Trade Aid

Power to the people in rural Ethiopia

2011-12-15T14:01:00.000-08:00

I’ve just been travelling in Ethiopia for the third time and I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to make repeat visits to a number of the coffee co-operatives with whom we trade. Signs of progress are plain to see; in rural Ethiopia, where government investment is extremely limited, coffee farmers are using the extra money they receive from fair trade for projects such as building more classrooms, putting in more power lines, and building better roads for themselves and their communities. It’s extremely satisfying to see how Kiwis paying a few cents more for their coffee can have such an impact in a country where a little money goes a very long way.

I do find my work challenging though. I arrived in Ethiopia conscious that prices for the coffee we import from this country have climbed sharply in recent years and that a number of the roasters who buy Ethiopian coffee from Trade Aid are starting to buy less of it as a result. On the other side, I've been talking with coffee farmers who still (barely) illuminate their homes with tiny diesel-fuelled lamps. They dream of the day when they would have electricity, could flick on a switch and enjoy the brightness of a light bulb, and could save critical income by not having to regularly buy new batteries to power their radios.

Our trip ended on a high with us making the first trip by any coffee western coffee buyers down to the village of Mummicha, which is in one of the main coffee-producing valleys west of Harrar. We borrowed tents from the Oromia co-operative's office in Addis Ababa and were humbled to find on pitching them that in remote parts of Harrar such accommodation is deemed to be very luxurious. Cooking our dinner over an open fire, it felt very much like a typical camping experience in New Zealand but for us it was an adventure, and not our everyday routine. In this village, like so many others in rural Ethiopia, there was no electricity to light the way that night. We all came home with a slightly deeper appreciation of how life is for millions in rural Ethiopia when the sun goes down.

Head winds on the mountain

2011-08-20T17:42:00.001-07:00

Just outside the town of Mbale, rolling countryside abruptly gives way to the hulking shape of Mount Elgon. An extinct volcano, Elgon looms above the surrounding plains and reaches over 4000m in altitude before extending many kilometres eastwards and downwards into neighbouring Kenya.

The lower slopes of Elgon are excellent coffee-growing land, and a large coffee industry was established on the Ugandan side of the mountain during the British colonial era. Tragically, this industry largely collapsed during Idi Amin’s 1970s reign of terror, a time in which trade became nearly impossible. Many coffee farms were abandoned during that time and remain untended today.

Visiting Mbale in late 2009 I spent several days with the Gumutindo co-operative and left feeling very positive about the future of coffee farming on Mount Elgon, as I discussed in this previous post. Now, less than two years later, my optimism for Gumutindo’s future is badly shaken. What could have changed there so suddenly?

The problems that have arisen have not been due to failings on the part of the co-operative, which continues to strive hard to build a sustainable business model and which this year took the bold step of constructing its own processing mill to cut production costs and improve coffee quality.

The problem has been the weather.

Although farmers in the Mount Elgon region had already experienced difficulties as a result of changes to their weather patterns, two significant events have recently impacted on them in quick succession.

In March 2010, torrential rains brought down a number of landslides on the largely deforested flanks of Elgon, destroying many buildings and claiming more than 300 lives. In helping its farmers to recover from this disaster Gumutindo set up a landslide fund to help out as best it could, and has provided support to those who lost family members, land, crops, and buildings.

One year later, an enormous new challenge has emerged. Leaf rust disease has spread rapidly through Elgon’s coffee trees, destroying much of the latest harvest. The disease was spreading anyway due to increasing temperatures, which have allowed rust-bearing organisms to rapidly multiply, but the past year has seen an explosion in the number of diseases and pests.

Faced with this fresh disaster, Gumutindo is again responding as best it can. Understanding the rise in local temperatures to be a symptom of global climate change, they have put resources into a climate change awareness-raising program. They have launched a tree planting initiative and have distributed tens of thousands of seedlings to their members this year, as well as providing training to farmers on tree conservation, protection of watersheds, keeping of wetlands and better land management.

What has really alarmed me has been the scale of these two weather-related problems, and the amount of damage each has caused. If the exceptional rains of early 2010 and the coffee leaf rust explosion of 2010-11 would both be symptoms of a changing climate, they highlight the challenges that even well-resourced coffee farmers would face if they would be capable of effectively combating this phenomenon. New tree seedlings take decades to grow, disease-resistant coffee strains take many years to develop and use.

Trade Aid remains committed to its trade with Gumutindo, but we are under no illusions that the strength and longevity of our trade may ultimately be dictated by weather conditions that we can do little to influence. As Gumutindo explain, their weather has changed and it is severely testing them:

“The rains do not arrive at known times and even when they come, they are unpredictable and fall so heavily in a very short time or they are so little that crop production cannot be sustained in the way we know”.

Trade Aid Education Tour update #2

2011-03-24T14:09:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Thailand!

We are now in Day Three of our visit to Thailand, based in and around Chiang Mai. It is about 35 degress most days with high humidity and that steamy tropical feel about everything. Out in the rural areas, the temperature reached an unrelenting 38 degrees today and we were all wilting badly.

The lushness of both the city and the rural and mountain areas has been refreshing after the dryness of the Delhi area.
We're also all enjoying a greater sense of order and cleanliness than we did in India and we delight in the fact that driving around seems a lot less of a risk to life and limb than last week's adventures!

We have visited Y Development offices and then travelled with them to see ceramics and paper producers. They treated us so well and in the evening, hosted a banquet dinner and wonderful traditional dancing, and we were all asked to join in.

The last two days we have been with Harry and his staff member, Nasi from Thai Tribal Crafts as we have travelled North from Chaing Mai towards Thailand's northern border. We visited two villages - one who worked on traditional embroidery and another who were weavers. It was in this second village (Mae Muang Noi) that we spent the night in one of the local's house - a bamboo pole house. We slept - (or at least tried to!) on mats on the floor and were not so gently serenaded to the sounds of village life - dogs, cows, roosters and cicadas. We were treated to food cooked by the local women - all from produce in and around the village.
We've all had an experience that the majority of visitors to Thailand will never get - a very genuine village stay which of course, included their loos and "bucket" bathroom! We were fascinated by their beautiful weaving and our many purchases have added to the village coffers!

We then went on to a village specialising in patchwork - fabulous intricate designs in wonderful rich colours. It is so encouraging that with the work of TTC, these traditonal and unique crafts are being preserved and also providing much-needed income to the rural people in this region.

We are nearing the end of our time here and it has all gone very quickly.
Over the next few days we head to the South East to visit two more villges
- one which specialises in weaving and then a group who are involved in
silver work. As with India, it is very hearetening to hear the stories
of these producers and realise that without the support from TTC and other Fair Trade organisations, these people are unlikely to recieve fair prices for their hours of work. Their very livelihoods and that of their families, depend on selling their handcraft work.

We will no doubt return next week with wonderful memories of fascinating people and rich expereinces, and all with a renewed sense of why we all do what we do in Trade Aid.

Sawatdee from us all on the Trade Aid Education Tour 2011!

Trade Aid Education Tour March 2011 - Update #1

2011-03-21T16:54:00.000-07:00

"Happy Holi" and greetings from the Education Tour!

It's hard to believe we are nearing the end of an amazing week in India - a land of immense contrast and a land which challenges not only our senses but also at times, some of the foundations of our Western upbringings.

There has been so much to visually digest and absorb, especially in this frenetic, teeming city of 15 million people, not to mention the uncounted millions eking out a life on the dusty roadsides or in evacuated building sites.

We've had a mix of visiting historical sights including the stunning Taj Mahal and some more modern ones such as the beautiful Bahai temple, remniscent of the Sydney Opera House and designed to resemble a lotus flower. And far more importantly, we've also been visiting the producers of our products. Many long bus rides in the "Bone shaker" bus have been needed and these long trips have been a great way to absorb the richness of what's going on out of the window. No one can quite imagine how Delhi hosted the Commonwealth games. It simply defies logic.

Visiting the producer groups is wonderful and to see their appreciation for all the opportuniites this work gives them makes you realise how very important it is to their livelihoods. These many individuals and families would otherwise have little or no choice regarding their own future or that of their children.

Their hospitality is so generous when they have so little and we have been treated as honoured guests and long lost friends. It's also wonderful to meet artisans who have been featured in previous Trade Aid stories and hear about their life some years on from when Trade Aid last visited. And as Helen said, the stories of our producers have "touched us to tears".

Over the last few days we have visited very poor slum areas and had a couple of "body guards" with us - some of the hefty blokes from the TARA projects office! The level of poverty is almost beyond comprehension.
It's currently the middle of a festival called Holi - the Festival of Colours and it's rather wild where everyone daubs each other with coloured dye powders, or even worse water bombs filled with the dyes. There is a generally riotous feel about everything and the workers in some of the
projects had great delight in doing so to their Kiwi guests! This was
followed by spontaneous frenzied dancing, laughter and hilarity - with a sense of unbridled joy in the midst of abject poverty.

It's such a privilege to engage with the people in this way - so far beyond a regular tourist experience.

