Please visit www.fairtradenyc.org to view the New York City Fair Trade Coalition’s website. Thank you!

World’s Largest Fair Trade Coffee Break Comes to NYC - Park Slope Farmers’ Market

Fair Trade means a fair price for farmers and artisans, a better future for our planet, and a tasty, higher quality product for you.

NYC & Fair Trade supporters across the USA will set the World Record for the World’s Largest Fair Trade Coffee Break. Learn more about Fair Trade and join other Fair Trade supporters taking a break to enjoy a Fair Trade treat!!

Event: World’s Largest Fair Trade Coffee Break

Where: Grand Army Plaza @ The Green Market, Park Slope, Brooklyn
(Subway 2/3: Grand Army Plaza)

When: Saturday, 10th May @ 1pm (Stall from 9am-2.30pm)

On Saturday, May 10, 2008, the NYC Fair Trade Coalition will join people from 70 countries to celebrate World Fair Trade Day and highlight the importance and benefits of Fair Trade.

Isn’t it time we made the world fair?

Website: http://www.fairtradenyc.org/

E-mail: fairtradenyc@gmail.com

Local Sponsors of our event:

Think Coffee, Mercer St - & new 2nd location: Bowery and Bleeker Sts.
Gorilla Coffee, Prospect Park in Brooklyn
Prospect Perk, Prospect Park in Brooklyn

National Sponsors for our event:

Alter Eco
Fair Trade Apparel by Counter Sourcing
Divine Chocolate
Equal Exchange
Fair Trade Resource Network
Global Goods Partners
Numi Tea
TransFair USA
World of Good, Inc

Join Project Bona Fide to Celebrate Nicaraguan Culture: 12/1, 8pm-11:30 pm

Project Bonafide’s Holiday Fun-Raiser

PARTY FOR A CAUSE & help us plant fertile seeds for Nicaraguan communities.

Project Bona Fide celebrates the vibrance of Nicaraguan culture through food security and re-forestation action. The holiday event, which is being generously hosted by Jivamukti, brings together the best of locally made vegan foods and desserts, music, organic wines, and colorful crafts of Nicaraguan culture.

Project Bona Fide is based on Isla Ometepe, a twin volcanic island within Lake Nicaragua, in the southwest corner of Nicaragua just above the Costa Rican border. Our projects support long term nutrition and fair trade through edible reforestation and empowering single mothers to achieve a better life for themselves and children.

Art Auction, Drinks, D’oeuvres, Desserts, and Great Music! Please come learn more about Nicaragua’s colorful culture and movement at our Holiday Benefit Fun-Raiser. This is going to be an incredible fiesta.

December 1st, 8:00pm - 11:30pm
Hosted ByJivamukti Yoga Center
841 Broadway (just below union square in nyc)
www.projectbonafide.com
Contact: Michael Judd
michael@projectbonafide
240.344.5625

Note on Attire:Wear your most colorful socks!Shoes must be removed at the door to the yoga studio. And please no furs.

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FACES OF FAIR TRADE: THE GLOBAL AND LOCAL UNITED
A panel discussion of Fair Trade farmers@ Judson Memorial Church
239 Thompson Street entrance
Sunday, October 28
7:30 p.m.

Judson Memorial Church, Okeusa, Oxfam @NYU, the NYC Fair Trade Coalition and others will be hosting a panel discussion with Fair Trade Farmers. The 30 minute presentation will include 2 banana farmers from
Costa Rica, one local farmer, and one pecan farmer from the Georgia of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. The 30 minute presentation will cover the common obstacles/challenges of being farmers in sustainable food systems and the impact of fair trade on the lives of farmers. Okeusa is particularly interested in connecting with faith communities in the NYC metropolitan area.

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Connecting Movements: Fair Trade and Buy Local

A banana farmer from Costa Rica, a pecan farmer from Georgia, and a local fruit and vegetable farmer may seem worlds apart, but they are part of the same movement to build a fair and sustainable food system.

The Fair Trade Committee is partnering with Oke USA, Red Tomato, and Equal Exchange to bring together farmers from diverse parts of the world to share their experiences and discuss their vision of Fair Trade.

Speakers will include banana farmers from Costa Rica, a coordinator from the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative and a local producer. Join us for a rare opportunity to hear these speakers from different regions of the globe talk about their struggles to stay on the land, their experiences in the market, and the impact of consumer support for fair trade and family farms.

Event Details:

Date: Saturday, October 27th
Time: 7 PM
Location: Park Slope Food Coop

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Fair Trade Ice-Cream Social: 10/14, 4pm - 6pm

Fair Trade Ice-Cream Social!
Date and Time: October 14th, 4PM-6 PM
Location: Think Coffee, 248 Mercer Street, New York City

The New York City Fair Trade Coalition will join Think Coffee to welcome Juanita Baltadano, president of the APPTA cocoa and fruit cooperative to New York City. The Coalition will be hosting an ice-cream social featuring Fair Trade banana splits. Ms. Baltadano will be discussing her experience with Fair Trade and a representative from the Coalition will discuss what can be done to support Fair Trade in New York City.

Cosponsors: TransFair USA, Oxfam at NYU

For more information or to get involved, please contact fair.trade.nyc@gmail.com

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Come stop by or volunteer for the Fair Trade Month Giveaway!
Date and Time: Oct 1st, 10 AM – 2 PM
Location: Washington Square South

We will be giving away free cups of Fair Trade coffee and letting students and commuters know about ways to support Fair Trade in New York City!

Cosponsors: New York City Fair Trade Coalition, Oxfam at NYU, local, Deans Beans, Think Coffee

For more information or to get involved, please contact fair.trade.nyc@gmail.com

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Fair Trade Book Launch & Reception: Friday, 5/11 at 7pm
The Coalition invites you to NYC’s World Fair Trade Day Celebration. On Friday, May 11 at 7 pm, we will join one of Fair Trade’s leading activists, Jacqueline DeCarlo, in launching her new book, Fair Trade: A Beginner’s Guide.

Everyone is welcome to come celebrate global economic justice with wine, cheese, and great music. Entrance is Free!

Friday, May 11 at 7 pm at Rapture Café and Books, located at 200 Avenue A between 12th & 13th Streets

Sponsored by
New York City Fair Trade Coalition ( fairtradenyc.org )
Fair Trade Resource Network (ftrn.org )
Northeast Two-Spirits Society ( ne2ss.org)
Global Goods Partners (www.globalgoodspartners.org)
Peace Coffee (www.peacecoffee.com)
Rapture Café and Books (www.rapturecafe.com )
Think Coffee (www.thinkcoffeenyc.com)

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The New York City Fair Trade Coalition co-hosts:

the FIRST ANNUAL FAIR TRADE FAIR
in partnership with Oxfam@NYU and Judson Memorial Church

Buy fair trade for the holidays and shop your conscience
-Artisanal Goods
-Clothing & Accessories
-Coffee & Chocolate
-Bake Sale

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9th 11 am – 4 pm
JUDSON MEMORIAL CHURCH ASSEMBLY HALL
239 Thompson Street (South of Washington Square Park between 3rd and 4th Streets)
NO ENTRANCE FEE

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Get It While It’s Hot: Saturday 12/2 - Saturday 12/16

This is a FREE event in Brooklyn the first two weeks in December.

Get It While It’s Hot is an exhibition of fine arts, film for thought, and live music, inspiring all of the senses through an exploration of consumption. Promoting the talents of local multimedia artists and the idea of consuming with a conscience, this event is open to the public for only two weeks, so come BUY!

Half of the art sales proceeds are donated to Trees Not Trash [treesnottrash.org], a community non-profit organization.

The Bazaar guides us into a world of delicious, mindful, thrifty shopping, offering eclectic, hand crafted, fair trade and socially responsible products and affordable art.

name: Get It While It’s Hot
when: Sat 12.02 - 12.16 (Opening 12.02 1-11pm, Closing 12.16 7-11pm)
where: AdHocArt, 49 Bogart Street, East Williamsburg/Bushwick, Brooklyn [Take the L to Morgan Avenue, walk straight on Morgan Avenue 1 block and make a left on Bogart St.] 718.417.4076
price: Free ($5 donation Thur 12.7)
links*: ArtEfect.org
details: below

Ad Hoc Art Gallery
49 Bogart Street, Bushwick, Brooklyn
•
Opening Reception: December 2nd, 7-11pm
Live Music hosted by percussionists Dalius Naujo & Mesh
Fair Trade & Socially Responsible Food Tasting
•
The Bazaar: December 2nd & 9th, 1-6pm
•
Multi-Media Extravaganza: December 7th
Media That Matters: Good Food Film Festival, 8pm
Installation: Flock Optics, 9pm
•
Closing Reception: December 16th, 7-11pm
Live Music hosted by saxophonist Jonathan Haffner
•
Brought to you by the folks at interrupcion*, ArtEfect & Peripheral Media Projects

All events are FREE and open to the public. [December 7th - $5 donation.]
Cheap drinks are offered throughout the festivities.

Bazaar contact: Michela*, 718.417.4076 michela.calabrese@interrupcion.net
Vending tables are $50 per day
Art Curator: Jennifer Harris, ArtEfectSubmissions@yahoo.com

Participating Artists:
1 dave scaringe
2 bokov
3 yusuf sayman
4 chantal ughi
5 ryam lemke
6 michael allen
7 raha raissnia
8 anna lezhen
9 ayca koseogullari
10 jennifer harris
11 isack kousnsky
12 monica frisell
13 artem mirolevich
14 tim billings
15 bill mcright
16 leon reid
17 rachael budde
18 lindsay stadig
19 laura yun
20 ayala gazit
21 erik weshnak
22 chris kannen

Participating Bazaar Vendors (December 2nd & 9th)
Interrupcion* [interrupcion.net]
Peripheral Media Projects [peripheralmediaprojects.com]
FreeDimensional [freedimensional.org]
Mercado Global [mercadoglobal.org]
Green Apple Guide [greenappleguide.com]
Mad Imports [madimports.org]
Global Goods Partners [globalgoodspartners.org]

Fair Trade and Socially Responsible Food Tasting (December 2nd)
Interrupcion* [interrupcion.net]
NYC Fair Trade Coalition [fairtradenyc.org]
Numi Organic Tea [numitea.com]
Pangea Organics [pangeaorganics.com]
Lower East Side Girls Club [girlsclub.org]

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Oxfam America @ NYU Presents:
Fair Trade Gala
Sunday, October 29, 8pm
Think Coffee, 248 Mercer St.

Coffee, tea, mingling, and Fair Trade fashion!
Please RSVP at www.nyu.edu/clubs/oxfam/gala

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Fair Trade Chocolate Tasting with Equal Exchange: Saturday, 10/28, 7pm

During October, Fair Trade advocates and supporters around the country are hosting hundreds of events to celebrate the surging Fair Trade movement.

The Park Slope Food Co-op, together with Equal Exchange, a leader in the Fair Trade movement, invites you to a free chocolate tasting and brief presentation on the wider story behind its fair trade organic chocolate.

Learn about Equal Exchange’s long-term direct relationships with its small-scale farmer partners, where its cocoa and other ingredients come from, how its chocolate bars are made, and how all these factors together
impact the texture, mouth feel, and overall flavor.

Saturday, October 28th at 7pm
Park Slope Food Coop,
located at 782 Union Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn

This event is open to the public. See you there!

