang of campaigning 'tea ladies' danced their way round London, with an inflatable giant tea cup in tow. They looked fantastic in their pink and blue pinnies and head scarves made in India from Fairtrade cotton by committed company, Bishopston Trading. I also danced along, together with Mr Henriksen from Chamraj tea estate in South India, and we ended up popping in on Sarah Brown at No 10 where Maggie Darling joined in the fun too. Check out the photo on the web. Sarah, who was very welcoming said: ‘The beauty of Fairtrade is that if we all do a little, then together we do a lot. We’re a nation of tea drinkers, so just imagine what we could achieve if we all put fairness first in our choice of cuppa. Here at Downing Street we now have Fairtrade status and all our guests and staff enjoy Fairtrade tea and coffee, and we have Fairtrade chocolate, fruit and biscuits too.”

With so much stuff already Fairtrade, Sarah is struggling to think what to swap. I suggested some Fairtrade lotions or soaps – or a tea-towel made with Fairtrade cotton. There must be lots of washing up to do after hosting all those dignitaries. Sarah’s been so supportive. In the autumn, she hosted a party to celebrate 15 years of the FAIRTRADE Mark. Being 15 years old, we were going to have a teenage rave but the neighbours at No 11 said it would disturb their work – anyone would think they were running the economy. But it was a lovely teaparty with campaigners from across the country and 15 year olds and people from the very first companies to get behind Fairtrade.

So anyway, back to this Fairtrade Fortnight. Mr Henriksen, who a week ago had never left India, was over the moon to have met the PM's wife outside No 10: 'It's just magic!' he exclaimed grinning from ear to ear. Just before, he'd managed to squeeze in a visit to the Head Office of Marks & Spencer. All the tea in their shops is Fairtrade, including some of Mr Henriksen’s so he'd been telling them about all they've done with the premium. He's most proud of the pension scheme for retired workers, who he says face a tough life and for whom the pension can be literally a life-saver. Laughing, he tells of the old lady who explained: 'Before I had nothing and none of my four children wanted me to live with them. Now I have a pension, they're all fighting over me'.

At present, they're only selling 10% of their tea on Fairtrade terms and with that they've managed to achieve so much - not only the pension but also education and health programmes to name just a few. But this means there’s only enough to pay each pensioner for 10 years and Mr Henriksen reckons that if they could only sell 22% of their tea for Fairtrade prices, then they could extend the pension for life and complete many more schemes like buying more computers for the secondary school – pension, on health and education That's why we're calling on Britain to swap their cuppa to Fairtrade. The more we buy, the more the farmers can sell.

Mr Henriksen has been blown away by discovering how much campaigning effort goes into raising awareness and sales of Fairtrade. It's a theme echoed in an email I get from Anup Singh in North India, who works for our global body, Fairtrade Labelling Organisations and whom I met last year. Inspired by all he's read about the campaigners in the UK, he wrote:

'Sometimes when the going gets tough it really helps to know that there are other people across the globe fighting the same battle and this gets you going with a new energy... This is one part of Fairtrade that people like me remain mostly unaware of. We keep so much occupied in our battle to support producers' access to Fairtrade that we never get to think that other half of the battle could be equally or more challenging. I salute the spirit of Fairtrade. Your unending energy to keep fighting such battles for Fairtrade further invigorates my commitment to ensure that producers do benefit from the fruits of your labour.'

Lovely words of inspiration for Fairtrade campaigners everywhere. He has a great idea - for a common platform where 'Fairtrade torch bearers' from all around the world could share ideas. let's hope we can make it happen.'

The swap-o-meter is rising steadily. Still - there's a way to go. So we’re encouraging everyone to spread the swap. Just 800,000 swaps to go!

The future of Fairtrade and tea at No 10 by Emma Huntly

2010-02-26T14:10:00.006Z

Emma Huntly is the Marketing Manager at the Fairtrade Foundation.

I woke up this morning to my phone beeping nonstop, 'you're in the Metro!' 'ooh, pink really is your colour'. My friends were referring to a picture of Sarah Brown and a gaggle of us dressed up as tea ladies, in the newspapers this morning. The caption read ‘Sarah Brown took a break yesterday outside No 10 to meet a group of tea ladies who were urging people to swap their favourite cuppa for a Fairtrade cuppa’.

Brilliant news, I thought, even though I was woken earlier than I wanted to be, we are really getting the message out there. Let’s hope us dressed up as old school tea ladies will remind people to think about the people that pick the tea they are drinking.

Later on in the evening, (having taken out the hair curlers) I went to an event in St George the Martyr Church on Borough High Street. I accompanied Mr Hendrickson from Chamraj tea estate, through the monsoon rain to talk by Paul Chandler the head honcho at Fairtrade pioneer company, Traidcraft.

The event was titled The Future of Fairtrade and was a thoughtful journey from Traidcraft’s early days importing Handicrafts from Bangladesh to some of the challenges operating in a market place where Fairtrade is becoming more mainstream. Yes, he said, Fairtrade has come a long way with sales reaching nearly £800 million in 2009 but that’s still a tiny proportion of what it could and should be. And needs to be to continue to offer hope for the future to disadvantaged producers, who are now facing the challenges of unfair trade rules, and climate change.