We are very much a novelty as we dine with locals in local restaurants. We have eaten like kings and with help from the locals, have tried many new and exciting dishes.

Today, Sunday is the festival day of the Holi Festival - a holiday here and nothing is open. The advice from the TARA staff is that the festival activites are so wild that we have been advised not to go outside. So it has been a compulsory rest day before heading off to Thailand on Monday.

So far, we are all enjoying a change of pace and a chance to catch up on ourselves.

From the Trade Aid Education tour group 2011!

The battle for coffee is heating up in Mexico

2011-01-22T08:53:00.000-08:00

For information on Tadesse Meskela and the movie Black Gold, follow this link

I’ve just finished a visit to ISMAM, a coffee co-operative in southern Mexico. We go back a long way; Trade Aid’s been buying their coffee for at least 15 years and in 2003, when we didn’t have the volumes to buy straight from co-ops who were used to exporting by the containerload, they were the first organisation to sell us green coffee directly by offering to send us a shipment half the normal size.

I’ve been anxious to get back to Mexico, where co-operatives of small-scale coffee farmers such as ISMAM have been increasingly struggling in recent years to compete with large coffee companies in a price war which may yet drive many of them into bankruptcy. With coffee now in tight supply, these large companies have every buying advantage imaginable; politics and big business are intertwined here and they receive subsidies from the Mexican government which enable them to offer very competitive prices through the coyotes (street traders) who drive from village to village buying coffee. These companies have such strong cash reserves that they can offer full payment on the spot to farmers – a tempting deal that the cash-strapped co-operatives cannot match.

Returning to Mexico this week, I’ve heard the anguish of many of these farmers. They set up their co-operative with the plan of marketing their coffee themselves to earn better prices from caring customers and have enjoyed running their own export business for the past 25 years. They enjoy working together and they dearly wish to avoid selling their coffee to the same companies that showed no regard for their welfare in the past by offering them the lowest prices possible. They know that these same companies still only have interest in their coffee today, and not in them. But the temptations are great right now.

Meeting here with representatives of many of the communities from whom Trade Aid buys its coffee, I discussed the pricing challenges which we will try to help them overcome. We all recognised that our best efforts, and the trust and confidence we have in each other, may not be enough to overcome the difficulties their co-operative is facing. The subsidised coyotes are in a good position to win any price war, and we must all work harder and better if we are to resist this challenge.

The day after that meeting, I travelled to one of the co-op’s more remote communities – a three hour drive above the town of Motozintla, much of it up dirt roads which become treacherous in the rainy season. Standing next to a coffee farm, talking with farmers, it was easy to understand on a more personal level the anguish of the farmers that I’ve been visiting.

The conversation turned to the subject of education, and many of the farmers in the group had a similar story to tell; they have children who would love to receive a tertiary education but who cannot for lack of the money to pay for it. One, Victor, has an oldest son who has finished school and would like to study business administration “but we don’t have the money right now”. A second, Julio, has a daughter who has just started high school and has already expressed a desire to study engineering but who will not because, as he recognises, “we already know that we wouldn’t be able to afford her education”.

A third farmer, Lucas, mentioned that he too has a daughter who has just finished high school and who is not going on to do further study but is helping out on the family farm instead. “I know that she would like to still be studying”, he said, “but I haven’t even asked her what subjects she would like to take. I can’t bring myself to do so because by talking about it with her I’d feel like I was offering her a possible future which in truth I cannot”.

I find it wrenching to think that if their co-operative would fail these farmers, standing on the side of the road sharing with me their frustrations, could soon find themselves back at the mercy of the street traders they’ve worked so hard to avoid. It has been the co-operative that has offered them the hope of a brighter future for their families, including the prospect of better-paid careers that require higher education, up until now.

All over the world, large companies are now dominating agricultural production. Mexico is no exception, and transnationals here are using every weapon at their disposal. They’re even establishing cooperativas fantasmas (‘ghost’ co-operatives) and now sell some of their coffee as ‘fair trade’ to unwitting buyers.

Unless we want to support the demands of profit-driven business, we have to consciously support a more producer-friendly trading chain; one which helps farmers to meet aspirations such as providing higher education opportunities for their children. Trade Aid can offer this, as long as enough of us are willing to pay the price required to support the likes of Victor, Julio and Lucas. In Mexico right now, this is a big ask.

Food for thought in Guatemala

2011-01-22T08:41:00.000-08:00

Our merry group of coffee travellers – I’m moving around with four staff from other New Zealand coffee companies - is working its way through Guatemala. We’re taking a short and relaxing weekend break before heading upcountry to meet with one more coffee co-operative.

We’ve already met with two co-ops here. As usual on trips like this, I find that as conversations develop between us and the coffee farmers we meet, different topics often come up in the discussion which become the ‘theme of the day’; one day it might the problems farmers are having with the weather, on another it might be the importance of remittances from family members who migrated illegally to the United States in search of better incomes.

Aparicio Lopez Arana, a genial coffee farmer in his early sixties who sells coffee to us through the Guaya’b co-operative, welcomed us onto his land and started to tell us his story. Prompted by one of his comments, the subject quickly settled around the challenges that he has in keeping nutritious food on the table all year round for his family.

Like Aparicio, hundreds of thousands of farmers throughout Latin America earn such little income from the sale of their coffee that the months immediately prior to the next harvest – and their next payout – are tough. Their money has almost run out and they endure what they know to be ‘los meses flacos’ – ‘the lean months’. With no money to buy anything but the most basic of food items, the nutrition of their families suffers. A recent survey found that two-thirds of coffee farming families in Central America endure between 3 and 8 months of restricted diet every year.

“When we hardly have anything to eat – beans, eggs, not much else – we feel frustrated. We want to eat better but we can’t. In this time we don’t eat meat at all, and we often can’t afford rice. We can’t buy milk and we need it if we want my grandchildren to get calcium into their diets. Instead of milk they drink coffee, even the little ones. They’re too small – they don’t eat enough food and they don’t get enough vitamins”, he explains. “The first thing I would buy if I had more money would be better food, like corn, rice and a little more meat. Even during the best of times we can still only afford to eat meat once or twice a month”.

It’s a vicious circle; people who don’t eat enough calories can’t work hard, while children who go without meals can’t concentrate properly in class. If we can, by paying higher prices to Aparicio for his coffee, help to eliminate this problem for his family then we will be helping to remove one of the key obstacles that hinders development in this part of the world.

Welcome to the Philippines

2010-11-26T14:18:00.000-08:00

I hadn’t been in Manila five minutes before someone was offering me sex.

My taxi driver from the airport, probably quite reasonably assuming that as a solo male arriving in the Philippines I might be one of the country’s many visiting ‘sex tourists’, could easily set me up, no problem. ‘You want beautiful girl, I can find you! Look here!’ (He pointed to one of the many sex clubs we were passing on the drive into town).

Outside my guest house, when I went searching for dinner, the propositions continued. Various men approached me, offering a choice of many beautiful girls, all assuredly aged between 16 and 24 (in reality, it’s thought that up to half of prostitutes working here are under the legal age). I’m used to being offered cigarettes or other drugs by street traders; here the trade was all for Cialis and Viagra.

Child prostitution and human sex trafficking are big business here in the Philippines, with the trade often controlled by organised crime syndicates. In Olongapo City, where I have mostly been staying, it’s estimated that up to 8% of the population are prostitutes; perhaps this is the sorriest legacy of all from the days when the US navy was based at nearby Subic Bay. Although the sailors have left, plenty of other western visitors have helped to keep the trade very much alive, including many paedophiles who know that this is one country where their desires will be easily satisfied. Poverty is another major driver; low rural income has led to a massive urban drift but in the cities work opportunities are very limited for people arriving from the countryside.

I’m actually here in the Philippines to meet with the Preda Foundation and with some of the farmers they work with near Mount Pinatubo, five hours to the north of Manila. Preda, which has a strong focus on winning freedom for underage sex workers, and on gaining legal justice for sex abuse victims, helps to support its operations through the sale of fair trade dried fruits including one of our most popular products, a delicious dried mango.

The farmer groups I visited had their own stories of oppression to tell; as indigenous Aeta, they have had to fight for decades to secure ownership rights to their traditional ancestral lands, and they regularly protest in an attempt to contain the spread of illegal mining activity in their region. Preda supports them in a number of ways and although these Aeta still feel discriminated against, they are now much more confident of their rights and feel more empowered to defend these rights.

Teresa de la Cruz illustrates the kind of difference her community has seen as a result of the legal advice they have received from Preda. ‘In the past, if we would go to a local hospital we would be turned away; now we know our rights better we are able to receive treatment as a result’. Another member of the group, Salvador, told me how a cousin of his had been offered Paracetamol as treatment for malaria and later died.

Reflecting on the stories I have heard from the Aeta community, and conscious that by staying at Preda’s headquarters in Olongapo I was sleeping under the same roof as dozens of young women who have been rescued from sex trafficking rings and are being provided protection and support, I’m comforted by the thought that at Trade Aid we are supporting the fight against both ethnic discrimination and sex slavery through our trade.

