In January of this year, The New York Times ranked Sri Lanka as its #1 “Place to Go in 2010”, and rightfully so, as Sri Lanka is arguably one of the most naturally beautiful corners of our planet. The tear-dropped shaped island has recently been portrayed as a “corner”, having been marred by years of internal conflict between the Sinhalese and the Tamils. The past year has witnessed domestic peace, which hopefully will continue for ages to come.
But peace in a third-world country is tenuous, as most of the citizens live on means that most Westerners will never be fully capable of understanding. However, as Amartya Sen famously penned in the first sentence of his Nobel Prize winning work “Development As Freedom”, “development can be seen as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy.” And freedom and peace go hand in hand.
For most countries, the starting point for economic development is by and through its earth-given natural resources. In many African countries, like Ghana, these are fossil fuels. In many South American countries, like Brazil, these are soils where tropical crops like sugar cane are grown. In Sri Lanka, due to its unique combination of location-altitude-temperature-rainfall, it is tea production. Tea here is known as Ceylon tea, taking the former name of the country.
For the past century, Ceylon tea has been regarded around the world as the global standard for quality. I can attest. In 2004, I made my first of many visits to the island and to the world’s first organic tea estate–Indulgashinna,. I have been working with the tea growers at Idulgashinna ever since to help promote peace and sustainable economic development by promoting the ethical trade of the country’s high quality tea globally.
My company, Partner’s Tea Company, sources our Fair Trade and Organic Pure Ceylon Green Tea from this estate. We give one percent of our total annual revenue back to the community of tea growers at Idulgashinna through their non profit association– Idulgashinna Bio Tea Association for Development (IBITAD), as our mission is to “empower women through education and opportunity with 1% of every purchase”.
When I’m talking to people about Fair Trade, I’m often asked about the extent of Fair Trade’s impact. Does it matter that Fair Trade helps one tea community in India and they are thriving when the community next door is living in extreme poverty?
I explain my theory of how Fair Trade’s impact will extend like a ripple effect sustained by consumers, the end goal being that one day all ponds will be rippled, or all trade will be fair, and we’ll wonder, like we do now at the thought of slavery, how we ever accepted that behavior.
In simple terms, it works like this–1 guy goes to Nicaragua and buys coffee beans from a coffee farmer at above market price. He brings it back to, say, Australia, and sells it to his friends. They like it, like that it helps the coffee farmers kids go to school and make a better life and they tell their friends. The guy goes back and buys more beans. Pretty soon, so many people are buying these Fair Trade coffee that he has to buy from the farmers neighbors. The bar is then lifted for the whole region and the cycle spins upwards.
I was just reading something that supports my theory and shows how increased consumer demand is helping Fair Trade (chocolate in this case) make the critical leap from being a small, fringe concept to becoming ‘business as usual’, that unfair trade is on its way to being abolished.
It turns out that Kraft and Nestle are testing out the Fair Trade market and starting to use only Fair Trade cocoa beans for the Kit Kat bar and the Cadbury Dairy Milk bar, among others. This is like in late 2008 when Starbucks decided to double their Fair Trade purchases to 40 million pounds, making them the world’s largest buyer of Fair Trade beans. While the multi-nationals and big corporate businesses like Nestle and Starbucks are driven, and sometimes legally bound, by the desire to make as much money as possible, not to make the world a better place, they are the ones with all the power, the ones who have the ability to make a real difference and the ones who’s move towards practices like Fair Trade signals a paradigm shift.
Again, this is all initiated by demand, by people choosing, voting throgh their purchases, to make trade fair or voting not to. Two of my favorite Fair Trade chocolate bars that are available at any Whole Foods and many other conventional grocery stores and gourmet/ natural ones too are Divine and Equal Exchange.
Fair Trade estates provide education for children
Fair Trade is a trading partnership, based on dialogue, transparency and respect, that seeks greater equity in international trade. It contributes to sustainable development by offering better trading conditions to, and securing the rights of, marginalized producers and workers – especially in the South. Fair Trade organizations (backed by consumers) are engaged actively in supporting producers, awareness raising and in campaigning for changes in the rules and practice of conventional international trade. Fair Trade’s strategic intent is:
deliberately to work with marginalized producers and workers in order to help them move from a position of vulnerability to security and economic self-sufficiency
to empower producers and workers as stakeholders in their own organizations
to actively to play a wider role in the global arena to achieve greater equity in international trade.”
Photo: Children of tea workers play at a school at Idulgashinna estate, Sri Lanka.
Since I started Fair Trade Teas in 2001, I’ve been searching for the answer to this question– what is Fair Trade? There are a million definitions and explanations out there, but I have been more interested in what Fair Trade really means, how it actually effects the people who grow our tea and coffee and other commodity products we so love like chocolate and wine and fruit and if it really makes a difference or if it is just a marketing ploy, as some claim.
I’ve been so lucky to have the opportunity over the last 9 years to visit Fair Trade and non Fair Trade tea, coffee and cocoa producers from the Himalayan Mountains in India to the Cape Region of South Africa and from Ghana to Southern Mexico, to try to glean an understanding of this fast growing, seldom understood concept- turned certification system and I think the best way to explain it is to share stories and experiences from teh field, from the growers, from my travels and let you decide for yourself.
I’ll be posting stories and experiences here as well as recent global news on Fair Trade, especially as it pertains to tea.
Thanks and welcome!
Sarah
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