Fair-trade firm prepares strategy to aid Swaziland

from NE Business

Here is a good profile on a fair trade business. This explores some of the challenges in keeping a workforce when you struggle with diseases like AIDS or malaria.

by Andrew Mernin,

IMAGINE running a business where almost 50% of your employees are infected with a potentially killer disease and the average life expectancy of your workforce is just 31.

Imagine standing by as key employees become severely ill or die on a regular basis, leaving your company and community in a constant state of disarray.

These are just some of the trials and tribulations faced by businesses in the Aids-ravaged, poverty-stricken Southern African state of Swaziland.

However a North East fair-trade company is hoping to change things as it prepares its long-term strategy to help the country, which sits between South Africa and Mozambique.

Today Andrea Wilkinson of the Newcastle-based Shared Interest Foundation will head to Swaziland as part of a 23-day visit to Africa.

The company will conduct what it calls a needs analysis of the country to evaluate how the ethical investment house can help the local community.

From its Newcastle HQ, the society currently co-ordinates regional offices in Costa Rica and Kenya and is soon to open a further base in Peru, with the aim of raising current investment levels from £23m to £75m by 2012.

Through the Shared Interest Foundation, it gives vital training to sustain growth and survival in an increasingly commercial world for third world countries.

Ms Wilkinson, originally from Berwick and a Northumbria University graduate, said: “In Swaziland 42% of people have HIV/Aids and average life expectancy is 31.

“In the handicraft business they have a key craft person who teaches everyone how to make a particular item. But if they are then lost to Aids, there is no contingency plan to keep up with the running of the business. Shared Interest will step in and offer training and a long-term solution to the problem.”

Ms Wilkinson will also visit Kruger national park where its inhabitants have faced huge upheaval in the way they are able to generate income.

She said: “There are groups that used to be hunter gatherers which can’t do that because it’s a national park so now they have to make handicrafts.”

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Oxfam stands by Fairtrade campaign

from the Melbourne Herald Sun

This follows the story of a consumer group in Australia accusing OXFAM's fair trade label as misleading. OXFAM is now defending it's fair trade certification. - Kale

Free market think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), has complained to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) that Oxfam has been misleading consumers about the brands helping farmers in developing nations.

The IPA today released a letter it received from the ACCC.

The letter said the ACCC had conveyed its view to Oxfam that some of its statements contained "absolute claims'', which could be at risk of breaching the Trade Practices Act if the Fairtrade certification process was not 100 per cent reliable.

But the letter said the ACCC would not take any action against Oxfam.

An ACCC spokesman said the commission had not found any of Oxfam's activity to be misleading.

An Oxfam spokeswoman said the file was now closed and the group stood by its Fairtrade campaign.

"Fairtrade aims to give farmers and producers a much fairer deal and we strongly believe in that,'' she said.

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New fair trade store in Wisconsin

from the Racine Journal Times

An organization called the Racine Dominicans are opening a fair trade store this fall. - Kale

By Michael Burke

RACINE — The Racine Dominicans this fall will open the HOPES Center, a Downtown operation that will be part ministry, part fair-trade store and part coffee shop.
The sisters called it "a place for healing and opportunity."

The components include A Cup of Hope, a coffee shop at 507 Sixth St., and Just Trade at 505 Sixth St., a store that will sell fair-trade products. The HOPES center will be located at 504 Seventh St.

"The focus of the center is really around poverty," Sister Ann Pratt, the center’s director, said Friday. "Economic poverty, ecological poverty — those things go hand in hand.

"And spiritual poverty, that sense of longing that people have for something more in their lives, and they can’t always name what it is."

She said that focus on poverty led to a location "in the heart of the Census tracts for poverty. ... It’s a real visible sign of our commitment to the city."

The acronym HOPES comes from "healing opportunity, peace and justice, ecology and spirituality," she said. Pratt said the center was modeled on a similar store in Bloomington, Ill., that has been around for decades.

Fair-trade products put more money in the hands of people in developing nations and ensures that those products are made sustainably, Pratt said. Selling the products educates buyers about ways to combat poverty.

"Sometimes these problems seem so enormous," she said. "Fair trade is a very concrete way to be able to help people."

Just Trade will start with merchandise from about 75 different fair-trade vendors, including coffee, jewelry, clothing, baskets and bags, toys, candy, greeting cards and statuary. Some items will be made from recycled materials, such as bags made from juice boxes.

Just Trade will likely be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., she said.

A Cup of Hope, which is connected with Just Trade by sliding doors, "aims to provide an atmosphere that will support the vibrant hub for the diverse and inclusive community the HOPES Center wants to encourage, especially for young adults," Pratt said.

It will likely be open from about 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.

And the center itself will provide referrals or services on-site, such as mental health counseling, substance abuse help, adult mentoring and healing arts, said Pratt, who has a master’s degree in social work. The sisters are collaborating with other organizations such as the Health Care Network and Racine Vocational Ministries.

The center will depend on volunteers for its operation and will build that volunteer corps over time, Pratt said.

She said the nuns hope to open the coffee shop and at least part of Just Trade by about Oct. 1.

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Fair trade parties

from the San Francisco Chronicle

Now there is a fair trade scheme that follows the Tupperware model. This one helps women in Uganda. - Kale

Meredith May, Chronicle Staff Writer

After work one Thursday, a group of women friends gathered for Chardonnay and goat cheese at a posh home in Los Altos.

A veritable pirate's booty of colorful beaded jewelry was piled on the dining room table, where the women spent most of the evening trying on bracelets and necklaces.

Welcome to the Tupperware party of the new millennium. In the Bay Area and across the nation, women are gathering in homes and churches to buy colorful beads made by women from an Ugandan village.

The women of Kampala make the beads out of magazine paper. BeadforLife, the Colorado nonprofit behind the movement, imports and sells the beads at bead parties and online, and the money goes back to Kampala to buy land and build homes, send children to school, and help the women start businesses and improve their health through malaria treatments and mosquito nets. And at the bead parties, guests are discussing how to use their buying power to lift an entire Ugandan village out of extreme poverty.

"The draw is the beads, but really, it's an opportunity to get a discussion going about extreme poverty and how if we work collectively, we can change people's lives," said Julie King of Redwood City, one of the first handful of BeadforLife "ambassadors" in the United States.

Many of the beadmakers have been widowed by AIDS and war. Before BeadforLife started, they lived in mud huts on less than a dollar a day - not enough to feed their families or afford school uniforms so their children could get an education.

Today, BeadforLife is raising $3.5 million annually, and sends the bulk of it directly to Kampala. Now, the women earn $5 and $6 dollars a day, on par with a Ugandan police officer's salary. They have bank accounts now, and the average balance for each woman is $436.

The first Kampala beads arrived in the United States in 2003, in the luggage of two Colorado women who bought the beads from an African woman making them outside her hut, and selling them to the rare passers-by for $1 a strand. Torkin Wakefield and Ginny Jordan gave the jewelry to friends and wore it themselves, and noticed an immediate reaction. The jewelry was such a hit, the women returned to Kampala to buy bagsful. They met with 100 women in Kampala, and talked about starting a supply chain.

"They met the women and said, 'I think we can do much better for you,' " said King.