Heading back to Manila airport in a different taxi, I’ve been offered more girls by my driver. ‘Students’. Thinking of the thousands of taxi drivers who are, in effect, the country’s doormen peddling sex in this manner, it’s hard for me to foresee a day when the Philippine sex industry might shrink to a more moderate size. Preda’s work is far from done.

Three nights in Bangkok

2010-11-20T02:03:00.000-08:00

After two weeks of long and occasionally gruelling days of working on the move, I’m taking what I believe to be a well-earned break for the next three nights and two days here in Bangkok. To my no great surprise, my body is shutting down now that time is my own again and I don’t expect to stray very far from the guest house – perhaps just to stroll as far as the street food sellers outside the nearby Ari Skytrain station for hot food and some cooling, sliced fruit.

I’ve been recommended some of the most popular tourist spots as places to go over the weekend; the Grand Palace, a river cruise, or perhaps the floating market at Damnoen Saduak, which is an hour or two from Bangkok by bus. The combination of Bangkok’s sultry heat and my general fatigue will probably scupper these plans but I’ve also already had good opportunities during the past week to visit numerous temples and some rather more authentic markets in small-town Thailand. However, it was not these experiences but the human encounters I’ve had here that have been so enjoyable and so inspiring for me.

The organic Jasmine rice harvest started this week in the Yasothorn region of eastern Thailand, and I was lucky enough with the timing of my visit to catch it in the company of staff from Green Net, from whom Trade Aid imports brown and white organic rice. The region was busy with farmers out bent forward in their paddies, sickles in hand, cutting ripe stalks of rice and laying them flat in the fields behind them to dry. Occasionally the puttering of a diesel-powered two-wheel tractor could be heard from the paddy of the rare farmer who could afford to use one to help to transport their dried and bundled rice stalks back to their home in a nearby village.

While the average age of rice farmers here continues to rise – it’s now over 50 – I also met with a number of younger farmers who still love the simpler, family-centred life out in the countryside and who are determined to remain self-sufficient on their tiny (by our standards) blocks of land. One young woman, Sawitri, particularly impressed me. She studied political science at her local university but sees her future to be on the land. ‘Studying at university helped me to develop an independent streak, and to become more proactive’ she explained. ‘I’ve bought just over a hectare of paddy of my own which I’ve planted out in rice. I may keep on with my part-time accounts role at the local rice mill but I don’t need to; the amount of land I have is sufficient and I can survive off it’.

A long day’s travel from Yasothorn, I also met with members of a small coconut farmer group who live near the coastal town of Ban Krut, more than five hour’s drive south of Bangkok. In a region where corrupt politicians own a lot of land and use their power and influence to create landscape-destroying development, the group originally formed six years ago to protest against plans to construct a lignite-fired power plant in their district. Their protests have been successful - so far – and the power plant is now off the agenda but their quiet, clean and sleepy part of the countryside is still under threat.

‘We’re still protesting!, explained Pongsak Budhruk, the leader of the group whose organic coconuts are now processed into milk and exported to fair trade organisations in Europe (and possibly soon to New Zealand, too). ‘Now our local politicians are trying to build a steel mill here. We’ve got an alternative idea – we want to make this region a coconut-growing capital instead!’

I often think about buying a piece of land and becoming more self-sufficient, but everyone I met in the rice and coconut farmer groups I‘ve visited is already doing it and although they admit the pay isn’t good – as low as $5 per day for a family in some cases – and the weather is unreliable, I don’t get the sense that any of them would want to trade places with me. If this doesn’t inspire me to grow more of my own food, too, then whatever would?

The 10 cent coffee challenge

2010-10-27T20:14:00.000-07:00

For every coffee you drink at your favourite cafe, or from your plunger at home, the farmer who grew the coffee that went into your cup will have earned about 10 cents. For reasons I’ll explain below, I estimate that the farmer would need to be paid about twice that much to be making a sustainable living from growing your coffee.

With flat whites selling in cafes at $4.00 each and the cost of your plunger coffee at around 60 cents, it shouldn’t be too hard for me as a dedicated fair trader to ensure that the grower could earn 20 cents per cup, should it? However, in practice this is a very hard thing for me – or for anyone else - to achieve.

Firstly, to better understand the problem, let’s head back to the coffee farm. World coffee prices have fallen steadily over recent decades, and so too has the income of the millions of small-scale farmers who grow much of the world’s supply. Around 1990, following a particularly sharp fall in prices, prices earned by farmers became unsustainably low and have stayed too low ever since; by this I mean, that since that date it’s become much harder for coffee farmers to maintain a viable income – they generally can’t afford to replace aging trees, and therefore grow less coffee year by year – and as a result their children have become much less likely to take over the family farm. The full impact of shrinking prices has taken a long time to show through, but now we’re really starting to see the long-term impact of these low prices. The average age of coffee farmers in hallowed producer countries such as Colombia and Kenya is now over 50, and total production volumes in these countries are falling steadily. Where coffee is being grown in greater volume, in countries such as Vietnam, production is more mechanised and the quality of the coffee is correspondingly low – this is coffee destined for the instant coffee market and is not the kind of coffee we would want to see showing up in our cafes.

So if, as an importer buying directly from farmer co-operatives, I believe that farmers need to earn double what they receive today (prices they haven’t seen since prior to 1990), what’s to stop me paying them this price?

Our market is stopping me. While Trade Aid sells its own brand of coffee, we mostly have to retail this coffee through stores which have such high running costs (rent, staffing, and other overheads) that these stores are not profitable as things stand. Adding extra cost to the products we buy would only leave us losing more money through these outlets. Much of the rest sells into supermarkets where we face strong competition on price, and where shoppers have grown used to paying less than $7 for a packet of organic fair trade coffee. At any rate, 97% of the coffee I buy is then sold onwards as green (unroasted) coffee to other coffee roasters, and while these roasters are generally happy to pay a little extra for Trade Aid-sourced coffee, they won’t pay anything like close to double our current asking price.

But with so much apparent margin to play around with between that original 10 cents and the final retail price of either 60 cents or $4.00 for that cup of coffee you drink, can’t those of us in the coffee business do a better job of controlling the costs in between?

One of the challenges is the high quality demanded of the final product, which requires some or all of the following: expensive roasting equipment and a building to house it in, trained roasters, barista trainers, trained baristas, expensive espresso making equipment, milk (which, in a flat white, costs about as much as the coffee), shop rent, retail staffing, taxes and other sundry costs. Roasters and cafe owners assure me that they are making scant profit and that any surplus profits must lie elsewhere in the trading chain. There is some truth to this – they’re offering a handmade product at a commodity price.

There’s also the issue of pricing generally; even though some roasters, some cafe owners, some retailers and some retail customers would respectfully pay higher prices to their coffee suppliers if they believed that doing so would support fair prices for farmers, they would need to both (a) trust that any extra money they paid would be passed on to farmers and (b) be given the opportunity to do so in the first place, in a trading world where a product is usually marketed at one price only. By dint of a typical customer’s expectations (given that so many of us are out for a bargain), this one price becomes a lowest-common-denominator price for all of us.

All this leaves me thinking that if I’m to offer the higher prices to farmers that they need to maintain their farms, cover the basic living costs of their families, and motivate their children to become coffee farmers in the future, I’m going to have to do a better job of working with willing consumers here in New Zealand to address this pricing challenge.

For this to work, you would need to take me at my word that while the market requires us to sell our coffee at a standard base price, that you can pay us more for this product, knowing that farmers will receive all the crucial extra amount you pay in the form of a rebate which we would channel back to their co-operatives in its entirety.

For our part we would also need to develop a new sales channel with lower structural costs for you to support. My hunch is that such a channel might need to be an online store; we would eliminate the need to pay for a bricks and mortar location, you would buy more directly from us than you probably do at present, and the difference would go straight back to coffee producers in the form of a rebate. I figure we’d need to cover the tax component of your extra payments, assuming that you’d like to know that 100% of your extra payment would be passed on, and that this will be a critical factor in your decision to pay a higher price.

As for your flat whites, we could do the same; strive to find a lower-cost way to provide you with the cafe-style coffee experience you want, provide a rebate back to farmers as their share of the cost saved, and retail these coffees at a base price but which also allows you to pay an overprice that goes straight back to farmers.

I can’t think of a better alternative to this new model – can you? If so I’d love to hear your thoughts, which I will gladly share with fair traders all over the world who are grappling with this same challenge in their efforts to support sustainable coffee production for small-scale, artisan farmers, and to pay them the higher prices they need in a world where the monetary forces of the regular marketplace are stacked against them.

A co-op's community development plans crystallise around sugar

2010-08-14T22:20:00.000-07:00

Sugar farming families in the Arroyos y Esteros region of central Paraguay have to make some hard choices.

While growing sugar cane remains their best potential source of income, the prices they receive for their cane are typically very low. Prices are so low that their earnings leave them with very limited ability to pay for education opportunities for their children - the typical level of education kids receive in their region is very basic - or to cover the cost of treatment for any health problems their family might have. They can't afford to make many improvements around the farm, and they still carry out such major work as ploughing their fields using oxen. Most challengingly of all, in the months leading up to their next annual sugar payout their cash reserves are typically depleted. This means that for these families, purchasing nutritious foods to complement the food they can grow themselves can become impossible.

