Innovating Fair Trade

Innovating Fair Trade

Published by ibrown on September 20, 2010

	By Ian Brown

Five employees from TransFair Canada recently attended the Fair Trade Futures conference in Boston, MA. It was inspiring for all of us to spend a weekend surrounded by almost 800 other people as passionate about Fair Trade as we are – meeting producers, networking with advocates and businesses, and participating in a wide variety of seminars and debates.

One of the most interesting sessions for me was a session titled Innovating the Fair Trade Model in the North and the South, which included information about emerging models of biodiversity and sustainability for farmers, agroecology programs in Brazil, and the production of Fair Trade bananas. However, it was Darryl Reed’s presentation about a state-operated poverty eradication mission in India that really grabbed my attention.

Kudumbashree – meaning ‘Prosperity of the family’ - is a community-based women-oriented initiative to eradicate absolute poverty amongst the 32 million people who live in the state of Kerala. More than 3.5 million people are members of the program, giving 50% of households in the state access to its three core components of micro-credit, entrepreneurship and empowerment.

The decentralized model encourages women to work with others in their communities on a wide variety of projects. Some examples:

• Cooperatives of people living below poverty level are together able to lease and work fallow land to grow bananas and spices, or purchase equipment for weaving or other manufacturing;
• Groups receive assistance to develop value-added processing such as making jams and chutneys from locally-grown fruit;
• The also receive help with branding and marketing – with the goal of creating a labeling system identifying products created by women’s development groups.

Products are sold at local markets and within networks of program members – women are obviously inclined to ensure that their purchases – where possible – work towards the continued success of their programs. They are also able to leverage economies of scale and participate in larger-scale projects such as opening retail stores and participating in Shop for Change, a domestic ethical certification program in India. They are also working to ensure that public institutions – government, hospitals, schools – have procurement policies that support local social justice enterprises. This is an idea that we heard several times during the conference.

Kudumbashree is working to develop a range of Fair Trade cotton products, and while they aren’t currently certified by FLO, their initiatives are being explored and supported by the Sumac Community Worker Cooperative in Guelph, ON, so we may see their products in Canada in the future.