Fairtrade Fortnight at the Old Electric Shop

The Old Electric Shop is hosting a second Fairtrade breakfast on March 10th, and with this voucher you can get free Fairtrade tea or coffee.

Fairtrade for Breakfast

Fairtrade Fortnight is coming up soon - this year it runs from 29th February to 13th March - and the theme this year is Breakfast!
Breakfast ingredients come from all around the world - and some of those people who supply our breakfast tables can't afford to feed their own families. Fairly traded food can help to support those farmers and other workers who produce the products we need - sugar on your cornflakes, tea and coffee, fruit, and much more.
So come to The Old Electric Shop on Thursday 3rd March and Thursday 10th March for a Fairtrade breakfast.
Many cafes in Hay also serve Fairtrade coffee - look for the Fairtrade sign in the window, or ask.
And if you're looking for a Valentine's Day gift, try something fairly traded from Eighteen Rabbit.

Christmas Fair

It's a bit of a dismal day (but a lot warmer than some Christmas Fair days have been!), but there's a good spread of stalls in the Buttermarket today.
Free tea, coffee and mince pies (donations gratefully accepted) are being done by the new Refugee group this year. In fact, they have organised a day trip for a group of refugees to visit Hay tomorrow - a treat before Christmas for them.
Martha from Love Zimbabwe was there (I bought a lovely hand printed round tablecloth, with elephants on it, for my round table):

Opposite them was Zimele with Zulu crafts. On the other side of the Buttermarket was Tools for Self Reliance, a display of Tuareg silver jewellery and leatherwork, and knitted and felted goods at the end from the Fairtrade shop at Llandeilo, which I think is called the Dragon's Garden.
Chris, with his Timbuktu twinning hat on, was manning the Tuareg jewellery stall, and also had holly branches, with lots of red berries, and mistletoe. He said that the Fairtrade group are hoping to make enough money from the fair this year to put into Shared Interest again, which loans money to Fairtrade groups around the world.

Shared Interest

For some time now, Fairtrade Hay have been investing any profit they make from events they hold into a Shared Interest account. The minimum that can be put in is £100, so the group usually waits until it has a round number to put in.
Last night Sue James, of the Council of Shared Interest, came to speak at Tomatitos. When I got there, she was just explaining about the makeup of the Council, which includes randomly selected investors - so one year someone from Fairtrade Hay might be asked! The only requirement seems to be that they can get to Newcastle, where the meetings are held, three times in the year. The AGMs are held alternately in Newcastle and "somewhere further South" - the nearest to Hay so far has been in Bristol.
Shared Interest started off at about the same time as Fairtrade, the founder realising that some capital would be needed by Fairtrade producers and buyers to make the system work. This year, they have £33 million to loan out, and they do it in countries round the world. At first, they had an office in Newcastle, but now they have four more - one in Peru, one in Costa Rica, one in Kenya and one in Ghana, which makes it easier for members of staff to visit borrowers who often live in remote areas.
One of the main borrowers are coffee co-operatives. When the farmer harvests his or her coffee crop and brings it to the co-op, they need to be paid straight away, but the co-op needs to sell the coffee before they have the money. So they take out a loan to pay the farmers, and pay it back when they've sold the beans.
Other loans are to improve machinery, or install electricity - that sort of thing. We were told about a banana group which used the money to install a cable car arrangement between the farms so the bananas could be transported through the jungle, and a group of women in Africa who make beaded craftwork who installed solar panels, so now they don't have to go to the nearest town to charge their mobile phones!
There are quinoa farmers in Bolivia, exporting to the US, and vanilla farmers (and this is where I learned that vanilla is actually a type of orchid, which grows up a tree!).
47% of the money goes to coffee producers, but strangely only 1% goes to tea producers. One of the things that they have started doing is to offer a loan to producers whose coffee plants have been affected by roya, a coffee disease, so that they can replace their plants with more resistant varieties. Of course, it also takes five years for coffee plants to mature enough to produce a crop.
In India, loans are made through charities like Oxfam and Traidcraft as Shared Interest are not able to work there directly, but they still managed to work with 51 organisations there last year.
Mostly they deal in US dollars, and a little (mostly in French speaking areas of Africa) in Euros, because dealing in all the local currencies would be too difficult. The interest rates they charge on loans varies from country to country and organisation to organisation, too, depending on the individual circumstances. Meanwhile investors didn't get any return for a few years, because of the banking crisis. It's only in the last couple of years that they have got half a per cent of interest, because the Council thought they ought to get something back!
Investors have an equal voice and vote in the company whether they have invested the minimum of £100 or the maximum of £100,000.
There's also a charitable wing of the organisation, for producers who need more help than a conventional loan can give.