With little money available to spend, how do they choose between providing a child with a meal that will help them to stay more focused in class, or else buying them a new exercise book when their old one runs out of space? These are difficult choices for any family to have to make.

Market factors are also working against them, more and more. These days, the local sugar factory’s focus is on extending its own plantations and milling the sugar it grows itself. While the factory does also buy and mill other sugar grown locally by small-scale farmers it pays these outside farmers the lowest prices of any processor in the country, and doesn’t pay them for their cane until three or four months after they deliver it to the factory.

At least for the 800 families of sugar cane growers in this region who have come together to make up the Manduvira co-operative, some of their choices have become a little easier since they began working together and using their combined strength to begin exporting to fair trade organisations including Trade Aid.

'Since joining the co-op and selling my sugar to fair traders, my family has seen lots of benefits', explains Jose Rivas (pictured). 'I get better prices, I get paid on time now, and we have much better access to health facilities these days. We can visit the co-op's medical clinic here in town at lower cost and get test results back days sooner than we did when we had to drive into the city. I can use the co-op's own tractor to prepare my fields and this saves a lot of time and money. I've helped my oldest son, Jose, into college where he's studying to be an agronomist. None of this would have been possible without the support of the co-op's fair trade customers!'

But for Jose and the other farmers within Manduvira, many tough choices remain. By the time Jose's two other children will also be old enough to start in college, he hopes that the family finances will be stronger again, because the costs of tertiary education are challengingly high. At the same time, his production costs are increasing, and variable weather conditions can make or break his harvest in any given year. By selling his sugar to his co-op, he receives higher prices than he would by selling to his local factory. However, the processing costs Manduvira pay to have their sugar milled under contract are skyrocketing, and this is eating into his profit.

To counter this challenge, Jose and the rest of the farmers within Manduvira have recently taken on a significant risk; they are loaning the money they would normally receive as a dividend, and which helps them to pay for better food during their lean financial months, back to the co-op. These loans will help fund the construction of their own sugar refinery, as they seek to build on the improvements that fair trade has brought them so far. It's a huge investment both into their own community and into the fickle sugar industry, but it is a gamble which they have collectively decided is worth taking and one which they are taking on together with a spirit filled with hope and confidence.

Once the refinery is operational, Jose Rivas and his fellow co-op members will no longer have to pay another company to process their cane and by processing their cane themselves they will receive a greater share of the value of their sugar. With this additional income, they expect that more of their dreams for their families will come true, and that they won't have to take so many tough decisions relating to their family’s welfare in the future. They will also be able to provide a better service to other small-scale farmers in their region who are not members of the co-op, by milling their sugar at fairer rates than the existing processors are willing to offer them.

Trade Aid applauds Manduvira’s decision and will be doing all we can to share their story - and their delicious organic cane sugar - with New Zealanders who wish to support hard working, disadvantaged small-scale sugar farmers wishing to improve their lives through fairer trade.

A bitter sweet cocoa harvest - high prices, but small pods

2010-05-29T01:03:00.000-07:00

Leaving the coolness of our air conditioned cab, we stepped out into the hot and humid tropical air of early afternoon. Cocoa trees lined both sides of the track, their deep green leaves waving languidly in the light breeze. Stepping into the shade of the trees we crunched noisily across the thick carpet of dead leaves that blanketed the ground. Calling out to anyone who might be in earshot, we could see plenty of evidence of recent activity. Here and there richly coloured cocoa pods were heaped in small brilliantly-coloured piles; fully ripe, their hulls were various shades of red, gold, green, brown and mauve.

We soon found who we were looking for. Emilio, our guide, is a field worker for the CONACADO cocoa co-operative and he knows exactly which of their farmers are expected to be harvesting their cocoa at a given time on a given day. Nicolas Manzueta, a genial cocoa farmer bathed in sweat from his day’s work, called back and soon approached welcoming us into his plot.

Having grown up on a cocoa farm Nicolas is all too aware of the vagaries of cocoa production; although cocoa prices are relatively healthy right now, he remembers the years when prices hit rock-bottom and farmers couldn’t cover their costs. In difficult weather years – like this year – his production can drop significantly. Hurricanes wreak havoc from time to time – in 2004, Hurricane Jeanne caused significant damage to farms – and here in 2010, the Dominican Republic is facing its most prolonged drought in at least thirty years and cocoa pods are 30-40% smaller than usual this harvest.

Generally, however, these days Nicolas has reason to feel more confident in the future of cocoa farming. ‘The prices I receive are more stable now that I’m a member of the co-operative’, he notes. ‘I used to live with the rest of my family but with the security of better returns thanks to the fair trade market I’ve now been able to build my own house’.

His organisation, CONACADO, has done a remarkable job of supporting better returns for small-scale cocoa farmers since its creation in 1988. Evolving out of a German-funded development project, the organisation is steadily transforming the local cocoa industry. Starting with a strong focus on research, CONACADO developed new fermentation techniques tailored to particularly suit the beans that were growing in the Dominican Republic. This cocoa, once a low quality product, is now marketed as a high grade product and has forged a reputation as a high-quality bean on the world market. More and more farmers have been pulled into their production system and today they represent the cocoa of 10,000 farmers – one quarter of the national producer base.

In addition to the success the organisation has had in adding value to the cocoa, they have also used sales to the international fair trade market to fund an impressive number of community projects, from schoolroom construction to provision of medicines for local health clinics, to the joint construction (in partnership with local neighbourhoods) of hundreds of water tanks that offer clean and accessible water to local residents.

We leave Nicolas to complete his work. CONACADO’s efficient collection system ensures that he will need to have all his cocoa beans removed from their pods and packed into sacks in time for a 5:30 pick-up; the organisation maintains a highly organised harvesting schedule to make sure that they can handle the logistics of fermenting and drying of all the beans at their local processing centre in nearby Yamasa, and everyone has agreed which day their own cocoa must be collected. He picks up his machete and heads off to split open pods and to get his cocoa ready for the truck.

2010-05-07T19:28:00.000-07:00

Visit to El Ceibo, Bolivia, May 2010

La Paz – the city of the naked houses

I find myself wondering if it is a tax on finished buildings or just poverty that prevents Bolivians from cladding their brick dwellings… the mass of red brick buildings jammed into the valley of La Paz gives the appearance of a city of ancient ruins.

Travelling through the city past the commercial centre, looking very much like any other, one comes to South La Paz which resembles the desert landscape and vulgar wealth of Los Vegas where the same red brick buildings have fancy cladding and the red double decker tourist bus proudly claims the resurgence of the economy due to neo-liberal policies imposed on the country in the 80s. I wonder what the red bus says about the area I’m staying in next to the ‘marche negro’ and the witches market where Cholitas beg with babies on the broken cobbled streets.

La Paz, because of its resurging indigenous culture and perhaps because of its poverty, is a place full of character making the poverty easy to romanticise. I don’t have photos because the Cholitas have likely been scarred by too many tourists and appear to despise having their photo taken, but I will retain memories of the shiny cobbled streets that have nearly sent me flying several times in my grip-less shoes. Streets bordered by stalls selling alpaca fetuses and socks, jewellery and beautiful paintings.

If I spoke Spanish I would talk to the locals about life in Bolivia. I’m fascinated by Evo Morales who cut his income by 57% when he took the job as President in 2005. He’s an ex-coca farmer working for equality of the indigenous populations who make up the 60% of the population who haven’t necessarily benefited from Bolivia’s liberalisation policies. Competition from cheaper imports from surrounding countries (all wealthier than Bolivia), have taken their toll on the indigenous tribes who make up a large percentage of the rural farmers.

A large percentage of these farmers migrated from the highlands down to the Alto Plano in the 70’s drawn by promises by the government to provide incentives for migration to an area they saw as more fit for agricultural and economic development than the hostile highlands. It took until the 90’s for the government to fulfil its promises and despite some improvement the area is lacking some of the more essential services such as good roads, access to health care and secondary schools.

El Ceibo, the group I came to meet, formed in 1977 in a bid to provide an income that rivalled coca production and a livelihood that would prove better for the environment and for the social development of the indigenous populations. I think they’ve done a good job (an expert opinion gained from talking to 4 people for 2 hours!) and I liked the El Ceibo staff I met and their values. I’m disappointed to have not been able to visit any of the farmers during my stay to hear from them about their changed circumstances and opportunities. My stay coincided with strikes led by fruit farmers against the government who’d promised them a processing facility and roads were closed as a result. This meant I didn’t get into the area and two of the people I met with today had had to leave vehicles and luggage and walk out of town presumably to pick up transport further down the road rather than walking back to La Paz via the ‘World’s most dangerous road’ – A road I was looking forward to taking and in hindsight should have traded the ‘Las Vegas’ city bus tour for the mountain biking tour that sends you down the death road!

