On 13 June, Fair Tracing project research student Ashima Chopra presented “The Fair Tracing project and thecase study of establishing traceability for coffe in India: Is technological innovation necessary for social development?” as part of the Ninth Informatics Workshop for Research Students.
The event is hosted annually by the University of Bradford School of Informatics, and all presentations are collected in workshop proceedings edited by Dr Dimitrios Rigas.
On 26 March, Ashima Chopra, one of two funded research students on the Fair Tracing Project, presented ”The Fair Tracing project: Indian coffee and the digital divide” at the annual conference of the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS) held in Leicester from 26-28 March 2008. Note that BASAS is “is the largest UK academic association for the study of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives and the South Asian Diaspora”.
The network of researchers involved in the four EPSRC-funded projects met in at Emmanuel College, Cambridge on 7-8 January 2008 for a second “Bridging the Global Digital Divide” conference. The aim of the two-day meeting was to bring the project teams together to share news and information about our ongoing work, as well as plan for the months ahead. Attending on behalf of Fair Tracing were Dr Apurba Kundu, Dr Ann Light and Christian Wallenta (both days), as well as Dr Dorothea Kleine and Ashima Chopra (day one), and Maria Jose Montero (day two).
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
as well as recent and forthcoming publications concerning the project, including
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:
All in all, it was a very productive two days!
UC Atlas Conference – Mapping Global Inequalities: Beyond Income Inequalities
For several years there has been debate in the academic and popular media about the implications of globalization for poverty and inequality. The debate has, however, become stalled partly because it is too narrowly conceived, being focused almost exclusively on income inequality and on the national scale. The conference will expand this debate by both mapping global inequality at various scales and by deploying multidisciplinary perspectives to take the debate beyond income inequality.
“UK consumers flock to Fairtrade” read the display wall of Ehrmanns’ stand at the London International Wine and Spirits Fair 2007. Ehrmanns is currently the UK’s leading Fairtrade wine importer and a key collaboration partner for our Fair Tracing project. Ann Light and Dorothea Kleine were at the Fair and visited both the Ehrmanns stand and the stand of our other key partners, the Chilean Fairtrade Wine producers Los Robles (who sell through Ehrmanns). Export manager Sergio and Chief Oenologist Paula had come over from Chile to offer tastings and talk business with visitors to the stand.
Yesterday, the IAgrE hosted the Landward 2007 Conference on Traceability across the Foodchain in Peterborough (program).
The morning session looked at Traceability Issues and Challenges. Christine Tacon, General Manager of The Co-operative Farms, gave some reasons why food traceability is so important. Farmers are distant from the final customer and receive very little feedback about what consumer want. They cannot show consumers how their products are grown (strict protocols, environmental stewardship, etc.) and the consumer, on the other hand, has very little visibility about the product she buys. Tacon also reported that consumer research has shown that consumer do want traceability and that it would add value to a product.
Martin Grantley-Smith, General Manager of the Red Meat Industry Forum, illustrated the hurdles of traceability across the meat supply-chain. He identified the key issues as the long, fragmented chain, the poor communication, the imbalance of power and the adversarial, commercial activity within the chain.
Among the other speakers were Brigitta Wolf from the German quality assurance organisation QS and Caroline Drummond, Chief Executive of LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming) who was talking about traceability as a contribution to environmental management.
Meurig Raymond, Deputy President of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) talked about the farmers point of view and asked the question who will pay for the extra costs of traceability. Many farmers fear that they have to bear the extra costs.
The afternoon session started with Carla Gasparin and Sven Peets, PhD students from Cranfield University, who talked about their research on stakeholder requirements and the design of an automatic recording system for traceability.
The following session looked at Traceability in Practice, including Stephen Leese, Business Development Manager of John Deere Agri Services. Leese talked about John Deeres approach and claimed that traceability should be seen as an (important) by-product of farm management systems. There is no incentive for farmers to deploy a traceability system alone. Farm management system help farmers to manage their data and information better and traceability will then come for free.
During our visit to Bangalore, we attended the India International Coffee Festival 2007 in order to learn more about Indian Coffee and to present the Fair Tracing Project to interested producers.
The festival began with a welcome address from Krishna Rau, the current Chairman of the Coffee Board of India followed by several other speakers including Shri Jairam Ramesh, the Minister of State for Commerce.
