Fair Trade

That is the pilot scheme thought up by the Soil Association and Fair Trade’s chief executive Harriet Lamb. Although Harriet is adamant that it must not effect the work Fair Trade is doing with third World farmers, who often don’t have enough clean water, and cannot send their children to school.

Although she does admit: " A number of farmers in the UK are interested in becoming part of the pilot project. Most people do most of their shopping in supermarkets, so one key point is to talk to the supermarkets about this. As a result we might find that a Fair Trade scheme is not the right way ahead. But something needs to be done to assess the plight of the British farmer."

“For example not getting the price of production. Surely we can learn from what has happened in the third World ?  It might be applied here so that smallholders can remain on their land. Above all though we must maintain the hard won gains we have made in the Third World.”

And those mainly involve coffee and bananas, although there have been other gains as well.

Harriet Lamb herself admits that she has always wanted to work for a more just world, right from her childhood onwards: " I can’t sit here in comfortable England and know that 14 million people can die from starvation, when we have the means to end all that."

After school she went up to Cambridge University where she started studying English but switched to Social Political Science. After getting her degree she went to live in India for two years. Her father worked for Formica, that great kitchen surface of the 60’s, and was setting up a factory in Poona. As a child, therefore, she had lived in India for three years, as well as returning between school and university, so it was a natural place for her to go back after university.

She says: " I have the privilege to know what life is like in another culture. The poverty there had been very formative in my approach. After university I got involved in a very interesting project in Bombay. It was supported by Mahatma Ghandi’s grandson, a group of untouchables, as they used to be called.. The project had found out that the lowest of the low had small bits of land, but it was always taken away from them,. Anyway with our help they won back their land, but each piece of land was so small it was impossible to live off it. So with our project behind them the whole community pooled their land. They planted grapes, so the most despised people in the village, who had only been used as cleaners, now were exporting grapes to Kuwait.”

When she returned to Britain she did some work looking at multi-national companies, worked with refugees in the North East before joining the World Development movement in London. Their mission was to campaign for a better deal for the developing world. They ran the campaign against the Persau damn, before taking the Conservative Government to court over the linking of aid with arms sales.

She recalls: "It was a landmark case, and we won. It was a very exciting moment in my life."

Then she moved to Germany with her husband journalist for two years, where she got involved in a banana project before returning here and getting her present job.

Of Fair Trade, whose label you can see in most supermarkets, especially Sainsburys, she says: "As far as coffee is concerned there is an absolute crisis with farmers getting a 30 year low for their product. It is the second most  traded  commodity after oil. The profit is not going to the farmers. Coffee can exchange hands 150 times ! Ethiopia’s  main output used to be coffee. Now they are paying more for their debts, than they are earning from their coffee. Prices get lower because power gets into the hands of a few supermarkets. Price cutting gets passed onto the farmers.  Consumers don’t always want the  cost produce. Sometimes Fair Trade is not known about. What you do is cut out all the middle men. The price to the producer is only one part of the finished article. But you can buy direct from the farmer."

I will return to Fair trade in a future article.

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