Discovery Ramblings - April 30, 2021
Discovery Ramblings - April 30, 2021
Randy Hooper - Discovery Organics
TAKE A WALK ON THE WHITE LINE
Our Fair Trade path defines our mission, including an unwavering commitment to the rights of workers, and small farmers. Fair Trade speaks to poverty and traditionally low wages. Annie Moss, our director and past president gave me license to discover, learn, adapt and change the way our unique business would behave in the produce distribution industry over the last 22+years. Annie once told me that where she grew up in rural California in the 70’s, lots of kids walked to school barefoot, and on hot days, with scorching hot dirt and asphalt, the coolest place to walk was on the white lines on the highway.
Our journey into Fair Trade started in Mexico 15 years ago. I was invited to an organic conference in Mexico City, where I had the opportunity to interview about 30 small farm producers. Those 2 days were filled with horrible stories, of farmers growing vegetables for American distributors, only to be paid late, or less, or not at all. There was not one happy story, nor any enthusiasm to continue any of their relationships with “the American Coyote.” That’s not to say there aren’t any happy stories, there are. Just nowhere near enough. On my next trip, (of what would, over the last 15 years, be 75 trips accompanied by staff and customers all through South America and Mexico) I was introduced to the Fair Trade model, on the ground.
Fair Trade (the opposite of Free Trade) combines three facets. For a producer to be certified in one of the global platforms, they must meet important goals –including a ban on child labour, gender equity, fair pay, worker representation, and potable water. Basic human rights.
As well, for many commodities (like coffee, tea, bananas and avocados) an MG – a minimum guaranteed price - is established that guarantees growers can produce profitably.
Finally, there is a social premium, a surcharge as it were, included in the selling price of any Fair Trade product – ranging from $1.25 on a case of bananas, to 10% of the selling price on field crops. Consumers spend a little more when buying Fair Trade, but that money goes very, very far. This money does not go to the producer, but through the growers in a cooperative model, or employees for a larger family farm, usually into a trust fund, and that money is then dedicated to the communities where those people live - to provide social services often non-existent in rural areas – dental clinics, potable water delivery, drug abuse counseling, and education programs to name but a few.
Our Canadian dollars have 5 times the spending power in some countries – another reason our social premiums can do so much in rural farming areas, where social services are always scant, simply because the tax base in those areas is also very small.
Over the years we have established long standing personal relationships with many growers, and at times have been asked to help out in emergencies. With some of our retail customers, we have been able to raise tens of thousands of dollars, which when combined with social premiums has provided money desperately needed to build temporary housing for hundreds of displaced farm workers after the Chilean earthquake of 2010, as well as support dozens of banana growers who lost their plantations to the flooding Chira river in Peru in 2012.
My first grower meeting in the field in 2007 was with Pedro, a young avocado grower pictured here, who had just become a member of the Pragor Avocado Cooperative in Michoacán, Mexico a few years earlier. Now being paid well for his organic avocados, he showed me, quite proudly, that he now had running water in his kitchen – for generations, his family had walked uphill a couple of hundred feet to a well. And for the first time, they had glass windows. Just think about that, in a place that can be frosty in the wintertime and raging hot in the summer months. Glass windows in their house, instead of plastic.
In 2008, we travelled to Peru to learn the banana business – for the most part one controlled globally by 3 corporations, and pricing set, not by the growers, but in reality by the demands of large retailers in the U.S. and Europe, where bananas are (and always have been) a loss leader.
Unfortunately, for the small farmers, there is little opportunity to make money. I was shocked to discover that most of the banana producers in Peru had just 3 or 4 acres of land, and thousands of growers were members of just 8 cooperatives. At that point, virtually every banana container from all the coops were sold to 1 multinational corporation for distribution to the US and Europe.
As brave as it was for a little Vancouver wholesaler, we made a commitment to buy organic and Fair Trade bananas directly with one of the cooperatives. It was also a leap of faith for them to bypass their large and only customer. That first shipment in May 2009 was the first Fair Trade sale of bananas from the BOS Coop. From that model, and proof of success, within just a couple of years, nearly all the bananas exported from Peru were sold as Fair Trade directly from the coops to distributors in the U.S. and Europe. In fact, as we found out later, CEBIDO Coop in the same area also shipped their first Fair Trade banana container in May 2009 – to Equal Exchange in the US. How meaningful was that? We were both able to nearly double the price paid to the individual small producers simply by avoiding all the middlemen and working within a direct trade model.
Over the years, with this cooperative and others in Ecuador, we have generated over $1,000,000 in social premiums alone from banana sales that have been invested back into desperately needed social services in what is one of the poorest areas in South America. In 2011, the cooperative we were working with asked us if we could contribute $2,000 for a summer school program – something that doesn’t exist in that area. In combination with money from social premiums and other donations from their importer in France (Brochenin), every kid in the town of Salitral, the hub of banana production in the area, over 600 of them, had a six-week program of arts and crafts, dance, and a trip to the beach in Paita, just an hour’s drive away. Most of them had never seen the ocean before. Visiting that camp was one of those moments that makes this old guy cry.
Ten years ago, fueled by consumer interest and support from our retailers, we continued our mission to help farms across the Global South enter the Fair Trade world. We were instrumental in many firsts, from Fair Trade Turmeric from Peru, Fair Trade blueberries from Chile, and Fair Trade grapefruit from central Mexico.
We looked at great vegetable operations in Mexico that were already meeting the Fair Trade labour regulations, and returning some of their profits to the community for social investment, but weren’t yet certified. We won’t take any credit for them becoming certified in a Fair Trade system, but we were certainly one more persistent voice asking these producers to formalize their Fair Trade operations within a certification platform.
Del Cabo Coop, Covilli, Wholesum, Rico and Divine Flavor, all large organic and Fair Trade farm operations have been the backbone of our purchasing program for a wide variety of vegetables over the winter months, all grown in northern Mexico, for many, many years. Together those 5 operations have raised over $15,000,000 in social premiums since becoming certified over the past 8 years – an astounding story. To read more, please visit their websites to see how Fair Trade dollars support so many people in Mexico - giving them the opportunity to not have to walk on the white line.
Finally, the most important, yet rarely talked about aspect of Fair Trade is the formality of employment. The millions of people working for Fair Trade certified producers and exporters around the world are legal employees, registered with their governments, as you and I are – vacations are paid for, health care is paid for and government departments can oversee that workers are treated with some semblance of dignity and paid minimum wage at a minimum. In Mexico, employers have to pay workers a 2-week bonus in the middle of December – but only to formal workers. Very often this puts Fair Trade producers at a competitive disadvantage.
In Peru, we found that some large ginger exporters have 95% “informal” workers, with company records (available online) showing just 5 formal employees – while La Grama, for instance, has 120 registered employees, with an additional cost of 20% of wages that Rodrigo has to pay to the Peruvian government – these aren’t withholding’s from the workers’ pay, but a social tax the operator pays on top of wages. This is true for every Fair Trade producer around the world. You can watch Rodrigo’s video here and see for yourself.
In the end, no matter how much some consumers want to help change the world with their purchases by buying Fair Trade, they are only able to do it with the overwhelming support we see every day from the natural food retailers we supply. For that, a big THANK YOU.