The Fair Tracing Project

Today’s Observer has an extremely interesting article on fair trade coffee in Rwanda and elsewhere in Africa. The author considers both sides of the argument (including the Economist article we mentioned recently):

Fairtrade labelling has helped some farmers in Ethiopia and elsewhere. It guarantees a minimum $1.26 a pound to producers’ co-operatives (Union Coffee Roasters will pay around $1.65 to the Rwandan co-op for this February’s crop) and it brings many other benefits, not least stability and the confidence in the market that enables farmers to plan ahead. While Fairtrade coffee sales have been rising unstoppably this decade – up by a third or more every year in the UK – it is still largely in the posh coffee sector, the bags of roasted beans and cafetière-ground at the expensive end of the supermarket shelf. The British drink far more fairly traded coffee than anyone else and sales hit £65.8 million here in 2005. But that was only five per cent of overall UK coffee consumption – a soupçon, in the global market – where Fairtrade accounts for less than one per cent of business.

One of the key questions we are investigating is the relative merits of consumer-led action through fair trade labelling (with our wine partners in Chile) compared to government regulation of social conditions (with our coffee partners in India).

At the beginning of February, the Indian Government issued a new policy on design to support global positioning and branding of Indian designs and make “Designed in India” a by-word for quality and utility in conjunction with “Made in India”.

The full governmental press release can be viewed at: http://pib.nic.in/release/release.asp?relid=24647

How do you store the vast amount of information present in a global product information system? Which technologies can scale to hold data from producers, distributors and consumers on millions of different goods?

Pengcheng Lu wrote his MSc dissertation on one potential solution: Distributed Hash Tables, a type of distributed filesystem being developed by researchers at UCL and a number of other universities. Please do have a look at his well-researched Distributed Database report and let us know what you think!

Today is Valentine’s Day. What better way to celebrate than to discuss flower miles… Could they be featured on product labels to reduce the environmental impact of these goods?

Joseph Muchemi, the Kenyan high commissioner to Britain, said: “‘Food miles’ is a valuable concept but it must be looked at in the whole. It is neither fair nor sustainable to stigmatise certain goods purely on the basis that they have been freighted by air. ‘Food miles’, or the distance food has travelled, is on its own not a reliable indicator of the environmental impact of food transport.”

It is certainly the case that the distance travelled by a product is only one component of its ecological impact. At a minimum, the exact transport mechanisms used and the amount of other goods carried at the same time need to be taken into account.

UK International Development Secretary Hilary Benn said:

“Recent research shows that flowers flown from Africa can use less energy overall than those produced in Europe because they’re not grown in heated greenhouses.

“So, this Valentine’s day, you can be a romantic, reduce your environmental impact and help make poverty history. This is about social justice and making it easier, not harder, for African people to make a decent living.”

This “total energy used” metric has also been used in recent research to show that tomatoes grown outdoors in Spain then flown to the UK are responsible for fewer carbon emissions than UK tomatoes grown in heated greenhouses. UK Environment Secretary David Miliband has blogged his views on this work. However, there are also other factors to consider:

Thousands of workers who have flocked to the shores of Lake Naivasha to work in the flower-growing areas are placing enormous strain on the local ecology, such that the lake could soon be polluted beyond use and have all but dried up in the next 10 to 15 years.

David Harper, a University of Leicester ecologist, says the flower trade is devastating the area. “The lake is being destroyed at an alarming rate by the sheer pressure of people on it.” He does not advocate boycotting Kenyan flowers but wants to see a “Fair Trade” system and “Fair Planet” label to highlight the problem. Its profits would be used to improve the lake’s environment, he says.

In such a complex debate, where government intervention is politically unlikely and individuals will value developmental and environmental factors differently, can we give consumers all of this information so that they can make their own minds up?

Traceability could play a big part in reducing the risks of avian influenza:

Bernard Matthews, 77, had the look of a broken man when The Times spoke to him at his home in Norfolk as his workers completed their cull of 159,000 turkeys.

But the tycoon may still not have grasped the magnitude of the trouble that his international operations, valued at £400 million, were in as Defra officials investigated the cause of the outbreak of bird flu…

Foremost among his competitors in an industry that is worth around £3.4 billion to the economy every year, and most likely to take over his crown, is Cranberry Foods. With annual sales of £85 million, the Derbyshire-based company is tiny compared to its Norfolk rival. But it entices consumers with the boast “traceability to the egg guaranteed”.

Can we do better?

I just finished reading Jared Diamond’s excellent Collapse. It has an interesting postscript on the effectiveness of consumers in encouraging ethical business decisions:

Consumers who wish to influence big business by either buying or refusing to buy their products, or by embarassing or praising them, need to go to the trouble of learning which links in a business chain are most sensitive to public influence, and also which links are in the strongest position to influence other links. Businesses that sell directly to the consumer, or whose brands are on sale to the consumer, are much more sensitive than businesses that sell only to other businesses and whose products reach the public without a label of origin. Retail businesses that, by themselves or as part of a larger buyers’ group, buy much or all of the output of some particular producing business are in a much stronger position to influence that producer than is a member of the public…

For instance, if you do or don’t approve of how some big international oil company manages its oil fields, it does make sense to buy at, boycott, praise, or picket that company’s gas stations. If you admire Australian titanium mining practives and dislike Lihir Island gold mining practices, don’t waste your time fantasizing that you could have any influence on those mining companies yourself; turn your attention instead to DuPont, and to Tiffany and Wal-Mart, which are major retailers of titanium-based paints and of gold jewelry, respectively. Don’t praise or blame logging companies without readily traceable retail products; leave it instead to Home Depot, Lowe’s, B and Q, and the other retail giants to influence the loggers… Wal-Mart is the world’s largest grocery retailer; they and other such retailers can virtually dictate agricultural practices to farmers; you can’t dictate to farmers, but you do have clout with Wal-Mart.

How much can we learn from this? And could fair tracing make it easier for consumers to have influence at the far end of the production chain?