Ever wanted to know where your Dole Organic Banana comes from?
Consumers can “travel to the origin of each organic product” Dole produces. By entering the three digit Farm Code located on the sticker of their fruit. You can visit the country, the farm, view photos and learn more about their products and people.
However, read the comments on TreeHugger to see how some consumers feel about tracing goods from companies such as Dole, who have dubious ethical backgrounds.
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”.
On 28 February 2008, Ashima Chopra, one of the two funded research students on the fair Tracing project, gave a presentation entitled “Fair Tracing and the digital divide: tracking Indian coffee across the Internet” at the Critical Internet Studies semiar series held at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU).
Series organiser Dr. Adi Kuntsman called the presentation “fascinating”, and encouraged Chopra to appear as a guest lecturer on the globalisation course offered at LJMU. Kuntsman also invited her to attend the Internet Studies Festival to be held at LJMU in July.
Want to obtain more information about the bottle of Chianti you just purchased? You can trace it here (in Italian). Each bottle has a code than can be entered via the web form or by sending a text message.
The hard work….
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!
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E-bay launched a portal dedicated to fair trade that allows shoppers to easily find Fair Trade certified goods on the site.
It works because the seller has already paid a fair price for the goods so, although it’s perhaps not quite as cheap as broader eBay stuff, you can still get a bargain.
The interface is flash-based and easy to use, you can search by 4 main categories (Clothing & Accessories, Jewellery, Home & Garden and All Categories) and find information in the Fair Trade sellers listed on the portal. The intention is that each region highlights a Fair Trade artisan cooperative with its story and photographs, but unfortunately the sections about fair trade sellers and fair trade itself are not working at the moment.
More details here.
Panoramio could be a good option to track the routes taken by wine/coffee in the Fair Tracing project. In Panoramio you can see the photos and the map at the same time. The example below shows the Inca Trail to Macchu Pichu in Los Andes, Peru.
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“Join the dots: camera phones to decode new ad widget”
“Next week’s DVD release of the zombie-flick 28 Weeks Later will bring a revolutionary marketing widget, widely used in Japan, to the UK for the first time.
The film poster contains a square box full of black and white dots known as a QR – quick response – code. It contains information that can be decoded by the camera on a mobile phone with the right software installed. A huge poster showing nothing but a QR code has already gone up in London’s Shoreditch to advertise the DVD.
These “bar codes” are widely used in Japan to store everything from web addresses and phone numbers to product details. Rather than laboriously typing in a person’s phone number or an internet address into a phone, these codes give one-touch access to a wealth of information that can then be stored on a phone. Rather than laboriously typing in a person’s phone number or an internet address into a phone, these codes give one-touch access to a wealth of information that can then be stored on a phone.”
To read the full story that appeared in The Guardian on 5 September 2007, click on the link above.
Promoting European Traceability Excellence and Research (PETER)
“Promoting European Traceability Excellence & Research (PETER) is an essential Specific Support Action that provides an international forum for focusing and disseminating the results of European Commission’s €100M investment in research on food traceability. There is an urgent need for rapid consolidation and dissemination of European expertise to developing countries and SMEs so that they can have access to the global markets that now exist.”
