“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.

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

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.

Attacked for business hubris and $4 confections, Howard Schultz insists the firm is all about real, Fairtrade coffee

The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Tuesday 24 March 2009.

In the interview below we said all the espresso-based coffee used in its European stores was Fairtrade certified. That is not the case. Starbucks has made a commitment that all the espresso-based coffee sold in its outlets in the UK and Ireland will be Fairtrade certified by the end of the year

The Frappuccino king truly knows how to talk. Starbucks’ chairman, Howard Schultz…  discusses ethical sourcing, quality roasting and the “unparalleled” standards of freshness in Starbucks’ coffee beans…

Starbucks’ effort to revive its fortunes will play heavily on what Schultz sees as its ethical strengths. All of the espresso-based coffee used in its European stores is Fairtrade certified. The company’s charitable efforts extended to mobilising thousands of employees to help rebuild hurricane-savaged New Orleans last year. Trying to tap into the zeitgeist, the firm offered a free coffee to anybody who voted on US election day.”Even though people are under economic pressure, they still want to support those brands with values that are compatible with their own,” says Schultz, who professes to be perplexed that Starbucks is targeted by a “vocal minority” of anti-capitalist protesters…

The clothing company MADE-BY (based in Copenhagen) is “decicated to promoting sustainable clothing manufacture…You can recognise items produced…by the blue button…[Using its Track&Trace technology] you can even find out who made your T-shirt or skirt, and who picked, spun and wove the cotton”. (Source: “Track and Trace: Who made your skirt?”, Jackpot Magazine, Autumn 2008, p 77.)

“MADE-BY Track&Trace follows the trail of your clothes. With the MADE-BY code in your garment you can find out where your garment was made and by whom. In this way, MADE-BY brands open up the doors to the production process…MADE-BY Track&Trace is the very first system to trace the origin of clothes.” (Source: MADE-BY Track&Trace page at http://www.made-by.org/tracktrace.php?lg=en.)

Track & Trace is a database system…for manufacturers that was developed by MADE-BY in collaboration with Organic Exchange and the English IT company Historic Fu­tures. Every link in the production chain enters production information into the database and forwards it to the next link. This gives the brands as direct access as possible to production data from the other suppliers in the chain. Consumers can enter the code found on the clothing label into a simplified consumer page to see who was involved in the production of their clothing”. (Source: ”Track&Trace: what is it?” at http://www.made-by.org/downloads/TrackTrace_EN.pdf)

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!  

Alternative trade networks and the coffee system

Every day 1.5 billion cups of coffee are drunk somewhere in the world – quite a few of them in this house – but few of us in the North know much about the 25 million families that grow and produce this valuable bean.

After reading a new book called Confronting The Coffee Crisis I feel better informed not just about the negative aspects of the story – but also motivated to explore practically the potential of emerging alternative trade networks to change the bigger picture in profound ways.

[For full review, click here.]

“B2Bpricenow.com is an e-marketplace in the Philippines. Through this on-line market place farmers, fisherfolk and small and medium enterprises can access market prices and trade products. This can be achieved either through their website or by cell phone. Split into two phases, the project began by obtaining content for the site from a variety of agricultural and fishery cooperatives and training them to both access and post products on the website. Through free technical support and hosting by Unisys, B2Bpricenow.com is able to offer its services for free. The second phase is focused on getting these groups connected to the internet and actual transactions occurring on-line.” [see http://www.sustainableicts.org/infodev/B2B.pdf

The Sustainable ICTs site offers quite a few case studies, of which this is perhaps the most related to what we are trying to do, and considerable guidance on embedding projects so that they stick.