It an evening off for Mr Henriksen, so I thought it would be really interesting for him to meet some campaigners. The people that have been tirelessly working away to promote Fairtrade products to create the market we have today, were an amazing, 72% of people recognise the FAIRTRADE Mark. But it wasn’t much of an evening off, the second speaker had fallen through so Mr Henriksen, stepped in and spoke of what Chamraj tea estate has achieved in the 15 years they have been selling Fairtrade teas. It’s impressive. They have set up a pension scheme for workers, invested in health and education. He talked about how in India, old age is a curse and how the older generation are seen as a burden on their families. But he said one pensioner from the estate he met recently told him, her children were fighting over who she would live with because her pension could contribute to the family income. This is what the estate has achieved selling 10% of their tea under Fairtrade terms.

But Mr Henriksensaid they need more money to invest in the pension scheme, and want to continue to offer education and health to the wider community. Just imagine, he said, what we could do if we sold 100% of our tea as Fairtrade. It’s very simple, we just need to swap our cuppa for a Fairtrade cuppa.

Who knows one day, we could even have Mr Henriksen’s tea, sold in a packet with the FAIRTRADE Mark to some of the growing Indian middle class. Could be part of the future of Fairtrade?

On the road for Fairtrade Fortnight - Part 2 by Krishnan Sainathan

2010-02-26T13:23:00.008Z

Day three -

We went to the Wear Alpaca Farm to discuss the differences and similarities in production of cotton and Alpaca Wool. They were filming for a DVD which is being produced for the local area. They filmed a discussion between me and Katherine (the owner of the farm) about Fairtrade cotton and Alpaca wool. We explored the possibilities of blending cotton with Alpaca wool to make the availability more widespread at a good price. I was then interviewed separately about Fairtrade and Agrocel.

For the entire days the involvement of Mrs Lauren, Mr Liam and Miss Jenny in organising and coordinating made the day a success and got Fairtrade Fortnight off to a bang!

Invasion of the tea ladies by Tony Wright

2010-02-25T20:51:00.006Z

Fairtrade Foundation Digital Marketing Officer Tony Wright reports on a busy day for the Fairtrade tea ladies...

It was an early start for The Big Swap's Fairtrade tea ladies this morning as everyone gathered together, dressed in their favourite pinnies, turbans and hair curlers, to set the message of Fairtrade Fortnight flowing through the streets of London.

Morning commuters watched on in amusement as a giant inflatable mug, a sea of floral dresses and passionate Swap Your Cuppa chants passed them by in a conga line that crossed Westminster Bridge, lapped Parliament Square and took over Trafalgar for a Strictly Fairtrade Tea Dance.

Whilst the masses danced and promoted the swap to Fairtrade tea in the shadow of Nelson, a breakaway group along with tea producer Mr. Henricksen from the Chamraj Tea Estate in India, took to No.10 Downing Street for a brief chin-wag with Sarah Brown.

Bystanders were passed pieces of Fairtrade chocolate, The Big Swap stickers and leaflets and chatted with the Fairtrade Tea Ladies about why you should swap to Fairtrade products and how it gives producers in the developing world a fairer deal.

Find out more about why you should Swap Your Cuppa and join Fairtrade Foundation fans on Facebook to see more photos from today.

Remember to register your swap to Fairtrade and then why not sit down for a brew to read our new tea report on rebalancing the power in the tea supply chain.

On the road for Fairtrade Fortnight by Krishnan Sainathan

2010-02-25T13:04:00.001Z

Krishnan Sainathan is the Fairtrade cotton project manager for Agrocel Industries Ltd, India. He's currently in the UK for a producer tour to meet with students, shop managers and the general public.

Day one -

The first day of the Fairtrade Fortnight started with the declaration of the Hadrian’s Wall Corridor as a Fairtrade Zone. This occasion was marked by the presence of a Roman Soldier, Hadrian’s Wall Steering Group and other Fairtrade supporters in Cumbria. The presentation of the Hadrian’s Wall Corridor as a Fairtrade Zone certificate was made by me to Mrs Lauren in the presence of the group who attended and was highly applauded. I was the guest of honour and was very much pleased to be in the historical place and was crowned the first Indian Roman Soldier. Thanks to the Fairtrade Foundation for sending me to this 2000 years old historical place to mingle with Fairtrade supporters.

Day two -

We started the day at Brampton Primary School which has now been a Fairtrade School for 3 years. We were greeted with the Indian Namaste symbol of folding hands by the Fairtrade committee of students. All of us were introduced to the different classes and shown some of the work they had been doing on Fairtrade and the projects about India. Since they are celebrating the 5th birthday of Brampton as a Fairtrade Town and the school were celebrating their 3rd birthday as a Fairtrade School a special assembly was arranged.

The film presentation on Fairtrade products made by the students is worth watching. The commitment to the Fairtrade movement by the school management is highly appreciable and the knowledge on Fairtrade implemented in their education system is amazing. Special thanks to Mrs Jo Friel and Rev Sue Wilkins for the arrangements and celebrating this Fortnight in the school. An excellent Fairtrade cake, complete with icing in the shape of the Fairtrade Mark, was made by Linda and Milly (cut by me and the Mayor of Brampton). Undoubtedly the involvement of the other teachers in this school (whom I don’t know their names - sorry for that) are making a grand success of Fairtrade, not only in the school, but also in the minds of the children. My best wishes to the children and the residents of Brampton and I hope you all continue to by Fairtrade.

We then travelled to High Heskett Primary School which has been a Fairtrade school for 2 years. The Fairtrade committee presented at an assembly about the work they have been doing to support Fairtrade.