There are 300 women making the beads now, and 100 more enrolled in a training program to learn how. Using long, triangular strips of magazine paper, the Ugandan women roll the beads, glue and shellac them, and string them into necklaces and bracelets that have made it into the fashion pages of such magazines as InStyle and O.
Beads to boarding school

BeadforLife bought 18 acres of land in Kampala, and teamed up with Habitat for Humanity to help the women build 80 homes and pay for them with their earnings and sweat equity.

The women are no longer sharing latrines with 10 other families. Where before they would eschew free AIDS antiretroviral drugs because the medicine made them hungry and they couldn't afford food, now they don't have to make such choices. Many have vegetable gardens.

BeadforLife also pays for a hospital bed at the local hospital's charity ward so if anyone from Kampala has an emergency, there is a place reserved for them to get care.

The nonprofit is changing lives like that of Joan Ahimbisibwe, an HIV-positive beader, who bought a piglet with her jewelry earnings. With the money she made from selling the pig, she moved her three children from a hut to a storefront. During the day she sells sugar and vegetables. At night the family sleeps on a mattress behind the counter. Today, she has enough income to put her daughter through private boarding school.

Word-of-mouth success

BeadforLife doesn't do any grant writing, and donations make up just 5 percent of its revenue. The overwhelming majority of its money comes from women buying beads, a strand at a time. It's a female word-of-mouth phenomenon. Founder Wakefield is now living in Uganda the majority of the year to oversee the program.

"We've tapped into this incredible desire to participate in helping people overcome poverty, and there's something so tangible about the beads," said Devin Hibbard, North America director for BeadforLife.

Colleges have started BeadforLife chapters, churches are getting involved, and a chiropractor in Los Altos is selling them in his office.

King brings her book of Kampala snapshots to bead parties. She shows guests what extreme poverty looks like - the mud huts, the charcoal fires burned inside for warmth, the dirt rivets of sewage running between homes.

To Get Involved

BeadforLife, (303) 554-5901; www.beadforlife.org
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Fair trade comes to New York by way of South Africa

All Africa

Usually story's on fair trade stores only profile the store itself. This one talks of the artisans who supply the store. - Kale

Inter Press Service (Johannesburg)

By Stephanie Nieuwoudt
Cape Town

Entering the Monkeybiz shop, one is confronted with hundreds of brightly coloured beaded animals, dolls, place mats and pictures. You find yourself smiling involuntarily.

"Just look at the beautiful work. How can you resist it?" asked Emma Johnson, an American tourist who visited the shop twice in one week. "I am buying a lot of dolls to take home as Christmas gifts."

Another tourist, Beatrice LaCroix from Canada, said she was impressed with the fact that Monkeybiz helped poor people: "I read about this project some time ago. When I arrived in Cape Town, I made a point of finding out where the shop was."

Monkeybiz was started in 2000 to help poor women in the townships around Cape Town, South Africa, to make a living. "The poverty in the townships is staggering," lamented Barbara Jackson, a ceramic artist who founded the non-profit organisation with fellow artists Shirley Fintz and Mathapelo Ngaka.

"As a privileged white South African I had to do something to help others so that I could sleep peacefully at night."

The women who make the beadwork for Monkeybiz mostly live in tin shacks with only basic necessities. Before they started beading, many had no other source of income. Now they earn 1,000 rand (about 131 dollars) to 3,000 rand (about 394 dollars) per month, depending on the amount of work they do.

Monkeybiz initially started with eight beaders. Ngaka took the beads to Khayelitsha, the township where she lived, and trained the first group of women. Today Monkeybiz employs 250 beaders.

In some cases up to 10 people depend on the income of a single woman. Many of the beaders are HIV positive.

In a country with an unemployment rate of 35 to 40 percent (counting those who have given up looking for a job), initiatives like Monkeybiz go a long way in putting bread on the table.

"Unfortunately there is no government appreciation of the potential the crafts industry has to create employment and generate income for this country," Jackson argued.

Monkeybiz products can be seen in shops around the country but about three-quarters of the goods are exported to a number of countries, including the U.S., Norway and Japan. The products are even sold in the New York shop of designer Donna Karan.

According to Jackson, Monkeybiz's monthly income from sales vary from 300,000 rand (39,000 dollars) to over 500,000 (65,700 dollars).

Monkeybiz supplies the thread, beads and other materials which are delivered to co-ordinators in the townships who distribute these inputs to individual beaders. "I like the idea that the women work from home. They do not have to spend money on transportation costs," Jackson indicated.

Poor households in South Africa spend an inordinate amount on transport because of the legacy of apartheid town planning and the lack of cheap and efficient public transport.

When asked about the principles of fair trade, Jackson answered: "We do not work as a fair trade organisation, but I guess we apply the same principles."

These translate into a fair price for each piece of work delivered. Each object carries the creator's name. The women are also trained in the craft of beading and recently Monkeybiz extended its range to include objects made from recycled rubber.

"To survive as a business we have to sell the items at higher prices than we pay for them, and the buyers then up the prices further so that they in turn can make a profit. This is how business works. However, the money we earn is used to provide the beaders with all the materials they need and to offer them other services, like a wellness clinic," Jackson explained.

The weekly wellness clinic for HIV positive women and their children is run at the Monkeybiz shop in Cape Town. The women are given advice on how to live with HIV/AIDS and get a chance to interact with others who have an illness that still often leads to stigmatisation by family and community members. The women also receive food parcels.

"We realise how important balanced meals are to those living with HIV/AIDS," said Jackson.

Linah Speelman (46) from the township Macassar near Cape Town has been beading for Monkeybiz since 2001.

"It has changed my life," she told IPS. "I used to work as a domestic worker but it was very stressful. The money I earned was far less than what I get as a beader. I can work at my own pace and do as much or as little work as I want to. I don't have to struggle with public transport to get to my place of work at a certain time."

Through Monkeybiz, Eunice Mlotywa from the township Khayelitsha was able to help other people: "Compared to some of my neighbours, I had a good life. When some of them started asking me for food, I realised that I had to try and teach them some skills. I started teaching them beadwork, but I did not have a market for the products."

When she met Jackson in 2001, a mutually beneficial partnership was entered into and she started working as a co-ordinator for Monkeybiz. "I realised that I could help more people who would be ensured of a regular income because of the strong marketing strategy of Monkeybiz."

Her house soon became too busy for her and her family to live there.

"There were people everywhere. We had to move because there wasn't space for us. The beaders bring their children and work mostly from here in summer. But in the winter most prefer to work from home. Many of them only come here on market days when I do quality control and when they get paid."

New beaders are also trained at the centre from which Mlotywa runs a weekly soup kitchen. "Through Monkeybiz I have been able to send my two sons to university. I have also seen how women who have had no income become independent through beading.

"A year ago it was clear one of our beaders, Mankozi, who is caring for the two orphans her brother left behind when he died of AIDS, was also ill. Through Monkeybiz she has had access to medical help and good nutrition.

"She has put on weight and you will not recognize this woman as the same one who was so terribly thin and sickly a year ago," said Mlotywa.

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A FAIR price to pay?

from journal Live, UK

This is a look into the future for fair trade. With prices going up and the climate changing, will fair trade still be able to help? - Kale

by Jane Hall, The Journal

As the credit crunch bites and we become more conscious about how we spend our money, what does the future hold for prime food brands like Fairtrade? Jane Hall finds out.