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Fair Trade Bazaar: Saturday, 10/21, 12pm – 5pm


United Nations Association of New York’s Young Professionals for International Cooperation presents their inaugural Fair Trade Bazaar

Date: Saturday, October 21, 2006
Time: 12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

The Permanent Mission of Hungary to the United Nations
227 East 52nd Street, New York (between 2nd & 3rd Ave.)

Retailers from the New York City Metro Area will be selling a variety of interesting, entertaining and tasty fair trade products! Also, come for your chance to win a FREE trip for two to Costa Rica and a gift basket from Aveda!

Panelist

Devin Stewart, Director, Global Policy Innovations, Carnegie Council
Discussion on how Fair Trade benefits developing countries in the global trading system.

Admission is Free
But Registration is Required

Students- Join UNA for just $10 at the door!
Non-students- Join UNA for just $25

To register, please e-mail your name and contact information to Andrea Satter, Director of the Economic Development Committee, at ypiced@unanyc.org.

________________________________________________________________
Devin T. Stewart is Director of Global Policy Innovations at Carnegie Council. He is also editor of the column Carnegie Ethics Online.

Previously, Mr. Stewart was Assistant Director of Studies and Japan Studies Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. He remains affiliated with CSIS as an Adjunct Fellow and advises the Sustainable Profitability Group.

From 2000 to 2003, he was a researcher at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade, and Industry and in 2004 a staff writer for The Daily Yomiuri in Tokyo. He also chaired the Korea-Japan Study Group in Tokyo and in Washington. Mr. Stewart was a researcher at the Japan External Trade Organization New York and has served on the staffs of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and Senator Barbara Mikulski.
His articles have appeared in four languages in numerous publications, including SAIS Review, The Asian Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune, Japan Inc., the Asahi Shimbun, Prospect Magazine, and The National Interest.

He holds a B.A., cum laude, from the University of Delaware and an M.A. from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C., and Bologna, Italy.

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Black Gold, Documentary on the World Coffee Trade: Now Playing in NYC

Black Gold, a documentary on the world coffee trade that makes a strong case for Fair Trade, is now playing in NYC at Cinema Village. Click here for showtimes. See the film’s website at www.blackgoldmovie.com to learn more about the film.
.

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Stories About Travel and Faraway
Places — Fair Trade in Darjeeling and
Guatemala: Wednesday, 10/18/ at 7pm

Where Have You Been?

Stories about travel and far-away places. New Yorkers go all over the world but the city has a way of swallowing their homecomings. Orbit the earth and your friends just ask if you missed the pizza.

Tonight offers a chance for travelers to tell stories, to bring the world home, and to share it with the rest of us — travelers as well as those of us who don’t get out much.

Featuring interviews with three intrepids: Ida Benedetto tells us what happened when she introduced Guatemalan coffee farmers to a tea collective in Darjeeling, India; Tod Seelie remembers getting kidnapped in Brazil; and Steve Duncan takes us underneath Minneapolis on an urban exploration vacation.

Interviews by Jeff Stark. Gorgeous slideshows tightly edited and mercifully short.

Wednesday, October 18th
Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen Street, Manhattan, NYC
7-8:30p; $5 suggested donation
http://www.bluestockings.com/

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The Lower Eastside Girls Club Block Party, celebrating the grand opening of LA TIENDITA. “The little store with a big mission.”

When: Saturday, October 7, 2006, Noon to 6pm
Where: 1st Street between 1st and 2nd Aves
What: Be here at noon for the ribbon cutting ceremony with City Councilman Alan Gerson and Borough President Scott Stringer, plus our favorite home-girl ROSARIO DAWSON (with Voto Latino and friends.) Blessing by the REVEREND BILLY and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir (finally, a store he’ll shop at!)

And then… a party all day hosted by MAHOGANY L. BROWNE with performances by:

DJ DROOPIST DaRIDDLAH’
NYC B*GIRLS

URBAN WORD NYC’S YOUTH POETS

ALL-GIRL BANDS FROM WILLIE MAE ROCK CAMP FOR GIRLS

GIRLS CLUB FLAMENCO DANCERS

and more to be announced!

Get ready for other fun stuff including:

- Organic farmers market tables

- Organic (and healthy) baked goods from our own Girls Club Sweet Things bake shop

- Street Studio: professional portraits in front of a backdrop created by our girls

- Custom T-shirt designs by legendary street artist, Chico

The Lower Eastside Girls Club Block Party is in collaboration with the First Street Block Association’s most fabulous flea market (all proceeds from the Block Association’s flea market go to maintain the 1st Street Children’s Park and Playground!)

LESGC is a member of the EVCC and Interupcion. Shop local, support community.

Special thanks to Council Woman Rosie Mendez, Congress Woman Nydia Velasquez, and Robert Graf of the First Street Block Association.

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Interrupcion* Product Sampling

*Pangea Organics*, *Numi Tea*, and* interrupcion** invite you to enjoy organic wine and hors d’oeuvres at 5C Cultural Center in the East Village of Manhattan at on *Monday, July 24th at 6:30pm*.

They will present a captivating look at how our culture and world are being changed by companies who have chosen to take a different, yet highly effective path through the world of consumerism.

Experience products from the fastest growing organic skin care line in the world (PangeaOrganics.com).
Taste the difference that sustainable, organic tea makes (www.Numitea.com).
Understand the impact of socially responsible products (www.interrupcion.net).

Attendees will be given samples and have the opportunity to purchase products at wholesale.

Due to space limitations please RSVP to michela.calabrese@interrupcion.net

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Everything 4 Coffee and Tea Festival

The New York City Fair Trade Coalition will have a booth at the Everything 4 Coffee and Tea Festival. This is a two-day event dedicated to the growth and proliferation of the specialty coffee and gourmet tea market place. There will be food, music, art auctions, coffee demos, tea cermonies and more! Learn more at www.everything4coffeeandtea.com

Join us in educating event presenters and the public about Fair Trade! We’re looking for volunteers to staff our booth for a few hours on Saturday, July 15th and Sunday, July 16th. To sign up, learn more, or ask questions, please send an e-mail to fair.trade.nyc@gmail.com.

Location:
Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18th Street,
New York, NY 10011

Date/time:

Saturday, July 15:
11am-7:30pm

Sunday, July 16:
10am-6pm

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CitySol

The New York City Fair Trade Coalition will have a table at CitySol, a summer music and market series on Manhattan’s East River waterfront powered by the belief that bringing environmentalism to New York means first putting more New York into the environmental movement.

We are looking for volunteers to staff this event. If you have some time on Sunday, July 2nd and would like to sling some Fair Trade iced tea and pass out information about Fair Trade and the Coalition, please contact Michela Calabrese at michela.calabrese@interrupcion.net. If you can’t volunteer but would like to swing by anyway, please do!

When: Sunday, July 2nd
Time: noon - 8pm
Where: Stuyvesant Cove Park, located along the East River between
18th and 23rd Streets

Please also note that City Sol will go on two more times over the summer — on Sunday July 23rd and Sunday August 13th. We will need volunteers for those dates as well. For more information visit www.citysol.org

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From Bullets to Coffee Beans

A Community of Ex-Guerrillas and the Fair Trade Market
A Photo Exhibit by Ida C. Benedetto

June 1st through June 26th @ Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen Street between Stanton and Rivington, NYC
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Café Conciencia Talk on Fair Trade: Tuesday, 6/20

Café Conciencia Wake Up Tour
Making Good on the Promise of Fair Trade
A Slideshow Discussion by Tim Kantz

Tuesday, June 20th, 7PM @ Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen Street between Stanton and Rivington, NYC

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Human Rights Watch Film Festival — NYC Premiere of Black Gold: 6/9 - 6/12

Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center
165 West 65th Street, plaza level

(between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave.)

Nick Francis and Marc Francis, U.K., 2006, 78m, video, doc
In Amharic, Oromiffa and English with English subtitles

“Multinational coffee companies now rule our shopping malls and supermarkets and dominate an industry worth over $80 billion, making coffee the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil. But while we continue to buy our lattes and cappuccinos in their millions, the price paid to coffee farmers remains so low that many have been forced to abandon their coffee fields. Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee. Tadesse Meskela is on a one-man mission to save his coffee cooperative’s 75,000 struggling farmers from bankruptcy. As they strive to harvest some of the highest quality coffee beans available to the international market, Tadesse travels the world in an attempt to find buyers willing to pay a fair price. Against the backdrop of Tadesse’s journey to London and Seattle, the more powerful sides of the international trading system come into focus. New York coffee traders, auction houses and the double dealings of trade ministers at the World Trade Organisation reveal the enormity of Tadesse’s task to find a long-term solution for his farmers. *Official Selection, Sundance Film Festival 2006. Presented in association with the New York African Film Festival.”

Film’s website: www.blackgoldmovie.com

SHOWTIMES:
Fri June 9: 4; Sat June 10: 7; Sun June 11: 4; Mon June 12:2

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Socially Responsible Governance in NYC — A Forum with Councilman Alan J. Gerson on Ethical Impact Standards for Business
Co-sponsored by the New York Open Center and the Foundation for Ethics and Meaning (FEM)

@ the Open Center
83 Spring Street in Manhattan
(#6 Train to Spring Street, R to Prince Street, walk 1 block South to Spring)
Sunday May 21, 2006
7:00PM - 9:30PM
212 219-2527

FEM Presenters include:
Nanette Schorr (Restorative Justice Lawyer; Co-Chair, Foundation for Ethics and Meaning; Member, Network of Spiritual Progressives and the Tikkun Community)
Rosa Naparstek (Board Member, Foundation for Ethics and Meaning; Founder, Artists Unite)
Rick Ulfik (Co-Chair, Foundation for Ethics and Meaning; Director, We, The World)
Louise Gilmore (Labor/Civil Rights Lawyer; Steering Committee Member, Foundation for Ethics and Meaning)

This event is FREE, but seating is limited. To reserve a seat, please RSVP by replying to this email (or to Rick@WeTheWorld.org). In the subject line put RSVP Alan Gerson Event.

Dear Friends,

A new tool for ethical and socially responsible politics is currently being discussed by New York City Council members. Ethical Impact Standards for labor and the environment have a potentially vital role in the bidding process for city contracts, and can enable city government to take the relationship between business and community to a more humanly satisfying level.
Of 10 companies with equal credentials bidding for a city contract, the final decision would be based on which business demonstrated the best record of social responsibility in labor, environment and possibly other areas.
Please join our downtown City Councilman in an interactive exploration of how to implement this groundbreaking legislation and promote governance based on vital human needs. This is an opportunity for New York City to become a model for municipalities around the country, showing how their governments could be more responsive to the social, economic and environmental needs of their diverse communities.
Express your views, have input, and support this vital legislation in a specially facilitated Forum for information, dialogue and understanding.

There will be a followup meeting (to be announced) to take action on implementing Ethical Impact Standards for Business.

If you or your friends are in NYC on May 21st, I hope to see you there!

Rick Ulfik
Co-Chair of Foundation for Ethics and Meaning
Director of We, The World

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Fair Trade Day Canvass: Saturday, 5/13
Join the New York City Fair Trade Coalition as we celebrate Fair Trade Day by canvassing the City!!

Date: Saturday, 5/13
Time: Noon - 3:30pm
Location: The fountain in Bryant Park

For two years the Coalition has been collecting information on where to buy Fair Trade products in New York City. As the list of Fair Trade retailers continues to grow, we realize that we lack important details about many of these stores, such as which particular Fair Trade products each store carries. In honor of Fair Trade Day, Coalition members will divvy up the Where to Buy List and pay a visit to many of these stores, restaurants, and cafes to check out their Fair Trade offerings and introduce them to the Coalition. And after a day of canvassing, we’ll reconvene with some Fair Trade goodies.

