Fair Trade Challenges
We like to think of the Fair Trade movement as strong, healthy and on course for inevitible and continuing growth. The reality is that it has more challenges than we might realize — perhaps more than ever before.
Progress in Fair Trade in perhaps most vulnerable in Africa. Fair Trade has been established there for many decades, but now faces global forces unforeseen even a few years ago. Many African economies have suffered negative economic growth bought on by a toxic convergence of civil unrest, rising oil prices, climate change, and now food shortages.
The World Bank estimates that poverty has increased as much as 6 percent in some parts of the world due to the hike in oil prices in recent years. African counties like Guinea, Guinea Bissau, and Senegal import 100 percent of their oil. Their oil bills are a fraction of the amount they spend on public services and poverty reduction programs.
Lately, the growing spectre of food shortages is drawing attention away from economic development toward simple survival for millions of Africans. The Africa Progress Panel, chaired by Kofi Annan, said recently that food shortages threaten to destroy years of economic progress and drive 100 million people into poverty.
Civil unrest is hindering economic progress as well. Tribal violence in Kenya threatened dozens of Fair Trade producers in that country earlier this year. Though stability is returning, it reminds us how many different ways in which Fair Trade networks can be damaged.
The challenge of war and social strife certainly extends beyond Africa. If you have been following the story of Arghand cooperative in Afghanistan, started by former NPR reporter Sarah Chayse, you know that even after many years of struggle, the very existence of the cooperative is still threatened by the Taliban.
Just this month Taliban forces escaped a prison in Kandahar province. Last week, government forces launched an offensive against Taliban fighters in Arghandab where the cooperative is located. As Sarah said this morning in an NPR interview, the cooperative is a “soap factory in a shooting gallery…
Certainly these challenges are discouraging, but I believe there is opportunity in every circumstance. Many of the principles of Fair Trade — sustainability, equality, democracy, economic independence – can be applied to tribes, towns, provinces, and nations as well as individuals and cooperatives.