Joe Turner

Rethinking Ethical Trade
About Me

Joe Turner is an activist and a maverick, seeking to think about and act upon issues to do with development, trade and justice.

For five years, Joe ran a small clothing company struggling to work with manufacturers in the occupied West Bank, in the process learning about the cotton industry, fairtrade, organic and other certification schemes.

He is now interested to contemplate the post-fairtrade landscape and the failings of the current system.

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skype: joe-freedom-turner

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my environmental heroes

 

Some left a message on my phone because they wanted to write an article about 'environmental heroes'. I'm not sure about you, but I think the term is loaded and overused. I also don't think I have done anything that is remotely heroic.

That said, I had a good few minutes thinking to myself about who are my heroes. So here are my top five environmental(ish) heroes.

  1.  My wife, Dr Heather Turner.  Although she works as an academic statistician, she is the best example of an honest-to-goodness environmentalist that I know.  For example, whilst I was researching palm oil we decided to try living on a palm-oil free diet.  Being a man, this just sounded like a good idea.  But my wife has clung stubbornly to the task - to the extent of checking the ingredients on every single item that we buy.  I am honored to live with someone who is far, far better than I am.  My better half.
  2. The almost forgotten James Starley, the Coventry-based entrepreneur who invented the modern bicycle.  To start with, he worked for a company that made sewing machines and in his spare time he invented his bike.  As the sewing machine market slumped, he transformed the business to mass-produce the bikes instead.  Eventually they moved into motorbikes and then cars.  His descendents began the Rover company.  But just imagine the impact he has had on the world with his invention.  And his amazing ability to turn an idea into a city-saving enterprise.  Inspiring.
  3. Indian academic Vandana Shiva, India's one-woman answer to the multinationals' control of food.  Whilst the agrochemical companies insist that monocultures with genetically modified genomes are the only solution to vitamin deficiencies amongst the poor, Vandana insists that it is the monocultures which have caused the problem and that multi-tiered traditional home-gardens were able to support families with all the nutrients they need for their diet.
  4. Gandhiji.  Who believed in this stuff from first principles long before anyone else.   Who lived his life as an open-book which we still, fifty years on, have not really learned to read.  We are not worthy of his example.
  5. Dr E A FitzPatrick (Fitz).  Whilst primarily known within the microscopically small field-within-a-field of micropedology, Fitz was the architypical anarchist.  He had a wicked sense of humour even when I met him, well into his 80's, still trying to get the authorities to listen to his rationality instead of their obvious irrationality.  I am honored that I had the opportunity to meet a man as great as he was.

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Posted 21 minutes ago

the curse of Better Than Nothing

I would like to briefly riff something I want to call the 'Curse of Better-Than-Nothing-ness.

Fairtrade is better than nothing.

The fact that the average individual Fairtrade producer gets only 30 Euros from the Fairtrade Premium is better than nothing.

The fact that producers cannot sell all their potential produce as certified fairtrade is.. you've guessed it... better than nothing.

How exactly are we measuring 'nothing' in this context? How much better does it have to get to be awarded the honorific 'better than nothing'?

Wouldn't any improvement be better than nothing to a producer living on a couple of dollars a day and totally without any mod-cons we consumers take for granted?

Just think for a second about the massive publicity Nestle is generating by moving a fairly small part of their chocolate range to Fairtrade. Is the 'cost' of giving the certificate to one of the world's worst multinationals worth it? Is it actually better than nothing?

And who said that we wanted better than nothing anyhow?  Is the lot of a tea worker suddenly miraculously improved by fairtrade?  Do cotton farmers no longer struggle?  Does it remove the long hours?  Does it suddenly supply healthcare where there was none?

Are these not legitimate aspirations for those directly affected by Fairtrade?  Can Fairtrade ever supply it?  Honestly?

There is also a closely related parallel question.  The FLO plans are to rapidly expand the production of fairtrade certified goods and producers.  But if you look, they're assuming that the benefit to each individual producer will be about the same.  So we're talking slight improvements spread across more people.

When does a slight improvement spread across a large number of people become barely worth having?  Clearly it is a difficult thing to call, but at some point doesn't it make more sense to focus on a smaller group of people and struggle to see a much bigger improvement in their lives? 

If there is an oversupply of tea, wouldn't it make sense to find some other crop to diversify into rather than signing up more potential producers?

Of course, this is more of the partnership model of the fairtrade handicrafts and the WFTO.  But even here there is a problem.  I know of about half a dozen excellent projects around the world.  What they do is excellent, but their products are not good enough, or too similar to others or would just be very difficult to sell.  The truth is that the market is saturated with very similar handicrafts. 

