“Sourcemap is a tool for producers, business owners and consumers to understand the impact of supply chains. The site is a social network where anyone can contribute to a shared understanding of the story behind products. You can simulate the impact of manufacturing, transporting, using and throwing away products using their Life-Cycle Assessment calculator. This web-based tool uses linked data from geological and geographic resources. Each ‘Sourcemap’ can be used to help market socially – and environmentally – conscious products and to buy carbon offsets. Supply chains published on the site can be embedded in external websites, printed onto product packaging or linked through QR codes readable by camera phones.” (Article source: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=708#)

The SourceMap website at http://www.sourcemap.org/beta/stage/ offers users the opportunity to make their own product, travel and/or food maps. Note that this open source site is optimised for the Firefox internet browser.

Greetings from Lima!

I, [Fair Tracing project manager Dr Dorothea Kleine], am at Congresso HDCA 2009, the annual conference of the Human Development and Capabilities Association, in Lima, Peru. This is an interdisciplinary conference interested in human development as freedom (Amartya Sen).

I presented a paper called “Applying the capability approach to the ‘medium of choice par excellence’: Using the Choice Framework for a holistic analysis of internet usage”. In it, I used Fair Tracing as an example to show how action research can help consumers and producers in their choices. I argued that one can use Sen’s capability approach, translated with the Choice Framework, to theorise what we did.

The conference is also a great opportunity to draw the attention of Latin American academics to our work, including our participatory work with producers in Chile.

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!      

The exhibition notes tell us:

“The term ‘feral’ denotes the project’s wilful wildness (as in pigeons) as opposed to romantic or nature-wildness (wolves): it offers street-wise survival tactics for urban environments. Since the first registered Feral Trade import of 30kg of coffee direct from the growers in El Salvador to the Cube Microplex in Bristol in 2003, Kate Rich has used social networks to traffic edible produce from around the world. Feral Trade participants become mules, carrying food items with them on trips they would have taken anyway and delivering them to depots (usually friends’ and colleagues’ flats or workplaces) in the growing network.”

“The process is facilitated by an online database, handcrafted by the artist, where couriers log their journeys. This forms the sole physical infrastructure for an alternative freight network, which operates without any material assets (vehicles, staff, communications devices, depots). It enables producers, couriers and buyers to track not only the transit of their own produce but all grocery movements in the network; outputting waybills that document the details of sources, shipping and handling with the kind of microattention that ingredient listings normally receive.”

See/eat it at:

http://www.http.uk.net/exhibitions/FeralTradeCafe/index.shtml

Food tracer uses d-touch visual markers which can be read at point of sale with a mobile phone. It is designed to address several “ethical issues” such as carbon cost,  packaging, local food, Fair Trade and organic. Many of Guiseppe’s ideas take the thinking behind the Fair Tracing project into exciting new directions. He says: “Fair Tracing has been an importnat source of inspiration for me”.

Have a look at Guiseppe’s project website: http://www.giuseppecostanza.it/foodtracer/index.htm    

Foodtracer is also on display at the Central Saint Martin’s 2009 Finalist Exhibition, June 22-25 between 10am -8pm at Candid Arts, 3 Torrens Street, London, EC1V 1NQ

“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.”

This publication offers a guide to Fair Trade through the exploration of 49 sites which include the official organizations of the movement, alternative traders, labeling organizations, government and multilateral bodies, NGOs and academic research across North America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. The Guide makes no claim to be representative, many sites being chosen for their intrinsic interest (availability of information, documents), but it does we feel capture the breadth and diversity of the movement and makes accessible a wealth of documentation on the key aspects of the movement, from facts and figures to analysis and debates. 

Ensler is campaigning for “Rape-Free” consumer electronics products whose raw, mineral components can be traced back to sources that can be verified to have procured them ethically.

Abstract: This research note describes the second stage of the ‘Fair Tracing’, a research project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the United Kingdom. The project aims to support ethical trade by implementing digital tracing technologies in value chains to provide consumers and producers with enhanced information about specific products; in this case, Chilean wine and Indian coffee. The genesis and first stage of the project—as it related to the India case study—was documented in an earlier research note published in Contemporary South Asia one year ago. This note goes on to describe the second stage of this case study which beings by mapping the life of the coffee bean in its current global commodity chain, and ends with proposing a traceable value chain for small growers of Indian coffee. It is argued that the use of tracking technologies will help increase the value chain ‘rents’ that accrue to farmers in developing countries by allowing them to charge more for differentiated products increasingly demanded by informed consumers, both in the West and in home markets.

This article is the second in a projected series of three following the India case study of the Fair Tracing project. The first in the series was “The Fair Tracing project: digital tracing technology and Indian coffee”, Contemporary South Asia, 16:2, June 2008, pp 217-230.

If anyone is going to this year’s conference and would like to write us a summary, that would be great. Otherwise we will catch up here: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/ser/resources.html in the fullness of time.