Fair Harvest in the Dominican Republic

8 years ago here at Global Exchange Reality Tours we began incorporating the fair trade story into our annual departures to address disturbing truths about the global economy.  Millions of farmers around the world are facing poverty and starvation because global crop prices have continued to plummet to all-time lows, a worldwide crisis exacerbating problems including malnutrition, family farm closures, and in some cases increased drug cultivation.

In today’s world economy, where profits rule and small-scale producers are left out of the bargaining process, farmers, craft producers, and other workers are often left without resources or hope for their future. Fair Trade helps exploited producers escape from this cycle of poverty.

The tourism industry has seen a growth in both “voluntourism” and philanthropy-based travel, and in 2003 Reality Tours launched its first Fair Harvest tour. The goals; to share the story of fair trade with travelers, to offer a service learning opportunity, to support local community-based tourism initiatives as a promoter of socially responsible travel, to meet and exchange with fair trade certified cooperative farmers, and to inspire our alumni to return committed to supporting the fair trade movement in their own communities and to support our Global Exchange Fair Trade campaigns and Fair Trade craft stores.

Global Exchange Reality Tours highlight the importance of fair trade on commodity crops such as cocoa, coffee, olives, and tea as well as textiles and crafts, and contextualizes the debate between “fair trade” and “free trade” crops and products in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Ecuador, Palestine, India, Nepal, Rwanda and many other countries. Reality Tours provide the opportunity for participants to learn firsthand how:

  • fair trade producers receive a fair price – a living wage;
  • forced labor and exploitative child labor (and modern day slavery) are prohibited;
  • buyers and producers have direct long-term trade relationships;
  • producers have access to financial and technical assistance;
  • sustainable production techniques are encouraged and mandated;
  • working conditions are healthy and safe;
  • equal employment opportunities are provided for all;
  • all aspects of trade and production are open to public accountability.

The Fair Trade system benefits over 800,000+ farmers organized into cooperatives and unions in over 48 countries. While the complexities of each country are unique, what fair trade means for communities is often very similar. Fair Trade profits help fund basic education, health care, and general infrastructure in communities, amplifying the dignity of communities who get to stay on their land. Reality Tours fair trade themed trips provide the opportunity for farmers to share their stories with participants. Reality Tours participants who have witnessed firsthand the benefits of fair trade return from their journey inspired by the experience.

Nicaragua Woman Harvesting Coffee Beans

A Cup of Fair Coffee?
Let’s take a commodity or two as an example. The United States consumes one-fifth of all the world’s coffee, the largest consumer in the world. But few North Americans realize that agriculture workers in the coffee industry often toil in what can be described as “sweatshops in the fields.”

Many small coffee farmers receive prices for their coffee that are less than the costs of production, forcing them into a cycle of poverty and debt. Fair Trade is a viable solution to this crisis in Nicaragua, assuring consumers that the coffee they drink was purchased under fair conditions. To become Fair Trade certified, an importer must meet stringent international criteria; paying a minimum price per pound, providing much needed credit to farmers, and providing technical assistance such as help transitioning to organic farming.

Fair Trade for coffee farmers in Matalgapa means community development, health, education, and environmental stewardship. Our Fair Harvest programs to Nicaragua provide the historical context for this social and economic vulnerability and absolutely impact people’s purchasing decisions. We’ve been honored to work with the Fair Trade Cooperative CECOCAFEN for years and know that when our delegates return many choose fair trade in their cups. What if that one-fifth of global coffee drinkers all put their purchases where their values are? That would have global repercussions!

Sweet, Sweet Chocolate

Fair Cocoa Harvest in the Dominican Republic

Next, let’s look at chocolate. The six largest cocoa producing countries are Ivory Coast, Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, and Cameroon. Cocoa has significant effects on the economy and the population in these countries. In Ghana, cocoa accounts for 40% of total export revenues, and two million farmers are employed in cocoa production. The Ivory Coast is the world’s largest cocoa producer, providing 43% of the world’s cocoa. In 2000, a report by the US State Department concluded that in recent years approximately 15,000 children aged 9 to 12 have been sold into forced labor on cotton, coffee and cocoa plantations in the north of the country. A June 15, 2001 document released by the Geneva, Switzerland-based International Labor Organization (ILO) reported that trafficking of children is widespread in West Africa. (For ILO definitions of these labor violations, see ILO Convention 182 on Child Labor ILO Convention 29 on Forced Labor.)

