Editorials

Three years have already passed since I have been to Léo, a small village in Burkina Faso where I was visiting the workers’ cooperative that produces the shea butter I use, and I still feel close to the ladies that work there. It is for and with them that I’ve been working since 2002 as a shea butter importer as well as an organic and fair trade body care product producer.

In 2007, I obtained the first “fair-trade” certificate given in Canada for shea butter importation. 

Forming alliances to be stronger

Since 2002, our cooperation with the Burkinabe workers has been bearing fruit: the cooperative now has more than 5 500 worker members! The members of the Union des Groupements de Productrices de Produits de Karité (UGPPK) have understood that there is strength in numbers.

What Manitoba seems to be making the news for these days is flooding – Lake Manitoba, the Assiniboine River, to a much lesser extent this year the Red River and Lake Winnipeg.  However, the other flood taking place in Manitoba is a wave of fair trade products flowing into Winnipeg, Brandon and rural communities and flowing out in institutional procurement orders, consumer shopping carts and in church, school and office coffee breaks!

About five years ago, when the Manitoba Council for International Cooperation (MCIC) first undertook its “Fair Trade Manitoba” program, our province had been left behind by more populous, some might say more “happening”, provinces such as Quebec, British Columbia and Ontario.  Not so today! 

Although the Fair Trade movement has made great strides in many Canadian cities and towns over the past few years, we are still a long way from catching up with countries like England when it comes to Fair Trade awareness and availability.  From my perspective, England’s example is truly inspiring, as it proves what is possible despite the David vs. Goliath marketing battle between Fair Trade and status-quo products.  Their experience provides us with a valuable template to inform our strategy here in Canada.

What has proven successful in England and elsewhere is a strategy where each city, town, campus and school carries out innovative and fun ideas autonomously, but with a broad coordination of theme that allows for the sharing of resources and scale that garners wide scale media exposure. 

‘I was hungry, and it was your world’ -Bob Dylan

Flashback (October 5, 2009):

Fair Trade pays $1.55 per pound for organic coffee…but Antonio is left with only 50¢ per lb. after paying Fair Trade cooperative fees, government taxes and farming expenses [and] gets deeper into debt every year. ‘It’s not enough to live on…What we earn isn’t enough to buy food for our children.’

…Farmer advocates are urging the FLO to consider raising the price (to) more than $2…(but) the FLO is balking…‘What good is it to have $2-per-lb. coffee if you can only serve tens of thousands of farmers instead of millions?’ asks Paul Rice, president and CEO of TransFair USA (now known as Fair Trade USA). ‘You risk killing the goose.’…even Starbucks is likely to buy less java at that cost.  Instead, the FLO’s main growth strategy is to keep recruiting retailers like Starbucks.  ‘We are going more and more mainstream’, says FLO chief operating officer Tulia Syvanen.  ‘We’re doing it to increase the market for our famers’....

The environment in which we operate as a producer and marketer of organic and fair trade products has significantly changed. We are confronted by greater competition, often times from bigger players that have larger budgets they can spend on outreach programs and promotions targeting consumers. This being said, the offering of organic and fair trade products on the Canadian market has increased and the choice to buy one of our products is no longer as automatic as it was a few years ago. The environment is challenging us and, like many other players in the field, we have had to rethink our strategy to better differentiate ourselves. It has become more important to define our vision of fair trade among the growing number of companies entering the fair trade market. This has been and remains an exciting time.   

For La Siembra, this meant product diversification.

Tadesse Meskela steps across the door thresh-hold onto a polished cement floor. “Look!”, he says, spreading his arms into the large sunlit empty room. “This is for the workers.” Tadesse points out the places where the workers' lockers will be, the washrooms and showers. Across the room and through an open air courtyard and into another large well glazed room he points out where the buses for the workers will pull in, the cafeteria and where the health room will be. “We will have someone to look after the workers health problems here”, he says, “they will be here when the workers are here.”

This is the first stop on a visit I made this summer to the new coffee processing facility being built by the Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union of Ethiopia, OCFCU. Tadesse is the General Manager of the union and its originator. The state of the art facility is located south of Addis Ababa. The union is a key supplier of fair trade certified Ethiopian coffee to the world.

In its New Global Strategy for Fairtrade, FLO states that within the next few years, producer networks may take their place as fundamental actors of the system instead of being just the recipients of fairtrade. This endeavour has always been at the heart of the movement. But do producers really occupy the place that is rightfully theirs in this system?

For the past 15 years, my own fair trade has been centred on the families that are at the base of the system, on the field. This journey around the world of fair trade began in 1996 when, with Laure Waridel, I visited members of the Unión de Comunidades Indígenas de la Región del Istmo (UCIRI), in Mexico. Since then, I have visited 25 producer groups in 15 countries. Added up, these trips amount to almost two years living in direct contact with farmers, craftspeople and other workers in the fairtrade world.

It was the village of Bipoa in the Kumasi region of Ghana which helped provide the inspiration for the Cadbury Dairy Milk move to Fair Trade. Bipoa is set in the heart of Ghana’s cocoa growing area in the Kumasi region of Ghana.

I travelled to Bipoa in December 2008 with Martin Hill from the Fairtrade Foundation and Nicolas Adjei-Gyan from Kuapa Kokoo, a Fair Trade co-operative of farmers. Bipoa looks like many other cocoa villages and again, like so many, is reached by a dusty red road. Small children can be seen playing in the village square and chickens run around freely.

Bipoa was one of the first villages to become Fair Trade certified and is part of the Kuapa Kokoo co-operative, with a membership of around 50,000 farmers. The real difference, however, is obvious as soon as one meets the villagers.

There is much to celebrate about Fair Trade. Its dramatic growth and increased acceptance as a legitimate social and economic movement are cause for optimism. That large corporations have started to dabble in marketing Fair Trade products is a further indication of its permanence in the marketplace. For a movement that began as an alternative and which still represents less than .01% of global trade, being emulated by transnational actors is a remarkable accomplishment.

This is, however, far less than the whole tale. The most inspiring aspect of the Fair Trade story remains largely untold. There has been a greater depth of influence and impact than is often explicitly acknowledged.

It’s important to remind ourselves that Fair Trade emerged from a global context which celebrated Milton Friedman’s mantra that the only social responsibility of business was to increase its profits, a philosophy that has today been rejected by almost every credible business and corporation.

Like all great social change movements, Fair Trade is a messy and imperfect project.

A grassroots movement that for some emerged in opposition to global free trade eventually gave rise to an ambitious labeling and certification system that has now grown into a complex global organization. A simple yet powerful idea that began with small scale coffee farmers now spans a vast range of products that includes soccer balls and soon artisanal gold.  From the 1988 launch of the world’s first Fair Trade labelling initiative, Stichting Max Havelaar is today part of a worldwide network of twenty-three certifying bodies, that includes TransFair Canada, and three producer networks within the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations (FLO) International.