My meeting was with two El Ceibo members Ramiro Garcia the export manager and Bernardo Apaza the Gerente Comercial, and Chloe (chocolate extraordinaire) and Ignacio Trepp who works for a Foundacion called Nuevonorte. Ignacio is provided as a full time staff member to help El Ceibo in their operations - a result of wealthy business men from La Paz providing funding for various industries in and around La Paz with a view to the economic development of the area. This information made me feel a bit kinder towards the inhabitants of Vegas…

Chocolate prices appear to work in the same way as coffee prices and three to four years ago the cocoa price dropped to US1200 – 1500 per tonne. This is below the fair trade minimum of 1950 (included in this is 150 FLO premium and 200 organic payment) and at this time the fair trade price was invaluable for farmers. Recently however the price has been known to have risen to 4000 per tonne so the additional price of 350 on top of this doesn’t have the same impact. This for me indicates how invaluable fair trade practises are for farmers at the mercy of international commodity markets.

El Ceibo work within and outside of the fair trade system. The majority of their 49 cooperatives are FLO certified and 90% are organic certified. So when I asked if 100% of how they work is based on fair trade principles they replied in a slight rephrase of my question answering that they work to a true cooperative model. They gave the example of how El Ceibo members rotate roles through the cooperative – from a desk job in management at the central office in El Alto La Paz one year to tending the fields the following – and everyone from the cleaners and chocolate retail assistants are from the member base of 1300 families (49 cooperatives). Between 40 and 50% of profits are returned to members to be spent how the cooperatives see fit and El Ceibo spend a substantial amount more than the FLO premiums on community projects, the list of which are as long as a long man’s arm. El Ceibo are proud that they are able to help those outside of their coop members with services and are a little scathing that FLO premiums can only be spent on the Fairtrade farmers. Community benefits include additional payments to farmers for health care, emergency funds for unforeseen health problems, retirement funds for farmers once they turn 60 and agro forestry projects encouraging farmers to bio diversify providing the both seeds and technical assistance. These were the projects El Ceibo told me about today but I noticed that Alto Eco who also buy from El Ceibo have a much longer list of community projects on their website.

El Ceibo provide vital technical assistance too. Cocoa saplings for members are provided from a nursery they maintain at Sapecho where they determine the best quality and best suited varieties for the different regions. Over the last few years cooperative members have moved from cultivating two hectares of cocoa to five hectares, most still have more land than this but use it for other subsistence crops and one would presume coca. El Ceibo say they want to both increase the amount they buy from farmers as well as bring new farmers into the system but it sounds like most farmers still have the ability to put more of their land into cocoa for the time being and it doesn’t appear that the number of members has increased in the last few years.
Although most of their cooperatives are FLO certified they also buy from individual farmers scattered around Alto Beni who cannot logistically form any type of structure that FLO will certify. El Ceibo finds this hard to reconcile as they work on a principle of non-discrimination on the grounds of religion, culture and gender, through (obviously) to location and ability to form cooperatives. For certification reasons, El Ceibo keeps this produce separate once they have traveled out by motorbike to pick it up from these remote locations and I imagine it is used in their domestic chocolate production which in 2010 makes up more than 45% of sales, up from 25% in 2007.

Currently Trade Aid buys organic chocolate bars from Claro, a Swiss fair trade organisation who buy their raw materials from El Ceibo.

Beware of economic theorists

2010-04-11T20:48:00.000-07:00

I can just about forgive the major inaccuracy in this recent Sunday Star Times article:

Sunday Star Times Article "Chocolate - The Fair Factor" 04-04-2010

Trade Aid was selling fair trade chocolate in New Zealand a good decade before Scarborough Fair entered the market. Theirs was merely the first fair trade chocolate range aimed squarely at supermarket distribution. But even ours wasn't the first fair trade chocolate found on these shores - a lone rider from the Green and Black's range already bore fair trade certification by that stage.

More importantly and very disappointingly, the article's subsection entitled 'Fair or Flop?' regurgitated inaccurate comments from two of fair trade's most cynical opponents. I'm all for well-informed debate about the merits of various approaches to trade - but this isn't it. Economic theorists such as Tim Harford and Brink Lindsay (both quoted in the article) propose that if we go around paying third world producers enough money to adequately feed their families and put their kids through school, we're only encouraging them to overproduce and to thereby send commodity prices spiralling even lower.

But this isn't how trade works, it's just an oversimplified theory. Blowouts in commodity production occur for rather more complex reasons, such as European subsidisation creating wine lakes, or the IMF pressurizing economies to grow more cash crops in order to finance their debts. Depressingly, through periods of production booms and busts, commodity prices have tracked grindingly downhill for the past century. Clearly other forces are also at play.

For the many third world commodity producers I've met, fairer trading terms are unlikely to spur them into an overproductive cycle. They’re unable to access the capital that would allow them to diversify out of cocoa, coffee, sugar or whatever it is that they produce. They can’t afford the technological improvements that would boost their harvests, and because they’re also unable to rip up their crops for want of alternative cash income options, they're pretty much trapped. While fairer prices might encourage some to increase their production, many would also welcome the economic freedom that savings would allow them and which might help them to reduce their reliance on farming as their main source of income. And most of the next generation growing up on farms from Ethiopia through to Peru won't be able to acquire enough land to sustain an income from farming, anyway.

This is where fairer trade becomes so important to third world producers; they want to offer their kids a healthier and better educated life than they have had, whether they be involved in trade themselves or not. They want to lift themselves out of poverty, and to avoid difficult situations where bonded child labourers get caught up in production as they do in the cocoa fields of western Africa.

By all means let's have reasoned debate about whether or not these are goals we as New Zealand consumers wish to support through their purchases, and whether or not fair trade is the most effective way to support disadvantaged producers to achieve such goals. But at least let's focus on factors that actually influence market behaviour and move past the throwaway comment of agenda-driven theorists.

The challenge farmers face in today's climate

2010-04-07T19:29:00.000-07:00

In Uganda…

In late 2009 I visited coffee farmers in Bukalasi, a small village on the slopes of Mount Elgon in eastern Uganda. Last month, several days of continuous torrential rain triggered mudslides, killing hundreds of people in Bukalasi's nearby villages, and the town has become a camp for refugees who have had to leave their homes as a result of the flooding. With deforestation a major contributing factor in the massive landslides that have already collapsed from the waterlogged hillsides, and with more heavy rain forecast, the Ugandan government is talking of evacuating up to 500,000 people living on Mount Elgon to safer, more stable ground - perhaps shifting them permanently.

In Mexico…

When I was in Chiapas in southern Mexico in early 2009 I met with coffee farmers, all members of the ISMAM co-operative, in two separate villages. They had their own unhappy tale to tell - for the past four years, they have struggled to produce sufficient coffee to live off, due to erratic weather patterns which wreak havoc on their coffee production.

Alberto Velasquez, one of the coffee farmers I met explained to me 'The seasons aren't normal any more. We don't get so much sun in the summer, and not as much rain in the rainy season as we used to'. For Alberto and his neighbours, with their coffee harvest down by up to 90% in 2009, this was a major problem. 'We won't have enough money for food this year, and there will be nothing to pay for anything else'.

In Colombia…

Farmers are currently experiencing their third straight year of harsh weather - two years of heavy rain followed by drought conditions this year - which has hurt the national coffee harvest so badly that the country is currently importing coffee from Peru to satisfy its domestic demand.

In Palestine…

Palestine is coming through its worst drought in 30 years and, in a land where olives and olive oil contribute an important part of export earnings, the olive harvest was so small this year that Palestinians have had to import olive oil to meet their local requirements. We have had to pay a high price to our trading partner, PARC, for the little olive oil that we have bought in the hope that by selling it on at the same higher price we will keep our trade with the group alive.

In Paraguay…

Paraguay has suffered from severe droughts as well, and the last sugar harvest for the members of the Manduvira co-operative from whom we buy was down 60% on normal. Visiting sugar farmers there in May 2009, just prior to the harvest, I was shown crops of sugar cane which were less than half their normal size. For farmers who in a normal harvest year already pass through several difficult months prior to receiving payment for their annual sugar harvest with very little cash, on the back of such a tiny crop this year's 'tiempo muerto' (dead time)has been very hard for them.

In New Zealand…

From where we sit, there may not often be much we feel we can do to alleviate the problems farmers living below the poverty line in the developing world face when extreme weather threatens their livelihoods. However, surely the least we can do is to empathise with them and to understand their plight. For farmers who struggle to earn a living wage in average climatic conditions, any change in their local weather patterns - of the kind we're seeing a lot of right now - always makes life tough.

The Great Barrier Reef and how we’re killing it

2010-03-17T20:48:00.000-07:00

When Trade Aid was first thinking of importing fair trade organic sugar which is produced in Paraguay, a land-locked country in South America, I had to ask myself the question: does it really make sense for us to be shipping sugar so far, when much of the sugar we consume in New Zealand is grown far closer to home, in Queensland? Food miles and all that? And as Australian sugar farmers are relatively well-paid, and Australia actively campaigns for the removal of the unfair sugar tariffs imposed by many Western countries, is this one example of a situation where importing a fair trade product just didn’t make enough sense to us; would prioritising support for local production be the better way to go, all things considered?