The struggle for any small fairtrade producer group is to find something to sell which stands out from the crowd - because you cannot survive long on the goodwill of your friends.  And there isn't a lot of point in even trying to.  It breaks my heart because a lot of these people are really trying hard and working against the odds.  The returns they're looking for are very small. 

Somehow - if you are so committed to a development model that depends on overseas exports - you need a team of enthusiastic entrepreneurs who can look at bulk basic products and find things which turn them into more valuable commodities.  That might mean growing a particularly valuable form of coffee.  Or tearing up your tea garden and planting something else.  Or finding new exciting designers to generate great new ideas for your handicrafts.

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Posted 4 days ago

the straw that broke Fairtrade

 This is possibly the straw that broke the camel's back.

According to the FLO in the milestones document released to me last week, there are 1.1 million individual Fairtrade producers.  They share 32 million Euros in Fairtrade Premium.  Which means the average Fairtrade producer gets 30 Euros Fairtrade Premium.  Which also means, presumably, that a lot of producers get a lot less.

I could go to a producer country and stand on in a tea garden handing out 40 Euro notes to the producers for a lot less than it costs the Fairtrade system.  The brands have probably spent a lot more than that printing information about the 'Fairtrade Social Premium' on all their publicity and packaging.

And, of course, to top it all, the producers don't even receive the Premium directly.  It goes to pay for schools, community buildings, roads (apparently) and even the maintenance of factory buildings. 

Is this the vision of fairtrade you've been working for all these years? 

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Posted 6 days ago

the charity, their WEEE, their contractor, his partner and the regulator

This is a story of traceability and accuracy in ethical labelling.

Charity x does good work in refurbishing computers - which they give to local and international groups who need IT. They apparently said that those donated products which they could not use were recycled in the UK due to the WEEE directive. This is a European directive which prevents electrical waste from going to landfill.

To me, this sounded pretty unlikely given the mix of materials in IT waste. So I asked if they could tell me more, so they directed me to their contractor, SWEEEP Ltd of Sittingbourne in Kent. So I asked Justin Greenaway of SWEEEP whether they export any of the waste to contractors in other countries.

Justin initially said that they only export 'raw materials'. So I asked what that meant. It turns out he means that they break up the computers into various parts (wires, printed circuit boards etc) and some of those are exported. I'm not sure about you, but those are not 'raw materials' to me.

Anyway - fine I said, what do you export and to where. And in the end, he gave me the name of the company in China who takes the majority of their plastic waste - a company called Gold Leader.  So strictly speaking, the charity is inaccurate to say that their waste is recycled in the UK. 

Now, I want to be quite clear.  Justin did not have to give me this information.  I have no doubt that if you were to visit his factory in Kent you would find all the correct paperwork and everything kosher.

The problem is what happens then.  The Environment Agency issues export licenses of the waste - and, according to them this is assessed against a paper-chain supplied by the exporter.  The Chinese company has an ISO certification and is said to be operating to 'European standards'.

The problem is that ISO is itself a paper based scheme backed up by very irregular inspection regimes.  China has no environmental regulations to speak of.   Chinese companies are known to try to cut corners at any opportunity in order to make additional profit.  There is every reason to suppose that they are cutting corners - because, ultimately, why else would it be more affordable to process materials in China than in Europe?

The Environment Agency does not visit China.  Even the contractor has not visited China, but said that a customer had visited the factory and states that it is the 'best factory they have seen in China'.  So - how do we know that the Chinese factory is not subcontracting or reselling the plastic to another, much worse factory?  The contractor does not know.  The EA does not have the resources to check.  The charity is not involved in the vast majority of the chain. 

The materials have disappeared into an enormous black-hole where anything could be happening.

On the other hand, what is the alternative?  Setting up a hugely expensive tracking system?  Burying the stuff in Europe?  IT recycling in Europe is a hugely profitable process, I am reliably informed.  And the Chinese are resourceful business-people.  I recently saw a TV programme where a man who collected cardboard actually had to pay shops for their waste cardboard - an unthinkable transaction in the UK.

The problem is ultimately that nobody really cares.  Nobody has the time or resources to check out all the steps through this chain.  Even if they did and found something slightly untoward, what would they do?  In the cold light of day, what can we expect from WEEE contractors, who are only following the auditing proceedure set up by the WEEE directive?

