Fair Trade Blog

Last fall, things were looking dark for the Arghand Cooperative. The corrupt Afghan election and deteriorating security destroyed moral. Several members announced they wanted to leave. I worried that we would lose a wonderful product and beautiful connection to something that was going right in Aghanistan.

More importantly than that, I feared the members would loose the livelyhood they had built over the last several years.  You and I have played a small part in helping them build better lives. 

Miraculously, just the opposite has happened.  The latest information describes a cooperative that continues to grow and thrive.

• The solar electic system is providing power 24/7, allowing members to press seed for oil up to 4-5 hours per day.
• Two more men and two new women have joined the coop.
• A new business plan has been created.
• New products are coming soon including lip balm, body lotion, and face cream.

Finally, let me share this quote from a recent e-mail.  “so we have decided as a group to leave politics aside and thrust ourselves back into the work of tranforming the agricultural bounty of southern Afghanistan into luxurious soaps and skin care products.”

Keep shopping your good values!

If you want to hear a great story, go to a Fair Trade shop. I have never walked into one where the owner couldn’t pick up half a dozen products and tell you an incredible story about it.

When I was in Ecuador, there were countless stories. I remember Washington, the tagua carver. We saw his shop and the new house he had built for his family, all possible through Fair Trade. He started simply, but now he employs several workers in his shop. 

And I love to tell everyone that comes in about Arghand Soap.  It’s one of our most impressive and popular products.  Their cooperative employs a handful of people and gives them an alternative to the drug trade. 

Great stories aren’t limited to our Fair Trade Shop.  Our other shop, Rhubarb, attracts some great stories as well.  Just a couple of days ago, one of the local artists that provides us with cards came in with exciting news.  One of her paintings is now on a prayer card that is distributed worldwide by the Catholic Church. You can read the story here, and see the print of the painting that was presented to the Pope.  The cards are available in our shop. 

If you are hungry for more, stop by and I’ll tell you other inspiring stories about Fair Trade and local entreprenuers!

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My heart rose into my throat as I read the latest notes from the field, penned by Arghand Cooperative’s Jennie Green after her recent trip to Afghanistan. The challenges Arghand has faced in the last few months have nearly undone a venture that I support and respect.

I want to do more to support them. So, Arghand soap will be featured with a discount from Friday, November 27th through Thursday, December 24th.   I’ll take for a little less to make your holiday shopping more affordable in the hope that you will buy a little more of their wonderful product.   

Arghand has always had it’s share of challenges, but not as overwhelming as the ones they have just worked through.

The Canadians had recently withdrawn their consent to ship Arghand products through their APO.  As Jennie prepared to go to Kandahar to help find a way to ship out a backlog of supply, three men in the cooperative confronted Sarah Chayes, the founder, about deteriorating safety in Kandahar.  Since the corrupt election in August, resurgence of the Taliban (who are now blending with the local populace), and renewed violence, they had decided the danger of working for Arghand had become too great.

As always, the Taliban had it in for those Afghans who were known to collaborate with foreigners, or worked for the government, and the daily reports of murders kidnappings, suicide attacks and bomb blasts became especially worrisome when the victims started to be neighbors and friends – Jennie Green

They wanted to dissolve the cooperative and distribute the assets evenly among the members, so that they could take their nest eggs and begin again, perhaps in a safer places, even Pakistan.

After many days of painful discussion, Sarah and Jennie convinced the three men to stay on at the cooperative as they put it into “survival mode.”  For six months the cooperative will be operating at reduced capacity as they attempt to remain under the radar and hope for the situation to improve. 

We have a growing history with Arghand since we started carrying their soap in the fall of 2007.  You’ve helped us provide income for them as we continue to reorder.  More than a dozen Afghans, mostly women, are supported, at least in part, by Arghand. 

Jennie assures me there is plenty of supply for the holidays, thanks to the backlog that had built up before shipping resumed.  We just got another box with all of their soap varieties and more pebbles are on the way. 

We badly want to succeed.  We don’t want to surrender our years of hard work to a sinister enterprise. – Jennie Green

They have not surrendered.  As long as Arghand survives, I know there is hope for the Afghans. 

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Arghand Cooperative, maker of wonderful soaps, body oils, and scarves in Afghanistan, is once again facing a big challenge. So many of you have purchased their products, so I thought you would appreciate an update.

Until recently, the Canadian Military was allowing the cooperative to use their postal service at Kandahar Air Field to deliver product to North America.  Suddenly, they shut down that option without explanation.  The cooperative has been scrambling to find an alternative.  Word is they have uncovered some promising leads.

Unfortunately, hundreds of packages of Pebbles (my favorite item) are waiting in Kandahar for a way to our store and others.  That’s why they are currently unavailable on our website.  We still have plenty of single pieces in great varieties like Desert Fields and Pomegranate.

The good news is that the solar power system, so long in coming, is up and running! The 14 members of the cooperative are no longer at the mercy of the local power grid, so they can run their oil presses and other equipment whenever needed.  This means Arghand will be able to produce body oils again.

Here are a couple of photos.  On the right are the new solar panels on the roof.  On the left, Abd Al-Ahad and Bacha work on the installation.

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Patricia Lewis, who lives with her canine companion in Canada, has been a good customer. We share a passion for the Arghand Cooperative, which I have written about in the space many times. Patricia started by buying their distinctive soaps from us. Just recently, she bought Arghand scarves that we first began offering earlier this spring.

