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09/03/2018

Sciaf Sunday - 11th March 2018

Marian Pallister, SCIAF ambassador for the Diocese of Argyll & the Isles and Justice & Peace vice chair reflects on the country on which the Wee Box campaign focuses this Lent.

It was the first time I had been to a war zone, if you discount passing through the checkpoints of Northern Ireland. The preparation in itself was complicated – the rushed vaccinations, the visa for Thailand, the rather vague information about how we would contact the Scottish Red Cross nurse we were to interview in the refugee camps on the border with Kampuchea and Thailand.

For that is what Cambodia was called between 1975 and 1979 by the ruling Khmer Rouge, and I was travelling with a photographer to report on the end of a bloody conflict that left millions dead and thousands homeless.

It was a byzantine story that led to this humanitarian disaster. The Vietnamese had occupied eastern Cambodia, the US carpet bombed the area, and the Cambodian politician Norodom Sihanouk, leader of the Khmer Rouge, presented himself as a man who could achieve peace. Instead, he led his people into genocide. Now the International Red Cross was trying to pick up the pieces, setting up a tented city on the north-east border of Thailand to receive the refugees from each side of the conflict.

It was tense. The Thai soldiers guarding the camps were trigger-happy. The Red Cross personnel were there for three-month stints and were physically and emotionally done in. There was no technology to record who these people were or how many. No system to track the unaccompanied children and reunite them with the remnants of their families. Huge boards went up at the gate to every camp with photographs of the children – a haphazard attempt to let frantic relatives find their offspring. But the children took the pictures down and gave them to nurses, doctors, the Scottish dentist who’d arrived out of nowhere to fix shot-up faces and save people from starvation. They wanted someone who would care now, not the vague possibility of a happy-ever-after reunion.

One child, Ra, latched onto me as we toured the camps and did our interviews – the dying elderly couple, the man showering under a bucket, balancing on his remaining leg, the woman whose husband was shot as an ‘intellectual’ because he wore glasses. Ra clutched my hand and broke my heart. I didn’t know what would become of her.

‘Cambodia’ came back into existence in the 1990s. Those camps remained in place for decades. Girls like Ra might well have ended up in the sleazy sex parlours of Bangkok – or she might have slipped back into the steaming tropical forest and tried to re-create a life for herself. If she survived, she would be a middle-aged woman by now.

The country was devastated. The American bombing had destroyed much of the infrastructure and the Khmer Rouge did the rest. Cambodia became a graveyard and its population is still trying to pick up the pieces.

And that’s why the Lang family on our SCIAF Wee Box this year deserves our attention. Four decades isn’t enough to stick the pieces of a country and a culture back together again and rural families like the Langs are prey to a continuing lawlessness.

Families like the Langs depend on fish in the huge, languid rivers of Cambodia. But gangs have used dynamite and electrocution to steal fish stocks. Then they move on and leave the rural fishing families devastated.

SCIAF has worked with a local partner to create an advocacy system to help such families, and now local fishermen liaise with the police to patrol the rivers. The Langs are in a better situation now, thanks to your generosity – and by working to secure peaceful solutions, Cambodians have the kind of future I didn’t think I’d see in my lifetime.

Let’s fill our Wee Boxes. Be generous on SCIAF Sunday (the UK government is doubling what SCIAF raises). We might just be helping that wee lassie who held my hand to live out her life in peace.

02/03/2018

Come On In

As we enter the final week of Fairtrade Fortnight Justice and Peace Scotland Commissioner Margaret McGowan writes our blog and reflects on her involvement and campaigning for the Fairtrade cause.

‘Let each one examine his conscience. Is he or she prepared to support out of his own pocket works and undertakings in favour of the most destitute? .... Is he or she ready to pay a higher price for imported goods so that the producer may be more justly rewarded?’Pope Paul VI

Fairtrade Fortnight 2018 runs from 26 February to 11 March and is a chance to learn about the working conditions of people who produce the commodities we often take for granted.

The theme for 2018 is ‘Come on in’, inviting people to join the Fairtrade movement and learn more about how Fairtrade impacts the lives of producer communities across the world. Through Fairtrade, millions of poor farmers and workers are already coming together to demand change. With Fairtrade’s support, they aim to stop exploitation and transform their communities.

Last October I campaigned in support of the ‘Don't Ditch Fairtrade’ campaign outside my local Sainsbury’s. This supermarket chain, the UK’s largest retailer of Fairtrade products, weakened fair trade power by replacing the Fairtrade Mark from some of their own-brand tea with a ‘Fairly Traded’ label. They decided to abandon Fairtrade and pilot their own scheme.