The knowledge about Fairtrade from the students is really admirable. The meaning is rightly understood by the students and being followed very well. We also found lots of Fairtrade products in the kitchen. The involvement of the school classroom teacher (Jen) and the Headmistress (Margaret) is making the school stronger from the beginning. The involvement of the younger children greeting us with their work about Fairtrade and the Fairtrade Mark was wonderful. I had a discussion with the Fairtrade/Eco Group about Fairtrade and how they can take their campaign further in the future. The involvement of this group and the questions asked about the farmers were fantastic.

In both the schools Agrocel can supply them their uniform made out of Fairtrade cotton.

Fairtrade Fortnight: Doing nothing is no longer an option by Harriet Lamb

2010-02-24T16:41:00.000Z

Harriet Lamb, Executive Director of the Fairtrade Foundation, shares her thoughts as Fairtrade Fortnight gathers pace.

Day three of Fairtrade Fortnight. Breaking news on the swap-o-meter: baboons are going bananas for Fairtrade! Baboons in Knowsley Safari Park will be swapping their regular bananas for Fairtrade bananas which have been donated by Knowsley school children. A selection of children will 'feed' the baboons the bananas in a special feeding event. What a great idea.

I know who else will love this news – the banana farmers in the Windward Islands. I got an email yesterday expressing their ‘fervent support’ for Fairtrade Fortnight. Julius Polius is the very dignified President of WINFA, the farmers organization. He’s a calm man, and a thinker who was over last week to speak at a conference Sainsbury’s held on Fairtrade. He’s always ready for the next challenge, always thinking what more the farmers need to do, how they can innovate or improve. He wrote: ‘Without Fairtrade, there would perhaps not be a banana industry in the Windward Islands today. Fairtrade has made a difference in the lives of many and has significantly contributed to the overall economic stability of the islands. The small banana farmers’, he wrote, ‘sincerely appreciate the work of the Fairtrade Foundation in enabling them to take more control over their business and their lives.’

It’s enough to make you go out and swap, swap, swap, swap… Tomorrow, in particular, we’re calling on Britain to swap their cuppa. So now we’re all getting ready for Thursday’s exciting invasion of the tea ladies. Via a conga line over London Bridge and a tea dance in Trafalgar Square, the tea ladies are even going to descend on No 10 Downing Street and have a nice cuppa with Sarah Brown. I’ll find out what the Brown household are swapping and report back tomorrow. Then at the weekend, six local groups in Birmingham, Cardiff, Dundee, Liverpool, London and Newcastle are holding Strictly Fairtrade Tea Dances. Better brush up on your dancing skills.

We’ve also brought out a new report explaining why farmers and workers need Fairtrade so much – Stirring Up the Tea Trade. Forget the kettle, this report will make your blood boil. Get this – tea workers in Malawi can get as little as 70 cents a day. In 2010. Two years ago, I met a tea smallholder in Malawi. She had five kids of her own and had adopted five HIV/AIDS orphans – humbling generosity. When she told me how little she got paid for her tea, I asked her how she managed. She was very tall, thin and dignified and she looked me straight in the eye and said: ‘Sometimes I can’t manage. Sometimes, although what I want most in life is for my kids to learn to read and write, I have to take them out of school in order to use the money to put food on the table. Or sometimes, I skip my main meal at night in order to pay the school fees.’ Every time I think of that, it makes me spitting mad that anyone in 2010 should have to choose between putting their kids in school and eating at night – just so we can have really cheap tea. So cheap in fact that producers are now receiving only around half of what they did 30 years ago.

That’s why the tea producers are calling on us to increase sales of Fairtrade tea. Dushantha arrived in our office yesterday, having just flown in from Sri Lanka. He’s from Maskeliya tea group who sell only 3% of their tea on Fairtrade terms. So he’s keen to encourage Britain to swap to Fairtrade because the producers will only get more benefits, if we buy more Fairtrade. Today only one in ten cups of tea in Britain are Fairtrade – we’ve got to get that number up. It makes such a difference. By the way, that woman I met in Malawi is now selling her tea as Fairtrade. You can enjoy in it Sainsbury’s Red Label tea. Now the group has substantial amounts of premium which they are investing in a range of major schemes for the benefit of their community.
More good news just in, hot off the press. According to TNS/Kantar Worldpanel data, 90% of households bought a Fairtrade product last year. That means 22 million households bought Fairtrade – so that’s more than 3 million more than in 2008 (18.3m)! Amazing. So last year, Fairtrade sales grew by at least 12%. This is despite the recession. Today Pascal Lamy, with his WTO hat on, was talking at the European Policy Centre. He said: ‘World trade has also been a casualty of this crisis, contracting in volume terms by around 12 per cent in 2009 — the sharpest decline since the end of the Second World War. The main explanation for this freefall in trade has been the simultaneous reduction in aggregate demand across all major world economies. The drying up of trade finance during this period has also been a contributing factor. To a much lesser degree, trade has been adversely affected by some instances of increased tariffs and domestic subsidies, new non-tariff measures and more anti-dumping actions.’

So overall trade has declined, one reason why farmers need Fairtrade more than ever. And meanwhile, Fairtrade sales have gone on rising, in the UK by 12% as it happens. Surely a message in there to companies: that the future is fair. As PriceWaterhouseCoopers concluded in a 2008 report, entitled Sustainability: Are consumers buying it?, sustainability is like the internet – all companies will adopt it in the end – so the clever ones will adopt it early and benefit from that. As they concluded: ‘Doing nothing is no longer an option’.

