FairTrade Facts

Facts on Tea

· There are 49 Fairtrade-certified tea producer organisations in 7 countries throughout the world"

· Extra producer benefits through Fairtrade labelled tea sales was US$688,000 in 2001"

· Clipper, Equal Exchange, and Teadirect teas are the Fairtrade teas available to Irish consumers"

Since the end of the 1970's tea prices have hardly changed which means an effective price decline of 41% between 1970 and 1998. Tea production survives low international tea prices by paying low wages. Labour laws and minimum wages, where they exist, are often not implemented. Enforcement is frequently lax, and sanctions for breaking them so trivial as to hardly affect plantation owners. The implementation of laws is left to employers, for whom the improvement of working conditions is not normally a high priority. Many tea pickers live and work in miserable conditions.
" Our biggest problem is that we have too much to do. In the morning we prepare meals and get the children to school. We have no time even to eat. I have to work very fast,.. We have to carry 10-15 kilos of tea to the weighing place, which can be three quarters of a kilometre away. After work it is the same - we have to do all the cooking and collecting firewood and getting water. We eat rice and one vegetable... Towards the end of every month we find it difficult." Sivapackiam has been picking tea on the same tea estate for 23 years. Her mother and grandmother did the same job before her, and it's a hard life. She takes home the equivalent of 80 pence a day.

Facts on Bananas

Fairtrade labelled bananas are available in 12 countries
In Switzerland 20% of all bananas sold carry a FAIRTRADE Mark
Six countries, India, Brazil, Ecuador, Philippines, China and Indonesia, account for 55% of total world production of bananas. The United States, Europe and Japan are the main importing countries.
Bananas are the fifth most important agricultural commodity in world trade.
Banana exports have steadily increased since 1950. To meet the increase in exports, particularly since the 1980's, an increased amount of fertilisers and pesticides have been used. Of the 11 million litres of fungicide, water and oil emulsion applied by aeroplanes each year on banana plantations, 90% is lost to wind drift, ends up in the soil or is washed off by rain. For every tonne of bananas shipped, two tonnes of waste is left behind, not least of which are the mountains of plastic bags sprayed with herbicides.
Current banana production methods & standards cause an enormous human and environmental cost. The work is very often dangerous and workers rights have been slowly eroded with increased competition, led by the four largest fruit companies. Workers therefore are paid lower salaries, paid to work longer hours, increased persecution for trade unionism, redundancies without benefits, squalid housing and generally low quality of life.

Facts on Coffee

" Coffee is second only to crude oil as the world's most highly traded commodity"

"Seventy per cent of the world's coffee is grown on farms of less than 10 hectares. The vast majority is grown on family plots of between one and five hectares"

"There are 171 Fairtrade-certified producer organisations in 23 countries throughout the world"

The economies of some of the poorest countries in the world are highly dependent on trade in coffee. The price paid to African, Latin American and Asian farmers for their coffee - both robusta and arabica beans - is appallingly low. In 1997 prices began a steep decline, hitting a 30-year low at the end of 2001. Taking inflation into account, this means that the money farmers make from coffee can only buy one-quarter of what it could 40 years ago and is the lowest real price that farmers have been paid in 100 years. The current world market price does not cover farmers' costs of production, it comes as a shock to realise that there is "poverty in your coffee cup".
" You can be helping someone all your life but nothing changes. Tell more people that we are producers who are capable of change. It is a worldwide movement which aims to reduce the injustice of the imbalance between rich and poor… The coffee is produced by capable people and we would like consumers to recognise the value of what we are doing."
PEDRO ANTONIO HASLAM, CECOCAFEN R.L., NICARAGUA

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