I don't know.  But I'm not happy that we seem to think throwing our waste at China is somehow an ethical solution.  Has nobody considered that maybe we should not be generating this waste in the first place?

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Posted 6 days ago

FLO's vision for the future of fairtrade

 

Since Friday, I have been trying to make sense of the documents released to me by the British government about their funding of the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation.

A couple of people have asked me to summarise what I have found.

I think the most compelling document is the one with the rather dull sounding title 'Strategic Fairtrade Funding Programme - Stage II'.  This is essentially the pitch document the FLO gave to the funding bodies, of which DFID was a part, and sets out the official vision for Fairtrade over the next five years.

It includes a number of headline points:

  • The FLO wants to expand the variety of products they certify - to possibly include carpets, wood, handicrafts, silk, etc.
  • The sale value internationally of Fairtrade certified products is set to double over the next five years
  • The FLO is considering changing the financial model - so that in the future there may not necessarily be a 'fairtrade minimum' and 'social premium'
  • The FLO wants to set up an international marks, so that transnational brands can have the Fairtrade Mark on a product, even if it is sold internationally.  Currently the mark is administered by the local country fairtrade organisations.
  • The FLO wants to certify models outwith of the standard co-operative producers.
  • The Fairtrade 'social premium' appears to have been reframed as simply the 'fairtrade premium'
It strikes me that these will all act to assist the 'mainstreaming' of fairtrade, to the extent that the use of the Fairtrade mark will end up being increasingly more associated with the multinationals.  As I have noted elsewhere, the movement seems to have given up using the buzz line 'guarantee of better conditions for producers'  and instead the form of words used are

'This certification scheme is not a guarantee of "perfection" in ethical issues, but a promise that every purchase supports the efforts of producers to work towards a socially and environmentally sustainable livelihood.'

And whilst the FLO states that it is working to develop certification standards in co-ordination with existing certification bodies in other products (such as the FSC, WFTO etc) one wonders what future some of these might have.  The WFTO, after all, is a totally different beast than the FLO.  It is also, I understand from a close source, effectively bankrupt. 

The end, according to the FLO, is to encourage consumers to adopt a 'fairtrade lifestyle' - which presumably involves buying fairtrade replacements for many of the standard consumer products.

A second document gives milestones over the length of the funding arrangement.  There are several interesting statistics to draw out of this, but in particular, I am interested in the proportion of the 'fairtrade premium' compared to the 'retail sales'.

In 2008 (the baseline) there were apparently sales of 3 billion Euros and the premium was 32 million Euros.  Which meant that the premium amounted to about a 1% benefit by value to producers.  As the sales increase, this proportion seems to remain the same over the five year period.

Of course, we all know that the fairtrade premium is not the only benefit to being fairtrade certified.  However, when the fairtrade minimum price is set at, or even below, the market price for the commodity - then it is hard to argue that this in itself is much of a benefit.  The fairtrade premium is the only tangible financial reward for being a fairtrade producer and this appears to remain stationary at 1%.

£12 million is about 14 million Euros at today's exchange rate.  So British tax-payers, on their own, have contributed nearly half of the 2008 baseline fairtrade premium, which affects 1.1 million producers.

So.. to summarise.  We have a complex system of trading backed up by a complex system of certification which requires injections of institutional/government funding in order to keep going.  Wouldn't it have been simpler just to give the producers the 14 million Euros?

 

[edit - apologies, missed out a critical 'not' in a phrase above, which totally changes the meaning!]

 

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Posted 7 days ago

the Bitter Taste of Fairtrade Tea

The Bitter Taste of Tea is a Danish documentary film. It aims to visit fairtrade tea plantations to uncover the truth about the difference that the fairtrade system makes in Kenya, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

It lasts about an hour and can be seen online here.

The Asia Institute of UCLA recently hosted a showing of this film followed by a debate including David Funkhouser from Transfair USA and Rodney North from Equal Exchange.  The podcast of the exchange is long but well worth listening to.  It is the frankest and best discussion by those at the centre of Fairtrade certification that I have ever heard.

To start with, I think there are a number of problems with the film, many of which were brought up in the discussion. 

For example, whilst in a Danish context it makes sense to talk about the 'Max Havalaar' foundation as if it is a worldwide organisation, it isn't.  The global umbrella body is called the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation.  Max Havalaar is the name of the country organisation in several European countries - the equivalent of the Fairtrade Foundation in the UK and Transfair in the USA.