Participation is open to all. Please e-mail fair.trade.nyc@gmail.com for more information.

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From Bullets to Coffee Beans: 3/30-4/30

From Bullets to Coffee Beans: A Community of Ex-Guerrillas in the Fair Trade Market

-Photo exhibit by Ida Benedetto

Exhibit on view: March 30th-April 30th
Location: 66 West 12th Street, 4th floor bridge gallery at The New School

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Greening the Religious Community: Sunday, 4/23

Sponsored by NYC Sierra Club and Cathedral of St. John the Divine
Unprecedented collaboration of Sierra Club and NYC religious community!
Date: Sunday, April 23rd
Time: 3:00PM, with reception following at 5PM
Location: Cathedral of St. John the Divine (Synod House), Amsterdam Ave and 110th Street

See www.sierraclub.org/community/newyorkcity/ for more information.
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Earth Day at Grand Central: Saturday, 4/22

The New York City Fair Trade Coalition will have a booth at this year’s Earth Day New York Festival at Grand Central Station. Swing by for some information about Fair Trade in NYC and, of course some coffee samples! The Coalition will also be joined by 100% Fair Trade Roaster Equal Exchange. We look forward to seeing you there!

Visit www.earthdayny.org/earthday_2006.html for more information about the event.
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Fair Trade Product Tasting: Saturday, 4/22

Celebrate Earth Day with the New York City Fair Trade Coalition and the Park Slope Food Co-op Fair Trade Action Committee by sampling some Fair Trade products from around the globe! The event will feature a variety of Fair Trade teas, chocolates, and other products, including Fair Trade rice.

Saturday, April 22nd at 6pm
Park Slope Food Co-op (in Brooklyn: 282 Union St.)
Open to the public

Please contact us at fair.trade.nyc@gmail.com with questions.
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Sweat Free Communities is holding its third annual conference on April 7th - 9th in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The gathering will be a place for anti-sweatshop activists to share experiences, learn vital organizing skills, and build joint strategy. If you are campaigning for sweatshop-free government or religious purchasing or if you are interested in learning more and getting active in the movement, this gathering is not to be missed!

For more registration and more information, visit

www.sweatfree.org
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Mirembe Kawomera ”Delicious Peace” Coffee Tour comes to NYC: Sunday, 3/5 at 1:00 pm

Please join us this Sunday to hear JJ Keki, founder and director of the Peace Kawomera Cooperative, a Ugandan coffee cooperative run by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim farmers. In addition to speaking about the Cooperative’s efforts to build peace through Fair Trade, JJ, a Grammy nominated musician, will be singing and playing guitar.

JJ comes to NYC as part of the Mirembe Kawomera ”Delicious Peace” Coffee Tour of 2006, sponsored by Thanksgiving Coffee.

Event Details

This Sunday, 3/5
1:00 pm
Cafe Nana
606 West 115th st

If you have any questions, please contact us at fair.trade.nyc@gmail.com

—More Information on the Tour—

Mirembe Kawomera “Delicious Peace” Coffee Tour
Tour dates: February 26 – March 21, 2006

Thanksgiving Coffee Company is proud to announce the Mirembe Kawomera ”Delicious Peace” Coffee Tour of 2006. The tour will present JJ Keki—founder and director of the Peace Kawomera Cooperative, a Ugandan coffee cooperative comprised of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim farmers. The tour seeks to build a network of support for Fair Trade Mirembe Kawomera “Delicious Peace” Coffee from the farmers of the Peace Kawomera Cooperative. Please join us in our effort to build peace through Fair Trade.

The Tour

JJ Keki is the leader of the 400-member Peace Kawomera Cooperative. Founded in early 2004, the Cooperative represents a strong interfaith alliance guided by JJ’s vision that “Today the world is in pain. We want to prove that a better way is to be proud of who you are, respect each other, and make something great together.”

JJ seeks to share this vision of healing and cooperation through the Mirembe Kawomera “Delicious Peace” Coffee tour. The tour will focus on the Peace Kawomera Cooperative, providing occasion for JJ to share the story of his community’s work for peace. JJ’s presentation will highlight the struggles and accomplishments of his cooperative, the challenges faced small-scale African coffee farmers in general, and will culminate in a call to action inviting consumers to support meaningful change through the purchase of Fair Trade coffee. Current tour plans include tentative dates in Orlando, Atlanta, Richmond, Washington DC, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Thanksgiving Coffee Co.

Thanksgiving Coffee Co. is a small, family run company dedicated to environmental sustainability, great coffee, and social justice. Thanksgiving Coffee Co. works with small-scale family farmers and their cooperatives in Latin America, Africa, and Asia; we joined the Peace Kawomera Cooperative in 2005 to support their mission to build peace among their communities. Our support for the cooperative’s goal of a strong and economically sustainable foundation for peace is manifested through our long-term commitment to purchasing their coffee on Fair Trade terms. Additionally, Thanksgiving Coffee Co. manages a unique profit-sharing program designed to further strengthen the cooperative by raising funds for infrastructure development, training, and community projects in health and education.

The Mirembe Challenge

The Mirembe Kawomera “Delicious Peace” Coffee Tour seeks to build a lasting community of support for the farmers of the Peace Kawomera Cooperative. This tour is an invitation to U.S. communities of faith to join Thanksgiving Coffee Co.’s 2006 Mirembe Challenge which aims to build a market for the entire 2005 harvest of the Peace Kawomera Cooperative—75,000 pounds of Fair Trade Certified coffee. Translated to human terms, the goal of this tour is the creation of a community-based network representing 3,000 participating coffee lovers who buy two packages of coffee every month every year.

Tour Highlights

Thanksgiving Coffee Co. hopes to forge new connections and deepen existing relationships with faith-based communities who have joined in a grassroots effort to build a market for Mirembe Kawomera “Delicious Peace” Coffee. Each tour event will highlight the following:

• The realities of African coffee farmers and the impact of Fair Trade in their communities
• The innovative strategy of the Peace Kawomera Cooperative; focusing on the importance of economic justice as it relates to peace
• The hopes of the Peace Kawomera Cooperative and the challenges faced by this cooperative of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian coffee farmers in Uganda
• Plus a cultural celebration: JJ Keki performing songs of the Abayudaya, the Jews of Uganda (See Smithsonian Folkways 2005 Grammy Nominee), a slideshow featuring the members of the Peace Kawomera Cooperative, and Thanksgiving Coffee Co.’s Mirembe Kawomera “Delicious Peace” Coffee brewed and served.

Seeking to build a community-based market for the Peace Kawomera Cooperative’s coffee, the Mirembe Kawomera “Delicious Peace” Tour hopes to build lasting connections with allied interfaith initiatives and communities of faith. The tour hopes to provide occasion for a collective affirmation of the goals of economic and social justice, environmental sustainability, and interfaith peace. Translating this collective affirmation to action, the Mirembe Challenge seeks to empower individuals and communities with a means of participation, empowering people to join in the work of building peace in support of the farmers of the Peace Kawomera Cooperative.

We hope to partner with your organization and community! Mirembe, Shalom, Salaam, Peace!
www.mirembekawomera.com
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United Students for Fair Trade Annual Convergence: 2/17/2006 - 2/19/2006

United Students for Fair Trade will be holding its 2006 International Convergence on February 17th-19th in Denver, Colorado. For more on the conference, including information about registration, submitting workshop proposals, and sponsoring the event, visit www.usft.org
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How Venezuelan oil is benefiting your community: Thursday, 1/19/2006

Cooperation vs. Exploitation: Local & Global Implications
Congressman Serranoinvited to present the PetroBX pilot project

Thursday, January 19th at 928 Intervale Avenue (take the 2/5 to Intervale & Westchester)

Sponsored by NYC People’s Referendum on Free Trade, Mothers on the Move, La Aurora, NYCISPES, Sustainable South Bronx, Participación y Consultación Dominicana sobre Libre Comercio, After Dark TV Productions, Comisión Dominicana para los Derechos Humanos, and Centro de Educación Básica

Contact 646-245-9931 or newyorkcispes@mindspring.com for more information.
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The Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture presents:
Winter Crafts Fair

Saturday, December 17th from 11AM - 4PM
53 Prospect Park West at 2nd street in Park Slope, Brooklyn
(F train to 7th avenue or 2/3 to Grand Army Plaza)

“We have transformed our beautiful landmark mansion into a gallery of original arts and crafts including:
* Jewelry * Pottery * Art Prints * Toys * Clothing * Decorations * Stationary * Mirrors * Candle Holders * Paper Art * Stained Glass * Picture Frames * Global Disaster Fundraising Art * Local to Global Fair Trade Crafts

Child care available by donation for easy shopping!

For more information see www.bsec.org
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National Supermarket Day of Action,
in collaboration with Oxfam America and Coop America: Saturday, 11/19/2005 from Noon – 4 PM.

On one of the busiest shopping days of the year, join activists from around the city to raise awareness of Fair Trade and encourage Fairway, Gristedes, D’Agostino and the Food Emporium to carry more Fair Trade products. We’ll be handing out Fair Trade Recipe cards, customer comment cards requesting Fair Trade, and information about Where to Buy Fair Trade products in New York City.

If you are interested in participating in this event, please RSVP to Scott Codey at scottcodey@gmail.com by Wednesday, November 16th so we know how many supermarkets we can cover.
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Fair Trade Month Events
October is Fair Trade Month. Throughout October, the New York City Fair Trade Coalition will be hosting several events around the city to celebrate the surging Fair Trade movement. Please join us for these free events to sample Fair Trade products and learn more about recent Fair Trade victories in New York City!

Fair Trade Dinner and Celebration
Wednesday, October 5th, 5:30 PM
Pret a Manger (11 W 42nd St, near Bryant Park)

Fair Trade Wine and Chocolate Tasting
Friday, October 7th, 8:00 PM
Havana Outpost (in Brooklyn: 755-757 Fulton St, at S Portland St.)

Chocolate Tasting Event
Saturday, October 15th, 6:00 PM
Park Slope Food Co-op (in Brooklyn: 282 Union St.)

Greenmarkets
Saturday, October 22nd and Saturday, October 29th,
10:00 AM – 4:00 PM
Union Square Farmers’ Market

Visit www.transfairusa.org/pdfs/shopper.pdf.

Coldplay Campaigns to Make Trade Fair

Click here to link to Oxfam America and read this article.

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Transfair’s Fair Trade Beat - Spring ‘06

Click here to read the latest issue of Transfair’s quarterly newsletter.

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Fair Trade Roaster Equal Exchange in Time Magazine

TIME MAGAZINE

HOW TO BREW JUSTICE
Coffee Importer Equal Exchange Shows How to Make Good Money While Paying Farmers High Prices

By G. Jeffrey Macdonald / West Bridgewater, Mass.

Sunday, December 11, 2005

In the mid-1980s, Rink Dickinson wanted to go into business to help an unusual constituency: his vendors. He proposed to import coffee by paying impoverished Latin American farmers double the going rate for their beans. Reaction from potential investors was predictably cool. “People were just, like, ‘That’s a bad idea,’” he recalls. “The concept of having your values embedded in everything you did in your business … was just not happening in any major way at all.” Nonetheless, with just $100,000 from family, friends and a few supportive idealists, Equal Exchange was born in 1986 in a 2,000-sq.-ft. room in Boston’s South End. Today copresident Dickinson boasts a 77,000-sq.-ft. facility outside Boston, a full-time staff of 80 and a 33% average annual growth rate over 19 years.