IMAGINE having to permanently forego your morning wake-up shot of Peruvian coffee or soothing cup of Assam tea.

Worse still, muse on what it would be like to never again enjoy the pleasure of eating a banana, drinking pineapple juice or adding an exotic twist to your fruit salad with slices of mango and papaya.

Contemplate what life would be like with no more lemons, limes, grapefruit or lychees. No more demerara sugar, cashews or raisins. And no more organic cocoa.

In short, consider what it would be like to exist with no more imported foods. Could you handle it? They say a ripple in America creates a wave this side of the Atlantic, and the credit crunch is threatening to turn us all into penny-pinchers. Already discount supermarket chain Aldi is cashing in on people’s worries with plans to increase its chain of 400 UK stores to a 1,500-strong empire in the next five years.

The German chain’s expansion plans come amid increasing signs that cheap and cheerful high-street retailers are benefiting from a tightening of the consumer purse strings as inflation hits an 11-year high of 3.8% following a ferocious rise in the cost of living in June.

Now there are fears that inflation may soar as high as 4.5% or even 5% by the end of this year as wage growth stays muted and everything from energy bills and fuel to food prices continue to rocket.

It is premium-priced foods like Fairtrade that are likely to feel the sharp end of the economic turndown as consumers ditch them for their cheaper conventional counterparts.

There is already evidence this is happening. A recent survey found that nearly three in five people said paying up to 45% more for fairly- traded goods is no longer an option.

Add concerns over food miles and climate change to the mix, and Britain is now experiencing a bunkering down not seen since the Second World War and the days of rationing.

Nearly 100,000 Britons are on allotment waiting lists (in Blyth Valley, Northumberland, around 1,140 people are currently hoping to be allocated one of the area’s 900 plots, while in North Tyneside the figure is 1,316 for the borough’s 1,718 strips of land across 53 different sites).

Vegetable seed sales increased by 7% last year and the National Lottery is investing £50m into community gardens and school farms.

But as we look to save the pennies and consume less foodstuffs like Fairtrade, how is this going to affect the Third World producers whose income is entirely dependent on our demand for their fruit, tea, chocolate, flowers and cotton?

Fairtrade sales were worth £500m last year. This compares to £2bn for organic foods.

Any drop-off in consumer interest for Fairtrade goods would therefore have serious implications. Even the free trade-focused Adam Smith Institute warned earlier this year that “farmers who have been promised long-term contracts and sustainable prices may be unprepared to cope if Fairtrade’s stock suddenly falls in the public eye.”

Why is this? Because more than seven million people in 62 countries depend on Fairtrade for their livelihood. This is either directly through employment or indirectly by profiting from the schools, hospitals and other benefits.

So is the UK’s dependence on tropical fruits a sustainable one, or are we about to experience an about-turn and head back to the days of our ancestors when they only ate what was in season and had to survive the lean winter months on what had been pickled, preserved and prepared in the months of food glut.

Barbara Crowther of the Fairtrade Foundation believes we aren’t ready yet to abandon our love of the exotic. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to survive on turnips and potatoes for the rest of my life.

“By supporting agriculture in other parts of the world, we enable growers to provide food for themselves and protect the lands of their community so they’re not bought out by huge developers.

“And if we’re worried about the increasing level of food prices, we should send a positive signal to the growers of those products that we’re prepared to invest in their future, as we’re going to keep relying on them to grow things.” But what if Britain decided to go entirely local and seasonal? “I don’t think this would ever happen, as the cost of manual labour in the UK is too high,” claims Edson Marinho of Etica, a Brazilian farmers’ co-operative that grows mangoes for Dutch importer and distributor AgroFair.

“But if it did, it would result in chaos: even the biggest producers of Fairtrade goods wouldn’t have anywhere to sell, prices would fall and whole corporations would end up bankrupt.”

One alternative to eating seasonally and locally, says Robin Murray of TWIN, an alternative trading company that launched Cafedirect and Divine chocolate, is to grow everything Britain wants in Britain.

“Let’s say we could grow bananas in greenhouses in Kent,” says the economist, alluding to the 80-acre Thanet Earth project, which will grow 1.3 million types of fruit and vegetables under seven glasshouses 365 days a year.

“Does that make ecological sense in a lifecycle term? Let’s say it does. Then the banana industry the whole world over would have to be restructured – so should we build houses for Ecuadorians here in the UK to help us grow the bananas they used to grow?”

This notion of responsibility lies at the very heart of Fairtrade, not least because 1.5 million livelihoods in Africa alone are estimated to be dependent upon UK consumption of agricultural and horticultural produce.

But the land that’s used to feed the West could actually be used to feed Africa itself, opponents to Fairtrade have argued, as our purchase of Fairtrade products is coupled with the need to help feed continents that can’t feed themselves.

“They call this Fairtrade,” says Anthony Blay of Vrel, a Fairtrade co-operative with 250 hectares of banana and pineapple plantations in Ghana. “But this isn’t a fair world: there’s a huge difference between the price we sell our mangoes for and the prices in the supermarkets in the UK. There is something going seriously wrong here.”

While Ghana also grows crops like cassava, tomatoes, okra, peas and millet for internal trade, it has had to start importing rice from China to help feed its population of 23 million.

“If we could feed ourselves with our own food, that would be better,” admits Anthony. “But the organic bananas that we export to the UK are too expensive for the average Ghanaian to buy.” Vrel ships 5,000 boxes of bananas in five shipping containers to the UK and France every week. The bananas are put into plastic bags, which are themselves sent from the UK, to help them be differentiated from conventionally grown ones, resulting in 100,000 plastic bags being used every week.

While transport actually only accounts for about 10% of food’s carbon footprint, the rising cost of fuel is expected to bump up shipping costs, which in turn will increase the cost of Fairtrade goods.

But forget the future of Fairtrade, says Anthony Blay: he’s not even sure that farming – Fairtrade or not – is an industry that has much long-term projection.

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Shoppers want to buy with clean conscience

from the Galveston Daily News

This article is a good primer on the basics of fair trade. Explaining what makes an item "Fair Trade Certified" - Kale

By Leigh Jones

Today’s consumers are toting their consciences with them on shopping trips, a trend that has encouraged the growth of the fair trade market.

Shoppers want to know that the products they buy aren’t produced in sweat shops and that the farmers get a fair price for their crops.

But with retail outlets thousands of miles from the coffee plantations and rice fields where their purchases originate, how can buyers be sure they’re shopping with a clean conscience?

What Is Fair Trade?

The fair trade philosophy ensures producers get a fair wage for their work and labor in healthy working conditions. It also emphasizes environmental sustainability and community development, with farmers and producers deciding democratically how to invest fair trade revenues.

The movement started in the late 1940s, when American and European churches founded alternative trade organizations to help refugees and other poverty-stricken communities around the world by selling their crafts, according to TransFair USA, the only U.S. certifier of fair trade products.

The socially responsible way to shop has risen in popularity again recently as consumers become more aware of the way their purchasing decisions affect producers in developing countries, where labor standards are lax and workers cannot rely on assistance from their governments.

In a conventional supply chain, products change hands about six times before they get to the consumer.

Because farmers are so far removed from the marketplace, they often have no idea that buyers are giving them far less than market value for their crops, said Jennifer Rudolph, TransFair spokeswoman.