On the second day the Fair Tracing team was invited to present the project to the audience. As a part of the “Coffee Differentiation for Value Enhancement” session, Ian Brown and Ann Light presented the aims and goals of Fair Tracing and invited coffee producers to work with us on the project.
The session was followed by “Coffee Quality and Sustainability” with producers from Kenya, Costa Rica and India talking about the challenges and problems they encounter during their work. One speaker was Bose Mandanna, a coffee planter from Coorg, the largest coffee growing district in the country and former Vice Chairman of the Coffee Board who kindly invited the Fair Tracing team to visit his plantation the following week. Another was Dr Adolfo Lizano-Gonzalez, deputy executive director at the Instituto Del Cafe de Costa Rica. Mr Mandanna and Dr Lizano-Gonzalez described a range of information on the environmental impact of coffee farms that could be included in a product information system: the range of wildlife sheltered by plants, methods of rainfall management, whether processing water and pulp are reused and filtered, and the impact of farms as “carbon sinks” under the Kyoto treaty. With Dr Joseph Kimemia, director of research at Kenya’s Coffee Research Foundation, they also discussed social impact indicators such as the average level of worker income, education and housing provided to workers’ families, and the provision of micro credit to grower communities. Mr Mario Cerutti, director of Luigi Lavazza Spa, described his company’s ¡Tierra! project, which certifies minimum environmental and social standards for coffee suppliers.
The last day of the conference was about the image of coffee, including speakers such as Dr. Ernesto Illy the Honorary Chairman of Illycaffe, Italy and Dr. Sylvia Robert-Sargeant from Positively Coffee.
The Coffee Festival provided a great opportunity for the Fair Tracing team to learn more about Indian coffee and the challenges and problems the planters encounter. Furthermore, we were able to present the project and discuss it with people who are involved in producing and distributing Indian coffee — vital to our participative design process. We are working to build strong partnerships with a number of organisations we met during our visit.
Last month’s Doors 9: Food, energy and fuel conference was a great opportunity for several of the Fair Tracing team to meet like-minded designers and activists. You can read some after-event musings from organiser John Thackara.
Most relevant for us were the following projects:
Today’s Guardian has an interesting article from ActionAid on the tensions between environmental and developmental concerns over flown-in produce:
In Africa alone more than one million people depend on selling fruit and vegetables to British shoppers. Fruit and vegetables are mostly airfreighted, but cutting African farmers off from international trade will cause devastation which far outweighs the tiny reduction in the UK’s carbon emissions — around 0.1% of our total emissions — that might result. In this case, the ethical choice would be to buy air-freighted products.
Obviously with perishable goods the greener option of sea freight is impossible without freezing products (which has its own consumer and environmental issues).
This question is also being looked at by the Beeline project, one of many fascinating teams here at the Doors 9 conference in Delhi that we are attending. More on that soon!
The network of researchers involved in the four EPSRC-funded projects around the Theme “Bridging the Global Digital Divide” met again for a conference at Cambridge on January 8-9, 2007. We had all gone through an interactive peer review process together, and this was the first time we met since the four projects started towards the end of last year – it was great to see everyone again.
Cambridge was grey and a bit wet, but still very pretty – and the archways at Emmanuel College were not only decorative, they also kept you dry. Above is a photo showing the Fair Tracing team giving our presentation to the other researchers – in this darkish historic hall with the stern looking men on the walls.
The atmosphere amongst the four project teams was much less stern – constructive feedback all around, and we found out that two other projects also work with partners in India. We talked to Ram Bhatt from the NGO “Voices” in Bangalore who run community radio in rural Southern India (see for example http://ictpr.nic.in/nammadhwani/2jul.htm for a UNESCO article on one of their initiatives). They are interested in reporting on our project locally, which will be great. I also think the way that their Namma Dhwani project connects participatory methods (PAR) with media and development issues is a good example of how a good participatory and holistic approach can ensure relevance and sustainability.
Finally, here’s us having a square-table meeting, planning the project, particularly the upcoming trip to India (left-to-right: Dr Apurba Kundu, Ashima Chopra, Christian Wallenta, Dr Ian Brown, Dorothea Kleine and Ann Light). We also tried to take on board the ideas and comments we got from colleagues- ah yes, one thing they really liked was having this project blog. So we’ve decided to fill it with even more content in the weeks and months to come – now that we have emerged from that dark hall. So watch this space!
