This year is the 30th anniversary of the Fairtrade mark, and as part of Fairtrade Fortnight in September I attended the Scottish Fairtrade Campaigner Conference in Paisley.
We heard from rice farmer Howard Msukwa from the Kaporo Smallholder Rice Farmer Association in Malawi. Howard told us how working with the Fairtrade Foundation had helped his community mitigate the drastic effects of a changing climate by introducing measures to limit and avoid soil erosion and creating and maintaining a secure and sustainable water supply. The Foundation has also provided his co-operative with access to sustainable markets and thus to a stable income. Though his own parents had not been able to afford the costs of sending him to school, he can now access education for his own children, and his community is proud that one of its young people is now studying agro-economy at university.
But sustainability measures and fairer ways of trading are not limited to the global south, and we heard from Claire Sloan from Ardross Farm in Fife, who explained the innovative methods of land management developed there. Increased flooding of prime arable land at Ardross in recent years, the low financial returns from their previous main crop of malting barley and the discovery that their broccoli, supplied to supermarkets, could be in storage for 6-9 days before it was sold, led them to a radical rethink of how they used their land. They have adopted a no-plough regime to limit carbon release, and by drilling seed into stubble are able to grow cover crops so that no soil is ever left bare.
Soil structure and nutritive value has improved and yields have increased drastically. They have ended their supermarket contract and opened a thriving farm shop selling 52 varieties of produce from the farm, as well as products from other suppliers, and have 27 local employees. Pivoting their businessnin this way has created a fair, sustainable and local solution to the issues they had been facing. Finally, we were privileged to witness a ‘lightbulb moment’ as Howard realised that Claire’s methods could be of value in Malawi, and he looked forward to further discussion.
The strapline for this year’s Fairtrade Fortnight campaign has been taken from Mahatma Gandhi’s exhortation to ‘be the change we want to see in the world’. A fair and sustainable future for everyone requires us all to play our part by choosing and using fairly traded products whenever we can.
It is up to us all to BE THE CHANGE
Glenys Wilcox
