The BBC reports that fish are the latest product to be tracked:
The government is to call for a Europe-wide system for tracking fish to help cut down on illegal fishing.
Fisheries Minister Ben Bradshaw and Overseas Development Minister Gareth Thomas say it will make it harder for illegal catches to enter the EU.
The Sunday Times magazine has a long feature on the rise and rise of ethical shopping:
Supermarkets know that there is a groundswell of opinion among consumers concerned about green and ethical issues. In a recent survey, the market researchers Mintel predicted that, this year, British shoppers would spend £2 billion on organic, fair trade and locally sourced products, an increase 62% since 2002. The same survey also found that the fair-trade market alone is predicted to be around £230m by the end of the year, doubling to£547m by 2011. Planting the flag to say “we care the most” could give retailers a big competitive advantage.
This week saw me talk to the New Scientist about the project. Find the first part of the story here (the rest needs a subscription to the magazine).
Then the Radio 4 programme on farming picked it up, so I popped into the BBC studios to talk about it yesterday. It went out on Farming News this morning at 5.45am. You can hear the interview on the Listen Again facility, linked from here, for the next few days.
Both reporters seemed more interested in the ethical shopping dimension of the project than any bridging the global digital divide aspects, although I described them in some detail. You can’t tell a journalist what to cover!
While Fair Tracing is focused on food products, it sounds like clothes might benefit from some ethical tagging technology:
Primark is named as least ethical clothes shop – Independent
Primark scores just 2.5 out of 20 on an ethical index that ranks the leading clothing chains on criteria such as workers’ rights and whether they do business with oppressive regimes. Mk One and Marks & Spencer were ranked second and third worst for ethics by Ethical Consumer magazine.
Jigsaw and Matalan scored the highest ratings but researchers said ethical standards were so low among the 27 high street clothing chains surveyed that none of them could be recommended to shoppers with a conscience.
BBC news today:
Buses equipped with wi-fi are being used to deliver web content to remote rural villages in the developing world.
A couple of months ago S. Keshav gave a talk about this topic at UCL. Have a look at the paper of his research group Lowcost Communication for Rural Internet Kiosks Using Mechanical Backhaul.
Rural kiosks in developing countries provide a variety of services such as birth, marriage, and death certificates, electricity bill collection, land records, email services, and consulting on medical and agricultural problems. Fundamental to a kiosk’s operation is its connection to the Internet. Network connectivity today is primarily provided by dialup telephone, although Very Small Aperture Terminals (VSAT) or long-distance wireless links are also being deployed. These solutions tend to be both expensive and failure prone. Instead, we propose the use of buses and cars as ‘mechanical backhaul’ devices to carry data to and from a village and an internet gateway…
The Times has launched a new Concerned Consumers Index surveying 1,000 adults whose purchasing behaviour is affected by the social, ethical and environmental behaviour of companies. The first index has found that such consumers are natural viral marketers, nearly 50% more likely than average consumers to recommend products to friends, and hence worth cultivating. However, it also finds that price still comes first:
Value and convenience still count more than carbon footprints and social justice. The survey shows that the two most important things to customers are price and location.
The Fair Tracing project was featured in News & Views (University of Bradford), January 2007. The full text of the article with accompanying photo appears below.
Want to know how fair trade your coffee is? Look at the digital tag!
A team of researchers led by the University of Bradford is looking at the possibility of tracing products from developing countries to give consumers more information about their origins. The ‘Fair Tracing’ project, led by Dr Apurba Kundu, Associate Dean of the University’s School of Informatics, aims to help bridge the digital divide between consumers from developed countries and producers in the developing world by using tracing technology to enhance the Fair Trade model of trade. The project, funded with just over £411,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), features a six-strong research team including academics from the University of Cambridge, University College London and Queen Mary College (University of London).
The research team will spend the next three years looking at how to use digital tracing technology to link producers in the developing world with their consumers in the developed world by ‘tagging‘ individual products with information readily accessible by both producer and consumer. Dr Kundu, a Senior University Teacher in Cybernetics, said: “The information that may be attached to tagged products is virtually limitless, beginning with details of the product’s date and cost of creation, as well as its individual creator and his/her working environment and pay, through the various steps of its transport to the eventual point-of-sale to the consumer. “At each stage of the product’s journey, information, including multimedia, may be added and/or edited.” “We believe that attaching tracing technology to products will enhance their value for consumers seeking to make ethical purchasing choices, increase the sales of producers in the developing world, and enable the mapping of global value chains.” In the first instance, the project will work with vintners in Chile and coffee growers in India, as both these products have connoisseur ranges which readily lend themselves to information-rich provision, and are already sold in the UK. In the long-term, the specific digital tracing technology developed during this project should also have applications in the wider commercial world.