Second, the film is not explicit enough to explain when we are seeing fairtrade plantations and when we are not.  Lipton, for example, is a massive tea multinational and is not exclusively a fairtrade brand.  Indeed, it appears that they have decided to become certified by the Rainforest Alliance rather than Fairtrade.  The sections of the film that discuss Lipton are muddying the issue.

That said, what we clearly did see was worker dissatisfaction with the fairtrade process.  We saw workers living in unsuitable conditions, working long hours for little money.  There was the suggestion that 'guarantee' has been removed from the fairtrade discourse as fairtrade cannot be guaranteed.

I think what was remarkable about the panel discussion was that Transfair were not attempting to distance themselves from the majority of claims in the report.  Indeed, David Funkhouser said that fairtrade should not be considered to be a panacea for all the problems.  And others reported that there certainly have been improvements in the conditions in those tea plantations as a direct result of fairtrade.

Whilst I welcome Transfair's refreshingly honest response to this, I think this is still extremely problematic for a number of reasons.

  1. I am not sure whether it is accurate to state that the word 'guarantee' has been removed from the discourse used by the members of the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation, but a casual look at the Fairtrade Foundation website certainly seems to suggest that this is less obvious tha it used to be.  The thing is that this cast iron 'guarantee' is what has been sold to consumers all these years.
  2. Multinationals are using the Fairtrade system to publicise their 'good ethical behaviour'.  Not only have we spent more on their products, but this has generated large amounts of goodwill for them.
  3. Transfair's solution to this problem is an increase in the purchases of fairtrade products, on the basis that many tea gardens only sell a fraction of their production under fairtrade terms, hence the benefits are limited.
  4. We have a minimum expectation of what fairtrade is 'supposed to do'.  The situations shown in the film fall well below those minimum expectations.
  5. Equal Exchange also said that if we were to charge for products what they would cost to drastically improve the life standards of those affected, nobody would pay because it would be far too expensive.  Maybe the truth is that it is impossible to provide a system which supports a sensible livelihood for thosands of poor women tea-pickers based on tea.  If Equal Exchange cannot do it, heaven help those who are working for a tea multinational.
I am not arguing that fairtrade is no better.  But I think this film adds to the evidence that the benefits of fairtrade are sometimes very small.  And I'm not sure I want to reward multinationals for that size of benefit.

image below taken from the film.

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Posted 10 days ago

British Government (DFID) funding for Fairtrade

In October 2009 Douglas Alexander, UK Minister for International Development announced a funding package for Fairtrade.

I can now present the details of that funding and how the money will be spent.

I had not appreciated that DFID was directly funding the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation rather than the British Fairtrade Foundation.

Thanks to DFID for being so open and responding positively to my Freedom of Information request even though the question I asked was slightly incorrect due to my lack of information.

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Posted 10 days ago

on your marks - is there a case against ethical branding?

Marks are strange things.  Talking particularly about those attached to consumer products, we've got the Fairtrade Mark, the Organic (and/or Soil Association) mark, the Rainforest Alliance frog.

My friend Rob has blogged about the development of a Social Enterprise mark, there is talk about a Co-operative mark (or marks), and even local farm shops in Gloucestershire have their own mark.

It seems it is no longer good enough to develop your own brand, you must show that you're part of something bigger and buy into a mark.

And within the 'ethical' sector, there is now a perfusion of marks.

A few things strike me:

First, there was a reason why these marks were developed.  For example, most of us understand the development of the Fairtrade Mark.  And there is still some logic applied to that - if you buy this product, you know that it is better than something without the mark.

There is a problem when there is a lack of rigour behind the mark as many of the posts on this blog attest. 

But overwhelmingly, there is a bigger problem.  Consumers do not just by products on their ethics, even if those are communicated accurately. 

Hence, I have to ask - are we actually interested in supporting these causes by bringing good business, or are we engaged in a vanity project with our branding?

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Posted 13 days ago

Rainforest Alliance [are very imprecise] about their certification of bananas.

Having found the claim on their website of 'certifying 15% of all bananas in international trade', I asked the person who operates their twitter feed (@rnfrstalliance) if this could be true.

In fact, according to the information that they sent to me, the claim was that they certify '18% of the world's bananas' which they made in an email to me from their British PR company.  The world crop is said to be around 70 million tonnes.

I attach screenshots of my tweet and their reply.

Unfortunately, an FAO report shows the lie of this claim.