Day two and we're top of the tweets! by Harriet Lamb

2010-02-23T16:46:00.000Z

Fairtrade Foundation's Harriet Lamb continues her Fairtrade Fortnight 2010 blog with news of The Big Swap launch event and a rise in Fairtrade sales of at least 12%

Fairtrade Fortnight got off to a flying start yesterday. Fairtrade was top topic of UK tweets yesterday and today – despite some hot competition from the BAFTA awards.

Lots of press, loads of Fairtrade signs all over the High Street from fashion stores to coffee shops, independents to supermarkets. Everyone’s gone swapping-mad. In Oxfam you can swap a bag of donated goods and you’ll get Cafedirect tea for free! At the event to launch Fortnight last night, all the guests had a riot swapping products. I swapped some Palestinian olive oil for a banana – and then swapped the banana for a Gossypium tea-towel. Then I swapped some of the spanking new Bulldog moisturizer for men, for some of Harry’s Nuts. But I think the best swap was from Douglas Alexander MP, the International Development Minister, who had the very first Fairtrade coffee from Congo which was so new that it was still in a brown paper bag from the farmers. The grant from the Department for International Development will help us work more with farmers from such countries in conflict such as Cote d’Ivoire or Sierra Leone. It was inspiring stuff - and a good laugh. Especially when someone asked if they could swap their husband...

The numbers are rising on the swap-o-meter but still way to go – so please go on and register your swap. It’s great having a peek at who is swapping what.

The Fairtrade movement can also celebrate rising sales last year. We announced yesterday that sales in 2009 rose by at least 12% to an estimated retail value of over £800 million. Not bad for the worst recession in living memory. I was with an independent analyst this morning, haggard with reporting on companies struggling through these tough times, and he was blown away that Fairtrade with its ruthless focus on tackling poverty and injustice in trade, was going from strength to strength. That ever rising sales graph is a living, breathing testimony to all Fairtrade supporters.

We also released some new TNS/Kantar Worldpanel data which revealed that last year 9 in 10 households bought Fairtrade – and they bought more regularly. Amazing.

In my blog yesterday, I mentioned the Winter Olympics. Continuing the theme: if you’re short of inspiration, just watch Ghana’s only competitor in the winter Olympics, 35 year old Kwame Nkrumah Acheampong who learnt to ski 6 years ago at the Milton Keynes snowdome, and will be in the men’s slalom on Saturday. At his first world cup he finished last; next time, two people finished behind him. ‘I was so proud of that,’ he said, ‘because they both came from countries with snow!’ And then he said: ‘It's never too late to live the dream.’

And this is our dream: that there will be a time when we tip the balance in favour of farmers and workers. So let’s keep swapping…… just 800,000 to go to meet our target of a million and one.

Our Fairtrade producers have arrived…. by Sarah Jewell

2010-02-22T17:40:00.002Z

Fairtrade Foundation Campaigns Manager Sarah Jewell blogs on the arrival of producers for the Fairtrade Fortnight Producer Tour

Every Fairtrade Fortnight we invite Fairtrade producers over to tour the country speaking about their experience of Fairtrade and what it means to their families and communities.

We can promise them fun Fairtrade events in many of our wonderful Fairtrade towns and villages, we can wine and dine them on Fairtrade products, but unfortunately we can’t promise our guests (this year from India, Ghana and St Vincent) sunny dry weather!

Not that that seemed to bother them and it was a privilege to welcome Diana, from Bomarts Fairtrade pineapples, Ghana; Nioka, a Fairtrade banana farmer from the Windward Islands; Sainathan, Fairtrade cotton project manager from Agrocel India; Vinay from Thiashola Tea Estate, India, and Mr Henricksen from Chamraj Tea Estate, India.

On arrival they jumped straight into meetings with companies, both those already selling Fairtrade products and those keen to swap some of their product ranges to Fairtrade.

After a busy week of events helping with the build up to Fairtrade Fortnight, they had a well deserved day off to see the sights of London.

The day started with rain, but all our guest Fairtrade producers were so excited to absorb London’s world famous landmarks that the weather was of no consequence, especially when Big Ben came into view, and nothing could dampen their enthusiasm for meeting the Queen at Madam Tussauds.

Today (the first day of Fairtrade Fortnight) they all went off to different parts of the country to stay with Fairtrade campaigners and to tell their Fairtrade stories at events in schools, faith groups, village halls and universities. It will be a busy two weeks for them and in day one alone we are already receiving great reports about who they’ve been meeting – Sainathan met a Roman just this morning while speaking at the declaration event of Hadrian’s wall heritage site as a ‘Fairtrade Zone’.

Stay tuned for more Fairtrade tales from the road and visit our events calendar to find out about the nearest producer talk to you.

Fairtrade Fortnight's here! by Harriet Lamb

2010-02-22T09:20:00.001Z

Fairtrade Foundation's Harriet Lamb blogs on the first day of Fairtrade Fortnight 2010 - The Big Swap

I love snuggling in to watch the Winter Olympics with the swirling skaters and slimline blurs shooting down snowy mountains. It reminds me of the 2002 Winter Olympics when my children were staying with Granny in a Somerset village. When I went to join them I was amazed to find the whole Somerset village in a buzz about.... the women's curling, of all things. I was perplexed. Until I joined the next excited gathering around the screen. For these were not super-athletes with the bodies of muscular tea-trays. Here were ordinary Scottish women - bankclerks and hairdressers and teachers - with bumpy bodies like the rest of us, going for gold. And winning.