After leaving the producer, fair trade products only go through the co-op and the distributor before arriving in stores.

Selling directly to the exporters, who cannot buy at below a set minimum price, helps farmers get more of a share in the profits their products generate, Rudolph said.

Certified

TransFair issues the “Fair Trade Certified” logo to producers who have passed an independent certification process according to international fair trade criteria. The organization is a member of Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International, which develops fair trade standards applied by 23 members in North America, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

Unlike its involvement with organic certification, which is established by standards set by the Department of Agriculture, the U.S. government has not participated in the fair trade certification process.

Coffee, tea and herbs, cocoa and chocolate, fresh fruit, sugar, rice, vanilla and flowers are the only products in the United States currently eligible for certification by TransFair.

Although the group wants to add more products to its certification list, it can only work in markets where every single part of the supply chain can be guaranteed, Rudolph said.

Handicrafts and clothing are difficult to certify because they are made from so many components, each of which must be verified as fairly traded in order for the final product to receive certification.

Establishing a fair price can also be difficult because every item is produced with a different process.

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Waterford market expands its sources

from the Troy Record

By: Tom Caprood

WATERFORD - Visitors to the Waterford Harbor Farmers Market Sunday were greeted by the addition of a new Ballston Spa vendor in honor of the market's focus on the many benefits of fair trade.

Mango Tree Imports at 2124 Route 50 in Ballston Spa was represented by the shop's owner, Kim Anderson, who was on hand to sell some of her store's wares, as well as answer any questions about the Fair Trade Federation that people had.

"Fair trade is basically an attempt at poverty alleviation in the developing world through sustainable business practices rather than just through charity," said Anderson, who noted that her shop was one of roughly 300 nationwide members of the Fair Trade Federation.

Anderson explained that her shop offers items from over 55 countries in the developing world and that she and her husband, who also teach language classes for adults and children in their Las Mariposas language center, try to work closely with some of the artisans of work that they sell in order to learn exactly what kinds of products they are getting and where they are coming from.

"In the big picture it's about educating consumers to make wise buying choices and realize that every purchase affects someone on the other end of the deal," said Anderson. "If you purchase a product from a fair trade retailer, it affects someone in a good way, but those that are not could have alternative effects on the living conditions of the workers used to produce those products."

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Worldwide fair, local trade

from The Lake Elmo Leader

by Andy Blenkush

A woman named Sonny grows basil in the St. Croix River Valley. Miguel farms coffee in Peru. At Freeset Bags in India, women seeking freedom from the streets of Calcutta’s red light district can find work at Freeset to earn wages in a safe environment.

These people share a common denominator – they seek a fair price for their work.

Fair Trade is not a buzzword. It is an international movement gaining momentum across the globe, nation, state and St. Croix River Valley. Fair Trade networks strive for equality within international trading. It seeks to give farmers and artisans who struggle in today’s economics humane working conditions, educational resources and livable wages that allow them to compete in various markets worldwide.

River Market Community Co-op and Trade Expressions are two Valley-based businesses that recently delved into Fair Trade. The businesses look to expand the Fair Trade products they sell while educating people on a topic that is often under-publicized and difficult to understand.

“I hadn’t even heard, honestly, of fair trade a couple years ago,” Steve Ackerson said, who starting Trade Expressions, an on-line store that sells Fair Trade merchandise within school and church fundraisers.

During a trip to Costa Rica two years ago, Ackerson noticed the high literacy, resources and abundance of talent in the people living there. He also took note of the living conditions.

“I was appalled by the poverty level and shocked that people with so much talent aren’t able to bring their stuff into a larger market,” he said. “I just thought, ‘How can we help these very talented people bring their products to a broader market, a market that actually has dollars?’ I started looking around and found out about Fair Trade.”

Jenn Posterick, marketing and membership manager at River Market Community Co-op in downtown Stillwater, recently traveled to Peru on an educational trip revolving around Fair Trade and co-ops. Posterick was educated in Fair Trade, but the trip was every bit as eye-opening as she toured Peruvian coffee and produce co-ops to learn about Fair Trade and co-op education.

“We spent a lot of time [on the trip] saying ‘who the heck am I?’” Posterick said.

Many of the farmsteads visited are multi-generational. Witness to poverty and harsh working conditions, Posterick returned from Peru more determined to implement Fair Trade products into the inventory at River Market.

“We are working toward importing economically responsible products,” Posterick said. We buy fair trade whenever possible. We have a lot of fair trade nuts and chocolate. Coffee is the biggest one. It’s really their labor of love that put these items on our sales floor.”

A set of criteria established by the International Fair Trade Association, a governing body in the movement, must be met before gaining the Fair Trade Organization stamp of approval.

Those standards include creating opportunity for economically disadvantaged producers, transparency in book-keeping, helping producers gain marketing skills, giving a fair price for merchandise, demonstrating gender equality, promoting humane working conditions and promoting Fair Trade.

The criteria are set too loose for Ackerson’s liking.

“I would like to see international standards,” he said. “I would like to see that the Fair Trade label has a consistent meaning for everyone in the world, that people know exactly what it means.

“Right now, I think there is a real lack of clarity over what it means,” continued Ackerson. “Because of that there are a lot of opportunities for people to kind of capitalize on it, on its growing popularity.”

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Blackpool youngsters learn poverty is no game

from the Blackpool Gazette

By Lisa Ettridge

IT may look as though Beacon Hill has gone wild – but in fact these furry friends have been teaching pupils about world poverty.

The Bispham school was chosen to host the national launch of a new online game which aims to tests the international knowledge of students.

To mark the launch, International Development Minister Gillian Merron paid a flying visit to see the game in action and to speak of her recent experiences in Malawi and Zambia.

The interactive quiz game, called Race Against Global Poverty, is aimed towards young people between 11 and 16 and has been developed by the Department For International Development as a way to make learning about the world more fun.

Beacon Hill was chosen as the launch school for their ongoing work on Fairtrade, the movement promoting a fair business deal in the developing world.

Mrs Merron said: "I'm really delighted to be in Blackpool to mark the national launch of this game.

"It will be a fantastic tool for teachers to be able to teach youngsters about poverty and why it matters.

"The children seem to have really enjoyed trying it out, there is a real enthusiasm to find out about life in other parts of the world.

"I know the school already runs a Fairtrade shop and has links with a school in Malawi so it was the perfect choice."

The horse and the elephant characters also delighted youngsters by appearing as surprise guests during the launch.

"Both animals feature in the game as vital to trade in developing countries.

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Store in Grayslake an ethical endeavor

from the Lake County News Sun

Ten Thousand Villages recognized by Forbes magazine

By JUDY MASTERSON

GRAYSLAKE -- One of the most ethical companies in the world is doing business here.

Ten Thousand Villages, which sells handmade gifts, jewelry and home decor crafted by Third World artisans, was recognized earlier this month for its fair trade and sustainable economic and environmental practices by Forbes magazine and the Ethisphere Institute.

The shop at 960 Harris Road, Grayslake, is one of 150 nonprofit Ten Thousand Villages retail stores across the United States. Founded 62 years ago by the Mennonites, the company establishes long-term buying relationships in places where skilled artisans lack economic opportunity. It practices fair-trade compensation practices including cash advances and prompt payments.