"The socially and environmentally certified products included in this chapter include products from fair-trade labelling programmes, organic production, Rainforest Alliance (RA) and SA-8000 certified products. Of these programmes, estimates for RA product sales are not available and the volumes of particular commodities are used instead. For instance, Rainforest Alliance certified bananas account for about 15 percent of the total banana exports from Latin America, or some 1.3 million tonnes, and 700 tonnes of RA certified coffee were exported in 2002. The situation for agricultural facilities certified SA-8000 is similar, although few enterprises have received this certification so far."

I hope you all got that. 1.3 million tonnes and 15% of exports from Latin America.  Not >10 million tonnes of the world banana crop.

[edit]

If anyone is actually interested in such things, I highly recommend reading this FAO report from 2009 about bananas.  I think it is quite amazing that there appears to be good evidence to suggest that the Rainforest Alliance certify more than ten times the number of bananas as fairtrade (FLO).  And that actually is an interesting story.

     
Click here to download:
Rainforest_Alliance_lie_about_.zip (1594 KB)

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Posted 15 days ago

why DEFRA is wrong about bus statistics

I am not a statistician.  Please bear this in mind.

The other day on the BBC's more or less radio programme, there was a discussion about load factors for public transport - local buses in particular.

They said that the average (mean) bus contains 9.4 passengers.  When I asked, they said they had obtained this number from DEFRA (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) and helpfully supplied a web link to the report.  It is called the "2009 Guidelines to DEFRA/DECC  GHG Conversion Factors for Company Recording: Methodology Paper for Emissions Factors." published in October 2009.

Sure enough, there is a table on page 34 which gives this figure - Table 30: New Emissions factors for the 2009 GHG conversion factors.

Now, I'm not sure about you, but I have been on a lot of buses.  I've been on buses which are full and I've been on buses which are almost empty.  Buses containing >50 passengers are not an unusual phenomena in my experience.

But this figure would have us believe that 50% of all buses contain less than 9.4 passengers.  If this is true, we can say a couple of things:

1.  The spread of passengers/bus is not normally distributed around the mean of 9.4 passengers - otherwise buses with >50 passengers would be an unlikely phenomena.

2.  Logic would suggest that a significant proportion of buses (say an eighth to a quarter) were running with very few or no passengers.

I don't think this is true.  Indeed, I'd go as far as to say it is obvious nonsense.

The note beneath the table says that the figures were from the Transport Statistics Great Britain (TSGB) prepared by the statisticians at the Department of Transport (DoT).  Please note that the 9.2 passengers/vehicle figure does not appear in this report.

So, unlike More or Less I decided I wanted to read this report to see where this figure came from.  I have attached this report as well.

Table 1.1 of this report shows the 'passenger transport by node'.  If you look down the columns, you can see that it states there were 50 billion passenger km by local bus and coach in 2007.

Table 6.9 shows the total local bus vehicle km.  At the bottom of the table it states that 'local bus' journeys in 2007/8 were 2664 million km and 'non-local' 1511 giving a total of 4175 million km.

So to give the number of passengers per average bus, we could calculate it as 50 billion passenger km/4.175 billion vehicle km, giving 11.97 passengers/vehicle.  I cannot see a figure they could have used from this table to give anything close to the 9.2 passengers/vehicle.

I also believe this is not very accurate as it includes passengers by coach - which could skew the 50 billion figure.  Coaches carry fewer passengers for longer distances, after all.

Unless anyone else can see a problem with the numbers I've used, I pronounce the DEFRA use of statistics totally flawed.  Not justified by the DoT statistics, not justified by any logic or common sense.  The question is - if they are so slipshod at manipulating these fairly basic numbers, why should be believe them about anything else?

[edit] - after further research, I found that these figures were based on a different, more detailed report by the DoT statisticians, see here.  A critical sentance from the report reads:

DfT are currently reviewing the PSV sampling and estimation methodology. The review started this
year and has initially been focusing on the imputation methodology for passenger journeys and
vehicle kilometres on local bus services (data are imputed for survey non-response and for non-
sampled local operators). 

First estimates of local bus patronage and vehicle kilometres for 2007/08 and 2008/09, based on an
improved imputation methodology, are being published for the first time in this Bulletin. However,
the imputation methodology needs to be tested and improved further.


It should also be noted that the patronage figures have not been adjusted for under-recording of
ticketless passengers as in previous years. The research on which these adjustments were based is now
some years old, and needs reviewing in the view of changes in technology and increases in
concessionary journeys in recent years. There is also evidence from some Local Authorities that
adjustments for under-recording are no longer appropriate in their area, which requires further
investigation.

Which leads me to think that the DoT are being rather more careful in making claims about their data than DEFRA are in applying and interpreting it.

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Posted 17 days ago