CHAPTER THREE

What Fair Looks Like

How Does It All Work?

Women in India explain how their bags are made. RYAN JACOBS/TENTHOUSANDVILLAGES.COM

What if all shoes were made in the same size? That wouldn’t work, would it? My son’s feet are so big I can grow plants in his shoes, but my nephew is only six, so his feet are tiny. There’s no way they could swap shoes.

Trade is like that too. What works for one group of people doesn’t work for another. Imagine having the same rules for cacao farmers and basket weavers. Doesn’t make sense, does it? Every project has its own way of working.

Even though fair trade projects come in different shapes and sizes, there are some things that always stay the same. There are always producers—the farmers or factory workers who make the products. They’re the first people on the supply chain.There are always the business people living in places like Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia who buy goods from the producers and sell them in stores and online. They are the second group of people on the supply chain. And there are always the buyers—people like you and me. We are the end of the supply chain.

Sometimes It’s Big

A large fair trade project is like a big ant colony. Have you ever been to a bug zoo and seen an ant colony in action? You know the kind I mean, with tunnels leading away from a central hub to smaller hubs farther away? That’s what a large fair trade organization is like. The faraway hubs are the farms, and the central hub is the cooperative where all their goods end up.

FAIR TRADE FACT: About 85 percent of the world’s farms are still less than 2 hectares in size. That’s about twice the size of most soccer fields. Those small farms grow about 70 percent of the world’s food.

Worms for Sale!

Can you imagine sticking your hand in a tree branch and gathering a whole pile of sticky worm cocoons? That’s what the silk farmers in Ethiopia do. They farm worms. It sounds strange, but it’s not. Did you know when you wear silk you’re wearing a worm’s home? Really. Silk is made from the cocoons that silk worms spin so that they can grow into moths.

Producers grow, harvest, sort and prepare crops before they pass them along to distributors. LEVEL GROUND TRADING

A woman shows off a piece of cloth that will be sold through Sabahar in Ethiopia.JONI KABANA/SABAHAR

Worm cocoons are made out of long strands of silk that can be spun and woven into cloth, then dyed any color of the rainbow. People around the world pay a lot of money to wear silk, and it all starts on small farms in places like Ethiopia.

Sabahar is a company that makes silk and cotton clothes. It is a fair trade company that works with farmers throughout Ethiopia. It buys silk from small, rural farms, then hires spinners and weavers to make it into cloth. Some of the spinners and weavers work at the Sabahar factory, and some work at home. In Ethiopia the women spin the fibers into skeins of silk, and the men weave that into fabric.

In My Basket

My family learned a lot about crops when visiting this farm in Jamaica. KARI JONES

The year I was twenty-six, my family and I spent some time in northern Jamaica where we visited a farmers’ cooperative. Being Canadians, we were used to farms that stretched for miles and miles, so we were surprised at how small these farms were, but when the farmers showed us what they were growing, we were amazed. On their small plots they grew cassava and yams in the ground, peppers and beans and leafy greens on top of the ground, and papayas and mangoes in the trees. Those small farms sure produced a lot of food! One of the farmers gave us a mango to share. Yum! That was one delicious piece of fruit.

Once the fibers are spun into silk threads, they need to be dyed. Sabahar uses flowers, coffee grounds, bark, roots and even insects to make these threads colorful. All this is done in their factory by artists. Then the colorful threads are woven into cloth and prepared for sale. So if you are wearing something made out of silk, you might be wearing worm homes and coffee grounds.

Sabahar is one of those big fair trade projects that’s like an ant colony, with all the farmers bringing their silk to the central hub.

FAIR TRADE FACT: Fair trade products are now sold in more than 120 countries.

Awash cotton towels made by spinners at Sabahar work perfectly as cover ups after a swim. SOPHIE JOY MOSKO/SABAHAR

Sometimes It Takes a Village

Kebby Lingomba Mandandi weaves a basket. VIDEA

Sometimes things that look easy are actually hard to do. Weaving is one of those things. In Lyamutinga in western Zambia, making woven baskets takes a whole village. First, the kids go out and gather leaves from palm trees and roots of a local plant called mukenge. Then they help their mothers scrape the fibers into long threads that can be woven. While the men and women weave the baskets, their children and babies watch them. That way the families can stay together, and the kids can learn the craft.