"We get to know our artisans on a deeper level -- culturally, socially and emotionally," said Kim Vander Yacht, the Grayslake shop's assistant manager. "We work with them to come to agreement on a fair wage for the products they produce. They tend to undervalue their items. They have no idea what they're worth in the U.S. or Canada."

The company gives its craftspeople 50 percent of payment up front to help finance production. It also pays for shipping. Villages shops keep overhead low with the help of a volunteer work force. The Grayslake shop runs on the efforts of people like Myke Cardosi of Grayslake, a retired credit union vice president.

"I wanted to give back to the world I had taken from for so many years," Cardosi said. "A gift item from Ten Thousand Villages is a gift that gives twice. It's a gift that also helps someone in the world feed their kids, clothe them, educate them, put a roof over their head. We're helping people we've never met but who we know are living in very destitute conditions."

Popular and affordable sale items include those made of recycled newspapers from the Philippines and Vietnam. Artisans wrap sheets of newspaper around single broomstick straws then coil them to make trivets, picture frames, placemats and bowls.

The shop also sells necklaces made out of a seed from a rare tree in Kenya. The seeds, which may only be harvested every other year, are dried then strung on cord made of recycled automobile tires. "Fish" rocks from Vietnam, which bear the imprint of the artisan's thumb, and that are popular choices for paper weights and aquarium decor, are also hot sellers.

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Making a difference in an unfair world

from The Lantern, OSU

Theresa Attalla

Sometimes people just want to be acknowledged for their work.

This is the simple goal of Global Gallery, located 682 N. High St. in the Short North. Established in 1991 by four local area churches, Global Gallery has taken it upon itself to spread the message of fair trade by selling products and educating the community about the importance of fair trade and the cultures it represents.

"The mission of Global Gallery has been an important driving force in my life," said Connie De Jong, arts scholars coordinator at Ohio State and executive director of Global Gallery.

De Jong began as a volunteer worker and fought to keep it open when at one point it was going to close. Now, there are four locations in the Columbus area: Short North, Easton, Yellow Springs and German Village. Boards of directors and local volunteers of the communities support the locations.

How it works at Global Gallery is simple. The gallery follows the fair trade guidelines according to the Fair Trade Federation: create opportunities for economically challenged people, create equal opportunity for gender classes, provide safe working conditions and environmental protection and give payment of full price to the producers of the product.

Global Gallery has been able to develop relationships with markets of countries that are marginalized in typical trading structures. Workers must demonstrate that they are able to meet market requirements for quality, consistency and continuity of supply. In addition, a minimum guaranteed price that covers the cost of production is established and paid to the company beforehand.

"It's an alternative method to conventional trade," said Megan Fitze, current manager of Global Gallery. "Nobody gets cheated."

The store sells items such as coffee, chocolates, jewelry, scarves and CDs of music from around the world. In addition to selling products, Global Gallery does numerous educational programs and activities to promote cultural awareness.

At the German Village coffee shop location, locals are able to listen to live music and practice yoga. At the Easton location, there have been workshops and activities involving paper making and Tibetan Monks.

International Fair Trade Day is another important event for Global Gallery and fair trade where numerous culture representatives come to show off their skills and educate the public.

De Jong and Fitze both have big plans in mind for Global Gallery and fair trade with the idea of expanding and increasing the education about the issue at hand. They said it is also important to them to open additional locations and continue to make a difference in underprivileged countries.

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Wined, sealed and delivered

from the Journal Live

by Jane Hall, The Journal

TWO North East restaurants are showing that a commitment to Fairtrade and support for local producers can be a recipe for success.

Owners of modern Northumbrian restaurant Grainger Rooms and popular Fairtrade eatery The Open Kitchen, Chris Slaughter and Chris Jewitt, have joined forces to show that dining out does not need to be an ethical minefield.

The two Newcastle-based businesses, which already stock a high amount of goods sourced from producers in the third world as well as from within this region, will be among the first restaurants in the North East to stock new to the market Fairtrade Merlot Reserve and Sauvignon Blanc by Chilean company Lautaro.

Owner and head chef of Grainger Rooms, Chris Slaughter, said: “Supporting Fairtrade producers like Lautaro makes sense, not just in terms of the high quality of the product, but also in terms of what this business can mean for the farmers responsible for producing it.”

Restaurants stocking out-of-season produce has recently come under scrutiny following comments made by TV chef Gordon Ramsay.

Last month the celebrity chef said restaurants should be fined for using the likes of asparagus in December and Kenyan strawberries in March – both are in-season in the UK now. This claim has serious implications for Fairtrade, but the two Chrises argue this does not, and should not, be an either or situation.

Co-owner of The Open Kitchen and chair of Newcastle’s Fairtrade Partnership, Chris Jewitt, said: “It’s important people start to realise eating with a conscience can be done in a varied and responsible way that doesn’t mean choosing just one to support.

“Finding a happy medium between helping to make poverty history by supporting Fairtrade and cutting food miles and improving the local economy through support for local producers – as championed by The Journal’s buy local, use local, eat local Taste Campaign – is becoming essential in today’s market.”

Chris opened Fairtrade eatery The Open Kitchen in Gosforth with business partner Andreas Korovessis in 2003. He recently moved to sister restaurant Grainger Rooms, which champions on its menu producers located within a 20 mile radius of the restaurant opposite Newcastle’s Laing Art Gallery.

Chris Slaughter, said: “Here at Grainger Rooms we feel very strongly about supporting local producers in Northumberland and serving up a menu which reflects seasonality.

“Sistering The Open Kitchen makes sense ethically as we are each taking on one another’s characteristics in sourcing our produce, with Grainger Rooms using more Fairtrade and The Open Kitchen sourcing many ingredients locally.” Currently Grainger Rooms relies upon Fairtrade producers for things like sugar, coffee, spices, herbs, and beer and will also be selling Lautaro wine later this year.

“At Grainger Rooms we welcome the diversity of produce offered by Fairtrade producers, particularly for things that are not available in this country.” Lautaro is a co-operative of 16 small-scale vine farmers around the town of Sagrada Familia, in the Curico Valley area of Chile at the foot of the Andes, 200km south of the capital Santiago.

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People are buying Fairtrade

from The Guernsey Press

By Thom Ogier

FAIRTRADE’S popularity grew globally by almost half last year and Guernsey’s Mondomundi shop owner thinks he knows why.

Phil Soulsby, 42, said the 47% sales boom was not just down to retail buying but it was also thanks to employers who had started opting to supply their staff with more ethical products.

‘More workplaces are deciding to offer their staff the option of Fairtrade tea and coffee and some have begun to stock Fairtrade and nothing else,’ he said.

He said companies in Guernsey were very aware of the need to act with respect for their global responsibilities.

‘Managers over here have done a great job of putting Fairtrade on the menu,’ he said.
Mr Soulsby, or Fairtrade Phil, as he is often called, said he had noticed that sales increased steadily as more products were included in the Fairtrade range.

‘It used to be just tea, coffee and chocolate mainly but now you can buy everything from footballs to clothes and, of course, the increasingly popular cola.’
He said the statistic was very good news for him.

‘It’s very pleasing because I believe very passionately in the cause,’ he said.
‘It shows the public’s recognition of the Fairtrade logo and what it stands for has increased and that people are accepting that fair trade is needed to play a great role in poverty reduction.’