Fairtrade has just that appeal. If you want to play your part in tackling poverty, you don’t need to be a trade wonk or have a Phd in international economics. You just have to get into swapping. Swap to Fairtrade tea or T-shirts, ice-cream or face-cream, coffee or cashews, pineapple or Palestinian olive oil. And you will be opening doors for more farmers to sell more of their crops on fair terms.

And they sure do need Fairtrade now more than ever. Because if these are tough times for us in Britain, they are desperate times for many farmers and workers squeezed by falling order books just as the prices of food and fuel are high. Workers on flower farms in Kenya told me they spent half their income on food and the price of maize had gone from 40 shillings to kilo to 80 shillings. That’s why they need Fairtrade – to have enough for today, and to build a better tomorrow.

But they can only sell more as Fairtrade, if you and me buy more. So that‘s why this Fairtrade Fortnight we’re running The Big Swap – aiming for one million and one swaps. All you have to do is swap from your usual product to Fairtrade, and register on our wacky swap-o-meter. When I last looked, it seems people have been swapping to a lot of cakes!! Lot of sweet-tooths among Fairtrade fans out there, clearly. But you could swap your five a day fruit to Fairtrade too if you’re feeling more healthy.

I’m swapping to Palestinian olive oil because I’m a salad addict and it’s so yummy drizzled on lettuce and rocket with tomatoes. And because, although we work with many farmers in very tough places, the Palestinian olive farmers must have the toughest time, even being searched going to their fields and sometimes finding their beloved trees uprooted….. And I’m definitely swapping to more clothes made with Fairtrade cotton. I’ve got a snuggy pair of tights made with Fairtrade cotton for cycling through this endless winter and some more cotton socks. To sock it to poverty.

Over the next two weeks of Fairtrade Fortnight, I know it’s going to be manically busy. It’s going mad already in the office – phones ringing with everything from producers finding their visas haven’t come through to journalists keen to write about the fact that Fairtrade sales are holding up despite the recession. The two weeks will also be so inspiring – to have the chance to hear from so many producer partners about the difference Fairtrade makes, and the challenges they face. And it’s also so inspiring to see what Fairtrade supporters have organised all round the country. There’s fashion shows and tea parties and everything in between. I went to a great meeting last month in Keswick – there too was Jamie Reed MP who blogged after saying he’d never seen such a focused group of people. Their anger about poverty, he wrote, was only matched by their optimism that they could help tackle it. Inspiring stuff. We’re kicking off on Monday with the launch event in central London – watch this space for more on that, and check out our website for events near you. But obviously, leave time to watch the Olympic curling!

Fairtrade Fortnight Eve by Tony Wright

2010-02-21T18:07:00.003Z

Fairtrade Foundation's Digital Marketing Officer Tony Wright blogs in anticipation of his first Fairtrade Fortnight

For most of my first few months working at the Fairtrade Foundation, the focus has been on preparing for Fairtrade Fortnight. Now but one sleep away, the excitement's definitely high. The Big Swap's about to commence and two action packed weeks of the nation celebrating and swapping to Fairtrade certified products will soon be underway.

The past week was a busy one, packed with great Big Swap stories including the new range of Fairtrade products by Bulldog, the sweet news that Compass Group are to use 100% Fairtrade Sugar and Ben & Jerry's pledge to convert their full global range to 100% Fairtrade from 2013. After a sighting of Fairtrade certified Banana flavoured beer at London's Borough market yesterday and a routine trip to the supermarket today where I found Fairtrade nut burgers for the first time, I'm eager to see what other Big Swap announcements might be made in the next 14 days that will improve trading structures and practices in favour of producers in the developing world.

As it's my first Fairtrade Fortnight, I'll be crawling through the hundreds of events listed on The Big Swap website's event calendar to see the Fairtrade movement in action around the country. I can't wait for the Strictly Fairtrade Tea Dance in London's Spitalfields Market, the Invasion Of The Tea Ladies in Westminster and then my trips to Bedfordshire for a Fairtrade flavoured jazz evening before a cat walk showcasing frocks of a fairer sort in Bristol.

Managing the jam packed events calendar has revealed to me the extent to which people in the UK are supporting and promoting Fairtrade. From Mad Hatter tea parties to wine tasting, talks and debate events, it's really inspiring that so many people are putting their free time into efforts to inform those not aware, about the benefits of swapping typical items on the weekly shopping list to Fairtrade certified equivalents. Passers by at schools, community halls, high street stands and markets all around the UK are about to learn of the very wide range of products you can buy, stamped with a Fairtrade label that represents a fairer deal for producers in the South.

Make sure you visit www.thebigswap.org.uk and register what products you'll be swapping, punch in your town on the events calendar to fill your calendar with Big Swap events and have an informative and fun Fairtrade Fortnight.

It's time to get swapping!

2010-02-18T09:17:00.001Z

Help us reach our target of one million and one swaps to Fairtrade certified products. Visit www.thebigswap.org.uk to register your swap and download web banners, widgets and use our Twibbon in the Get Involved section to help us spread the word and make The Big Swap our biggest Fairtrade Fortnight yet!

Hannah Harris in Mombasa

2010-02-15T11:09:00.000Z

How does Fairtrade help create sustainable businesses?

Well, actually at the moment I am in a Nairobi hotel on my way back to Moshi from Mombasa. Stopping off at a Sainsbury’s conference, just to make it a full week of conferences.