More information can be found on the website at www.shared-interest.com
Financial matters can tend to be quite dry, but this really was a fascinating evening, and the members of Fairtrade Hay now have a much better idea of where their money is going and how it all works!

Fairtrade Fashion

Here are some pictures from the Fairtrade Fashion show at the Globe, taken by Mari Fforde:

"Medallion Man" - he was also modelling a Timbuktu silver pendant.

With bamboo socks

I really liked this cardigan!

Stylish, and doesn't exploit the workers or pollute the planet.

The True Cost of Fashion

The Globe was the venue for last night's film and fashion show, hosted by Fairtrade Hay. There was even a glass of Fairtrade bubbly included in the ticket price - or apple juice for the non-drinkers.
First of all, we went downstairs to watch the film The True Cost, which has gone behind the scenes of the fashion industry to show just how destructive throw-away fashion really is. It's not just disasters like the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh, which killed over a thousand people - it's chromium used in the tanning of leather for cheaper shoes polluting the River Ganges and the local water supply, leading to deaths and disabilities. It's cotton farmers in Texas dying of brain tumours caused by the chemicals sprayed on the cotton - it's so common in the area that they have their own specialist cancer clinic. It's peaceful protestors in Cambodia campaigning for a minimum wage being met by riot police. It's the vast piles of throwaway fashion going to landfill. And it's a garment worker who can only see her little girl a couple of times a year, as she works in the city and her parents in the home village are looking after the child. Several of the people interviewed were in tears as they spoke. Not one major clothing company agreed to an interview.
This was all sobering and serious stuff, and it really should be widely seen. Because we all buy clothes, and our choices influence the industry.
We also saw the people who are trying to change the way the industry operates - the organic cotton farmer in Texas, the lady from People Tree visiting the factories that make the clothes, the American economist who wants to change the system, and the Indian lady who was talking about poor cotton farmers committing suicide in India, amongst other things.

We are fortunate in Hay in having three shops that sell Fairtrade clothing - and we are also fortunate in having a lot of good sports who were prepared to take to the catwalk to model them! Including two male models! Eighteen Rabbit, Number Two and Flow all sell clothing from Fairtrade companies like Mata, No Nasties, Tobias Clothing, Monkee Genes, Fabrica Social, Rapanui, People Tree and Braintree - and they were also wearing jewellery from the Tuareg silversmiths in Timbuktu, provided by Jump4Timbuktu and Haymakers Gallery.
The clothes may be a little more pricy than many in the High Streets and supermarkets, though in many cases they compare very well, and they are made to last - the leather handbags and satchels being modelled will last for life.
(I couldn't help thinking about Monsoon/Accesorize, which has been in the news recently for failing to pay staff in this country the minimum wage - if they thought they could get away with that in the UK, how do they treat their suppliers? And their dresses are quite expensive.)

Any profits from evenings like this one are invested by Fairtrade Hay in Shared Interest, an organisation which provides loans to fairtrade companies in the developing world, including farmers, co-ops, workers and craftspeople.
And on 2nd November a speaker from Shared Interest will be in Hay, at Tomatitos at 8pm, talking about investing in a fairer world.

The evening was funded with help from the Welsh Government, Fairtrade Wales/Cymru Masnach Deg and Hub Cymru Africa.

Anyone interested in finding out more about the fashion industry might like to try www.cleanclothes.org, www.labourbehindthelabel.org and www.fashionrevolution.org

Fairtrade Fashion