Archive for June, 2007

Event: ICT for Economic Development

Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

The North London Branch of the British Computer Society is hosting a free event on Thursday 12th July, 18:15 that might be of interest:

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) such as the PC, the mobile phone and the internet have revolutionised the way people in the Developed World live. Now, there is increasing interest, supported by real-world instances, that ICT could have a similar effect on individuals and communities in the Developing World.

Examples include farmers in Uganda using mobile phones to check market prices of their crops in order to gain a fairer deal from buyers, health workers in Kenya using Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) to access medical information while out in the field and rural women’s artisan groups in southern India using the Web to sell their wares directly to consumers.

Come and join us to gain an introduction to ICT for Development (ICT4D). Learn about its theoretical underpinnings in IT and Development Studies. Find out if ICT really have the potential to reduce poverty. Gain an insight into what has been achieved to date and what is to come. Hear about actual ICT4D projects from Africa and the India Subcontinent.

Our expert presenters are:

* Dr. Shirin Madon – Senior Lecturer in Information Systems, London School of Economics
* Dr. Simon Batchelor – Director, Gamos Ltd

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Farmer Direct Co-op: traceable organic foods

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

Farmer Direct Co-operative Ltd is “a producer-driven business” of 60 organic farmers in western Canada that aims to provide “the world with ethically grown and traded foods”.

Their “fairDeal” initiative aims to provide consumers with “properly grown and fairly traded food products” and to “address the rising consumer knowledge of food ethics, food safety and increasing food quality expectations”.

The fairDeal initiative allows the consumer to trace their “food to the farm where it was grown” by entering a lot# found on the front of their packaging. See http://www.farmerdirect.ca/index.asp

Posted in General, Tracing & Tracking | Comments Off

Fair Tracing in the news: World Changing

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

The Fair Tracing Project by Sarah Rich, posted March 6, 2007 12:32 AM on the World Changing websiate at http://www.worldchanging.com/

“A group of computer scientists and economic geographers in the UK put their heads together over the last few months to address a challenge in food systems design. As they see it, the Fair Trade movement faces obstacles to widespread adoption due to an ongoing divide between Northern consumers and Southern producers, as well as a lack of direct, specific information for customers about particular products. Their Fair Tracing Project proposes to enhance the growth of equitable global trade systems by adding digital tracing technology to individual items so that they can be tracked, and their stories recorded, as they move from farm to table.”

See the full article at http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006245.html

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What Fair Tracing might look like

Tuesday, June 5th, 2007

These are some ideas what a Fair Tracing interface might look like. You can click on the pictures for a larger version. A very simple user interface enables the user to look-up a Fair Tracing code.

She can then follow the supply chain of the product, for example, using Google Maps. Additional product information like ‘who gets what’ or even third party information is available. She can then follow the supply chain of the product, for example, using Google Maps. Additional product information like or even third party information is available.

She can then follow the supply chain of the product, for example, using Google Maps. Additional product information like or even third party information is available. Moreover, multimedia like pictures or videos can be displayed together with information about the product journey from the producer…

… to the retailer or consumer.

Please let us now what you think about it by leaving a comment.

Posted in Design, Fair Tracing project activities, UI | 3 Comments »

The eco-diet … and it’s not just about food miles

Monday, June 4th, 2007

The eco-diet … and it’s not just about food miles

“I’m a bit worried about the food miles [debate] because it is educating the consumer in the wrong way. It is such an insignificant point,” said Ruth Fairchild at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff. “Those [foods] could have been produced using pesticides that have travelled all the way around the world. If you just take food miles, it is the tiny bit on the end.”A better system, she argues, would be one that considers all environmental impacts from farm to dinner plate.

One option is ecological footprint analysis, which takes into account the amount of land needed to provide the resources to produce food, both directly on the farm and indirectly from the energy that goes into growing, harvesting, processing, packaging and transporting it. A food’s impact is measured in “global hectares”, the notional land area needed to produce it. But she thinks that consumers are not yet ready for ecological footprint labelling and the science behind it is not yet watertight.

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Greener by miles

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

More on the need for a more sophisticated measure of carbon footprints than food miles:

Greener by miles – Sunday Telegraph

Analysis of the industry reveals that for many foods, imported products are responsible for lower carbon dioxide emissions than the same foodstuffs produced in Britain. Even products shipped from the other side of the world emit fewer greenhouse gases than British equivalents.

The reasons are manifold. Sometimes it is because they require less fertiliser; sometimes, as with greenhouse crops, less energy; sometimes, as with much African produce, the farmers use little mechanised equipment. The findings are surprising environmental campaigners, who have, until now, used the distance travelled by food as the measure of how polluting it is.

Posted in Carbon footprint, Tracing & Tracking | Comments Off