Purpose

Last week I had an extremely interesting experience. In the afternoon I went to find a Cafe 生態綠咖啡，the idea is that it's a cafe importing and promoting 'Fair Trade' in Taiwan. To anyone who is unaware, Fair Trade has three main guarantees, a fair price for farmers, fair treatment for those farmers and fair treatment of that land. Why do we need fair trade? Mainly because you can imagine without these guarantees, large companies (let's take Nescafe for example) just buy coffee beans year by year from the cheapest source, doing their best to drive the price down to give them higher profit margins. Now think, a coffee grower with a small amount of land needs to make maximum use of his land, that means using any kind of fertilizers possible and it means using every square inch of land every year (a practice that is unsustainable). He needs to sell at the lowest price possible (in order to actually sell, otherwise the buyer just moves on) so his own profits just allow enough for seed for the next year. No school for his children, they need to help on the farm anyway.

Now imagine, this same farmer is given a fair trade contract. He's guaranteed a fair price for his product for a number of years in a row and he's asked to make sure that the land is taken care of in a sustainable way. Suddenly he has options. Which piece of land can take a rest this year? What kind of organic fertilizers can be used instead of chemical ones? Maybe the children should go to school, after all the money for tuition will be enough now!

I was on a trade mission to Hong Kong a couple of years ago and met a British businessman who runs a business showing company executives how to make chocolate, it's a kind of team building exercise I think. When I asked him if he used Fair Trade chocolate he laughed and said "no, I think there are some people in Europe making a lot of money out of fair trade!"

It's idiots like him that mean we need great organisations like 生態綠 to show people that Fair Trade makes a genuine difference. My dad went to Uganda a few years ago to visit a farmer who had been given a Fair Trade contract. His experience was just as described above. His children could now go to school and he could now use and invest in his land, in a way that was sustainable. If our choice of coffee, or chocolate, or something else can have this big an impact on someone so far away, then a simple choice for fair trade is just so obvious!!

今天我對我要看中文的朋友們很抱歉，用中文介紹公平貿易還是太難，所以我就很默默地給你們看這個網站orz! http://www.facebook.com/okogreen?v=app_4949752878&ref=search
www.okogreen.com.tw