The Fair Tracing Project

 On Thursday, 23 October 2008, the EPSRC Fair Tracing Project, Centre for Developing Areas Research (CEDAR) and UNESCO Chair in ICT4D at Royal Holloway, University of London, hosted a workshop on “Ethical Consumption, Traceability and ICT” - or, short and snappy - the Ethics 2.0 Summit.  The workshop brought together 35 participants from business, NGOs, and academia. Speakers included Tim Wilson (Historicfutures), Wesa Aapro (Consumergadget), Annesley Newholm (Easyethical), Rob Harrison (Ethiscore), Juha Kaario (Nokia Green Team) and Ann Light, Macarena Vivent, Helen LeVoi and Dorothea Kleine (Fair Tracing).

The speakers, from the UK, Finland and Chile, presented six different projects and answered questions about the thinking behind their systems. Getting this set of individuals together was in itself a success: as one speaker remarked, “I have not been to an event where you had this many key players in the field all together”.

During the lunch and coffee breaks, participants were able to try out and comment on post-its on the different interfaces of the various projects. Holloway students Andrew Brooks, Lucy Fenner, Simon Hepher and Rebecca Sankar exhibited posters of their research projects on ethical consumption. From the ICT4D Collective, Win Min Tun, Andrea Burris, Marije Geldof, David Hollow, Niels-Peter Nielsen and Ugo Vallauri assisted in running the workshop on the day.

In the discussions it became evident that there were fascinating parallels and promising synergies between the projects. We were fired up by seeing how many pieces of the puzzle allowing for a system of ethical tracking and tracing, and communicating it to consumers were there in front of our eyes, waiting to be assembled. At the end of the day, there were networking groups discussing themes like

• “How can we give producers a voice in developing these systems?”
• “How can we express ethical issues in figures or symbols to get information to the consumer quickly?”
• “What kind of business model could be used to make information services for ethical consumption financially sustainable?”

In our concluding remarks, we expressed our hope that several of the projects would now begin to collaborate or, at the very least, that we would keep each other informed of our work so that, as our projects progressed, we could avoid reinventing the wheel and, instead, exploit synergies. Thanks to all the speakers and participants for coming and contributing to an exciting day!  

Anyone recognise the place? As avid users of our Fair Tracing Demo will have spotted, this is Valparaiso Harbour in Chile, where the Los Robles Wine gets shipped off around the globe to Sainbury’s harbour warehouses in the UK. Dorothea Kleine and Macarena Vivent from the Fair Tracing team went there to see how the container shipments worked.  

 This August, about one year on from our original visit, Dorothea and Macarena from the Fair Tracing Team returned to Curico, Chile, to meet with the Fairtrade vintners again. For a variety of reasons, including the fall of the US dollar, the Los Robles co-operative was in financial difficulties (see here). The producers who had the Fairtrade certification, however, had managed to line up an alternative buyer for their Fairtrade grapes next year.

The vintners and employees of the co-operative were the first group to co-design our interfaces for Fair Tracing in 2007, so now we came back and presented the three versions of interfaces we have now begun to develop. The producers remain interested in continuing to work with us while the supply chains through which they are trading are changing. We wish our partners all the very best as they have to manoeuvre through these difficult economic times!  

Yesterdays BBC NewsNight featured a report on energy aware computing and how companies such as IBM, Cisco or Google try to tackle the increasing amount of energy consumption caused by large data centres in order to provide service to the users. Figures estimate that by the year 2020, the carbon emissions of the IT industry will be higher than airline traffic and that it’s already as high as the car industry.

You can find the report about 31 minutes into the show on BBC’s iPlayer here.

Image source: www.lbl.gov

Tesco breaks into Indian market

Tesco today announced a £60m investment to develop a wholesale cash-and-carry business in India alongside a deal with India’s Tata Group, marking the retail giant’s debut in one of the world’s fastest growing economies.

The wholesale outlets will be tailored to cater for the Indian market, buying goods from local farmers and selling them to restaurants and business owners as well as supermarket chains.

One customer is already lined up - Tata’s Star Bazaar hypermarkets. In a separate deal, Tesco has signed Tata up as a consultant to help expand the Star Bazaar chain from four hypermarkets in India today to 50 stores over the next five years.

The deals will “enable the two companies to benefit from the rapid development of a modern supply chain”, Tesco said this morning.

Based initially in Mumbai, the cash-and-carry chain is the latest in a series of ventures by Tesco, which expects to spend up to £60m in the first two years. In May, the world’s third largest retailer agreed to buy 36 stores in South Korea for $1.9bn (£996m) and last month it unveiled plans to move into banking. It already operates across Europe and has 814 shops across Asia plus the Fresh & Easy stores in the US, which were launced last October.

“This is another exciting development for Tesco,” said Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive. “It complements our entries into China and the US, giving us access to another of the most important economies in the world.

Tesco already sources more than £170m worth of products from India each year and has sourcing offices in Delhi, Bangalore and Tirupur. The supermarket employs nearly 3,000 staff at its service centre in Bangalore, which provides IT and financial services to the Tesco group. The new venture will see more staff recruited although the number is not yet known.

Tesco said that under the terms of the agreement with Trent, Tata’s retail arm, the Indian firm will be able to draw on Tesco’s extensive retail expertise.

Today’s announcement is the group’s first foray into the Indian market. Leahy has said in the past that India is at the top of its list for global expansion. It was beaten in the race to open business in India by Wal-Mart in 2006.