Getting the Goods: 2005

Fair trade
& sustainable agriculture

Stephen Law,
Environmental Monitoring Group, South Africa

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Mid-summer is harvest time for the rooibos tea farmers of the Heiveld. A hot wind blows across the dry earth and the rains are still some months away. On their small cultivated plots, scattered amongst rocky outcrops, farmers carefully cut the summer growth from the rooibos bush and carry it to a central processing yard. Here, an old diesel motor drives the machine that chops the leaves finely before they are fermented, dried in the sun, and finally packaged. A years-worth of investment in careful cultivation is almost over and the financial reward will soon come. The feeling of anticipation is almost palpable and the whole community is mobilized for this hard, hot and dusty work.

A few years ago, this would have been an activity done almost in desperation. The tea processing and marketing system, dominated by rich, large-scale plantations, placed little value on the small-farmer's contributions. Their small volumes were a nuisance and their tea quality (organic by default) was not recognized. Under the apartheid regime, the colour of their skins alone kept them economically marginalized. Apartheid had gone, but the marginalization remained. The harvest would bring in just enough money to survive and survival meant pushing the productive capacity of the land to its limits and beyond. Signs of rural poverty were easy to see – alcoholism, migration, overgrazing and land degradation. Agriculture was not sustaining the community nor was the community sustaining the natural environment.

Then things changed. The small farmers discovered that discerning European consumers were prepared to pay a good price for rooibos tea, cultivated by hand without pesticides and fertilizers. They formed a co-operative when they realized they had to work to together to access this market, and raised funds to build their own communal processing facility. They understood that conserving the biodiversity of their farmlands was the best way to manage pests, and better tea prices meant they could afford to do this. Home-grown methods of nurturing and feeding the soil, remembered from long ago, were proudly reintroduced. The co-operative could now afford to employ women of the community to sew cloth bags for the tea and help with packaging. Another women's group raised funds to build huts where "eco-tourists" could be fed and accommodated. There was clearly a new sense of "community", and a new sense of pride and hope. Their future was in their hands. Fairtrade was one of the things that made this remarkable change possible.

Sustainable agricultural production, by definition, should support both environmental and social sustainability, where the natural productive capacity of the land provides sufficient food or income to meet social needs on an ongoing basis. In turn, a stable social order and robust ecosystem allows farmers to follow agricultural practices that are in themselves self-sustaining. Agricultural land is seen as a productive asset rather than a resource to be exploited.

Fairtrade, in simple terms, tries to contribute towards maintaining the above dynamic by providing farmers with a “fair” price for their products and medium-term price stability. It recognizes, at least in principle, that agricultural products are more than mere commodities – that social and environmental externalities, exist and should be paid for. By contrast, most forms of conventional agricultural trade ignore external costs. Farmers are driven by survival pressure to produce more – requiring larger tracts of land, increased mechanization, and greater inputs of fertilizer and poisons – and ironically pushing prices down even further. One only has to look at trends in global commodities prices to see how vulnerable agricultural producers have become. On average, agricultural commodity prices are lower today than they were in the 1950s while processed foods have constantly kept pace with inflation. External costs are merely shifted elsewhere - as environmental damage and rural social upheaval.

In theory, fairtrade brings in a higher and sustained income for farmers, and allows them to build up the financial capital to invest in developing their families, farms, and communities. They become less inclined to over-exploit their lands. Education, health and other social services and networks can be built. Financial security, increased social capital and environmental integrity become mutually reinforcing.

On the consumption end of the “pipeline”, the marketing of fairtrade products serve as an important vehicle for raising awareness in wealthy countries about trade and its links to global poverty   –   and offers a more sustainable alternative to patronizing hand-outs and charity. Discerning consumers play their role in ensuring that environmental and social integrity is the “goose that lays the golden egg” for producers. Fairtrade moves the producer and consumer closer together in satisfying mutual needs, in not geographically.

However, fairtrade alone is not going to change the world. It is growing rapidly, but still accounts for a minute percentage of total global trade, and its benefits reach only a tiny proportion of the population. Attempts to “mainstream” fairtrade raise many contradictions and anomalies as fairtrade-as-business tries to reconcile itself with fairtrade as a set of values and a vehicle for social mobilisation, and one should be careful not to conflate the two. For example,

•  Fairtrade attempts to bridge the rich consumer / poor producer divide, it in fact it relies on this divide to function.

•  Most fairtrade products are shipped across large distances with an associated environmental cost.

•  The desire to "mainstream" fairtrade in competition with conventional trade, is driven on one hand by the desire to spread the benefits more widely, and on the other, to pay for certification, auditing and other forms of regulation. The drive to increase fairtrade sales can easily translate into lower prices paid to farmers and lower standards of "fairness".

•  Even as primary "beneficiaries" of fairtrade, farmers and farm-workers are given little political standing in a system dominated by Northern NGOs.

But fairtrade's limited global impact and other constraints, fairtrade has made a real and significant difference to the lives of the small-farmers of the Heiveld. The fairtrade income into the community has been a significant catalyst of change, but more important has been the notion that their agricultural crop is more than just a commodity. It is something valuable in itself. It is something to be proud of and something to build a future onto. Ironically, they would probably make little sense of the term “sustainable agricultural production”. To farm in any other way would be an anathema to them.

BOX 1

Rooibos tea is made from the leaves of the Aspalathus linearis plant, which grows only in a small area in the south-western part of South Africa and is part of the Cape Fynbos floral kingdom. The dried leaves have been made into a healthy and refreshing beverage for thousands of years by the original inhabitants of the area, but has only been commercially cultivated since the 1940s. The tea is high in anti-oxidants and contains no caffeine or tannins. Its popularity locally and particularly overseas has grown exponentially in the last 10 years.

BOX 2

The Heiveld Co-operative was formed in 2000. Its members farm small plots of rooibos tea and graze goats on their land in the extreme southern part of the Northern Cape Province of the Republic of South Africa. The area is semi-arid, sparsely populated and far from markets. In addition to facilitating communal harvesting and processing, the Co-operative has also initiated a farmer's study group and has co-operated on a number of research projects on combating desertification, tea-bush ecology, and indigenous knowledge.