The villagers of Lyamutinga worked this way for centuries, but in recent years kids stopped wanting to help out because no one was buying the baskets anymore. That’s where the fair trade partnership came in. In 2007, some Canadians from an organization called the Victoria International Development Agency (VIDEA) stopped by their village and admired the baskets so much that they decided to start a fair trade project. Now kids are happy to gather roots and be part of the process, because the money the community makes from the baskets helps pay their school fees.

Mebelo’s Family

Kebby Lingomba Mandandi is a basket weaver and father of six children. Kebby didn’t go to school, so finding work was hard, and their family was poor. But then Kebby started weaving baskets for the fair trade project in his community. With the money he made from his work he was able to send the eldest three kids to school. His eldest daughter is now a police officer in the Republic of Zambia.

Kebby’s third child, Mebelo, completed grade 12 in 2015 at Muoyo Secondary School. She had to travel five and a half kilometers to get to school, but she did it every day. She did well in school and will definitely go to college. Mebelo says, “All this achievement is attributed to my father, who managed to pay for my school fees because he is a basket weaver who sells baskets to VIDEA in Canada. I am happy for him being a basket weaver because without him selling baskets, I was going to stay home.”

Sometimes It’s Little

Mebelo Mandandi. VIDEA

Not all farmers or craftspeople are able to join a co-op. Sometimes they live too far away from other people. Sometimes there isn’t anyone else making the same craft. In that case, the farmer or artisan has to sell directly to a fair trade partner.

In Nairobi, Kenya, there are a lot of people living in deep poverty. They don’t have money, they don’t have farms or factories, but they do have skills, and they have imagination. Lizzi is a designer and artist who makes bracelets and necklaces out of beads. One day, someone asked Lizzi for food, but she saw that what he really needed was a way to make a better life for himself. So she asked him to gather all the plastic bags lying around the streets, and she showed him how to make soccer balls out of plastic bags. He started selling plastic soccer balls and was able to make enough money to buy himself food. Now he and Lizzi work together making bracelets and, of course, soccer balls. Their bracelets are sold through a fair trade distributor in Canada. Lizzi is not part of a fair trade co-op, and sometimes people call this type of fair trade “direct trade” because the goods go directly from the person who makes them to the person who sells them to us.

Baskets are used all over the world, including in Vietnam, where they are used in floating markets. QUANGPRAHA/ISTOCK.COM

In My Basket

Even years later these baskets from Tanzania brighten up our home. KARI JONES

My mother and I really love baskets, so when we visited a wheat farm in western Tanzania some years ago, we were delighted to see beautiful woven baskets all over the place. While my father and husband went to talk to the farmers about the wheat, my mother and I talked to the women about the baskets. We sat and drank tea, and they showed us how they made them. I still have the baskets we bought from those women, and every time I see them I think about how friendly they were and how talented!

Making Dreams Come True

Many people turn to fair trade projects to make their dreams come true. In many places around the world, it’s hard for people with disabilities to get jobs, especially people in wheelchairs. In Cambodia, an organization called VillageWorks employs young people with physical handicaps to sew and tailor. Recently they changed their whole workshop so that people in wheelchairs can move around more easily.

Getting It Out There

Kids in Zambia prepare materials for making woven baskets. KARI JONES

We’ve seen a lot of examples of the production end of the supply chain, but what about the next step along the way—the distribution phase? This is another place where “one size fits all” doesn’t work.

A large fair trade organization like Level Ground Trading (from Chapter Two) has a lot of people involved in distribution. There are the people who go to other countries to test and taste the goods. (The ones who taste chocolate are the luckiest.) They negotiate with the co-ops to set a fair price, and they also spend time getting to know the people they are buying from. Then, back at home, there are the salespeople, who convince grocery stores and other shops to sell their fair trade goods, and there are the people who get the fair trade products to the shops and grocery stores on time. Then there are the financial people who make sure the money goes to the places it needs to go to, and the marketing people who create the advertisements, and…phew…so many people.

For some smaller projects, the whole thing is much simpler because the person buying the goods will also sell them at fairs and online. That’s how it works for the basket weavers of Lyamutinga. Each year they sell the baskets they weave to their fair trade partners in Canada at VIDEA, who sell them directly to consumers at a fair trade fair and online through their website.