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) followed up these reports with an extensive study of cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon, directly involving over 4,500 producers. The results were released in August 2002. An estimated 284,000 children were working on cocoa farms in hazardous tasks such as using machetes and applying pesticides and insecticides without the necessary protective equipment. Many of these children worked on family farms, the children of cocoa farmers who are so trapped in poverty many make the hard choice to keep their children out of school to work. The IITA also reported that about 12,500 children working on cocoa farms had no relatives in the area, a warning sign of trafficking.

Child laborers face arduous work, as cacao pods must be cut from high branches with long-handled machetes, split open, and their beans scooped out. Children who are involved in the worst labor abuses come from countries including Mali, Burkina Faso, and Togo — nations that are even more destitute than the impoverished Ivory Coast.

Vicious Circle of Poverty

Rwanda Women's Coffee Cooperative Sorting Beans

Parents in these countries sell their children to traffickers believing that they will find honest work once they arrive in Ivory Coast and then send their earnings home. But once separated from their families, the young boys are made to work for little or nothing. The children work long and hard — they head into the fields at 6:00 in the morning and often do not finish until 6:30 at night. These children typically lack the opportunity for education, leaving them with no way out of this cycle of poverty. The IITA noted that 66% of child cocoa workers in the Ivory Coast did not attend school. About 64% of children on cocoa farms are under age 14, meaning that the loss of an education comes at an early age for the majority of children on cocoa farms. (Watch The Dark Side of Chocolate, a powerful documentary on this issue).

Producer income remains low because major chocolate and cocoa processing companies have refused to take any steps to ensure stable and sufficient prices for cocoa producers. World cocoa prices fluctuate widely and have been well below production costs in the last decade. Though cocoa prices have shown moderate increases in the past few years, cocoa producers remain steeped in debt accumulated when prices were below production costs.

Producers typically also get only half the world price, as they must use exploitative middlemen to sell their crop. The effects of insufficient cocoa income have been exacerbated by deregulation of agriculture in West Africa, which abolished commodity boards across the region, leaving small farmers at the mercy of the market. This economic crisis forced farmers to cut their labor costs. The outcome was a downward spiral for labor in the region, and a surge in reports of labor abuses ranging from farmers pulling children out of school to work on family farms to outright child trafficking and slavery. These small farmers and their children remained trapped in a cycle of poverty, without hope for sufficient income or access to basic education or health care.

 We Can Change It!
For years, US chocolate manufacturers have claimed they are not responsible for the conditions on cocoa plantations since they don’t own them. But the $13 billion chocolate industry is heavily consolidated, with just two firms — Hershey’s and M&M/Mars — controlling two-thirds of the US chocolate candy market. Surely, these global corporations have the power and the ability to reform problems in the supply chain. What they lack is the will.

At Global Exchange, we know there is a solution – supporting Fair Trade cocoa and chocolate. Fair Trade chocolate and cocoa products are marked with the “Fair Trade Certified” label. Fair Trade cocoa comes from Belize, Bolivia, Cameroon, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Ghana, Nicaragua, and Peru. Thus Reality Tours has a Cocoa Fair Harvest program in the Dominican Republic. Every year, we encourage chocolate lovers from around the world to join with our local partners from Grupo CONACADO to explore benefits of Fair Trade cocoa and sustainable harvest, renewable technology in the Dominican Republic.

Palestine Fair Olive Harvest, Group with Farmers 2009

Fair Trade Tourism is a growing segment of our socially responsible travel program here at Global Exchange. Our third Fair Harvest destination was announced in  2007 to Palestine where participants worked side by side Palestinians harvesting olives. The Fair Trade story continues to evolve and we look forward to expanding our Reality Tours programs in the years to come.  There is an opportunity for those of us in the tourism industry to make a positive change in the world. Tourism can be a force for good. We can ensure tourism dollars stay to benefit the local economies of our hosts. We can highlight the stories, the struggles and aspirations of the communities we visit. Together with Reality Tours trip participants, we can be a force for fairness.

This piece was originally written by Malia Everette  for Tourism Review, Tourism Magazine Review October 2010 issue.

Today is Blog Action Day, and Global Exchange is a proud Partner. Blog Action Day is an event that happens each year when bloggers from around the world blog about the same issue to raise awareness and hopefully generate a global discussion around that issue.

This Blog Action Day the issue is food, (today is also World Food Day) so Global Exchange’s Reality Tours Director Malia Everette takes you on a journey “From Sacred Seeds and Abundant Reads to Food Sovereignty Movement Building”…

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Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other’s presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime, when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, ‘Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place.’ This is how we survive long after we are dead.  This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on. –Natalie Goldberg

I grew up with a back yard garden where it was normal to delight in picking berries and tomatoes off the vine after school as a child. Each bite, each harvest imparted an intrinsic learning about the cycles of the earth and about the complexity of each ecosystem. Little did I know  that saving my favorite pumpkin seed would symbolize so much to me later on in life. Today as a mother, educator and advocate I try to provide these opportunities to my sons. They know that food is sacred and that the seeds we choose are chosen with love…and cherished.