The full project team consists of: Dr Apurba Kundu, University of Bradford, Principle Investigator, Dr Ian Brown, University College London, Co-Investigator, Dr Ann Light, Queen Mary (University of London), Co-Investigator, Ms Dorothea Kleine, University of Cambridge, Research Fellow, Ms Ashima Chopra, research student, University of Bradford , and Mr Christian Wallenta, research student, University College London.
The Economist recently featured a thought-provoking look at the costs and benefits of fair trade and food miles, both issues of central concern to the Fair Tracing project:
The standard economic argument against Fairtrade goes like this: the low price of commodities such as coffee is due to overproduction, and ought to be a signal to producers to switch to growing other crops. Paying a guaranteed Fairtrade premium—in effect, a subsidy—both prevents this signal from getting through and, by raising the average price paid for coffee, encourages more producers to enter the market. This then drives down the price of non-Fairtrade coffee even further, making non-Fairtrade farmers poorer. Fairtrade does not address the basic problem, argues Tim Harford, author of “The Undercover Economist” (2005), which is that too much coffee is being produced in the first place. Instead, it could even encourage more production…
But perhaps the most cogent objection to Fairtrade is that it is an inefficient way to get money to poor producers. Retailers add their own enormous mark-ups to Fairtrade products and mislead consumers into thinking that all of the premium they are paying is passed on. Mr Harford calculates that only 10% of the premium paid for Fairtrade coffee in a coffee bar trickles down to the producer. Fairtrade coffee, like the organic produce sold in supermarkets, is used by retailers as a means of identifying price-insensitive consumers who will pay more, he says.
What do you think? Let us know by leaving a comment…
The Discovery Channel News website has just published a story on the Fair Tracing project entitled Food Tags Aid Ethical Eating. As stated in the story by Tracy Staedter, the “Fair Tracing project…aims to narrow the gap between growers in underdeveloped countries and their consumers”. The story also includes quotes from interviews with Dr Apurba Kundu, the project’s principal investigator, and Dr Matt Jones of the Future Interaction Technology Lab of the University of Swansea, and member of the project’s Advisory Board. See it in full here.
Want to know how Fair Trade your coffee is? Look at the digital tag!
A team of researchers led by the University of Bradford is looking at the possibility of tracing products from developing countries to give consumers more information about their origins.
The ‘Fair Tracing’ project, led by Dr Apurba Kundu, Associate Dean of the University of Bradford’s School of Informatics, aims to help bridge the digital divide between consumers from developed countries and producers in the developing world by using tracing technology to enhance the Fair Trade model of trade.
This research project launch comes at a time when the University of Bradford is celebrating achieving institution-wide Fair Trade status (Monday 11 December 2006).
The project, funded with just over £411,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), features a six-strong research team including academics from the University of Cambridge, University College London and Queen Mary College (University of London).
The research team will spend the next three years looking at how to use digital tracing technology to link producers in the developing world with their consumers in the developed world by ‘tagging‘ individual products with information readily accessible by both producer and consumer.
Dr Kundu, a Senior University Teacher in Cybernetics at the University of Bradford, said: “The idea for this project was born out of the EPSRC’s Ideas Factory series earlier this year, which brings academics from a multitude of disciplines together for a five-day session of brainstorming and proposal-writing regarding a particular issue – in this case, ‘Bridging the Global Digital Divide’.
“The information that may be attached to tagged products is virtually limitless, beginning with details of the product’s date and cost of creation, as well as its individual creator and his/her working environment and pay, through the various steps of its transport to the eventual point-of-sale to the consumer.
“At each stage of the product’s journey, information, including multimedia, may be added and/or edited.”
“We believe that attaching tracing technology to products will enhance their value for consumers seeking to make ethical purchasing choices, increase the sales of producers in the developing world, and enable the mapping of global value chains.”
In the first instance, the project will work with vintners in Chile and coffee growers in India, as both these products have connoisseur ranges which readily lend themselves to information-rich provision, and are already sold in the UK. In the long-term, the specific digital tracing technology developed during this project should also have applications in the wider commercial world.
The full project team consists of:
* Dr Apurba Kundu, University of Bradford, Principle Investigator
* Dr Ian Brown, University College London, Co-Investigator
* Dr Ann Light, Queen Mary (University of London), Co-Investigator
* Ms Dorothea Kleine, University of Cambridge, Research Fellow
* Ms Ashima Chopra, research student, University of Bradford
* Mr Christian Wallenta, research student, University College London
Dr Apurba Kundu can be contacted on 01274 235046 or via email at: A.Kundu@bradford.ac.uk
MEDIA NOTE
For further information, contact the University of Bradford’s Press Office: Emma Banks: 01274 233089 / Oliver Tipper: 01274 233084 / Email: press@bradford.ac.uk / Fax: 01274 236280. For enquiries out of office hours, call 07879 437986. The University of Bradford is able to provide broadcast-quality interviews via an ISDN line. This press release will also be available online at www.bradford.ac.uk/corpcomms/pressreleases
ENDS