Mombasa was really interesting. Reps from African Fairtrade coffee producers were there (as well as CLAC, FLO GPM, Transfair USA, Oxfam & Twin). Lots of discussions about the benefits and challenges of Fairtrade and how the producers could work together to form a coffee network in the AFN. Too much was covered to even summarise in a blog, but the main themes were around market access (most just don’t sell enough as Fairtrade), the need for improving quality and building up sustainable businesses that are able to market, and trade direct. Market information was a key need, so I made lots of notes on this and have lots of ideas on how to make an AFN website promote producers via profiles and case studies. It was good to run these ideas past the producers as well, and bombard them with all my questions and warn them that more will come!

I then went on to the Sainsbury’s supplier conference. Participants were mainly traders rather than growers, although a few Fairtrade producer groups were there, but most were management from hired labour set ups. It was an interesting comparison hearing trader views of Fairtrade versus the producers views heard in Mombasa. I think Sainsbury’s idea of holding the conference was a brilliant one and I think more forums that bring together the whole supply chain would be hugely beneficial e.g. lots of misunderstandings were clarified and lots more insight into the way retailers work was given to suppliers, which can only be a good thing.

At quite literally the final hour in the Mombasa meeting, producers elected a few leaders to keep the process of dialogue between all Fairtrade coffee producers in Africa moving – we all celebrated with a cold Kenyan Tusker beer – Michael enjoyed his whilst still working, he just doesn’t stop (see photo) - much needed refreshment from the heat of the Kenyan coast - it’s cold in London though, I hear?!

Brain-storming Madness! by Richard Gray

2010-02-11T16:27:00.002Z

Richmond upon Thames Fairtrade group member Richard Gray writes about their forthcoming Mad hatter's Fairtrade Tea Party for Fairtrade Fortnight 2010

It was back in October 2009 - when the Richmond upon Thames Volunteer group brain-stormed Fairtrade Fortnight - that the madness set in! A crazy cocktail of tea, Johnny Depp, art, a re-working of Lewis Carroll’s classic and kids having fun whilst learning about Fairtrade and the Mad Hatter’s Fairtrade Tea Party was born.

From talking with other London boroughs, I think Richmond’s quite fortunate; we have a core of motivated volunteers with a good mix of skills and contacts. From the October meeting, we went away and hatched various ideas. We approached potential sponsors mindful of the fact that we needed a company with an available budget and a brand that was at least borough-wide and probably nation-wide. We talked with other partners; we charmed, cajoled, persuaded, purloined, begged, borrowed and managed to get together a theme and promotion that comprised…

• A schools’ art competition for age ranges 5 to 16

• A total of £700 in sponsorship to support this and other projects – £Starbucks the main contributor)

• Prizes of Waitrose/J Lewis vouchers, cinema tokens and a great big chocolate cake from a celebrity chef

• Support from Richmond Council in marketing and awareness-building

• Food and drink goodies from Starbucks, Waitrose, Divine Chocolate and local wholesaler Go Jumbo

• A big party venue courtesy of the Council

• An actor to play the Mad Hatter

• Support from local media, retailers and others in the business community with loads of posters and a BIG banner

To get to this level of organisation, the group has met frequently with 8 am coffee (Fairtrade of course) sessions as well as monthly meetings. With only a couple of weeks to go, we’ve met most of our objectives.

We all know that it can be tough ‘cold-calling’ potential supporters to blag funding and help; we know now how workers in call-centres must feel! But it’s been worthwhile. It looks like we’ll get a great turn-out on the 26th February when the Tea Party goes really mad and, hopefully, we can all look forward to a bit of sanity afterwards.

What’s been the biggest lesson? Start organising Fairtrade Fortnight several months earlier!

And our biggest asset is supporting each other, enjoying what we’re doing; the team spirit really works well; soon after the 26th, we’ll all be celebrating (I hope) with lots of Fairtrade wine!

York House, Richmond Road, Twickenham, London. 26th February 2010.

Fairtrade Fortnight 2010 - The Big Swap

2010-02-11T16:06:00.000Z

Hannah Harris in Moshi #2

2010-02-03T09:30:00.000Z

“Over time they [producer networks] will take their place as key actors in the system rather than simply beneficiaries of it” (Making the Difference, FLO strategy)

I have been preparing thoughts for Mombasa next week. It makes such a difference sitting somewhere else. The emails and conversations that I have in the office are far different from the ones I had in London. Still being copied in on emails from Fairtrade Foundation (keep them coming) makes for very interesting comparisons. Physically being somewhere else completely changes your perspective on things.

So much activity taking place in the markets and at FLO to keep building Fairtrade. The vision for producers to stop being just beneficiaries to active participants, is a good and much needed one. It is harder here though, with very few staff (picture of Michael and Sanga at lunch), the AFN has to work much harder to stay actively involved. The networks that the AFN is building up have this journey to empowerment as their focus. Mombasa should be good.

I am sitting today with blisters on my feet. I walked the 5 or so km to work (took an hour) trying to keep pace with a Masaai. He won!

Hannah Harris in Moshi

2010-01-26T09:00:00.000Z

I am writing this sitting in my aluminium partitioned office one week into my 6 month secondment at the AFN offices in Moshi, Tanzania. And what a week it has been! The cold of London is a distant memory. The only snow I see now is remnants on the top of Kilimanjaro, which looms majestically over the city.

While here, I will be working on specific projects that aim to create strong links between Fairtrade producers in Africa and the market. Week one has been pretty busy. I have been getting to know the people in the office - Sanga (accountant), Ruth (programme manager) and of course Michael Nkonu who used to work at the Foundation and is now temporary Executive Director of the AFN.