But the real accomplishment, Dickinson will tell you, is what has happened in the 15 developing nations where Equal Exchange buys from indigenous farmer cooperatives. In Oaxaca, Mexico, residents ride a fleet of cooperative-funded buses on routes that take hours to walk. In La Libertad, El Salvador, children who used to walk past an empty school building now study inside with a teacher who is paid by the cooperative. In Chajul, Guatemala, a cooperative-funded health clinic is helping reduce child mortality. And in remote corners of Peru, growing numbers of children of uneducated farmers are leaving to pursue university degrees, thanks in part to a predictable market for family-grown crops.

Equal Exchange can also boast that it started a trend. About 450 coffee importers opt to pay above-market rates for certain beans and then sell the product as premium coffee in 45,000 stores nationwide with Fair Trade certification, an independent audit from TransFair USA. The Fair Trade sector accounts for just 2% of the $22 billion domestic retail coffee market. But the industry is striving to keep up with rising public expectations for the way the brew comes to market.

Starbucks Coffee, for instance, in 2004 piloted its own certification program known as Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practices. By 2007, the company intends to buy more than half its coffee from a supply chain that independent auditors have inspected. Among the criteria: growers must minimize deforestation and receive “premium” prices, that is, those high enough to turn a profit.

Equal Exchange has helped create a new paradigm in an industry with a reputation for keeping suppliers poor. “The coffee industry for several hundred years has been viewed as a competition between producers and consumers,” says Ted Lingle, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. “Where the specialty market is changing is in getting everyone in the supply chain to recognize that there’s a partnership [which entails] some sort of shared prosperity.”

At Equal Exchange, countercultural thinking comes naturally. Employees ride bicycles and trains to pickup spots to minimize auto emissions en route to company headquarters in an industrial park in West Bridgewater. The office wing resembles a college dormitory: tapestries cover walls, posters plead for peace, an acoustic guitar sits atop the desk of Rob Everts, Dickinson’s copresident and a former organizer of California farmworkers. As a matter of policy, top management earns no more than three times the salary of entry-level employees, who start at around $25,000 a year. After a probationary period, all employees own one share of voting stock in the company, which gives each an equal say in key policy decisions.

But to fulfill their social mission, staff members rely on shrewd business acumen and a few key premises. First, they trust that consumers are willing to pay a little more to help family farmers, especially if the coffee in their cup is extraordinarily tasty. They keep costs down by eliminating middlemen whenever possible. And they defy industry norms by lending cash to farmers prior to harvest. That move aims to breed loyalty, eco-friendly harvesting techniques and uncompromised bean quality.

Despite Equal Exchange’s efforts, there’s still a long way to go before coffee growers will have a fair deal. Serious problems persist for coffee producers in developing nations. Commodity prices have languished well below $1 per lb. for much of the past two decades, so crops have often been sold at a loss, leading many families to abandon their farms for a better life in the cities. “It’s forcing families who have depended on coffee for income into destitution,” says Matthew Aho, who is producing a documentary on Fair Trade’s impact on Peruvian farmers.

Fair Trade isn’t a panacea for coffee growers’ difficulties. Uneducated farmers sometimes don’t understand why their cooperative has made certain decisions with their dollars, for example, according to Todd Caspersen, director of purchasing at Equal Exchange. What’s more, the cooperative movement is still just developing, so big companies say they have to buy from brokers as well. “A company of our level couldn’t find all we need from cooperatives,” says Dub Hay, senior vice president of coffee and global procurement at Starbucks.
In the meantime, Equal Exchange is pursuing new ways to do good business. The company is exploring produce markets in what would be a bid to show that squeezing local fruit and vegetable vendors for rock-bottom prices isn’t the only way to run a profitable business. In fact, their vendors might be the ones ready to do the squeezing–with hugs of gratitude.

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Fair Trade Cotton Coming Soon to Great Britain

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Cotton farmers to benefit from British ‘fair trade’

Thursday . November 17, 2005

Shoppers in Britain could soon be checking a new label when buying a pair of cotton trousers — the ‘fair trade’ mark.

The Fairtrade Foundation was to announce later Thursday the launch in Britain of cotton fair trade products that will guarantee cotton farmers in developing countries a just price.

The launch, backed by Britain’s Labour government, comes ahead of a WTO meeting in Hong Kong next month that seeks to tear down international trade barriers.

“I will finally be able to support my family thanks to the fair trade price we will get for our cotton,” Laljibhai Narranbhai, a cotton farmer from Agrocel Pure and Fair Cotton Growers’ Association in India, said ahead of the launch.

Britons are already cottoning on to fair trade products, including coffee and chocolate.

Last year saw a 51-percent rise in sales of fair trade goods here, according to the Fairtrade Foundation — an independent certification body that awards a mark to products that meet international standards.

Consumers in Britain spent more than 140 million pounds on goods bearing the fair trade brand in 2004 compared with 92 million pounds a year earlier.

“The government is committed to supporting the fair trade mark because it helps shoppers identify products that guarantee producers in developing countries a fair price,” Secretary of State for International Development Hilary Benn was to say at Thursday’s launch in London.

“By buying these items people here will be making a huge difference to the lives of poor farmers thousands of miles away.”

The Fairtrade Foundation said the launch would focus “on the urgent need for fair trade cotton in the context of low world cotton prices, depressed in part by US and EU subsidies”.

Cotton products carrying the fair trade mark would shortly be available from 10 companies who trade via a range of independent shops, websites and catalogues throughout Britain.

Items with the mark would include women’s and men’s T-shirts, shirts, trousers, dresses, children’s and babies’ wear, underwear and cotton wool.

“For too long cotton farmers have been invisible at the end of long supply chains and at the sharp end of injustice in international trade, and that has to change,” Harriet Lamb, director of the Fairtrade Foundation, was to say at the launch.

“Today we are setting a whole new pattern for international trade.”

The newly certified fair trade cotton would initially come from small farmers in India and Peru, Mali and Senegal. Farmers there would receive the guaranteed fair trade minimum price plus a premium to use
in social or business development projects.

Goods using fair trade certified cotton made in Africa have been launched already in France, Switzerland, and Belgium.

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McDonald’s to sell Fair Trade Certified™ Coffee

Oxfam America press release
27 October, 2005

Boston, MA – Oxfam America welcomes McDonald’s announcement today that it will be serving Fair Trade Certified™ coffee in 658 of its restaurants in New England and Albany, NY. Starting Nov. 1, participating locations will be switching 100 percent of their coffee products over to Fair Trade Certified™ organic coffee from Newman’s Own Organics, roasted by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.

“McDonald’s commitment to fair trade is an important step,” said Seth Petchers, coffee program manager for Oxfam America. “This is a sign that the fair trade market is growing in strength and numbers. Other retailers and coffee companies should see this as a wake-up call and follow their lead.” He added, “We are excited about this regional launch, and we hope to see it spread across the country.”

The market for Fair Trade Certified™ coffee has grown by an average of over 70% each year since 1999. Fair trade coffee is available from over 400 coffee companies at 20,000 retail locations across the country—a sign that consumers are making their voices heard.

“Fair trade provides significant benefits to coffee farmers, including enough income to invest in their harvest and in quality improvements,” said Lorenzo Castillo, head of the Junta Nacional del Café, an organization representing small coffee farmers in Peru. Fluctuations in the price of coffee jeopardize small-scale coffee farmers’ businesses. Fair trade, by providing a stable price, helps to mitigate the impact of the coffee crisis, which many farmers continue to suffer through. Castillo continued, “It’s great that McDonald’s has recognized that to secure the highest quality coffee they need to pay farmers a fair price.”

For more information, please contact Helen DaSilva at 617-728-2409 (office) or 617-331-2984 (cell) or via email at hdasilva@oxfamamerica.org.

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Fair Trade in the Washington Post

THE WASHINGTON POST

Gift-Wrapped Guilt?

By Frances Stead Sellers

December 18, 2005

Earlier this month, there was a three-day sale of imported Oriental rugs
at the Mennonite church near my house in Baltimore. “They are a little
pricey,” one of my neighbors warned me wryly, “because the workers are paid
a living wage.” What a concept! The last time I bought an Oriental rug –
years ago in Kashmir — I haggled over the price with little thought for the
well-being of the rugmakers. I was pretty sure most of the profit would go
to the store owner, anyway. But now my already stressful shopping season –
garlanded with aspirations to find creative presents — had been complicated
by the intrusion of altruism: I was meant to worry about the workers.

So it was that I found myself watching another neighbor sort through piles
of richly patterned, hand-knotted rugs, looking for just the right ruby tone
to replace the threadbare floor covering in her dining room. She knew she
probably wouldn’t get a bargain that day, but she had been persuaded by the
saleswoman’s spiel that there was added ethical value to her purchase: Her
investment would support Pakistani craftsmen and women (but no children, of
course) who use looms donated by a charity, Jakciss, that is committed to
building schools and promoting harmony between the country’s Christian and
Muslim populations.

I left the church with a warm feeling about an organization that was helping
to maintain village life half a world away. But without a rug.

Buying a pricey Oriental would have been beyond my budget, I told myself,
and was not, therefore, the right thing for me to do. I’d check out some
cheaper handcrafts instead, and other goods sold to support traditional
artisans and farmers in the developing world. That decision pitched me,
walletfirst, into the moral minefield of the movement known as “ethical
shopping.”

Using buying power to improve the world is a growing commitment among
consumers in this country, according to the rug sellers at the Mennonite
church, who told me that increasing numbers of customers ask well-informed
questions about the conditions under which their purchases had been made.
And it has become big business in Europe, where a fair trade consumer
guarantee was launched almost 20 years ago under the Dutch label Max
Havelaar. The aim back then was to replicate the moral mindset that
charities like Jakciss had fostered around niche handcraft markets and take
it mainstream. According to the umbrella group Fairtrade Labelling
Organizations International (FLO) , there are now fair trade initiatives in
20 countries, including the United States, for such staples as cocoa,
chocolate bars, orange juice, tea, honey, sugar and bananas as well as the
ur-currency of the fair trade world — coffee. Between 2002 and 2003, sales
of these goods grew by 42.3 percent worldwide. But there is also controversy
brewing about just who’s profiting from the guilt-charged spending habits of
the Western world’s consumers.

The pervasiveness of those habits came home to me a couple of months ago
when I was in Britain (the world’s largest fair trade market). My usually
frugal brother sought out ground decaf coffee with the distinctive green and
blue Fairtrade logo — and a higher price tag — for me at the Sainsbury’s
supermarket. Matthew told me he’s prepared to pay more for fair trade “if a
couple of pennies go to the poor grower,” and he also tries to support
people who grow produce locally in Cornwall, where he lives. But, he says,
he’s not holier-than-thou about his shopping, and he sometimes finds that
his two goals conflict. He’ll cast an eye over the ethical shopping reports
that appear in London’s newspapers now that the movement has picked up
enough steam to cater regularly to people like him. The liberal Guardian
reviews the Ethical Consumer Research Association’s “best buys,” which
allocates each purer-than-the-driven-snow product a numerical “ethiscore.”

The knowledge that people like my brother will pick fair trade products
first off the supermarket shelves has prompted many stores to advertise the
fact that they stock fair trade foods. And that has led, others suggest, to
an indigestible melange of entrepreneurship and ethics.

