Product tracking technology is increasingly available to big players in the value chain which connects producers to consumers, giving them new competitive advantages. Such shifts in technology do not benefit small producers, and especially those in developing regions, to the same degree. This paper looks at the practicalities of trying to level the playing field by making a form of tracing technology available for any producer to use. In doing so, it goes beyond considering engineering solutions to examine what happens in the context of use, reporting on work with partners in Chile and India and reflecting on the potential for impact on business and community wellbeing. Reporting on the results of the “Fair Tracing” project, the paper argues that a generic trac(k)ing tool for use with the different commerce systems employed across developing regions is not likely to be useful as such. It concludes with some insights into the tensions that arise in designing a viable socio-technical system around this type of tool and considers what the wider implications may be.

We will keep readers informed as to when the publication appears.

At this year’s Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Conference in Manchester (26-28 Aug 2009), Fair Tracing’s Dr Dorothea Kleine teamed up with Dr Ian Cook (Exeter University) and Dr Mark Graham (Oxford Internet Institute) to host three sessions on “Follow the thing: New Cultural and Economic Geographies“. The idea of the session was to bring together value chain research conducted from cultural geography and economic geography perspectives (see also the full programme).

Our sessions had 13 papers (one of which was on the Fair Tracing project) running from 09:00 to 16:50. Thanks to the great interest in the topic, sponsorship from two research groups, the quality of the papers (and the lucky coincidence that our session info was printed in the front section of the programme at a busy, multi-strand conference with several sessions in parallel) we had audiences of over 30 people throughout the day, consisting of mainly cultural, but also some economic geographers. 

The quality of questions were outstanding. One question on the Fair Tracing project was whether we had spoken to workers directly, or whether we had, just like much of the Fair Trade research, merged the categories or producers and workers. I was glad to be able to explain that our focus groups in Chile had been conducted with vineyard owners, bodega employees and workers separately. I also remarked how at the time one of us (ie Dr Ann Light) succeeded in involving the foreman in conversation and distracting him sufficiently while Macarena Vivent and I had unsupervised focus group time with workers… 

Ah, we were a great team!      

“Meanwhile, an online initiative called the Fair Tracing Project aims to publicise how farmers in poor countries are treated by the multinational companies that sell their produce in the west. Farmers use mobiles to upload photos and videos “so they can tell a story about the labour conditions they’re working under”, says Fair Tracing team member Dorothea Kleine of Royal Holloway, University of London. Kleine and her colleagues add this to data on how the goods travel from farm to store, including the amount that packagers, shippers, and retailers get paid along the way.

So far they have completed case studies on Chilean wine (see diagram) and Indian coffee. Customers in stores should eventually be able to photograph a product’s bar code with their phone, and be directed to the relevant charts and videos.”

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!  

Chile’s President Michelle Batchelet gave a talk at the London School of Economics on Friday. Maria and I, and what seemed to be the entire Chilean diaspora in London, went to hear her. She said:

“I believe that [in Chile] for so long we have struggled to be free, in many ways we forgot to be fair. We forgot that fair democracy requires equality of opportunity that comes from access to education, healthcare, social security or housing…Democracy must deliver goods, especially to those who have made great sacrifices in recent years but who have received very little reward, as shown by the levels of poverty which still prevail in Latin America.”    

Our own presentation — close to the halfway point of the Fair Tracing project – gave details of our recent field visits to Chile and India (including news that Professor N. Shantha Mohan has joined the project as a consultant), as well as initial results of our UK Consumer Study, and aspects of the prospective data collation, storage and retrieval technologies that the project will use. The report also highlighted presentations made by team members on aspects of Fair Tracing, including