The chairman of Fairtrade Guernsey, Steve Mauger, said he thought the island had played a significant part in the achievement.

‘As a registered Fairtrade island, we can feel proud to be a part of the success and are determined to continue to push sales even further.’

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Rough trade

from the Guardian

Ethical fashion pioneers may have to compete with the profit-obsessed high street but they still believe they are on the wave of the future, writes Matilda Lee

The best kept secret of any department store or fashion boutique is its troupe of soothsayers: the (mainly) women whose job it is - thanks to their skill, experience and sheer gut instinct - to figure out what consumers want to wear. As stores' creative directors or fashion buyers, they are trusted with million pound hunches to suss out the next "must haves" - be it by designer, cut, colour or hemline.

Buyers not only decide what is on offer, they also are responsible for who will make the product, where it will be made, and how fast it must reach the shops. Their decisions impact upon the lives and livelihoods of people thousands of miles away (90% of clothes in the UK are imported) who gin, spin, dye, cut, knit, weave, sew, trim, press and package clothes on their way to the British high street.

Such an impact is not always the most favourable. "The reality in the fashion business is, right, what's available? I want it quick and I'm not bothered how it gets here," says Salvatore Pignataro, the UK purchasing and sourcing manager at Traidcraft, a development charity that "fights poverty through trade" and a former fashion buyer himself.

Lacking industry-wide buying practices and legislation, buyers may be left with the advice of their corporate social responsibility departments or bodies such as the Ethical Trading Initiative to avoid supporting sweatshop labour or other practices harmful to people or the environment. The industry may be aware of the issues, but that does not mean a change in practice.

"A buyer's remit is to make money. There is tension between the end result, which is profit and sales, versus doing the right thing," says Sim Scavazza, a former brand director at Miss Selfridge who is now creative director at Adili.com, an online ethical fashion and homeware shop.

Scavazza, a defector from the conventional fashion business, admits it is difficult to build a fashion brand that tries to be ethical. "Coming from the high street, it is easy to look back and think: we had access to such a big supply base. Now we have to check every single point of the supply chain. It's frustrating, but you have to begin somewhere,' she says.

Adili is working on an own-label womenswear collection for 2009, but for now it is a one-stop portal for a wide range of eco and ethical fashion brands - chosen as much for their aesthetic qualities as whether they adhere to sustainability criteria such as Fairtrade, organic or recycled fabrics.

One jewellery brand they stock, Made, was created by the Italian-born Cristina Cilisino, another refugee from the high street. Having spent 20 years in a business where "buyers were asking me to make cheap copies of Italian designs in the far east and screw the supplier," a trip to Africa made her want to do something that would help, not harm, the people at the vulnerable end of the trade. Made brings together influential designers to design jewellery that is then produced by disadvantaged groups in Nairobi, Kenya.

Made doesn't work with middlemen, thus generating more profit for the 32 artisans who own a stake in the jewellery workshop. Five percent of profits are spent on improving local schools and sanitation.

Cisilino and other fairtrade and eco-fashion pioneers, such as People Tree's Safia Minney, have done the legwork setting up ethical supply chains and building relationships with their suppliers, proving to high street buyers that this type of sourcing is possible. But it does mean changing a number of common practices, such as just-in time sourcing, which allows stores to offer a constantly revolving carousel of fashions - up to 20 "seasons" a year.

The founder of People Tree, Safia Minney, says: "We start from a producer group, see what traditional skills they have and build it up." It can take between three or five years to make a producer group commercially viable.

People Tree works with 3,000 artisans around the world, whose income, by maintaining traditional skills such as handweaving, they have in some cases helped to double. "Handweaving employs 10 million people in India - it is the 2nd biggest employer after agriculture', Minney says.

People Tree came to the attention of Claire Hamer, when, as a junior buyer, she was researching how to get Fairtrade accreditation for Topshop's own brand of ethically made wear. "The Fairtrade Foundation wanted to make sure we were committed, so accreditation took a year and a half. I didn't want to sit around, so we decided on putting People Tree in our flagship Oxford Circus store," she says.

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Fair Trade: Providing A Way Out Of Poverty

from Suffolk Life Newspapers

By:Michelle Gabrielle Centamore

When Edward Quinn, an employee of Stony Brook University's Department of Theatre Arts, decided to accompany Equal Exchange on a trip to the Dominican Republic to purchase coffee, he was determined to learn first-hand about fair trade and how it benefits the farmers in developing countries, as well as consumers.

Equal Exchange is a worker-owned cooperative established in Bridgewater, Massachusetts in 1986 dedicated to fair trade with small-scale coffee farmers in the developing world. The organization offers organic and gourmet coffee, tea, sugar, cocoa and chocolate bars produced by democratically run farmer co-ops in Latin America, Africa and Asia. By accompanying Equal Exchange on their trip, Quinn said he hoped that through his experience, he could gain enough knowledge and insight so that he could educate others about the significance of fair trade.

"This program is important to everyone because it is giving others a hand up, not a hand out," said Quinn. "It allows for people everywhere, including the US, to work their way out of poverty. It teaches the younger generations that we need to care about everyone. It is important because it protects the environment so we can have a sustainable part of this earth to grow food." Furthermore, said Quinn, "it's important, because it stops forced and child labor and allows for people to earn a decent wage."

Companies have a tremendous impact on the countries - and the people - they purchase their products from, noted Quinn. "I learned that Equal Exchange establishes a partnership with the farmers and is committed to not only bringing their products to the marketplace at a fair price but also to invest in their future and community," he said, adding that he never realized how much effort was involved in producing a chocolate bar. "The growing and harvesting of the beans alone is a tremendous amount of work, never mind fermenting, drying, packaging, and shipping them to be processed."

The Equal Exchange program is indeed an educational experience, said Virginia Berman, organizing director for Equal Exchange, and has a major positive impact on all participants of the fair trade operation. "The food we buy and eat is more and more controlled by an industrial food system that gives little care for the earth it is grown in, the farmers who grow it and the people who eat it - and it has become motivated by profit," Berman said. "We put the farmers back as central to our food and the land it is grown on and, ultimately, you taste the difference. It is not taking away from the earth and it is not forcing farmers who grow it off the land."

Berman added that in addition to the positive impact Equal Exchange has on developing countries, the organization is also "making a difference" in the United States, as it is currently purchasing cranberries from farmers in Wisconsin and pecans from the Federations of Southern Cooperatives in Georgia.

According to Berman, Equal Exchange buys directly from the farmer, giving them a higher price than what they would get if they used a middle man. Having these extra profits in their pockets, said Berman, enables these farmers to invest in their families and their communities.

Throughout his trip to the Dominican Republic, Quinn said, "The [cacao] farmers we saw were hard-working and some of the friendliest people I have met. They not only care about their own farm, but about their neighbor's farm, their community and their families. They all depend on each other; otherwise they would not make it."

Traveling with 10 other people and a volunteer from the Peace Corps who served as an interpreter, Quinn and his group spent three nights at a hotel in Santo Domingo and three nights with the families of the farmers from Equal Exchange's Conacado cooperative. Quinn, who noted that he had never been to the Dominican Republic nor any other Caribbean country, said he was fascinated by the unique culture and customs of the people there.