We are all busy preparing for a Fairtrade coffee workshop that is taking place in Mombasa, Kenya in a couple of weeks. Organised jointly by Oxfam Belgium, TWIN and AFN. All Fairtrade certified coffee producers in Africa have been invited so as you can imagine lots of arrangements to make and strategy papers to write! The workshop will be an opportunity for African Fairtrade coffee producers to discuss issues, challenges and opportunities for increasing market access. The aim is that a coffee product network will be formed enabling producers to have a stronger voice in the Fairtrade system.

Ah, another street announcement is booming outside my window, apparently these can be anything from the water company telling people to pay their bills to calls to attend important meetings. Fortunately no calls to deport Hannah Harris who only just received her work visa – phew!
More news soon...

Volunteering at Fairtrade Foundation by Esme Jameson

2010-01-04T16:37:00.003Z

Just a small selection of the free Fairtrade tea and coffee available to volunteers in the Fairtrade Foundation kitchen.

Volunteering in any capacity can be a very rewarding experience – at the Fairtrade Foundation it is particularly so. The Fairtrade Foundation, as clichéd as it may sound, is like a family. The office is open plan, the atmosphere busy but friendly. Feeling like a newbie doesn’t last long – and soon you’re settled in, getting to know everyone and joining in with the birthday/leaving/wedding/baby song in the kitchen (a Fairtrade tradition I believe!)

I first volunteered at the Foundation in May 2009 for a month. I initially applied as I had the opportunity to do a work placement on my university course and was looking to do a placement at a charity. I speculatively emailed Fairtrade’s volunteer services explaining that I was interested in working on Fair Comment and could I come in and get involved. It was a truly rewarding month and at the end of it, with a finished copy of Fair Comment in hand, I felt a huge sense of achievement, knowing it was all for a really good cause too – the staff at Fairtrade’s passion is infectious! - and now 7 months later I’m back at the Foundation doing it all over again...and loving it.

There are so many volunteering opportunities at Fairtrade, there really is something to suit whatever skills you have. I volunteer in the marketing team helping out Jenny, the Fairtrade Foundation Writer and Editor. There are volunteers who help with IT and data input (and other super clever computer stuff!), volunteers who help on the press team, volunteers who help with the website and digital stuff, volunteers who take pictures for us and volunteers who lend themselves to anything - they are especially useful in the lead up to and during Fairtrade Fortnight (22nd February to 7th March 2010).

If you’re looking to help support a fantastic and ever-growing cause as well as work with some brilliant and passionate people head to the ‘get involved’ section of our website to find out more about volunteering at the Foundation.

Exploring the impact of Fairtrade in South Africa #3

2009-11-23T09:25:00.000Z

Fairtrade Foundation's Jess Gordon reports from Cape Town on a Fairtrade producer/worker impact study being planned

It became clear from my conversations with some of Heiveld’s members during the day that Fairtrade really does seem to be having a real positive impact on their lives, whether it be through their increased financial returns through access to international Fairtrade markets and a guaranteed Fairtrade Minimum Price for their tea, long term trading relationships with Fairtrade buyers (such as Equal Exchange and Alter Eco), support towards organisational development, or use of their Fairtrade Premium funds to construct a tea court and purchase tractors and tools.

The long journey back to Cape Town that evening gave me plenty of time to reflect on our Heiveld visit and what I’d learned that day. Having visited a Fairtrade certified wine farm in the same region a few years ago, I'd noticed a vast difference between the two South African producers and how they’ve been supported in various ways through Fairtrade. However, before I draw my own conclusions, I remind myself that I should be patient and wait to see the findings from the impact study!

Exploring the impact of Fairtrade in South Africa #2

2009-11-22T09:24:00.000Z

Fairtrade Foundation's Jess Gordon reports from Cape Town on a Fairtrade producer/worker impact study being planned

My first few days here this week were mainly spent interviewing and evaluating potential research teams who’d submitted tenders to carry out the research study. We want to contract a local South African research team as they’ll be suitably equipped to understand the local context, cultures and environment in which Fairtrade is operating here. It’s also important that we contract an independent and credible organisation who’ll bring an unbiased, open and objective approach to the work.

Early on Wednesday morning we (the SAFN Regional Coordinator and myself) prepared ourselves for the four hour drive northwards to the Suid Bokkeveld region in the Northern Cape to visit the smallholder Fairtrade certified rooibos tea cooperative, Heiveld. As we headed up along the N7 road passing Malmesbury, Citrusdal and Clanwilliam along the way, we watched the sparsely populated landscapes around us change from lush and fertile winelands to rocky and dry scrubland – I wondered how farmers managed to cultivate anything on these soils!

Heiveld is a group of 57 small-scale farmers who cultivate and harvest rooibos bushes which they then process to produce organic and Fairtrade rooibos tea for markets including the UK, USA and Germany. Formally established in 2001 with 14 original members, the group was then Fairtrade certified in 2003. As one of the few groups certified under Fairtrade’s Small Producer Organisation Standards in South Africa, we think they’d make an interesting case study comparison to include in the impact research study alongside other hired labour case studies.
When we arrived at Heiveld’s office in the small dusty town of Nieuwoudtville (which took me a few attempts to pronounce correctly!) we were greeted warmly by members of the cooperative including their treasurer and Board representatives. The group share the building with the Environmental Monitoring Group (EMG) and Indigo, both development organisations that have for a number of years supported Heiveld’s development, for example through training and capacity building as well as helping them link up with Fairtrade markets.