That, at least, is the contention of conservative commentator Philip
Oppenheim, who argued recently that in Britain, it’s supermarkets that
profit most from fair trade sales. They charge a premium for fair trade
bananas, for example, while a “minuscule sliver ends up with the people the
movement is designed to help,” he writes. I’m not sure whether he’s right.
And that’s the root of the problem: I’m a consumer, not a trade expert. I’m
more interested in finding fresh fruit than in investigating profit margins
as I swoop bananas into my shopping cart. But if he is right, Europe’s
experience may be a warning. A Wall Street Journal story last year, about
misleading labeling by some companies here, said that Cafe Borders adjusted
its pricing after it was suggested that the company might be taking
advantage of consumers’ charitable instincts.

If this modern, mainstream incarnation of fair trade is under attack from
the right by those who believe that free trade is the fairest trade of all,
it also risks a hammering from those on the left who feel that all big
business is bad business. As Julian Baggini, who edits the British-based
Philosophers’ Magazine, put it, ethical consumerism “is characterised by
three almost religious convictions: that multinationals are inherently bad;
that the ‘natural’ and organic are inherently superior; and that science and
technology are not to be trusted.” So anti-globalization activists criticize
huge companies such as Levi Strauss and Starbucks, even though Levi Strauss
was among the first multinationals to establish a code of conduct for its
manufacturing contractors and Starbucks is one of North America’s largest
roasters and retailers of fair trade coffee. And both can probably afford to
be more altruistic than many smaller companies.

These days, Starbucks should be able to harvest a steady crop of customers
with a thirst for fair trade coffee. TransFair USA , the California-based
FLO member that certifies imports to the United States, reported a 91
percent increase in fair trade coffee imports into the United States — from
9.8 million pounds in 2002 to 18.7 million pounds in 2003 — and a 76
percent increase the following year. When I went to a D.C. Starbucks on 15th
and K Streets, near my office, I did find some green packets of Fair Trade
Certified{+T}{+M} coffee beans tucked away at the back of a display stand,
and they didn’t cost any more than the other coffee. But when I ordered a
cup of fair trade coffee, I was told there wasn’t any — and that I was the
first customer to have requested it. Perhaps K Street isn’t the best place
to look for ethically aware buyers, but Starbucks itself exudes a corporate
philosophy brimming with goodwill: As Chairman Howard Schultz wrote in his
2004 report, a company “can do good and do well at the same time.”

At this time of the year, some people I know have taken the idea of doing
good by buying well to greater heights than I ever will. Over dinner a
couple of weeks ago, a friend told me what he was planning to give his adult
sons this Christmas: a heifer (to be donated to a family in the developing
world by Heifer International, the charity whose goal is “Ending hunger,
caring for the earth”) and a bag of stone-ground cornmeal (from an
18th-century Pennsylvania grist mill, which is preserved as a museum “for
the pleasure and education of the public”).

Unlike my friend, I’m prepared to toss a little tinsel over my conscience
and spend some money for fun instead of for socially responsible reasons.
Still, I did buy toothpaste from Tom’s of Maine (which donates 10 percent of
profits and 5 percent of paid worker time to charity). I bought stocking
stuffers from the Body Shop, whose founder Anita Roddick is savvy enough to
leaven her company’s earnest mission statement (”To dedicate our business to
the pursuit of social and environmental change”) with such sprightly scents
as “Zest for Satsuma” and “Perfect Passion.”

And I bought handmade soap (crafted from natural oils by traditional Indian
soap makers) as well as folded paper Christmas ornaments (made by a group
that supports disadvantaged Bangladeshis) from a special seasonal outlet of
Ten Thousand Villages, which is the company that distributes the Jakciss
rugs. And I enjoyed finding out more about the artisans on the company’s
informative Web site.

But I’m left with a conundrum. I want to do the right thing, but I’m not
prepared to make a career of it. It’s not hard to find criticisms online
about the Body Shop, for example; it’s much harder to verify them. And I’m
much less interested in checking out the story behind the bananas I buy than
I am in the origin of those origami ornaments. What’s more, despite efforts
by nonprofits like TransFair and the International Fair Trade Association or
IFAT (which monitors companies like Ten Thousand Villages), there’s a lot of
room for misleading labeling in our ethical shopping baskets. So when it
comes to my food shopping in particular, I’m left wondering whether I would
be doing just as much good if I simply bought the best bargain and sent the
money I had saved to a development charity (as Oppenheim would have me do).
Best of all might be to buy locally whenever possible, like my brother.

Even the purchase that I believe was one of my most ethical is
controversial. I bought a lamb. No, not a lamb like my friend’s heifer,
which will help feed a family in the developing world for years to come. My
lamb will feed my already well-fed family in the weeks to come. I bought it
– butchered and packaged for my freezer — from my daughter’s old
kindergarten teacher, who lives on a farm and used to bring orphaned lambs
to school to be bottle-fed.

I can’t pretend that I was motivated by the need to provide the workers with
a living wage, although I do know that running a profitable business helps
keep property taxes down and therefore keep the farmland open. No, I bought
the lamb largely because the more I’ve read about the lives of animals that
end up shrink-wrapped on supermarket shelves, the more I’ve developed a
distaste for mass-produced meat. So it struck me as a principled stance to
know that the animal I’m eating led a happy, hormone-free life, even if it
was a short one.

But try telling my vegetarian friends that. Or even the carnivorous friends
who came to dinner last Sunday and could hardly stomach the fact that I had
such intimate knowledge of the creature I was carving.

One man’s meat, you see, can be another man’s ethical predicament.

Author’s e-mail:
sellersf@washpost.com

Frances Stead Sellers is an assistant editor of Outlook.

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Ugandan Cooperative Mirembe Kawomera in the News

Muslim, Jewish, and Christian coffee farmers make mirembe kawomera—delicious peace

Yes Magazine, Winter 2006 Issue: Spiritual Uprising
Java Justice
by Dee Axelrod

Mirembe Kawomera coffee delivers a double jolt.

First, there’s the caffeine, but right behind that tang comes the jolt of learning that the arabica beans were sold by an alliance of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Ugandan­ farmers.

This unique cooperative in the Mbale region of Uganda is Mirembe Kawomera—Delicious Peace. Their coffee comes to market fairly traded, distributed by Thanksgiving Coffee, a Fort Bragg, California, company specializing in organic and fair trade produce.

By banding together and by establishing a fair trade relationship, the farmers now realize enough profits from sales to meet their families’ basic need­s—a sharp contrast to the hardship of trying to sell as individuals to large corporate buyers in a glutted world market. Better circumstances have, in turn, sweetened relations between the unique Mbale Jewish community and their more numerous Muslim and Christian neighbors.

The notion of forming a coffee cooperative was first conceived by Jewish community leader J.J. Keki as an economic survival tactic. In 1999, a worldwide coffee crisis developed as overproduction in new Brazilian and Vietnamese markets sent prices plummeting. The Mbale farmers were among the many growers who were hurt. Coffee farmers were forced to curtail children’s education so that the youngsters could go to work, or to sell off land their families had cultivated for generations.

In 2004, Keki went door-to-door, encouraging farmers of all faiths to band together. The alliance would be a first; interfaith relations had been strained since the establishment of the Ugandan Jewish community in 1919, when charismatic general Semei Kakungulu and followers converted to Judaism, rather than embrace the Christianity proffered by the British.

“The most serious problem for us is religious prejudice,” Keki said. “In Uganda, a Jew is referred to as a ‘Christ killer.’ Sometimes we have failed job interviews just because we are Jews.” And Muslim Ugandans, says Keki, believe that the Jews have been abandoned by God.

Keki can also recall how his father, during Idi Amin’s rule in the 1970s, narrowly missed punishment when he was caught studying the forbidden Torah. Fortunately, Keki says, the authorities were willing to accept a bribe of five goats in exchange for his father’s life.

But the history of prejudice would have to become less important than present concerns if the Mbale farmers were to survive in 2004. Keki, who had been supported by Muslims and Christians, as well as Jews, in a successful 2002 bid for a Namanyonyi Sub-County council seat, was widely considered a credible leader. Now, 400 farmers of all three faiths joined to form the coffee cooperative.

“We brainstormed,” Keki said, “and through participatory discussions we came up with the Mirembe Kawomera Cooperative.”

The diverse religious groups came together, Keki says, by focusing on what united them.

We looked to common things that were reflected in the holy books,” Keki said. “For example, we all acknowledge that we greet with the word of ‘peace’: shalom, salaam, mirembe.”

The next step was finding a market. Mirembe Kawomera got a break when American vocalist Laura Wetzler intervened. Wetzler learned about the Ugandan jews in the mid-1990s when she heard their Hebrew-African music on public radio.

Wetzler said. “I wrote away and got the tape. I learned all the songs, and I started telling the Abayu­daya’s stories in my concert work.” As coordinator of Kulanu, a Jewish nonprofit organizing community-development projects, Wexler had a mandate to help Mirembe Kawomera find a coffee market. She made 40 phone calls before Thanksgiving Coffee’s CEO, Paul Katzeff, agreed to buy the beans.

Next, Wetzler found a cooperative near Mbale that had already obtained the expensive Fair Trade certification the coffee would need to be sold through Thanksgiving. The Mirembe Kawomera Cooperative would buy farmers’ produce, which would then be processed through the nearby co-op and shipped to California.

Katzeff guarantees the farmers 20 to 40 cents per pound higher return than conventionally traded coffee. That makes their produce dependably lucrative for the farmers. There are other fair trade benefits, as well. Mirembe Kawomera can count on Katzeff’s commitment to an ongoing trade relationship, rather than having to cope with the insecurity of looking for a market each season. And Thanksgiving, like other fair trade buyers, contributes regularly to community development projects in Mbale. Thanksgiving’s contribution of one dollar for every package sold recently helped open and support a school there. The fair trade co-op has been so successful, Keki wants to see it duplicated.

“We hope to make the cooperative a model of championing development in communities,” he said. “We also hope that other cooperatives will emulate the principles of Mirembe and bring about peaceful coexistence. We get along very much better. You can’t believe the peace and harmony that this community has enjoyed since the cooperative society was formed.”

Dee Axelrod is senior editor at YES!

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Fair Trade Roaster Equal Exchange in the News
Gourmet coffee, high ideals

The Enterprise
By Jean Porrazzo

A gourmet coffee company’s novel business approach is paying off.

Equal Exchange, a worker-owned, fair trade company, has doubled its sales in just three years.

“You might expect this for a start-up company, but we will be celebrating our 20th anniversary in May,” said Rodney North, information coordinator. “We’ve averaged over 33 percent growth annually over the 20 years.”

Fair trade, North said, means an equitable and fair partnership between marketers in North America and producers in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other parts of the world. A fair trade partnership works to provide low-income artisans and farmers with a living wage for their work.

Equal Exchange buys organic coffee, tea, cocoa, chocolate and sugar directly from democratic small-farmer cooperatives and pays a higher-than-market price, which gives farmers greater control over their livelihood.

These organic fair trade products not only ensure small farmers get a fair deal but protect the environment as well, North said.

When the specialty coffee company introduced its business philosophy to the industry 20 years ago, experts said it wouldn’t work, he said.

But the coffee company that lives up to its name proved them wrong — sales increased from $10.1 million in 2002 to $20.5 million in 2005, according to the company’s 2005 annual report.

Today, coffee giant Dunkin’ Donuts uses fair trade coffee beans for its specialty coffee drinks, including espressos, lattes and cappuccinos since April 2003, and McDonald’s has been serving Newman’s organic fair trade coffee since November.

“You never thought you’d see that 20 years ago,” North said.