"Everyone greets each other whether you know them or not," said Quinn. "The families we stayed with were warm and friendly. Even the farmers we visited unannounced welcomed us and invited us into their homes."

Quinn said that his group, which included several fellow teachers, visited government agencies, as well as several local schools. "The students and teachers alike were happy to see us and interact with us. At one school we visited, the students did not want us to leave," he said.

"They really have very little in material possessions, but their relationships - family and friends - are what really matters," Quinn added. "I would say the people there live with much less but they really cherish what they do have and are willing to share. It is like we here in the US get confused with what we need, as compared to what we want."

For more information about Equal Exchange, visit www.equalexchange.com.

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eBay to unveil fair-trade marketplace

from CNET News

Posted by Stefanie Olsen

SAN MATEO, Calif.--Catering to a rising tide of socially-conscious shoppers, eBay this summer plans to help publicly launch WorldofGood.com, a marketplace for buying fair-trade products, according to Robert Chatwani, eBay's general manager of the project.

eBay, in partnership with a separate fair-trade company World of Good Inc., has already built a community site for people interested in goods that are made of recycled materials or produced by fairly treated workers, for example. But the two organizations plan to open a shopping site that will cater to these "social change consumers," Chatwani said here Tuesday at the Dow Jones Environment Conference.

That segment of shopper spends as much as $45 billion on green products annually, he estimated.

"Those people aren't on eBay. We believe only between 7 and 12 percent of these social change consumers are eBay users now ... so this could be accretive to the business," Chatwani said on a panel at the two-day conference.

Chatwani helped conceive of the idea for the WorldofGood.com marketplace three years ago while traveling to India with fellow eBay employees. There, they found some sustainably made artisan products they believed would sell online, and could give some money back to the creator. They tested the idea and it worked. Bay teamed up with World of Good, a group designed to alleviate poverty in third worlds by helping sell local artists' goods globally.

Chatwani said WorldofGood.com is only one project inside eBay that's focused on social change. Historically, eBay has been what he called a low-carbon company, built with more efficient online practices and an emphasis on technologies that are good for the world. But eBay also operates explicitly more charitable projects.

Those include MicroPlace, a micro-finance site for people to invest in entrepreneurs in the developing world. It also runs eBay Giving Works, a shopping site that lets buyers and sellers donate a percentage of sales to a charity. Chatwani said that that site has raised more than $120 million for charities.

For its part, WorldofGood.com will focus on giving people more information about products--where they come from, how they're made, and how they effect the environment, Chatwani said.

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Going abroad for education

from The Stockton Record

By Keith Reid
Record Staff Writer

STOCKTON - While her Waterloo School students are on vacation this summer, middle school teacher Stephanie Phillips will be preparing a special lesson plan for next year's classes - only she will be doing it in Brazil.

Phillips won a grant in a nationwide contest, sponsored in part by Sam's Club, to visit Brazil for a week this summer to learn how coffee bean farmers in the South American country live and work.

The trip will provide Phillips, and 10 other teachers from across the country, with a glimpse of how food products that are Fair Trade Certified can help environmental and economic conditions for farmers around the globe, trip organizers say.

Phillips said she has long taught students in her social sciences classes about farming practices, and the principles of Fair Trade.

"It's important for students to learn how farmers and workers in other countries live," said Phillips, a Lodi resident. "It's important to let them know that when you buy something at the store, you are supporting an industry. Fair Trade helps farmers get out of poverty.

"Students get all kinds of messages about why a product or brand is cool, but there's very little linkage to the human or environmental impact of the purchases we make," she added.

Students in Phillips' seventh- and eighth-grade classes say they enjoy talking about world cultures.

"She is always talking to us about world problems. I hope she'll be able to tell us what the schools are like there, and what kind of environment the children live in," said seventh-grader Jana Colombini, 12.

Phillips also heads a global-issues volunteer club at Waterloo School.

"I'm excited to learn about Fair Trade when she returns from Brazil," said Alexis Pettis, 14.

Products labeled as Fair Trade are monitored by non-profit organizations and groups that ensure food is grown in an environmentally friendly manner and that farmers are not gouged by wholesalers or other middlemen as the product goes from production to consumption, according to one such nonprofit, TransFair USA.

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My fair city

from Greater Milwaukee Today

Milwaukee becomes the first Fair Trade City in the United States

By LEAH DOBKIN

Milwaukee is known for its beer and brats, but many aren’t aware it is also an international leader in fair trade.

In fact, last June the city council passed a resolution designating Milwaukee as the first and only Fair Trade City in the United States, resulting in a beehive of activities to promote fair trade in our fair city.

Fair trade promotes livable wages, safe working conditions and long-term economic and environmental sustainability for farmers and artisans in developing countries. Green and organic products are hot, but so are fair trade products. Demand for fair trade in the U.S. is growing at a rate of approximately 40 percent annually, totaling $2.6 billion in sales in 2006.

And fair trade is going mainstream. Walk into many McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, or Sam’s Club and you will find fair trade coffee. But fair trade products have expanded beyond coffee to include chocolate, bananas, rice, wine and other agricultural products, as well as nonagricultural products such as sports balls, crafts, housewares and musical instruments. For a list of local businesses that sell fair trade certified products, such as Anodyne, Beans & Barley, Comet Café and Outpost Natural Foods, log onto www.transfairusa.org.

"For many years retailers were not sure if people really cared about the plight of farmers and workers in the developing world, yet companies like the Outpost, Whole Foods, and Roundy’s are taking the leap of faith by putting fair trade products on the shelf," says Paul Rice, founder and CEO of TransFair USA, the only organization certifying fair trade products in the U.S. "The good news is that people do care. We are finding through the rapid growth of this market, increasing concern about plight of the world, about social and environmental issues from people in this country."

The ground floor

There is a vibrant grass roots movement of businesses and community organizations in Milwaukee that know about fair trade, are excited about it and want to build the movement and reach more citizens in the city, notes Rice. "They have been joined by forward-thinking leaders such as Alderman Tony Zielinski, and Mayor Tom Barrett, in particular, who really got it and decided to join in the front end rather than much later, which is unique," he says.

According to Barrett, "Milwaukee has an important role in the global marketplace, but we maintain a commitment to improving the lives of workers in developing nations by supporting fair market trading practices. Fair trade is like an international farmers market, and now our citizens have the ability to affect social change by becoming consciousness consumers."

The Fair Trade Resolution, which was introduced by Zielinski, is modeled after the hundreds of fair trade cities in Europe, and encourages fair trade purchases within the city government and among local businesses, schools, religious groups and consumers. The resolution establishes a steering committee to educate the public about fair trade. "The ultimate goal is to educate as many people in our region about fair trade so we can have as dramatic an impact as possible," says Zielinski. "The other key component is to help spread fair trade to other municipalities as well."

Social conscience

Local businesses are demonstrating leadership in the fair trade movement, and provide significant local community support as well. Rishi Tea Co. purchases tea from selected regions of the world, including the villages of Jing Mai, an area of China whose culture has been intertwined with ancient tea trees for more than 1,500 years and has the highest poverty rates. Rishi pays above-market prices, plus an additional premium, for community improvements such as building a library, a hot shower system, water purification, and agricultural training programs. "We do business with larger, high-quality companies on a national scale, such as Whole Foods, Wagmans and Williams Sonoma, but our bread and butter has been and remains to this day locally independently owned business café coffee shops and retailers such as Sendik’s and Outpost," says Ben Harrison, co-owner of Rishi.