Sure, we knew of small-scale sugar farmers working for very low return throughout the developing world and yes, we knew that many of these farmers are committed to sustainable organic production, but it took a little research into the environmental impact of Queensland sugar production to emphatically convince me that we were doing the right thing.

An internet search quickly showed up some widely differing views on the environmental fall-out from the chemical usage employed in the sugar fields of Queensland.

On one side, the WWF claim that a cocktail of chemicals used in sugar production (including atrazine, banned in the EU due to safety concerns) are washing into waterways and are damaging river and ocean-based wildlife as far away as the Great Barrier Reef and that the production of sugarcane has probably caused a greater loss of biodiversity on the planet that any other single crop.

Australian cane growers, on the other hand, paint themselves as responsible environmental stewards who are doing a good job of balancing their need to remain profitable while also meeting their obligations around sustainable farming practices.

Scientific research is clear on the subject: sugar cane production and the materials which leak from it such as atrazine and diuron have caused damage to the Great Barrier Reef. This fact is well substantiated from a large number of scientific studies.

Debates rage as to whether the run-off of the cocktail of toxic chemicals used in sugar production is destroying the Great Barrier Reef and much of the other marine life off the Queensland coast or, as the industry's most ardent defenders would have, there is no cause for concern at run-off damage at all and that the extensive damage to the reef is caused by climate change or something else entirely.

The science suggests to me that by buying Australian-produced sugars we're participants in the creation of a serious environmental problem; that all things considered, if we want to do the best thing by people and planet were far better off supporting small-scale organic producers living in Paraguay.

Clouds Gather on Kilimanjaro

2009-12-01T17:16:00.000-08:00

Sitting in the top-floor restaurant at the KNCU coffee co-operative’s headquarters in downtown Moshi, drinking Serengeti beers from the Banana Grove Bar, our coffee travellers enjoyed the late afternoon sun following a day of meetings and of heavy intermittent rain. We were looking out the large windows that face northwards; after four days in the area, and with our time in Moshi drawing to a close, we still sought a clear view of the monolithic peak that dominates the region and, in a broader sense, our image of Tanzania – mighty Kilimanjaro.

In the wake of the rain showers the mountain had largely reappeared, but thick cloud continued to cloak its upper reaches and hid most of its higher slopes entirely. Unless we would strike it lucky on our last day, our clearest view of the mountain by the time we left would have offered us an image of its patchily-glaciated summit slopes, but not the full view that we had hoped for. Visiting the coffee co-operative that supports farmers living on Kilimanjaro’s lowest slopes, I’ve been left with much the same sensation. We’re here to learn if, and how best, we can work to support sustainable production for coffee farmers in a country notorious for the uneconomic size of its modern-day coffee farms. Due to the continual subdivision of farms as land is passed down from farmer to numerous children, plots here are becoming minute – an acre is a common size.

On this mountain, farms that produce 500kg of coffee are considered to be large, even though this is a tiny amount in comparison to that grown by small-scale farmers in most other parts of the world. But although we are paying relatively high prices for organic coffee produced by members of the KNCU fair trade co-operative, if I ask myself whether or not this can form the basis of a sustainable long term trade, the answer is not yet entirely clear.

The fortunes of the co-operative have in recent decades mirrored, to a large degree, those of Kilimanjaro’s famous glaciers. As the snows have receded, water sources further down the mountain have dried up significantly; where once 50-60 springs fed rivers and streams, today there are only around 20. Where once KNCU, a long-established co-op, dominated local trade and exported many thousands of tonnes of coffee, today that figure has dwindled considerably. The offices of the co-operative appear cavernous and empty as staff numbers have fallen by 90% in recent times, and the local processing mill owned by the co-op is largely a shell; the sacks of coffee awaiting hulling inside it occupy a tiny corner of the massive warehouse space available.

The average age of farmers here is increasing – it’s around 50 – and coffee trees are aging too; many of the trees are also at least 50 years old and their production is in steady decline.
At the same time, we know that there are a number of passionate younger farmers here who wish to continue growing coffee, and they know what it takes to produce high quality beans. We also know that organic production here could grow substantially, that there is a good market for Tanzanian organic coffee, and that a significant number of farmers can reasonably expect to get better returns by converting to organic production. Also, many farmers here are aware of the substantial health cost that has been paid through the use of toxic chemical insecticides and fungicides, and they don’t wish to repeat the mistakes of the past where spraying left them feeling physically sick, killed some of their relatives and caused their cows to miscarry.

The challenge for us largely lies ahead; can we support a trade in coffee that will help to preserve the industry in this country or, like the glaciers that still glisten thousands of meters above us, will it continue to dwindle until, sooner or later, it eventually disappears? Already farmers here have largely diversified out of coffee production; they enjoy the reliability of the income that their coffee harvest can provide, but with only 60-70kg of coffee produced per farm they need to earn additional money from other crops, from the sale of reared livestock, and from other paid employment. If Kilimanjaro is to retain its reputation as an important coffee producing region, farmers will need strong incentives to plant new trees on its broad, shaded slopes.

There is evidence that, with KNCU selling coffee under fair trade terms in recent years, higher stable prices from fair trade buyers is helping to motivate farmers to do this – and we hope that the trend can continue.

Travels in India and Nepal...

2009-11-25T12:58:00.000-08:00

A travelogue from Trade Aid's Product Developer Hannah (pictured right) on her travels to India and Nepal, showing our new buyer Amie the ropes....

"Thought I would give you all an update on the travels of Amie and myself..I apologise in advance it will not be as eloquent or coherent as Justin's fantastic travelogues...my mind is scrambled and very tired.

Amie (Trade Aid's buyer) and I are on a product development and buying trip in India and Nepal and I thought I would just share some of the funny moments...

no.1 - Stuck in a traffic jam and a boy bikes up to our window and delivers to Amie in the most serious of tones..."Hello, I love you".

no. 2 - An epic day trip to the Taj Mahal, and being asked by at least 30 people for their photograph with us. Undoubtedly countless family portraits with two awkward looking new zealand girls in it all around north India now.

no. 3 - completely misjudged the weather in Nepal...turns out it is freezing and I convinced Amie she would only need sandals and one cardigan..whoops! Needless to say we have now bought a pashmina each..

Things here are going well, we saw Aspiration last Tuesday, Tara project the next day and then visited some jewellery producers a couple of hours out of Delhi with Tara. We have seen lots of cool new products, and done quite a bit of new product development work.

We are now in Kathmandu, and having a great time here. We spent the last two days with ACP and are visiting for the next two days with Mahaguthi. Have seen heaps of great new products, and done lots of design work with all the groups we have visited. The visits with all the partners in Delhi also went well, Delhi as always is an intense city, so it is nice to be in Kathmandu where we blend in with all the other masses of tourists! All of the partners are facing decreased sales, so it is hard times all around, and every producer group we have visited have questioned us about when the next order is, not always an easy reply....

Hannah"

Promise and potential on Mount Elgon

2009-11-22T13:13:00.000-08:00

Four hours drive east of the Ugandan capital of Kampala, past the northern shores of the vast Lake Victoria and across the Nile river, the old British colonial outpost town of Mbale has been our base for the past four days.

To the east of town loom the flanks of the broad Mount Elgon massif, which straddles the borders of Uganda and Kenya. The mountain has been the focus of our visit, as it’s home to the thousands of tiny landholders who between then produce the coffee that Trade Aid has recently begun buying through the Gumutindo co-operative.

Getting out to the mountain from Mbale each day we’ve gotten a small taste of the make-up of the local agricultural economy as much of the produce is transported, uncovered, along the red ochre dirt roads that we’ve been driving along. A frequent and distinctive sight are men riding ancient bicycles – the main mode of transport in these parts – which are loaded with up to five towering bunches of bananas at a time. Sugar canes are a popular local snack and are sold, in eight foot lengths, all along the roadsides here. In many small towns, we see molasses being produced in battered old drums. It’s a key ingredient in the popular local firewater, which is affectionately known as ‘kill me quick’.

Motorcycles –along with bicycles - are the main passenger transport in this area, and up to four adults will all squeeze together onto one machine.

Like so much of this part of the world, this area has a violent recent history. Speaking with Mount Elgon coffee farmers, we’ve heard a number of harrowing personal accounts of the dark days they lived through during the most brutal years of Idi Amin’s regime in the late 1970’s. During that time, food became very scarce and coffee ceased to be traded locally.

One farmer told us how, as a schoolteacher who also grew coffee, he used his schoolchildren to help him smuggle coffee over the hillsides and into Kenya. The trip was arduous – 12 hours each way, in the dark, with 30kg loads on their heads – and dangerous, with government troops active on the mountain. But they had little option; without income from coffee they would have had no bread to eat. Even salt – that cheapest of commodities – was so hard to come by that his father took to carrying his supply around with him in his coat pocket.