The gourmet coffee company, which has 75 workers, outgrew its Canton location and moved to more spacious headquarters at 50 United Drive in August 2004.

“We debated for a month on where to move before deciding that it couldn’t be more than 15 minutes from the previous location,” he said.

The new location has plenty of room for future growth and can also accommodate the new coffee roaster that will help keep up with the growing demand for the company’s specialty coffees.

The $1.7 million fire-engine red, traditional German drum roaster is a large cast-iron drum that rotates over a burner that is adjusted during the roasting process.

The process begins with the green coffee beans stored in 100-pound burlap sacks on wooden pallets. The beans are poured into a hopper, where they are sorted and cleaned before traveling through chutes and tubes into the roaster, where temperatures reach 400 degrees.

“Ten seconds too long, and the batch can be ruined,” North said.

The beans turn dark brown in the roasting and then move on to the cooling process. After they’re cooled, the beans travel through more chutes and tubes on their way to the packaging machinery where the roasted beans end up in the company’s colorful packages.

Equal Exchange offers 40 varieties of specialty, arabica coffees from cooperatives in Latin America, Africa and Asia; three gourmet organic chocolate bars that combine cocoa from three cooperatives in the Dominican Republic and Peru; single-serving packages of sugar from cooperatives in Paraguay and Costa Rica, and three teas from India.

Equal Exchange’s line of coffee is available at Shaw’s supermarkets and many Stop & Shop locations, and many of its other products are available at natural and organic specialty markets.

Coffee prices range from $9 per pound to $11.50 for decaffeinated, chocolate bars are $34.95 for a box of 12 3.5-ounce bars, and 25 tea bags cost $4.

The Rockin’ K Cafe in Bridgewater serves Equal Exchange coffee.

The environmental movement spurred the demand for “environmentally friendly” products and now consumers want “people-friendly products,” North said.

The gourmet coffee company operates like “a small-town government,” he said.

“All those people are worker-owners,” North said, pointing to a graphic of the company model. “Each owner has one vote, can run for the board and make proposals.”

Equal Exchange is the sixth largest worker-owned cooperative in the country, and North hopes the company’s success will entice others to adopt its philosophy.

“If society can be organized democratically, why can’t we apply that to the workplace?” he said.

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Fair Trade Featured on NPR

On Thursday, November 10th, the Leonard Lopate Show featured Teruneh Zenna, Ethiopia’s ambassador to the UN, Jim Munson, Vice President of local roaster Dallis Coffee, and Paul Rice, CEO of Transfair USA. The three guests discussed coffee’s importance to Ethiopia’s economy, and the benefits and far-reaching potential of Fair Trade.

To hear the show, visit:
http://wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/11102005 and click on “Listen to the whole show”

In the spring of 2004 Congregation B’nai Jeshurun (BJ), a renowned progressive and innovative synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side (and New York’s second oldest) organized an Environmental Action Committee in the framework of its tikkun olam (social action/social justice) mission. In its introductory sessions, the nascent committee debated a wide array of issues that it might address, from bus-exhaust pollution in the South Bronx to shutting down the Indian Point nuclear power plant. Eventually, we settled on promoting the availability and consumption of Fair Trade Certified coffee (FTC) on the Upper West Side as our issue, because it had impacts both on the protection of fragile tropical environments where coffee is grown and on economic justice for the poor, often exploited, farmers who grow it. We also felt that it was a project that could produce concrete, measurable results in a relatively short time and in which B’nai Jeshurun could take a leading role on an issue that was not being addressed elsewhere.

The initial objectives of the campaign were to

-Get our congregation to purchase and serve only FT coffee (and tea) for all synagogue functions
-Promote consumption of FT coffee by BJ members in their homes and businesses
-Greatly expand the availability of FT coffee in food stores and restaurants on the Upper West Side (UWS).

The first objective was easily achieved, when the synagogue’s administrators readily agreed to make the switch. The second objective’s success is much harder to measure, since we did not undertake any systematic survey of congregants’ coffee-consumption practices, either before or at the end of the campaign. The effort was no doubt enhanced, however, by the synagogue’s publicizing its own adoption of FTC. The effort was further advanced by bringing the director of a Ethiopia’s largest coffee cooperative to speak at Shabbat morning services about how Fair Trade had improved the lives of his community and protected their environment. Anecdotally, a number of congregants told us that they changed to FT coffee as a result of our campaign.

We intended to achieve the third objective by sending committee members door-to-door on the UWS in an organized campaign to speak to store managers and restaurant managers about offering FTC to their customers, and by mobilizing congregation members to do the same at places where they regularly shopped and dined, in order to create increased demand for the product. This objective proved more elusive, largely due to the reluctance of most committee members to undertake this kind of hands-on advocacy. Our one major push, on the iconic New York gourmet food emporium, proved unavailing. Nevertheless, individual committee members, in a less-organized fashion, did approach many merchants and restaurateurs, with some success in the form of specific new offerings of FTC at a number of UWS establishments.

Our greatest success, however, was an achievement that had not even been envisaged when the project was launched. Arising our of a casual conversation with committee members who were tabling for FTC at a Broadway street fair, New York City Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who represents the Upper West Side, offered to introduce a resolution in which the City Council would endorse the practice of Fair Trade, compliment those who promote it, and call upon the New York City government to purchase only Fair Trade coffee for municipal use. She then challenged us to mobilize the necessary support from the community – which she thought would be difficult – to prevail on a majority of the City Council to adopt the Resolution.

The prospect of a City Council resolution was an idea that gained greater traction with committee members, who organized outreach to other religious institutions around the city to lobby their Council members in favor of this resolution. We concentrated our lobbying efforts on the council members who served on the committee that had jurisdiction over the resolution, which would have to endorse the resolution before it could come to a vote before the full council. We were assured that if the committee passed the bill, adoption by the full council would be virtually assured, but that getting the committee to even hold a hearing on the resolution – much less pass it – would be a real challenge, since only a small minority of resolutions introduced into the council ever get such a hearing. The principal focus of our lobbying effort was the chairman of the committee of jurisdiction (Libraries and Cultural and International Affairs), who represented a district in South Brooklyn, far from the Upper West Side, where BJ had virtually no members.

Long story short, we succeeded in persuading the chairman to hold a hearing on June 10, 2005, and mobilized four high-powered witnesses (including a labor union spokesman, a small-business owner, and former City Councilwoman and Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger) to testify in favor of the resolution. The committee passed the resolution unanimously, and two weeks later, the full City Council unanimously adopted it as Resolution 762-2005.

In the course of the campaign, we attracted a number of activists from outside the congregation to work on behalf of the resolution. In fact, by the end they provided most of the energy and outnumbered the BJ members in the committee, whose numbers in the campaign had dwindled to a handful. At the conclusion of the campaign, such a large and diverse coalition of people and organizations had come together around the Fair Trade issue, that we decided that they should reconstitute themselves as a new organization, the New York City Fair Trade Coalition, of which B’nai Jeshurun would become a member.

The NYCFTC has since burgeoned and continues to work to promote Fair Trade in many different spheres, including an effort to get the city government to act on Resolution 762 in its procurement practices. Although the BJ Environmental Action Committee has moved on to other issues, this coalition may prove to be its most lasting legacy.

Creating a Market for Fair Trade

Entrepreneurs and an international group team up to open a shop that sells goods produced by poor farmers and artisans.

By Evelyn Iritani

Times Staff Writer

August 5, 2006

WASHINGTON — Sunil Shrestha knows all about inventory and cash flow from his years operating Dairy Queen and IHOP franchises. But nothing in his entrepreneurial career prepared him for his current challenges.

What do you do when a South African supplier can’t deliver on time because the only woman who knows how to make its intricately beaded baskets has died? What is a reasonable price to pay poor Indonesians who are weaving bags out of recycled garbage? And where, in the nation’s capital, can one find milk produced in an environmentally friendly manner?

“If we can make this sustainable, we can help the artisans,” Shrestha said of his current business, a showcase for goods made by poor farmers and handicraft producers from around the world. “If this goes into a loss, we can’t help anyone.”

Pangea Artisan Market & Cafe represents a pioneering effort by the entrepreneur and his partners at the International Finance Corp., the private-sector arm of the World Bank Group, to enlist Americans in the campaign against global poverty.

The newly opened venture, which looks more like a high-end boutique than a development program, is on the ground floor of IFC’s Washington headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, not far from the White House.

Pangea is a departure for IFC, long the target of activist critics who say it favors the interests of big corporations over those of the poor, and an advance in the growing fair-trade movement, which is finding more acceptance among American customers.

To earn a space at Pangea, its 50-plus suppliers have agreed to act ethically, providing their workers fair wages and working conditions as well as promising not to use child labor or harm the environment. But they also have to deliver their products on time and within budget.

“This isn’t about charity,” said Harold Rosen, the driving force behind Pangea and director of IFC’s Grassroots Business Initiative. “We want to show that business can work for poor people.”

Pangea, from the Greek word for “all lands,” might more loosely be translated in this case as “retail with a conscience.”

Along one wall are shelves stocked with silk handbags and scarves produced by nonprofit group Hagar, which supports a shelter for abused women in Cambodia. The colorful woven baskets were produced by Gone Rural, a group of more than 750 artisans in Swaziland that supports HIV and AIDS patients. A stamped metal saxophone was crafted from recycled oil drums by a Haitian artist.

At the counter, shoppers can pick up a latte brewed with fair-trade coffee imported by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. or a smoothie whipped up from a ginger-coconut mixture produced in Indonesia. Fair-trade cocoa grown in Ghana was used to make the Divine brand chocolate bars.

Products carry tags that can be swiped at an interactive kiosk, giving shoppers short videos about the producers. Half of the producers have received some form of help such as loans and technical assistance from IFC.

The organization has been criticized by anti-globalization critics who view it as a U.S. tool to promote big infrastructure projects such as dams that benefit multinational companies yet may do little to help poor farmers, crafts workers and other needy residents.

But Rosen said few people knew about his division, which has 600 people working on projects to help small and medium-sized businesses.

Last year, the organization said it devoted a significant portion of its $1.95 billion in operating income to support the Grassroots Business Initiative.

“I wanted people to know that not everything we do is the target of the demonstrators,” he said.

Pangea already has a fan in Barbara Tesner, who dropped by on her way home from her job at George Washington University. She said she was impressed by the quality of the goods and pleasantly surprised to discover the shop’s social mission.

“I’m trying to look for things that have a broader impact,” she said. “I’m an ex-hippie.”

Not everyone views IFC’s kinder, gentler image — and the fair-trade philosophy behind it — positively.

William Easterly, a former World Bank economist who teaches at New York University, called the fair-trade movement a “brilliant marketing ploy” that had shown limited success in reducing poverty. He said a far better way to help poor African farmers would be to remove the barriers that prevent them from exporting their sugar and cotton to the U.S. and Europe.

“All the aid agencies are falling victim to the same kind of politically correct, so-called socially responsible thinking,” Easterly said. “The question is: Who decides what is socially responsible?”

For their part, supporters say the fair-trade movement is a proven tool for helping the poorest of the poor get their goods into a global market tilted toward the biggest companies and countries. And it is attracting more attention from customers concerned about the exploitation of impoverished workers and the environment.

For example, fair-trade products are the fastest-growing segment of the $22-billion U.S. coffee market. Shoppers bought nearly $500 million of fair-trade ground coffee and beans last year, compared with less than $50 million in 2000, according to TransFair USA, an Oakland-based nonprofit that certifies fair-trade food products such as coffee, tea and herbs. The biggest sellers are Starbucks Corp. of Seattle and Green Mountain of Waterbury, Vt.