Another "home-grown" company, Alterra, is a licensed roaster of Fair Trade Certified coffees since 2002, and now ranks among the top 12 licensees in the U.S. The business has a long-term relationship with the Kulaktik coffee cooperative in Chiapas, Mexico. Alterra’s "give back program" allocates 25 cents of every pound of coffee sold to Kulaktik, which provides an additional $15,000 to $20,000 to the co-op each year. The co-op takes this money and fair trade premiums, and invests in business and community development, such as constructing a tasting laboratory, formation tank and health clinic. These international projects complement Alterra’s local community partnerships, such as a curriculum project for fourth-graders on Fair Trade at the Fratney School. Alterra even donates its used coffee grinds to the Growing Power Food Center and Training facility. The grinds are used for a worm farm that produces high-grade fertilizer that Growing Power sells to support its nonprofit activities.

A personal statement

Businesses are not the only ones getting involved in fair trade; entire neighborhoods are, too. Vliet Street hosts fair trade festivals, which include fair trade wine and coffee tasting events. Also on Vliet Street is the Four Corners of the World Fair Trade Store and the Fair Grounds Coffee shop, both opened in the last two years.

The interfaith community has historically been very active in promoting fair trade. For example, the Greater Milwaukee Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America runs the Mt. Meru Coffee Project, which promotes fair-trading with coffee farmers in Tanzania.

The Archdiocese of Milwaukee and the grass roots organization SWIFT (SW Wisconsin Fair Trade) sponsors the Milwaukee Clean Clothes Campaign. The campaign is an anti-sweatshop initiative which has already had success with anti-sweatshop work in public and private schools, and all levels of government. The campaign has developed fair trade curriculum, and consumer information on how and where to buy fair trade products in Milwaukee. Local colleges, such as Marquette University, are also very active in the fair trade movement, and this past November sponsored a Fair Trade Christmas Fair.

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The friction between the fair-trade and local-first movements

from the Charleston City Paper

BY ERIC BLAIR

Food shopping has never been more political than it is now. Beyond the clutter of brands vying for consumers' attention in any grocery store aisle, deep social movements are at play, and marketers are keen to exploit their ideas to slap an additional 30 cents on a price tag. Eat organic. Buy local. Help children in Africa get access to clean drinking water. Support Lowcountry shrimp. The consumer is more powerful than ever, and at times, also more confused.

A few years ago, the concept of buying fair trade goods caught on. To be considered fair trade, a product has to meet the labor and environmental standards set by one of several international organizations. While the fair trade sales are still rapidly increasing, the public's concern has shifted toward global warming and eating local.

Now, the green movement is all the rage. Lowcountry Local First, an organization that promotes local food and agriculture, was formed six months ago and has quickly expanded its activities. The idea behind the "eat local" movement is to strengthen ties between local consumers and producers, increase awareness about where and how food is produced, and reduce CO2 emissions by encouraging people to eat food that doesn't have to travel thousands of miles to get to your dinner table.

But can today's moral standard be reconciled with the one from a few years ago? Is it possible to eat local and support farmers in developing countries? And should that be the goal in the first place?

In the United Kingdom, where both the fair trade and eat local movements are more established, tensions between the two movements have reportedly increased in recent years, but so far, that is not the case in the United States and certainly not in Charleston, where recently the city's one fair trade store, Global Awakening on King Street, had a flier from Lowcounty Local First on its front counter.

However, on some college campuses, a debate about how to approach these issues has begun. William Moseley, a geography professor at Macalester College in Minnesota, whose research focuses on agriculture in southern and western Africa, has first-hand experience.

Recently, Moseley began to notice that while many of his students were becoming more interested in eating local, they didn't have the same enthusiasm for fair trade. This concerned him because while the market for fair trade represents less than one percent of global agricultural trade, it is growing around 40 percent a year.

Moseley believes fair trade presents a way for small organic farmers and food cooperatives to become economically viable in the face of competition from large-scale plantation farms. He's seen this while studying a cooperative wine vineyard in South Africa run by about 60 black farmers. The cooperative provides its members with better health care and working conditions than the large-scale owner-operated vineyards and relies on wine exports to break even.

In November, Moseley wrote an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle criticizing the local food movement for being too insular. He did not reject the idea of eating local, but argued that conscientious consumers had to balance localism with an international perspective, one that included understanding our connections to the developing world. The response he received on some websites was openly hostile, and he began to think that it was because he was pushing people outside their comfort zone. Buying local is, after all, a simple theory — you go to the supermarket and look for local goods — and he was asking people to take a more nuanced approach. Not everyone appreciated it.

"I think part of that frustration was that I was complicating things, and they didn't want it to be complicated, they didn't want to have to think more deeply about it," he says. "It pushes you to understand that you're part of a global trading system and that trading system isn't necessarily an even playing field."

Gawain Kripke, the policy director at Oxfam America, a global anti-poverty organization, is concerned about where this debate might be headed. He sees the local food movement as being driven by a mix of concerns — a sense of supporting one's community, knowing about how food is produced and its environmental cost. He says that we should understand what criteria we are applying when making decisions about the food we buy. Some fair-trade products, for instance, actually have a lower carbon footprint than their equivalent in the United States, even when the transportation costs are factored in.

"It's important to parse out what the motivations are, and I think there is a worry that the local movement might turn into protectionism or a me-first-ism about our economic relationships, and that could be devastating for poor people in other countries who are really looking for a first step on the economic ladder and trading the things they produce, like agricultural goods, is one of the ways they can improve their livelihoods," he says.

Perhaps no one is more responsible for bringing more fair-trade products into the port of Charleston than Raymond Keane, a trader with Balzac Brothers & Company, a coffee import company that has been in business since the early 1900s. Balzac imports roughly 50 million pounds of coffee beans into the United States a year. Within the last four years, the amount of those beans that are certified as having been produced under fair conditions for workers and with methods that are environmentally sustainable has more than doubled.

Keane says that the coffee industry is in the midst of a generational shift, as younger, more environmentally conscious leaders take the reigns. Much of the change, he says, is fueled by consumer interest. He realizes that producing and transporting coffee gives off CO2 emissions, but he doesn't see a way around it in the short term.

"It's our business, and it is an impact, but coffee is such a huge part of the life of all these people," he says. "To curtail that, if we as Americans say, 'If you don't produce it here, we really don't need to use it', so you are going to tell the 40 million Latin Americans who work in coffee that we don't want their product ... what would happen then?"

For Alan Moore, program director of the local and sustainable agricultural program at Lowcountry Local First, the key word is balance. He says that consumers can support fair trade, eat local, and buy organic because all three ideas come from the same root.

"All of these things hit on very important issues on being connected again with the land and what we eat, and I feel like they are equally important," he says.

It may not be so easy. Oxfam's Kirpke thinks that there is an unavoidable intellectual tension between the fair-trade and eat-local movements, and how progressives navigate that tension will help determine how the public as a whole sees the issue. He believes that for the foreseeable future, consumers will be faced with complex choices every time they make a grocery run.

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