I ask her to send me some thoughts about her recent purchase and this is what she had to say. 

Discerning shopper?  Travel the world and find the same stores, same malls, selling the same merchandise you find in your local mall at home?  Handcrafted treasures are increasingly going the way of the dinosaur, now pretty much in the stages of the polar bear — threatened.  Cheaper mass-produced, often synthetic assembly-line goods are taking their place.  Our culture, one that clearly embraces uniqueness and individuality, is also disappearing. Doesn’t have to be entirely so.

Make a statement with your purchasing power — support handcrafted treasures made by traditional methods that date back to antiquity, at the same time fuelling little economies that enable people to live self-sufficently and also pass down their dignified crafts to the next generations, who can also take pride in their talents, works of art, and honest labours. 

Celebrate your lovely new purchase and wear it smartly.

Buy smart, dress smart. I like that. Thanks, Patricia.

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Just this week, both the president and General Petraus made the astounding assessment that America and NATO are losing the war in Afghanistan. After eight years of fighting and attempting to rebuild that country, we are failing.

If you haven’t heard what Sarah Chayes, founder of the Arghand Cooperative, has to say about how to get out of this mess, here is a link to a guest interview she did on the Rachel Maddow Show this past Tuesday.

In the brief segment, Sarah advocates for making the Taliban irrelevant instead of working to defeat them on the battlefield or subvert them by negotiating with willing elements.  Both solutions have been floated by the new administration, though Obama has said that a larger military presence is certain.

Sarah also described the life and death struggle of everyday life for Arghand’s members.  I hope you watch her interview.  We’re all concerned about the future of the country as well as the little cooperative we’ve come to know and love through the wonderful soap they make.

I hope you watch this enlightening interview.

Keep shopping your good values!

Things are not getting better in Afghanistan.  We hear about more deaths, new attacks, a reinvigorated Taliban, but little of it sinks in here at home.  In this age of simmering wars, causualty reports, skirmishes, and bombings have lost their impact. 

It takes a hardened first-hand account to bring home the miserable chaos that rules in much of Afghanistan.   I just got an inside look at Afghanistan from Sarah Chayes, a founder of the Arghand Cooperative in Kandahar.   She sometimes sends missives to Arghand’s retail partners.    

There is a brittle frustration in her “Notes from the Field,” dated August 22.  In a report that pressed on my heart, she wrote in part:

I’m feeling a little funny again, that slight pounding of the heart upon the instant of awaking in the morning, sleep broken when the dogs bark at night, that sense that something is brewing…

Little of what she narrates of life in Kandahar sheds hope for the situation there.  She feels that the recent jailbreak and tandem attack on Arghandab by the Taliban had little to do with territory and everything to do with sending a loud warning.  

The message they intended to deliver to the local population came out in stereo: we can come in here when we want to.  If you’ve been collaborating with the government or the foreigners, we’ll know about it.  We’ll string you up by the heels long before ISAF gets around to mounting a counter-attack.  Ordinary people make up the audience that matters in this fight.  For them, the menace of the Taliban message, as expressed in the June assault, couldn’t have been more convincing.

Sarah has been arguing for years that the Karzai government is threatening the future of the country as much as the Taliban.  Corruption, self-interest, and double dealing with the Taliban, have put the average Afghan in the middle of a no-win situation.  Afghans are now forced to chose between competing evils.

In the midst of all the turmoil, the cooperative continues making the essential oils for their wonderful soap.  Often they are running their presses at odd hours when electricity is available.  Sarah reports the cooperative is just about finished planning and paying for a solar electrical system that will gain them independence from the unreliable local grid.  

Still, the future of any enterprise in Afghanistan, including Arghand, is tenuous.  But we keep hope in play by supporting Arghand while we pray for change.  

Keep shopping your good values.

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. 

Arghand Soap is once again available on our website and in our shop, so we eagerly await your order for this special product.  We have Amandine, Anisette, Elixir of Artemis, Mountain Herb, Pebbles, and my favorite, Pomegranate.  Dig in! 

We also have more Arghand bookmarks featuring colorful photos of  women working with pomegranantes.  A beautiful reminder of their handmade products.  We include one with each order.  

Arghand continues to move ahead.  The resumption of shipments is a step forward.  The cooperative is planning to get solar power installed so that they can continue working even when the local power fails.  We hope that project is completed soon so that the cooperative gains a little more independence from the situation that continues to swirl around them.

Meanwhile, spring has finally arrived in the northern tier.  So has a lot of spring and summer fashion. Look for new items on our website next week! 

Keep shopping your good values!  

Kile

So many inquiries about when we will once again have soaps from Arghand Cooperative in Afghanistan!   I believe our collective patience will be rewarded. 

Another delay has reared it’s ugly head.  We received word on March 4th that their most recent shipment had been delayed.  Apparently, the usual channel through the Canadian military had broken down, so the process for shipping out of the country had to be re-established.  On top of that, the Canadian post office apparently had an issue with the size of the shipment. 

Unfortunately, we have no other specifics.  We do know that it normally takes several weeks for the shipment to reach North America and then more time for Arghand to work through their back orders.  But we are hopeful we will have supply on the way in a few weeks. 

I hope you have bookmarked our homepage so you can keep up to date.

In the meantime, we will have some exciting new products to offer you online in April.  Spring brings us new jewelry, clothing, and accessories for you to browse. 

Keep shopping your good values!

Kile