Fair-trade group Ten Thousand Villages just opened a store in the South Lake Avenue shopping district of Pasadena, its first in California.

The name of the organization, which was started in 1946 by the Mennonite Central Committee in Pennsylvania, was inspired by the words of Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi that his country could “not be found in the few cities but in the 700,000 villages.”

Priya Haji, co-founder and chief executive of World of Good, a Berkeley-based fair-trade distributor, said some groups had questioned IFC’s motives for entering this arena. But she said she welcomed the competition, particularly if it helped expand the market for such goods beyond a handful of stores, church bazaars and the Internet.

By the end of the year, Haji said, the World of Good brand would have placed half a million fair-trade products in kiosks in 1,100 stores, including campus retailers, independent bookstores and Whole Foods Market Inc. locations. As customer demand increases, she said, it will put pressure on mainstream retailers to carry such goods.

“Now, you have Wal-Mart selling organic milk,” she said.

But launching poor artisans into the global marketplace has proved challenging. Most of the producers are women, many of whom live in remote areas and work at home. Their sponsors often are volunteers whose primary purpose is to provide a social service, such as supporting an HIV-AIDS clinic.

Joshua Morris, a consultant working with IFC, said small artisan organizations were being forced to pay more attention to the bottom line or risk losing their development aid.

His group, Emerging Markets Consulting, has set up a fair-trade network linking five artisan groups in Cambodia. Morris’ organization, working from its base in the country’s capital, Phnom Penh, provides technical and marketing assistance, including advice on redesigning products to suit Western tastes or bodies.

At Pangea, Sunil Shrestha and his brother Deepak lease the space and manage the shop; IFC provides the educational materials and helps find suppliers. The Shresthas, who had immigrated from Nepal, got involved in the project after seeing a request for bids on IFC’s website. They still have their fast-food franchises and a software development company.

Coming from a poor country, the Shresthas understand the desperate conditions facing their suppliers. And there are many more vying for Pangea’s shelf space, judging from the brothers’ crowded e-mail boxes and the samples piling up in their small office.

The Shresthas, who hope to break even by year-end, have discovered that even customers with a social conscience expect their goods to be priced competitively. Most of Pangea’s products sell for less than $100.

If Pangea hits its goal of $1 million in sales this first year, the Shresthas hope to expand their fair-trade business across the United States.

“We’re especially interested in San Francisco and L.A.,” said Deepak Shrestha, who hopes to be selling on the Web soon. “People there are even more conscious of this fair-trade, ethical-trade sort of thing.”

Financial Times (London, England)

July 22, 2006 Saturday

Follow the thread From the fields of Mali to a rack of jeans in Marks and Spencer, Alan Beattie investigates the spin-offs for those growing and selling the latest Fairtrade product: cotton

By ALAN BEATTIE

It was when Peter Mandelson, Europe’s trade commissioner, produced a bar of Fairtrade chocolate during his parliamentary confirmation hearing that it became clear how far the movement had come. Mandelson, a skilled practitioner of political image and branding, knows a bandwagon when he sees one.

The distinctive Fairtrade mark, a waving figure against a blue and green background, once appeared only on chocolate and coffee bought by earnest vegetarian liberals in charity shops. Now it sanctifies hundreds of products from dozens of producers and retailers. Socially conscious European consumers, especially from Switzerland and Britain, have led the way. But Fairtrade aspires to be more than charity. It wants to help the world’s poor not through aid but by changing their relationship with the market to which they sell.

Fairtrade is not alone in using branding and the market to help the poor. “Product Red”, a brand launched this year by rock star and aid activist Bono and former music producer Bobby Shriver, has signed up some huge companies - American Express, Giorgio Armani, Gap, Motorola - to launch Red versions of their products. Some of the profits will go to combat Aids in Africa. In May, Bono made a whistle-stop tour of Africa and told me along the way how the right marketing could rescue struggling farmers and sickly industries from failure.

As Fairtrade expands beyond its niche it attracts scrutiny and suspicion. The economist’s automatic critique is that paying above the market price encourages farmers to stay in unprofitable sectors, inducing oversupply and pushing down prices for everyone else. Others think it well intentioned in theory but corrupt in practice, with European supermarket chains and international commodity brokers reaping more benefit than Guatemalan farmers.

The market share of Fairtrade-labelled products remains low even in its best markets - only 4 per cent of the UK’s instant- coffee sales, though nearly a fifth of the roasted and ground market - but both profile and sales are rising rapidly. Global sales of Fairtrade-labelled goods have risen by between 40 and 60 per cent in the past three years. Last year it won a special recognition prize from Superbrands, an annual marketing publication. Tony Blair made sure that Fairtrade tea and coffee was served at the Group of Eight rich countries’ summit in Gleneagles last year.

Fairtrade’s move into the mainstream was confirmed when Marks and Spencer, the iconic retailer of middle England, led the charge into a new commodity. Having already decided to switch all its coffee and tea in its stores to Fairtrade, earlier this year M&S started stocking T-shirts made from Fairtrade cotton. Recently it announced a plan for Fairtrade denim jeans. Some of the cotton will come from the impoverished west African state of Mali where Fairtrade has already made farmers visibly, and gratefully, better off.

The principle of Fairtrade labelling, which started in the Netherlands in 1988, is quite simple. Farmers, generally small- scale co-operatives in developing countries, are guaranteed a price above the world market price, making them richer and insulating them from big swings in global commodity prices. In coffee, for example, the grower of any arabica (higher-quality) coffee bean is guaranteed whichever is the higher of Dollars 1.26 per pound or five cents above the world market price, which is currently around Dollars 1 per pound. Co-operatives are also paid a variable “social premium” to be spent collectively on projects of communal benefit.

Prices are set and permission to use the Fairtrade mark granted by the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation (FLO), a Berlin-based non- profit association, and its national chapters, of which the Fairtrade Foundation is the British one. To become “certified” as Fairtrade, which costs a small fee, a co-operative has to convince inspectors contracted to FLO that it meets basic environmental and labour standards and is able to decide collectively on what to spend the social premium. Later on in the production chain, the wholesaler pays Fairtrade an extra levy of 2 per cent of the product’s value, which pays for FLO’s 100 or so staff and running costs.

Coffee, Fairtrade’s most high-profile product, is a relatively easy product to certify, with few links between grower and consumer, and a premium for beans from a single source. Cotton, by contrast, which achieved its first Fairtrade labelling just last year, has long, politically taut, economically entangled skeins of supply that wind intricately around the globe.

Success in cotton would be a big victory for Fairtrade, for historical symbolism as well as modern-day commerce. Cotton was once a blood-soaked crop of slavery, exploitation and empire. In America’s southern states, enslaved west Africans were imported in their thousands to tear their fingers raw picking cotton in the searing heat. In British India, cotton grown by colonial subjects was imported cheaply to the imperial headquarters, turned into clothing and sold back to the captive markets for profit.

Eleven million growers raise cotton today in the west African states of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali and Senegal, where the crop connects them, however tenuously, to the global economy. In a vicious historical twist, those millions of black farmers are undercut by the 35,000-or-so mainly white farmers in the former slave states of Texas and the American south. Some Dollars 4bn dollars a year in federal government handouts encourages high-cost American farmers to dump subsidised cotton on the world market, depressing its price.

Mali, formerly French Sudan, is a landlocked country whose outer extremities, beyond the mystical city of Timbuktu, stretch north and east into the Sahara. The cotton-growing areas are in the west, closer to Bamako, the capital. Terry Townsend, executive director of the International Cotton Advisory Council, a grouping of cotton- growing nations, says Mali has “near-perfect agronomic conditions”. Heavy rainfall in early summer helps establish the cotton plants and the soil and grilling sun do the rest.

Malian cotton is high quality, the climate and soil producing long fibres (or “staple”) that make finer cloth. The cotton is picked by hand rather than machine, so each individual cotton “boll” or seed pod can be harvested at the optimal time as pickers make successive passes over the field.

It is hard to walk through a village in a Fairtrade co-operative without seeing tangible signs of unaccustomed income. Batimakana is a village of a few hundred families in the traditional farming area of Kita - a region that will supply cotton for M&S jeans. The houses are mainly typical Malian huts of mud, thatch and straw, but when I visit in early June every third or fourth dwelling has a motorbike outside - a lifeline more than a luxury, given that the nearest medical clinic is 10 kilometres away.

The price differential between Fairtrade and conventional cotton is significant. For a kilo of raw cotton, the Fairtrade minimum price is 36 eurocents (or 238 west African francs, the old French imperial currency known as FCFA, now pegged to the euro); this year conventional cotton will fetch 24 eurocents.

The village feels remote but is not isolated. My conversations with the residents are interrupted not just by a bleating goat that, with superb comic timing, bursts loudly into the circle of villagers to join a discussion on crop diversification, but also by the arrival of a giant orange truck towering over the village, delivering cotton seed and fertiliser for the planting season.

The male elders of the village are swathed in robes and turbans and dignified with venerable age, several with eyes rheumy or sightless from river blindness disease. Though both sexes claim that Fairtrade has helped to promote equality by involving everyone in the decision about spending the social premium, the women sit separately and speak up less.

They are, predictably, deeply grateful for the Fairtrade price they are paid. Mamadou Keita, the head of the farm co-operative, says: “We get a double benefit from Fairtrade - a higher price for families, and the premium for the village.” It lets families send children to school. It means they can buy seeds for vegetables and ox-drawn ploughs for their fields. It also, he points out, bought the plastic chairs that the translators and I are sitting on.

In Batimakana, two years’ worth of social premium has built a concrete grain store. Dozens of bags of maize and other staple foods are stacked high in the cool, dark interior. The village uses the store to prevent big swings in food prices, buying grain cheaply after harvest and releasing it gradually through the year.

In Dougourakoroni, another Fairtrade certified community in the region, the premium has built a brick school in the village. Previously, children had to walk 7km to school, and fewer attended. In newly built classrooms on the edge of the cotton fields, a class of 11-year-olds has been set an intriguing essay subject: chalked on the blackboard is the forbidding injunction: “Definis la liberte” (Define liberty).

In these villages at least, concerns about reliance on a single crop seem overdone. Since cotton is a greedy plant that strips the soil of nutrients, it has traditionally been rotated with other crops, and that has not changed. Malian farmers can choose from a range of options: maize, cashew nuts, groundnuts (peanuts), sesame seeds and a plant called poughere, whose oil is made into soap and is being tested as a biofuel.

Soloba Mady Keita is head of Kita’s association of growers. Wearing long traditional African dress, quick to smile and exuding serenity and self-possession, he has a vaguely priestly air. “For now, cotton is the main crop in the country and the only one that brings high prices,” he says. “Until another comes along, we will fight to protect this one.”

Worries about inducing oversupply also look somewhat over the top, given that any co-operative growing any product anywhere in the world can sell only as much at Fairtrade prices as has been ordered from that co-operative by buyers. Cotton is an annual crop, so farmers know their demand before planting. All of Mali’s cotton is bought by the state marketing board, which sells it on to the big cotton brokers of Europe and America. If farmers produce more than contracted under a Fairtrade agreement, they can sell the rest at conventional prices, but are not guaranteed to make money from it.

In theory, Fairtrade prices could encourage non-cotton-growing villages to enter the market, but as yet there is little evidence. In Batimakana, just as before, only 20 per cent of the land is used for cotton, though farmers say quality has improved. Mamadou Toungara, head of Batimakana village, says: “We will keep growing cotton as long as people keep buying it. We will change if the next cash crop is more profitable. But we haven’t found it yet.”