Willington Wamayeye, who is now the inspirational manager of Gumutindo, told us how as a teenager at the time he had taken his father’s bicycle and ridden off in desperate search of food for his family. Eventually, he found work harvesting cassava. As payment for his labour he received 100kg of cassava which he had to wheel, by bike, the 50km back to his hungry (and no doubt very worried) parents.

Although Amin is now long gone, the coffee economy has continued to rise and fall and it collapsed badly in the 1990’s. Along the way, the militarily-installed government of Uganda has been no provider for the people; very little government support makes it way out to the provinces. Many classrooms lack roofs, and so when it starts to rain (as it frequently does) children have to be sent home. With local temperatures getting warmer in recent years, virulent malarial mosquitoes have migrated into the region and many children now die for lack of effective treatment.

If people are going to get ahead out here, they will have to do things for themselves. But for an average farmer here, who has a tiny holding of only 250 coffee trees (many of which are old and neglected – a legacy of the turbulent past when markets came and went) and less than half a hectare of land, what are the chances? This is where the Gumutindo co-op, under Willington’s devoted leadership, has stepped in; thousands of farmers are working together to find better prices for their coffee from fair trade buyers. They’re working hard to improve the quality and the quantity of coffee they produce, and they’re making a great fist of this. The quality is already remarkable – some of the best I’ve ever seen – thanks to an excellent training program and hard work by a small number of highly motivated farmers who in turn are motivating others. Many of them are now planting more coffee, a sure sign that they have a fresh confidence in the future of their industry.

I have great hopes that if buyers like us can increase our purchases of Gumutindo’s coffee at fairer prices, that all sorts of things will be possible for these farmers and their families. They’re already roofing the open air classrooms here, are putting in wells to cut down travel times for water collection, they’ve built a health centre and have repaired roading and bridges. They dream of supporting more of their children into higher education in the future, and to continue to expand their production and their incomes as they set about rebuilding their economy with or without government assistance.

I share these dreams with them.

Justin Purser, Trade Aid food buyer

Around Ethiopia in seven days...

2009-11-16T15:38:00.000-08:00

An email from Justin Purser, Trade Aid's food buyer.

Around Ethiopia in seven days...

I’m back in Addis Ababa after an epic week visiting coffee farmers here in Ethiopia, travelling with three hardy Kiwi coffee roasters. With no domestic air travel options, and with the various coffee growing regions here being spread so far apart, we’ve spent a long time on the road and have driven for more than 50 hours in the past seven days.

Travelling at ground level has its advantages; we’ve seen thousands of kilometres of scenes from everyday Ethiopian life and have viewed countless images of goats and sheep being herded, dense crops of tef (a local grain) and sorghum waving in the breeze, and thousands of women and children carrying water home from a distant well (with or without the help of donkeys). We’ve seen street vendors selling a bewildering array of goods, mostly locally-produced products like broad beans and chat, firewood and charcoal. We’ve passed white flamingos feeding in shining Rift Valley lakes, and have driven past herds of dromedary camels grazing by the roadside under the watchful eyes of their AK47-toting nomadic masters. Yesterday we visited the ancient walled city of Harrar and walked through its intriguing and beautiful twisting alleyways.

We’ve also met with seven different coffee co-operatives who are all part of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union, the producer partner from whom Trade Aid buys more product than any other. It’s been a big week.

I’ve been covering a lot of familiar ground; in late 2005 I met with farmers in the regions of Yirgacheffe and Harrar and heard from them how much benefit they were getting then from selling coffee to fair trade buyers, and now four years later I’ve been to catch up with their co-ops and also with some of their neighbouring co-ops who also now sell coffee to fair traders like us.

These people blow me away. Trapped for so long receiving a pittance for their cash crops, and living in areas so remote that even by Ethiopian standards they receive few government-provided social services, they have grasped the opportunity higher coffee prices has provided them with both hands.

A serious and pressing problem in rural Ethiopia is the lack of access to education, in an age where farms are becoming so small when passed from generation to generation that they no longer provide a viable income to families. But with the support of Trade Aid and other like-minded traders, the groups we visited here have received community funding which they have used to build dozens of new classrooms which together provide schooling for many thousands of extra students (the Ethiopian government had agreed to a deal where they provide teachers for every new privately-funded classroom). At the same time, the number of students per class is being actively reduced, to improve the quality of lessons; it’s not uncommon to see 150 kids or more crammed into a single room here, and the dream is to one day reduce the average pupil to teacher ratio down to 70.

These students have big dreams; they typically wish to help their community by becoming teachers, nurses, or doctors. Not all the students are so young; we visited a newly-built grade 7 class and found the age range was from 12 to 28. One of the 28 year-olds, who is hoping to become a doctor, has a son studying at grade 5 level in another classroom at the same school. Until this year, the father had not had a chance to continue studying towards his dream job.

Even from my visit just four years ago, the change I have seen has been staggering. Where a co-op then boasted several new classrooms that they had built, now they can also show me additional classrooms which are educating people up to higher grade levels, whole other new schools that they have constructed, new wells they have bored, and additional coffee processing facilities that they have funded.
Coffee prices for farmers have more than doubled in some regions from four years ago, partly thanks to Oromia fair trade co-operatives pushing up payments of farmers who are turning in coffee to them in their area which is driving higher prices received by other farmers from local traders as well.

But while fair trade coffee farmers here are themselves a little staggered by the improvements they have seen, I can see that there is so much more work that they must do just to provide even basic opportunities for their families; kids will need schooling opportunities all the way through to tertiary level if they are to become fully trained for their dream professions, children are still dying from easily treatable water-borne diseases, many of the rural roads are in badly rutted condition and will need to be better surfaced if these farmers ever hope to move beyond donkeys as transport for their many tonnes of coffee.

As one mother put it yesterday when I asked what she would do with extra income if coffee prices were higher still, she replied: ‘I’d feed my children better. Now I can only offer them basic vegetables like maize and sorghum, and they often only get to eat twice a day. I’d like to at least feed them some of the eggs that our chickens produce but that we currently have to sell at market to supplement our income’.

A Tale of Two Villages

2009-11-09T16:51:00.000-08:00

15 Oct 2009

On the steep and rugged hillsides surrounding the neighbouring villages of Yagavila and Teotlasco in southern Mexico, farmers are growing coffee. Low prices have forced many families off the land, but many stay on producing coffee as their main cash crop, growing it alongside corn and other crops on their small family plots. There is nothing at all unusual about the setting; a typical coffee farm in this area is right on the national average size (2.5 hectares per family). Some of the families in the district have joined fair trade coffee producer co-operatives in a bid to improve their incomes and their lives, and many have not.

In their very ordinariness, the people of Yagavila and Teotlasco have become the central characters in the most comprehensive study into the impact of fair trade I've yet seen.

In a comprehensive four-year research project which has recently been concluded, American researcher Daniel Jaffee compared the financial, social and environmental situations of families in these two towns who have chosen to either join, or to remain outside of, co-operatives which sell coffee to the international fair trade market. The results of his research have been written up into Brewing Justice, an important resource book for anyone wishing to better understand the complexities of coffee production and of international trade.

Farmers in the area have two ways to sell their coffee; either they sell it to their co-operative (which in turn sells as much of it as it can into the certified fair trade market) or else they sell it to a local coyote, or street trader. Jaffees research blows away any simplistic comparison of cash-in-the-hand prices received by farmers through these two different channels by asking much deeper questions. Does it cost farmers more to produce fair trade coffee, and if so is this additional cost adequately offset by higher prices? Does selling coffee to fair traders help keep farmers on the land? Do fair trade farmers do a better job of protecting their environment than their non-fair trade neighbours?

Studying 50 families half of which are members of fair trade co-operatives, half of which are not Jaffee has reached a number of conclusions which reinforce the benefit of fair trade but also challenge fair trade to deliver more significant improvements to the farmers the system is designed to support. He found, for example, that all the farmers lost money during the study period the fair trade farmers were better off, but they made a loss all the same.

One example of the complexity of the situation: fair trade farmers are usually also organic certified, and in order to satisfy their organic requirements, they have to do a lot more work around their plots than do non-certified farmers; building walls that help to retain soil, weeding their plots, etc. Much of this work requires the help of paid labourers, and fair trade farmers pay triple the amount that those outside of fair trade do for this extra help. Fair trade farmers still receive a higher net income, despite these higher costs.

But nearly half of the non-fair trade farmers gained more income from a source other than their coffee; they got paid more for working as hired labourers on other peoples farms (presumably, largely from working on the farms of their fair trade neighbours). The net result? More money is flowing back into these communities through fair trade, but once within those communities it moves around more than many of us had appreciated. It helps to provide more local employment, even for farmers with no direct personal connection to fair trade.

