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!