• D. Kleine, ‘Anything but neutral: The role of technology in development’, Open University, Milton Keynes, 28 Mar 2007;
• D. Kleine & A. Light, ‘Found in Translation: Experiences from the Fair Tracing Project’. Human Computer Interaction annual conference, Lancaster University, 4 Sept 2007;
• D. Kleine, ‘Linking local realities: Using technology to connect Fair Trade consumers and producers’, Royal Geographical Society annual conference, 31 Sept 2007;
• I Brown, ‘Current research’, Oxford Internet Institute,  10 Oct 2007;
• A. Light , ‘A Year in Pictures: Some Issues in Developing a Representation of Ethical Producers for Consumers’, Sheffield Hallam University, Nov 2007; and
• D. Kleine, ’The Fair Tracing project: Using the internet to track Chilean Fairtrade wine’, Centre for Latin American Studies, Cambridge University, 18 Jan 2008,

as well as recent and forthcoming publications concerning the project, including

• D. Kleine (2007) ‘Striking a Balance’, Engineering and Technology, 2:2, 30-33;
• A. Chopra & A. Kundu (2008, forthcoming) ‘The Fair Tracing project: digital tracing technology and Indian coffee, Contemporary South Asia, 16:2 June;
• D. Kleine (2008, forthcoming) ‘Negotiating partnerships, understanding power: Doing Action Research on Chilean Fairtrade Wine’, Geojournal;
• D. Kleine (2008, forthcoming) ‘How fair is fair enough? Negotiating alterity and compromise within the German Fair Trade movement’, in D. Fuller, A.E. Jonas & R. Lee, Alternative Economic and Political Spaces (Ashgate);
• D. Kleine (in preparation)  ‘From solidarity coffee to fine wine: The changing images of Fair Trade’, Antipode; and
• D. Kleine & A. Light (in preparation) ‘Designing with Partners in the Global South: Empowering producers, informing consumers’ .

While the conference itself proved a very useful means of communication between groups, fair tracing also benefitted from the time alloted for the separate teams to meet to plot our next steps. These include the following presentations:

• A. Chopra, ‘Fair Tracing and the digital divide: tracking Indian coffee across the internet’, Critical Internet Studies seminar series, Liverpool John Moores University, 21 Feb 2008;
• I. Brown, A. Chopra, .D. Kleine, A. Kundu, A. Light, M. Montero & C. Wallenta, ‘The Fair Tracing Project’, Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London, 6 Mar 2008; and
• A. Chopra (under consideration) , ‘The Fair Tracing project: Indian coffee and the digital divide’, British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS) annual conference , Leicester, 26-28 Mar 2008.

All in all, it was a very productive two days!

Ann Light (human-computer interaction specialist), Dorothea Kleine (economic geographer, project manager) and Macarena Vivent (ICT4D specialist, project director Chile) from the Fair Tracing Team have just completed an intensive round of fieldwork with our producer partners, the co-operative Los Robles in Chile. We visited the vineyards and the winery production facilities, interviewed workers, vintners, employees and management and conducted focus groups and participatory design workshops. Here are some photos: 

Observing the work in the vineyards…

Interviewing vintners and workers…

Holding focus groups with workers (finding out about their perspective on the wine value chain, on consumers, on Fairtrade, and on technology) ….

Conducting a participatory design workshop with the co-operative’s employees (conceptualising the value chain, mapping information flows and processes, identifying current data formats and technology in use etc.)…

Meeting volunteers, technophiles and creative students to discuss local content creation..

…and agreeing on next steps with the Directores (representatives of the members of the co-operative) and the General Manager of Los Robles, Francisco Della Maggiora Silva (in the picture with Macarena, Ann and Dorothea).   

Los Robles were very friendly hosts – they even raised a flag for each of us on our multinational research team! (But despite Ann’s extensive efforts of persuasion the Union Jack refused to unfurl properly for our photo…)

Yes, there was lots of very good wine. But we also raised a glass of typical Chilean “Mote con huesillos” (yummy peach syrup with dried peach and boiled wheat) in Curicó’s famous Café Montero in honour of Maria Montero, our valiant Research Assistant who stayed in London to hold the fort while we were away on our fieldwork visit to Chile. Cheers, Cote!

Our hosts are really friendly and my Spanish skills are increasing exponentially (from a very small base). I can’t believe that it’s all over for this visit in just three days…

Dorothea and Maca say hi!