Summary: Workshop on Indigenous Peoples and Access to Fair Trade

This meeting presented the concept of Fair Trade and its impact in the world today, with many examples of actual accomplished work. In the second part of the session, participants discussed the potential of e-commerce for emerging economies and the necessary conditions to make it a reality.

Opportunities and challenges of fair trade
Ms. Paola Ghillani, representing the Max Havelaar Foundation, talked about the origins, specificities and current state of her organisation. Max Havelaar promotes fair trade by assisting producers, controlling the production process, paying a fair price for products —which includes a premium for social development in production countries— and then selling them to a variety of retail stores under the Max Havelaar (MH) label. It demonstrates the viability of the fair trade model by functioning without subsides. Fair trade —including labels other than MH— represents a sales volume of $0.22 billion per year, still tiny compared to the $5,000 billion of total world trade, but shows strong growth, amounting to 16% per year (Max Havelaar in Switzerland grew by 35% last year).

Ms. Anne Dürr of Magasins du Monde (MDM) provided examples of successful collaborations and mentioned several organisations of fair trade labels. She also made the point that fair trade is not only about agricultural products, and that MDM stores also carry large amounts of artisan products from developing countries, which help to make the respective cultures better known.

Ms. Gladys Corredor of Caritas then talked about the action of her organisation in the field of fair trade, citing examples of cooperatives of Tuareg or Colombian women making traditional products.

Mr. Antonio Vilavila Vilcapaza of Agricar —representing the producers standpoint—explained that it did not go without problems when putting the concept of fair trade into practice. In Peru, the quasi-monopolistic nature of the market and the extreme difficulty to export drives down prices paid to producers. Most of the profits going to intermediaries. 

New technologies for fair trade
In the second part of the meeting, Ms. Rosa Delgado of the Internet Society presented the basics of e-commerce and how it relates to fair trade. E-commerce, as a way to reach a global customer base without intermediaries, offers a very promising alternative to traditional, Government-controlled trade channels. It also offers the possibility to sell alternative forms of work, like knowledge, software —the example of the Indian IT Industry was mentioned— or services. Furthermore, it allows workers in developing countries to stay home while working for foreign employers.

Mr. Malcolm Corbett, also of the Internet Society, presented the new .coop Internet domain name that is now available only to eligible cooperatives and gives cooperative organisations a chance to improve the recognizibility of their web identity.

There are however also many implementation difficulties to bring e-commerce to developing countries, as Mr. Gideon Hayford Chonia of the University of Zürich explained. The infrastructure is sorely lacking. High taxes, inefficient banking systems and transportation problems all represent big hurdles. Simple e-mail can be costly in Africa, when available at all. Computers are too expensive, which undermines the buying power of producing countries. The prices of computers have risen by a factor of 5 in the past year compared to raw coffee for instance. The absence of a safety net in case of failure acts also as a deterrent to many would-be entrepreneurs. Hence, there is a need to set up a system that can progressively balance these issues.

Interesting questions
Ms. Ghillani was asked whether Max Havelaar follows the standards of biological agriculture. She explained that whenever possible, MH tries to encourage organic production methods, in many cases helping producers to obtain the organic agriculture certification.

On the subject of helping producers to process their raw materials themselves and thus getting a larger share of the added value chain, Ms. Ghillani stated that her organisation tries to encourage such initiatives, but admitted that a lot of progress remains necessary.

Conclusions
Most participants seemed to agree that also indigenous industries or industries from developing countries need to be competitive. New solutions need to be found to achieve this, without selling out the very culture that civil societies profess to defend. Apparently some people want mainly to improve living conditions in poor countries, taking an approach based on pure economics, while others reject globalization as well as cultural assimilation and diminishment of traditional influences and are reluctant to compromises.

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20.05_ghillani_paola.ppt (742 K)

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