In fact, if anything, it is the supply infrastructure for cotton that enables farmers to diversify, there being no other practical ways of delivering fertiliser and trucking out produce. Like many African state marketing boards, Mali’s has been criticised for passing less than half the export earnings on to the farmers, raising complaints about inefficiency and possible corruption. But it does deliver seeds, pesticide and fertiliser to farmers on credit - the orange truck in Batimakana - and collects the cotton after harvest. Malian farmers growing other crops will often also contract to grow cotton because it is their only source of fertiliser. Opening up this market by privatising marketing boards, as was tried in Burkina Faso and proposed in Mali, has made no apparent change to efficiency.

As villagers point out, a Fairtrade contract often encourages farmers to increase the quality of the crop to get repeat orders. Since there is already an established international market for organic cotton, some co-operatives choose to produce organic Fairtrade, requiring two separate inspections but receiving a double premium.

The long-term future for Malian cotton is uncertain. Even with a Fairtrade-guaranteed price, growing commodities is not a road to riches, and Mali is struggling to rebuild the fully integrated cotton-to-clothing industry it once had before it was blown away by Bangladesh and China. Mali already has “ginning” factories that separate bolls into cotton lint and seeds. But a pilot project to move to spinning, one step further, is underperforming, and spinning Fairtrade cotton poses particular difficulties.

Fitina is a spinning factory built four years ago just outside Bamako. Government-backed, and initially attracting investment from Brazil and Malaysia, it is supposed to be spinning 5 per cent of Mali’s cotton but probably processes less than 2 per cent. An unremarkable metal hangar from outside, the mill’s warm, humidified interior clatters with serried rows of machines performing the seven or eight stages of turning raw cotton lint into thread. Workers standing waist-deep in lint laboriously pull apart and mix together fibres from different batches - a task usually mechanised in modern factories.

Patrick Mathieu, the plant’s production director, is a spare, taut Frenchman of 56 who spent 12 years running textile factories in Cote d’Ivoire. He came to Fitina three years ago and is blunt about the factory’s problems. “We have not even managed to start using all the machines yet,” he told me. “There have been technical problems and great difficulty finding electricians and people with experience in industry.” Coups and unrest in Cote d’Ivoire, Mali’s historical route to the sea, have not helped. Cotton exports can be routed through Senegal, but Mathieu says its port is slow and overloaded.

In theory, spinning Fairtrade cotton has the advantage of less competition. Although Fairtrade certifies only growers, it requires all producers in the supply chain to adhere to basic labour standards, including the right to join an independent trade union, which essentially rules China out. But because the batch needs to be kept separate, spinning Fairtrade lint requires a faintly bizarre and time-consuming ritual. Every machine has first to be shut down and cleared of conventional cotton from the previous run before the Fairtrade bundles are fed in. It can take several days to do the switchover, and Mathieu says some Fairtrade batches are too small to make it worthwhile.

A more all-encompassing approach to supply chains is being tested within the Product Red family. Most Red products are unrelated to Africa, but a notable exception is Gap’s Red T-shirt, made entirely in Africa from African cotton. The cutting and sewing is done in Lesotho, a nation surrounded by South Africa and, in a continent of republics, inevitably referred to as the “mountain kingdom”. Its garment exports were boosted in the late 1990s by US trade privileges for some African countries. But it suffered badly when a global system of textile quotas expired at the start of 2005, and low-cost Chinese manufacturers were given a free run at the world market.

Gap, Bono says, was about to leave Africa altogether. He and Bobby Shriver persuaded them to stay. I timed my run to Mali to coincide with Bono’s 24 hours in the country during his tour of the continent. Over bottles of Castle beer in the hotel bar in Bamako, Bono rejects my suggestion that he is merely delaying the inevitable extinction of African garment makers. “I think there is a failure in the market that Red intends to address,” he says. “We all know the story about teaching a man to fish rather than giving him a fish, but this is about getting the fish to market.”

Africa can’t beat China on price without improbable leaps in productivity. But with the right promotion Bono believes it could regain a market foothold among consumers who will pay more to guarantee minimum benefits and working conditions for producers. He and his wife Alison last year launched a high-end clothing line called Edun (”nude” backwards), which uses organic cotton and sources from Africa where possible. Watching a fashion show in which the Lesotho textile workers model their own merchandise, Bono says, he had an epiphany: “I saw these beautiful golden royal Africans and I thought: God, this is just such a sexy place. And it can be sexier than the competition.”

He and Bobby Shriver are quite clear that Red needs to be a commercial proposition from which companies make profits. Shriver says that, to his surprise, it took a long time to get the initial handful of companies on board. Consumer labels take risks when they sign up to a cross-company label they do not control, and need to show profits. “We don’t want this to be altruistic,” Shriver said during his attendance at the global economic gabfest at Davos in January. “Red will fail if it is weighed down by worthiness.”

As with any other brand, consumers of Red are buying an identity, in this case compassionate, engaged, globally aware and, Bono hopes, “that this is a sexy and smart club to be part of. That it is sexy to change the world, to buy antiretroviral drugs for (HIV- positive) people who will die without them.”

The drive to find the right marketing pitch, though, may not always respect liberal niceties. “There’s this guy Russell Simmons,” Bono says. “Hip-hop impresario, created Phat Farm (a clothing line that infuses mainstream fashion with urban cool), friend of Bobby’s. He was saying: ‘This Made in Africa thing sounds kinda cheap.’ I said: But Lesotho’s this incredible mountain kingdom. He said: ‘Made in the Mountain Kingdom? Now that sounds great. That sounds expensive.’”

In the search for authenticity, interest is spreading even among less wealthy European and American consumers about the provenance of their food and clothing. A standard bag of English-grown Cox’s apples from Sainsbury’s, the mid-level supermarket chain, now comes stamped with the name of the orchard’s owner.

A cheese stall in London’s hip Borough food market displays snapshots narrating the proprietors’ buying expeditions in France: arriving at Geneva airport, driving to the cheese farm, tasting cheese in the cellars, signing the order form.

Fairtrade can widen this by adding social justice to the combination of quality of product and clarity of production. And few such consumer trends escape the attention of Marks and Spencer, whose business relies on guaranteeing standards and reliability. M&S’s head of corporate social responsibility is Mike Barry, an animated and loquacious former envir- onmental engineer in his late 30s.

Over lunch in a Mayfair restaurant, Barry narrates M&S’s embrace of Fairtrade with an enthusiasm that borders on the messianic. The company convenes annual panels of 500 consumers to listen to their concerns, and follows up specific issues, such as Fairtrade products, in smaller focus groups. “We have seen Fairtrade come from nowhere to among the top three or four issues in the past five years,” Barry says. It was knowing its customer, not a fit of corporate altruism, that brought M&S to Fairtrade.

Barry describes the evolution of consumers’ desire to look behind the label. Starting with uninterest, he says, consumers moved to self-interest about health issues such as genetically modified organisms and organic food. In the third stage arose wider concerns about environmental and social sustainability, though in general they were happy to let M&S assess the issues and sign up where necessary to agreements protecting, say, marine fishing stocks and hardwood forests.

Fairtrade has taken it further. “The fourth stage, which is where we are now, is that they still want us to be doing the work but they want to know far more about what we are doing,” Barry says. “We expect at the next stage they will want to be empowered to get involved and feel they are making a real difference themselves.”

Presently 5 per cent of M&S’s customers always seek out Fairtrade or organic. “Another 15 per cent will buy it if it is put in front of them. Fifty per cent say they are interested but wouldn’t necessarily buy it as an alternative to an existing product… Those 50 per cent are the real prize for us, and there are twice as many as there were three to four years ago.”

Consumers willing to pay more to help poor farmers may also help companies fatten their margins. The potential to cream off higher profits starts early in the supply chain. The Malian cotton board made a slight loss last year buying and selling conventional cotton. But it sold Fairtrade cotton for about €1.43 per kilo, over 10 per cent more than it cost to buy and gin it. Even allowing for extra administration costs and the higher quality of Fairtrade, this looks like quite a mark-up.

Suspicions abound that retailers are also cashing in. Last November, in the conservative Spectator magazine, former Treasury minister Philip Oppenheim launched a spirited broadside against “Fairtrade fat-cats” - supermarkets and wholesalers who, he said, were unfairly jacking up the price of Fairtrade-labelled products, particularly Caribbean bananas. If consumers realised that growers got so little a share of the Fairtrade price premium, Oppenheim said, there could be a backlash.

The Fairtrade Foundation refuses to bash the retailers, adroitly appealing instead to the power of markets. Sitting in the foundation’s modest offices in Holborn, Ian Bretman, its deputy director, tells me that fierce competition between supermarkets is already reducing prices of Fairtrade-labelled products. “We can’t control retail prices because it would be illegal,” Bretman says. “(But) we make sure the products are as widely available as possible.”

Some companies realise the danger to their brand of being perceived as Fairtrade profiteers. Stuart Rose, M&S’s CEO, has categorically promised he would not increase margins on Fairtrade produce. Companies (and the Fairtrade Foundation) also point out that what might look like wider margins may simply be unseen higher costs - not so much the higher price paid to farmers as the extra effort of buying small lots from co-operatives, particularly in new products where the supply system is still bedding down. The M&S Fairtrade cotton T-shirt, for example, retails at Pounds 8, a pound more than a conventional equivalent. But a lot of the difference reflects limited availability of Fairtrade cotton and the cost of running small batches of cotton through the supply chain - problems that M&S expect to shrink as the volume of Fairtrade cotton buying increases.

Critics are acutely aware of the halo that a Fairtrade mark bestows on the seller. Last year Nestle, the Swiss-headquartered food giant, did an about-turn on Fairtrade, which it had previously criticised, and launched a “Partners Blend” instant coffee made with beans from Ethiopia and El Salvador. Nestle is a hate object for many European activists, who have not forgiven widely criticised promotion campaigns for infant formula in poor countries some years ago. Since the Fairtrade product was a tiny part of its overall coffee sales, and Nestle said it was impossible to compare relative costs and profit margins, the Fairtrade Foundation was accused by activists in non-governmental organisations of helping Nestle burnish its tarnished image while turning a profit.

These tensions will grow with Fairtrade. It was started by European NGOs as an adjunct to their ideological campaigns about free and fair trade but is increasingly becoming a commercial operation that works through the market.

The Fairtrade Foundation has other concerns. One is competition for its dominant position in the ethical labelling market. Kraft Foods, the giant food company that owns the Kenco coffee brand, chose instead a certification mark from the Rainforest Alliance, a New York-based NGO, which applies wider tests of environmental, social and economic sustainability, but does not guarantee farmers a price.

Green & Black’s, the high-end chocolate manufacturer now owned by Cadbury Schweppes, launched (and still sells) the world’s first Fairtrade product, Maya Gold. But it now says it helps producers best by paying a high price for good-quality organic cocoa beans rather than what it calls a “charity premium”. Starbucks takes a similar view of its coffee sourcing. The upmarket supermarket chain Waitrose does not certify any product as Fairtrade but uses some of its profits from importing fruit to fund education and health projects in South Africa.

Ian Bretman says there is a risk of confusion. “We don’t mind companies jumping on the Fairtrade bandwagon; after all it’s a bandwagon that we’ve created,” he says. “But it’s a bit frustrating when they clearly target consumers who are asking for Fairtrade, but actually offer something