Southampton Fair Trade Group

La Pita Faitrade coffee cooperative, Nicaragua:
working in the plant nursery

Some years ago I visited Nicaragua on a Fairtrade study tour. Part of our time was spent living with families on a coffee co-operative. It was a wonderful experience, from which I gained firm friends and a better understanding of fair trade.

The co-operative sold half of its product to Fairtrade (it would happily have sold all of it, if the Fairtrade market had been large enough to buy it). I learnt, firstly, that although Fairtrade can’t solve all problems, it is important in giving a decent reward for producers’ extremely hard work. Secondly, it really does help strengthen communities. It does much more than just making people’s lives a bit better by giving a slightly better price: properly implemented, it helps people to gain power over their own lives.

Main street of La Pita village

A fair trade community is one which practises democracy, and in which there is investment in training so that people can develop themselves and their local economy. Nicaragua has great economic problems and has suffered civil war and natural disasters. However, in "our" group of co-operatives, young people were not drifting away looking for employment in the city or abroad: they were learning skills and helping to develop the co-operatives. Co-operatives elsewhere in Nicaragua produce sesame seed for the Body Shop, which has enabled them to develop community clinics and schools. Fair trade is not a substitute for a fairer world trade system, but it is a part of the jigsaw.

View from La Pita Fairtrade
coffee cooperative, Nicaragua

I went to see "my" family again last year. They are now developing an eco-tourism project in order to strengthen and diversify the economy of the co-operatives. As part of this, the women were making paper from plant products and were making cards and bags.

On a personal level, study tours like these help to realise the Fairtrade aim of a closer relationship between producer and consumer. It is a wonderful experience, buying a bag of coffee, to think: "I know the people who grew this, or people very like them. I understand a little bit about their lives."

If you would like to share this experience, the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign is running another study tour in the summer of 2008, combining fair trade and ecotourism. For information go to: www.nicaraguasc.org.uk

Case Study: Chocolate that’s good for you ... and others too!

Hannah Stacey

Ever caught yourself saying you "couldn’t live without chocolate"? Well, in some countries chocolate really can be that important. The price paid to people for their cocoa and the conditions in which they produce it, affects their quality of life. In other words, their lives depend on it.

So what exactly do people deal with on a day to day basis?

• Global Exchange tell us that "farmers get barely 5 percent of the profit from chocolate", however companies get "70 percent ...14 times more!".
• world cocoa prices fluctuate and often what farmers are paid for their cocoa is well below the amount it costs them to produce it.
• farmers rely on others to sell their cocoa and so are open to being exploited.
• a need to keep production costs down often leads to the use of cheap child labour.
• children use machetes or apply chemicals to crops without protective equipment.
• children stop attending school because their parents need them to work on family farms in order to survive. Without education, the cycle of poverty continues.
• children from neighbouring countries are sold by their parents to traffickers in the hope that they’ll be found work on cocoa farms and send money home. In reality, once separated from their parents, children may be made to work for more than 12 hours a day and are paid little or nothing for this. In a 2002 International Institute of Tropical Agriculture study, 4,500 cocoa producers had 284,000 child workers.12,500 had no relatives in the area, pointing to trafficking.

Public outcry led to a voluntary, industry-wide ‘Cocoa Protocol’ in 2001. This aimed to eliminate the worst forms of child and forced labour from West African cocoa farms. However www.laborrights.org report that the child labour situation was virtually unchanged at the deadline of July 2005. An extended deadline of July 2008 was agreed, but as the protocol doesn’t guarantee fair and stable prices for cocoa, the risk is that abusive child labour will continue.

What’s the alternative? By looking out for the FAIRTRADE mark when you shop, you can take a stand against this situation.

Fairtrade is an international monitoring and certification system. The FAIRTRADE Mark guarantees that farmers get a fair and stable price for their products, a price which covers the cost of sustainable production. Because they know they will receive this price they can plan for the future and also do not need to resort to abusive child labour. In any case, producers who are ‘Fairtrade certified’ will be regularly inspected, guarding against this. Farmers usually work in cooperatives and they earn a social premium, which they reinvest in the community, thus improving their lives. The farmers are given access to markets and develop knowledge about them – they develop a stronger position and so are less open to exploitation. The mark also guarantees a greater respect for the environment (farmers are given targets to work towards and certain chemicals are banned). To learn more visit www.fairtrade.org.uk.

How you can make a difference As the people who buy the chocolate (or come to that the fruit, wine, cotton, rice ...) we have a huge part to play. If each time you shop you choose Fairtrade, you send a powerful message. Others gradually change to Fairtrade as they follow your example and companies change their policies in response to growing consumer demand for transparency. This process is more positive than, for instance, if the government were to ban all non-Fairtrade chocolate from the shops tomorrow - it’s arguable that sudden boycotts are not the answer to human rights violations. They might well further hurt the people whose rights are being violated by putting them out of work completely. A gradual but lasting and complete culture change is what’s needed. By switching to Fairtrade you can help to make this a reality.

At the end of the day we also need governments to act – it is they who can ultimately change the trade laws to provide a framework which will ensure economic justice. By buying Fairtrade we send a message to our government that this issue matters to their electorate.

So, now that you’ve finished reading, get out there and - making sure you look for the FAIRTRADE Mark - get buying chocolate!! Then simply sit back, unwrap and enjoy. You can be sure there’ll be no bitter aftertaste to this bar.