At times I am asked how I became active in social justice and why I have for decades worked in solidarity against the “Green” and now,  “Green Gene Revolution” and while there are a plethora of reasons, today on this global day to blog about FOOD I ‘d like to give credit where it is due and  honor two phenomenal food advocate heroines that remarkably influenced my knowledge and life patch path!

As a graduate student back in  the early 1990’s I heard Dr. Vandana Shiva speak at the Bioneers conference. I left totally  blown away by her intelligence, message and science. It in fact inspired me in my coursework and actually propelled me to dedicate my thesis, The Monoculturization of International Bio-relations: SocioEcological Implications of the WTO, SAPs and IPRs. I continue to read almost everything I can by her and truth be told her analysis on global politics, ecology and power relations has greatly contributed to the many programs I have been blessed to create here at Reality Tours since 1997.  In fact one of my personal Reality Tours highlights was spending January 1st, 2010 on Vandana’s farm, Naydanya. She spent the day educating and engaging with Dr. Arun Gandhi and the delegates on our annual Gandhian Legacy tour to India.

Today I encourage you to learn more about the vulnerability of the food system. As Vandana states in one article:

We are in a food emergency. Speculation and diversion of food to biofuel has contributed to an uncontrolled price rise, adding more to the billion already denied their right to food. Industrial agriculture is pushing species to extinction through the use of toxic chemicals that kill our bees and butterflies, our earthworms and soil organisms that create soil fertility. Plant and animal varieties are disappearing as monocultures displace biodiversity. Industrial, globalized agriculture is responsible for 40 percent of greenhouse gases, which then destabilize agriculture by causing climate chaos, creating new threats to food security. But the biggest threat we face is the control of seed and food moving out of the hands of farmers and communities and into a few corporate hands. Monopoly control of cottonseed and the introduction of genetically engineered Bt cotton has already given rise to an epidemic of farmers’ suicides in India. A quarter-million farmers have taken their lives because of debt induced by the high costs of nonrenewable seed, which spins billions of dollars of royalty for firms like Monsanto.  

After hearing the message of Vandana, I started researching. That is actually when I found out about an organization called Food First and the work of Frances “Frankie” Moore Lappé .  Frances “Frankie” Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins co-founded the Institute for Food and Development Policy, nicknamed Food First, in 1975.  Frankie’s book, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, opened my mind dramatically. I realized I was no longer a Malthusian. In fact food became something I never took for granted again and I gave up ‘fast food’.  This introduction to Food First actually has become life long. I serve on their Board of Directors and am so honored to be a part of  an organization that continues to be out front on issues such as genetically modified foods, agrofuels, labor rights and land grabs. The institute uses critical food justice and food sovereignty frameworks to offer analyses and transformative solutions for eliminating the injustices that cause hunger.

Thus today I want to thank Vandana and Francis, thank organizations like Bioneers, IFG, Global Exchange, Food First, Food and Water Watch and Slow Food that have inspired  (though they may not know it!) a collaborative  new form of alternative tourism….Food Sovereignty Tours.

 First defined by Vía Campesina in 1996, Food Sovereignty is “People’s right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.”

Food Sovereignty Tours offer you a way to explore the realities of today’s global food system and to connect with the global movement for food sovereignty. This travel program is a project of Food First/Institute for Food & Development Policy in partnership with Global Exchange’s Reality Tours. The combined expertise of these two organizations will get you to the front lines of the world’s food sovereignty frontiers, to meet local farmers, activists, policymakers, and local consumers. We are here to share with you our 35 years of knowledge and contacts, to facilitate powerful cultural exchange and learning, and to connect the global food movement.

Today as we celebrate that perfect biodynamic glass of wine, that fabulous organic strawberry or that ritual meal with loved ones at your table may we all reflect and embrace the domestic and global food sovereignty movement that celebrated the rights and the freedom to grow diverse and nutritious food. May you do one thing to protect and advocate for the right to have access to save healthy adequate and affordable food.

Interested in reading other food-themed blog posts? Check out our People to People blog post about food justice today called “Food Justice: The Nature of Farming and the Farming With Nature.” For more food-themed blog posts go the Blog Action Day website for a list of blogs taking part in Blog Action Day today.