Tea farmers will no longer be able to decide for themselves how to spend what they earn through the Fairtrade Premium. This may mislead customers into thinking ‘Fairly Traded’ is the same as independent Fairtrade certification.

It's not.

The concern is that this new ‘Fairly Traded’ tea, and any products that follow it, could mean an unfair deal for poor farmers.

The outcome of the Brexit deal will also impact on Fairtrade. Trade rules are being rewritten and new trade deals negotiated. As well as changes in our lives, it could be make or break time for millions of farmers and workers from the world’s poorest countries who rely on trading with us.

It could be the moment the UK starts trading in a way that delivers a fair deal for everyone by creating a high standard in trade policy that tackles global poverty - or the new trade rules might drastically harm the poorest people who work hard to grow the food we take for granted.

It should disturb us to learn that most of the cacao in chocolate is picked by child slaves in the Ivory Coast or that coffee farmers are starving when millions of pounds are being spent each year on lattes and cappuccinos We have to rethink what how we buy things.

The idea that Fairtrade items cost more isn’t necessarily correct. I have often thought about putting a price comparison beside for example, coffee in our Fairtrade stall. A packet of artisan roasted fairly traded, handpicked, shade grown organic coffee is no more expensive than a similar packet of similar quality regular coffee. It is the perception not the price that appears to be the issue. If you are throwing a £1.50 bar of chocolate in your trolley at the supermarket you notice it less than if you are buying it at a church Fairtrade stall.

Fairtrade is based on cooperation and mutual benefit, and is in many ways consistent with the Catholic vision for economic activities that promote the Common Good. By purchasing Fairtrade products, we are putting the values of Catholic Social Teaching into action. Our Fairtrade purchases respect human dignity, promote economic justice and cultivate global solidarity.

Pope Francis said the global crisis ‘will not be completely over until situations and living conditions are examined in terms of the human person and human dignity’. Fair trade allows us to acknowledge the dignity of people and purchase items in mutual respect for what they have made.

‘I was hungry and you gave me food…thirsty and you gave me drink…’

To me this is God’s call to us, to take care of those in His world who have less than we do. That is why Fairtrade should matter.

23/02/2018

Fairtrade Fortnight 2018

Rainbow Turtle is a social enterprise in Paisley who provide their local community with the opportunity to purchase Fairtrade goods and, in doing so change lives all around the world.

‘You can change the world, providing you have the determination and the clarity of what it is that needs to be changed’. So said Precious Ramotswe, Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Lady Detective, in her characteristic way of bringing gentle wisdom into whatever situation she came across.

When we look around the world there are so many things that we might want to change it can be so overwhelming it becomes paralysing.

For the last 22 years I have been a Fairtrader with Traidcraft – the pioneering organisation that brought ‘Fair Trade’ to our vocabulary, delicious foods to our tables, and craft ware to our homes. Fifteen of those years have seen me helping run a fair trade shop, Rainbow Turtle, in Paisley. A social enterprise that brings together supplier, customer, volunteer and staff – growing, creating buying and selling products that change people’s lives.

I have visited many fair trade projects around the world and have seen people flourishing through the provision of health care and sanitation, receiving a decent income, women gaining recognition and respect, children receiving education, young women freed from the fear of trafficking, and whole communities being uplifted. And all this simply because people like us choose to buy a product with a different label, a label that isn’t about what a bargain we are getting but about justice and dignity for the human faces behind it.

Some years ago I chatted with Chino, a charismatic farmer from Chile who grew blueberries and produced honey. He asserted that the Fair Trade movement should be nominated for the Nobel Peace prize. His reasoning being that, instead of putting things right after a conflict, Fair Trade creates an environment where peace can thrive. People are given purpose, a decent standard of living and security, and these things go a long way to remove the need for violence.

Recently the question that is more often in my head is ‘What are the consequences of not buying Fair Trade?’ How is the world changed when we look for cheap products and those made from non sustainable materials? How many of the things we buy have been made using exploited labour, have messed with people’s physical and mental health and our planet’s future?

It becomes clearer to me each day that injustice in world trade and chasing profits at the expense of humanity are the things that need to change.

The parliamentarian Edmund Burke said “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

This Fairtrade Fortnight we can all do something and participate in changing the world by buying Fairtrade products - especially supporting 100% Fair Trade organisations like Traidcraft, Divine or Cafedirect which go the extra mile, investing their profits back into small holder farmers and producers in the developing world.

And remember Fair Trade is for life – not just for Fairtrade Fortnight!

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