Talking about the weather in Mexico

2009-11-09T16:49:00.000-08:00

8 Jan 2009

It´s a day off for me here in Jacaltenango, Guatemala; it´s Sunday which is market day, which is colourful for sure, but there's not much else going down. I´m happy for the change of pace and for having nothing in particular to do, having been moving almost continuously for the past week. Six days ago I flew with Rene, an enthusiastic fair trade coffee roaster from Wellington, into Mexico, and since then we´ve been very much on the go visiting different groups who work within a coffee co-operative named ISMAM in Chiapas, southern Mexico. Work days visiting coffee farmers out in their villages have involved six to eight hours driving per day on top of time spent with the farmers, and even yesterday when we were simply transferring the 150km or so across the border from Mexico to here it still took us eight hours. So no travel today is OK by me.

I often have to remind people who think that my Trade Aid work-related international travel is romantic and fun that this is not always the case! The groups of coffee farmers we met with this week are the most desperate that I have ever seen; just about everyone in Chiapas seems to have grim stories relating to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Stan which passed through in 2005, and farmers certainly have their share. Coffee farmers lost trees, equipment, houses and in some cases even their lives. With no government assistance, no home and contents insurance, and no life insurance to be had a hurricane here is a disastrous set-back for a farming family. I do find it hard to listen on as men and women recount the tale of their houses being washed away before politely asking me if they might perhaps be paid a little more for their coffee.

Even in the big city, things were bad after the hurricane. In Tapachula, where the co-op we were visiting is based, bridges were out for weeks, roads took up to a year to get repaired, and the train simply doesn´t run anymore. Laura, our translator, recounted a story of watching on as a woman and the two sons she was carrying across a bridge-less river were all swept away by the current.

One of the groups we visited also had fresh bad news to share; high winds and unusual rain patterns this past year have destroyed almost all of their coffee crop. Farmers who usually harvest around 100 sacks of coffee this year might have picked eight, or nine sacks. They would normally still be picking coffee well into February but this year their harvest is already over. What does this mean for them? They're not going to starve to death, but times will be very hard for them. They freely spoke of the upcoming misery and suffering that they expect to face, with very little to eat, no money for anything beyond essential food items, and certainly no spare cash to reinvest into their farms to help ensure a more healthy crop next year or to put more kids through school. Hearing their stories, it's easy for me to understand why so many hundreds of thousands of farmers have abandoned their crops down here in recent years. The farmers we met cannot afford a repeat of this year's harvest again next year.. so their hopes are high for better rain this year. It must be said, their options for alternative income are extremely limited.

I always hope, on these trips I make, that I might hear reassuring stories telling me that by being organised together into co-operatives, that farmers are enjoying some benefits of a better trading system. But fair trade or no fair trade, life is still marginal for many producers around the planet when bad weather strikes.

Credit crunch? So what's new?

2009-11-09T16:48:00.000-08:00

15 Jan 2009
As much as financially over-extended westerners might be worrying about the thought of tougher economic times ahead, with borrowing becoming more difficult (and many of us aren't even too concerned about this prospect yet), my days chatting with coffee farmers here in Guatemala are providing me with a timely reminder of what a more permanent lack of access to credit looks like.

At Trade Aid, we've long realised just how critical (lack of) access to finance is to very small-scale producers. With loans either unavailable or else exorbitantly expensive to most of the people who produce the things we buy, our willingness to offer advance payments is acutely appreciated by the groups we trade with.

Here in Central America, coffee farmers appear to be experiencing their worst growing season in decades. The 'tiempo loco' (crazy weather) has blown coffee off many trees, while in more sheltered areas lack of regular sunshine has allowed the spread of a coffee leaf spot disease known locally as 'ojo de gallo' ('rooster eye') that has reduced the harvest by around one third, and in other places the sheer variability of sun and rain has wrought havoc with the flowering and fruiting of coffee trees and thus hampered the crop considerably.

Farmers at Guaya'b, whom we buy from, are feeling the pinch. Frustratingly for them, they also know that the lower incomes they are are going get this year for their coffee will inhibit their ability to recover in the future. They won't have the capital required to make improvements in time for next year's harvest and nor can they expect to tackle the much more expensive job of replacing their aging or diseased trees. Many of the coffee trees in this part of the world are now 30 or 40 years old, and are well past their best producing years. But the short term cost of replacing these trees is considerable. Farmers could chop them down and replace them entirely (which would better in the long term, but is quite costly in the short term due to the amount of fertiliser a young seedling requires, on top of the loss of production for the three years that a replacement tree would need before it would bear fruit.) Or, they can cut back existing trees and wait for them to produce coffee from new growth (they'd still lose three years of production, but would have fewer short-term costs. On the other hand, the tree would already be old and less rigorous than a new plant in the longer term).

So, what to do? We've spent a lot of time discussing this. For now, farmers are resigned to an ongoing loss of production in an average year. Maybe at Trade Aid we can help provide more funding for tree replacement, a job we started this year with the co-op but on a small scale, and which we know would require an awful lot more money to do properly. The farmers we spoke with were quite happy to receive a soft loan for this task, for repayment over 5-10 years, but for most they know that this is a pipe dream. In practice most will shoulder on in the knowledge that their trees are dying, and that they have few viable options for other income at their stage in life.

Journey to the heart of the universe

2009-11-04T17:34:00.000-08:00

A message from Justin Purser, Trade Aid's food buyer

Greetings from Buenos Aires! I’m transiting here for a few hours before completing the last leg of a work trip that has so far taken me to meet with reps from eight of the groups Trade Aid buys coffee from at a coffee conference in Atlanta, to Colombia to meet with farmers at two coffee co-operatives there. This afternoon I’ll be flying to Paraguay to meet with a sugar co-operative before heading home early next week. I’ll trust that however the swine flu epidemic plays out that I WILL be home early next week...

My first coffee visit in Colombia took me to the Santander region in the centre of the country, where I was warmly greeted by the APCO co-operative, a new trading partner for Trade Aid this year. As I so often find, groups are stoked when a buyer visits because it just doesn’t happen very often. The group was hungry for information about what happens to their coffee in New Zealand and about the coffee market in general. One sad reality about fair trade in Colombia is that all co-ops like APCO have to export their coffee through a licensed exporter and most buyers deal only with the exporter and never connect with the farmers.

Even so, the group has achieved an incredible amount for themselves in the past 15 years, grasping the opportunity that fairer trade deals have offered them to bring all sorts of improvements to their community. Passing from farm to farm I was shown a long list of enhancements; most had bought cows to supplement their income, all the farmers I met had bought chickens enough to keep themselves in eggs and meat, there were fish ponds, new coffee processing equipment, improvements to their houses such as chimneys (which save the women from excessive smoke inhalation) and tiles for their floors. There was also a school built within the local community with help from APCO funding to provide post-primary school opportunities. The group was very proud of their achievements – more of which, I believe, have stemmed so far from the confidence and motivation that group involvement has brought them than from the trade of their coffee itself.

My next trip took me into the heart of Arhuaco country; the Arhuacos are an indigenous Colombian people living in the Sierra Nevada mountains of northern Colombia. Like many native cultures, the Arhuaco have suffered greatly following contact with the outside world (mostly coming in the form of resident Capuchin missionaries). Alcoholism is rife in many of their communities and their culture has been eroded. But in one corner of their population, an amazing transformation is taking place. One of their number, a remarkable woman named Aurora Izquierdo, has inspired a complete turnaround in the fortunes of her local community through their involvement in the ANEI coffee co-operative. A trained agronomist, Aurora (pictured left with me) also has a powerful ability to lead and inspire others, and has used these skills to establish and grow a co-operative which is transforming many lives.

I visited Aurora’s own home town, Jeurwa, which was wracked by violence and alcoholism well into the 1990’s, and heard how ANEI has convinced many of the locals to turn things around. ANEI has been instrumental in supporting more local food production for the whole community, which is improving local health and also reducing the number of children starving to death (although I’m told this still happens). The organisation has improved relations between the various local indigenous groups and their neighbouring Spanish-descended coffee farmers by including them all into one harmonious group. Alcohol is strongly discouraged and I saw no sign of ongoing drinking problems. ANEI has also done much to support the revival of cultural traditions among their indigenous members. I was left hugely proud to think that Trade Aid will soon be marketing their coffee and sharing their stories with New Zealanders.

The Arhuaco have an exceptionally strong connection with the earth, and I was able to get a small sense of this in conversation with one of the group’s mamos (spiritual leaders). He stressed that his people have always honoured their environment and that those of us who live outside the Arhuaco world – the ‘younger brothers’ – would do well to learn from their example, given that ‘the water is getting hotter’. In fact, the Arhuaco consider themselves the guardians of the universe and believe that their capital, Nabusimake, is centred at the heart of the universe. No visit to this corner of the world would be complete without a trip up to their capital – the original town contains around a hundred houses with stone walls and thatched roofs, and is quite possibly the most well-preserved living town I’ve ever seen.

As ever, I’ve found my visits into the world of some of our trading partners very humbling. Especially on this trip I’ve been left in awe at their ability to take greater control of their own destinies. Particularly in the case of ANEI, this has been in the face of seemingly extraordinary odds. But whenever Aurora feels down about how something is going, she takes comfort in the words of her mamo advisers. They assure her she has planted a ‘good seed’ – one that will grow into a strong and healthy plant in the fullness of time.