After the chance to taste a range of Heiveld’s delicious rooibois teas, including interesting tea blends with ingredients such as lemongrass and ginger, we headed off along the potholed dirt roads which lead us to the group’s newly constructed tea court (essentially a large, open concrete floor space) an hour or so’s drive away, where the bundled rooibos is transported to for processing. One of the tea farmers explained to us how the tea is finely chopped by a powerful cutter machine, gently crushed and then stacked into heaps on the tea court floor to ‘sweat’ in the heat for around 8 hours (which makes the tea turn that distinctive red colour as it oxidises), after which time it is spread thinly on the concrete to dry in the hot sun before being packaged up into large sacs for storage until it’s transported elsewhere for export.

I was really impressed to see that the electricity supplying the tea court’s surrounding buildings (including storage sheds and a small office) is now being generated by solar panels covering the buildings’ roofs, also used to pump water to where it is needed most. Rows of shrubs and trees have also just been planted strategically around the farms to help protect the area from strong winds and prevent soil erosion and desertification during heavy rains.

Exploring the impact of Fairtrade in South Africa

2009-11-21T18:23:00.008Z

Fairtrade Foundation's Jess Gordon reports from Cape Town on a Fairtrade producer/worker impact study being planned

I’ve travelled to Cape Town this week to help set up a Fairtrade producer and worker impact research study being overseen by the Fairtrade Foundation in partnership with the South African Fairtrade Network (SAFN). The aim of the research study is to assess to what extent Fairtrade is benefiting producer organisations and farm workers on Fairtrade certified farms in South Africa, with a focus on how Fairtrade can deepen its impact and support these groups more effectively in the future. The study will incorporate a number of case studies covering a range of products (wine grapes, citrus, sub-tropical fruits such as peaches and rooibos tea) as well as different regions, farm sizes and structures, in order to reflect the diversity of Fairtrade certified producers that exist here.

Given South Africa’s unique socio-political history, and government policies designed to support the economic empowerment of historically marginalised black peoples in the country (referred to as Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment, B-BBEE), Fairtrade has a distinct role to play here in aspects such as supporting worker empowerment and better employment conditions and skills development, as well as encouraging previously disadvantaged black populations to increase their share of farm ownership and management. These factors, combined with the recent huge growth in the number of Fairtrade certified farms in South Africa and media spotlight on the country hosting the World Cup next year, means that now is an ideal time to reflect on the role Fairtrade is playing here, particularly within the context of hired labour farms (as opposed to small producer organisations) which make up the vast majority of Fairtrade certified farms in the country.

Cosmetics Trade Show, Coventry

2009-11-20T10:52:00.001Z

Fairtrade Foundation's Jenny Tither, reporting from a cosmetics trade show in Coventry

This week we packed our shiniest posters and headed for the Ricoh arena in Coventry, home of Coventry City football club. We were there for SCS Formulate, a trade show and networking event for the cosmetics industry. If you're struggling to make the connection between that and Fairtrade, you might not know that in June this year, the first beauty products to carry the FAIRTRADE Mark hit the shelves. A handful of companies were the first to launch, but if the people we met in Coventry were any guide, there is a lot of interest out there in making pampering fairer.

Most of the people we chatted to were chemists involved in making or processing the ingredients that go into soaps, shampoos, moisturisers, shaving cream and all the other lotions and potions we use everyday. We were there to tell them about how they could use Fairtrade ingredients, such as cocoa and shea butter, honey, vanilla, olives, nuts and seeds, so producers in the developing world could benefit from the security of long term trading relationships and a fair price for their work.

The most common question was 'How can I get the FAIRTRADE Mark on my product?'. There were even a couple of people with ideas for brand new and exciting Fairtrade products. Those might be a few months off, but in the meantime, why not check out the range of Fairtrade beauty products already available? They make great gifts, especially teamed with a luxurious Fairtrade cotton robe, or a bottle of Fairtrade wine and some Fairtrade chocolate, for a truly unselfish evening in!

Meeting the farmers

2009-11-19T21:08:00.002Z

Fairtrade Foundation's Head of Campaigns Veronica Pasteur's reporting during her trip to Palestine:

So, yesterday we drove 3 hours from Bethlehem to Jenin, where we met with the Palestine Fair Trade Association (PFTA). We visited their offices and heard about how they work with 49 co-operatives of which 43 are farmer co-ops with a total of 1200 farmers, and 6 are womens co-ops which process the agricultural produce, making things like cous cous from wheat and olive oil from the olives.

The PFTA works with small, marginalised farmers to help them find markets for their products, especially for export. So far, 14 of the olive farmer co-ops are Fairtrade certified and selling olive oil in the UK market through Equal Exchange, Zaytoun and Traidcraft. The first farmers were certified Fairtrade earlier this year and have used the Fairtrade premium to reinvest in the farmer communities.
After looking around the bottling facility, part funded by Shared Interest, we continued on to Anin - a village of about 3,000 people very close to the Separation Wall (it is also a fence in some places - like here).

We arrived just in time to meet the farmers coming back through a gate in the fence, having spent the day working in their olive orchards, which lie on the Israeli-controlled side of the fence. When the Separation Wall was erected in 2003, many farmers' orchards were on the other side, and the Israeli soldiers now control access to their land. They only open the gate twice a day - in the morning and afternoon - every day during harvest season, but only twice a week the rest of the time. Obviously this makes life very difficult for the farmers. When the wall itself was built, up to 9,000 olive tress in this area were destroyed and many farmers lost land.

We spoke more with the farmers over a shared meal and then stayed the night at Mahmoud Issa's home where we talked late into the night about the situation.