Fighting the Banana Wars

In Fighting the Banana Wars and Other Fairtrade Battles, Executive Director of the Fairtrade Foundation in the UK Harriet Lamb relives the dramatic campaigns and successes that have brought Fairtrade to this point, outlines the hurdles still to be overcome and shows what we can all do to help achieve global Fairtrade.

Meet Jorge Ramirez, manager of El Guabo, a banana co-operative in southern Ecuador, which has helped a small community of farmers to survive in the face of exploitation by multinationals; Amos Wiltshire, National Fairtrade Co-ordinator for Dominica, where the introduction of new Fairtrade orders from Tesco enabled a community blighted by crime, violence and gangs to regain order and self-respect; Bruce Crowther a local vet and campaigner who turned Garstang, Lancashire into the first Fairtrade Town in the UK; Ganga, a worker in an organic cotton farmer’s group in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, who thanks to Fairtrade has finally managed to buy a set of weighing scales to ensure the community is no longer cheated by money-lenders.

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Brooklyn Grade 6 Class proposes Chocolate Boycott

A letter to The Hants Journal:

We the Grade 6 students of Brooklyn District School would like to propose a boycott against a number of international companies that produce chocolate. Those companies have been buying cocoa beans from farmers who produce their cocoa by child slave labour. They also have been giving the farmers an unfair price for their cocoa.

In countries like Ghana and Cote D’ivoire, children work on cocoa farms as slaves and are never paid for their work. The children are kidnapped in countries like Mali. The children are promised money for their work but they never get it.

The companies have not been paying the farmers they buy the cocoa beans from a fair price. The farmers get about $0.01 for every $0.60 chocolate bar the companies sell. The farmers have to use child slaves to grow and produce the cocoa beans because they can’t afford to pay workers.

We are asking you to help us boycott these companies so that they start to buy fair trade cocoa beans. Some 84 million pounds of cocoa beans are produced by fair trade cooperative farmers, but only 1 million pounds were sold at fair trade prices. Farmers deserve to sell all of the cocoa beans at a fair price.

From the Grade 6 students of Brooklyn District School

Wales: a "fair trade nation"

The BBC reports:

Wales has been declared the world's first fair trade nation by campaigners, for the progress it has made increasing the availability of such goods.

A number of targets were set in 2006 by the Wales Fair Trade Forum (WFTF) in consultation with independent experts to reach the fair trade nation goal.

These included having fair trade groups in 55% of towns and every county working towards fair trade status.

... The campaign in Wales has seen the WFTF, which has received funding from the assembly government, encourage schools, businesses and other organisations to switch to fair trade products.

It also obtained a commitment from the assembly government to use fair trade goods.

More than 1,000 volunteers have helped to persuade 58 towns, 380 schools and groups in all 22 Welsh counties to commit to learning about fair trade and use fair trade products.

An independent panel of fair trade experts from Britain and Europe reviewed all of the evidence collated and congratulated Wales on its progress.

The WFTF is now planning to implement the second phase of its campaign which will focus on increasing buying and using fair trade products.