Fair trade with Cuba

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Fair trade with Cuba

(Wednesday 17 September 2008)

NICK MATTHEWS explains how buying fair trade could assist Cuba's rebuilding efforts.

Each morning, I enjoy a co-operative and fair-trade breakfast of coffee, muesli and a banana and raise a glass to Cuba. This is not because new Labour has driven me to drink - my toast is not with rum but with Cuban orange juice.


In the 1980s, Cuba was the world's largest citrus fruit exporter. The end of the Soviet Union took away their main market and put them in direct competition with two of the big citrus fruit exporters, the US and Israel.


Today, Cuba is the world's laboratory for sustainable farming and food sovereignty - the World Bank has described it as "almost the anti-model" - pursuing an approach that links ecology with the decentralisation of the control of farms. Co-operatives are playing a key part in these developments.


The US blockade on Cuba makes market access crucial.


In 2000, the Christian-rooted fair-trade organisation Traidcraft stepped in to assist seven co-operatives in and around Ciego de Avila find new markets and help them to secure fair-trade status.


Working alongside Gerber foods, they are now bringing first-class Cuban fruit juices to European consumers and, in developing the Fruit Passion brand, they are aiming to do for fruit juice what Café Direct has done for fair-trade coffee.


Modern consumers are increasingly concerned about the provenance of what they buy from the developing world. The Fairtrade Foundation has overseen a huge increase in quality, making fair trade an easier choice to make.


Fair trade is not socialism, but the fair-trade mark does guarantee farmers a minimum price and an additional "premium" payment.


In Cuba, the premium is used for projects that benefit the co-operatives - better machinery, vehicles, irrigation systems etc - or to finance other activities, including cultural and recreational facilities.


The Association of Small Farmers (ANAP) represents the interests of co-operatives and individual farmers. It is also working to increase the involvement of women in the farms and their decision-making processes.
Last year, I visited the region of Cuba where these co-ops are based and the extra income that fair trade brings can clearly make a real difference.


One of the dreadful things about capitalism is the way that the abstraction of the market separates consumers from producers.


Now, Traidcraft is running "meet the people" tours to Cuba in November, February or March visiting the CPA and CCS Jose Marti Co-operatives in Ciego de Avila that produce the juice that is so welcome on our breakfast tables.


Writing in Granma, Fidel Castro has pointed out that the recent hurricanes have done between $3 and $4 billion worth of damage to Cuba.


Farmers have not escaped unscathed. To help their recovery, the least that we can do is buy some of their output. So, why wait? You can find Fruit Passion in Co-op shops, as well as in Sainsbury's and Waitrose. The Co-op's own-brand fair-trade orange juice also includes Cuban produce in the blend.


The concept of fair trade is not new. Back in 1906, the first Labour MPs cited John Ruskin as the author who had most shaped their thinking.
Ruskin made a plea for fair trade in Unto This Last, which was published in 1862. "In all buying, consider first what condition of existence you cause in the production of what you buy; secondly whether the sum you have paid is just to the producer and in due proportion, lodged in his hands."


Given the present shenanigans in the Parliamentary Labour Party it would seem that the minds of some current Labour MPs have been shaped by an older writer than Ruskin, though, as evidenced from their detachment of political expediency from morality - one Niccoli Machiavelli.


Visit www.traidcraft.co.uk for details of Traidcraft's Meet The People tours to Cuba.

[loki]

Something has always bugged me about fairtrade goods, and especially that its being promoted by supposedly Christian organisations, such as Traidcraft.

Let me first remind us, of what christ did in the temple to the money lenders. Remember he was basically incensed that people were making money on the backs of poorer people by basically doing nothing. Owning all of the temple coin that was needed to make offering, meant you could charge what you wanted for the coin, bleeding the poor dry, and adding to their already increasing poverty.

Back to the matter at hand. Buying fairtrade goods is an admittance by yourself that the other goods you used to buy, unfairly deal with all those who actually work to get it to you the consumer, but that now you buy the same goods from the same companies only now with a fairtrade label, everything is now ok.

The farmers involved with these companies especially are payed poverty wages, just enough to buy food for themselves, let alone their families. Now because these farmers are in countries, that have fallen under the open free market terms of the World Bank and the IMF, the goods they once sold and traded freely in their own countries, they cannot now do so. This is because other countries who deal in the same goods are involved in the same scams set up by the World Bank and IMF, importing their own cheap goods, robbing those farmers and importing the same goods to other impoverished countries. Thereby creating a vicious circle of trade that impoverishes everyone involved at the lower end of the market ie the actual producers (farmers).

In effect, opening up your trade barriers to the World Bank/IMF stylized happy go fucky version of an open free market economy, actually impoverishes your country. The terms of your loans, mean you have to open all of your natural resources to privatisations, effectively losing any profit for your own country, also all of your nationalised industries are also lost to privatisation.
Our own country the UK for instance, even though not a third world impoverished country, is now being dictated to, too how we run our own economy, and it doesn't take an idiot to realise, that since all of our nationalised industries are privatised, and all of our natural resources are now being sold back to us by privatised industries, that we are in huge debt to the World Bank/IMF cabal, and entangled within the web of their free market economic system.

Sorry I digress, so back to the farmers. Buying fairtrade goods is a scam, just look at your own conscience, trust what it tells you, and you will see the truth of it. Your actually being encouraged to buy goods from companies or companies within companies owned by umbrella organisations under conglomerates of corporations, that cheat and steal from not only the producers of the goods, but you the consumer. This happens by charging you inflated costs, for goods that they say costs X amount for them to put it on your table, pleading poverty at all times while raking in huge profits and paying no corporation tax.

Now we are allowing ourselves to fall into a trap set up for those of us who try to give a shit about others, to think we're actually helping those fucked by the corporations in the first place to pay more for our goods, so these poor farmers can be payed a decent wage by those actually screwing them in the first place. This actually lets the companies keep their huge inflated profits, without having to lose anything to the farmers, while we have to pay the decent wages, through extra costs added onto the already over-inflated costs. All to massage our own egos, thinking we're doing a good thing, while still being manipulated by the corporate machine. This in effect helps no one, who determines the living wage that the fairtrade organisations keep banging on about? If we are really looking to live in a World economy, where trade barriers mean nothing, then surely there should be an international minimum wage, shouldn't there? This would solve any and all disputes for what constitutes a living wage. If a farmer for wheat gets say, I dont know, a £10 per bag of wheat, then surely a farmer in ethiopia or any third world country should get the same?

No this will not happen while under the auspices of the WB/IMF cabal that is a part of something that I will not go into here. Why is it that the agricultural industries in all countries under these so called free trade agreements, cannot really afford to sell to people in their own countries? In england for example, we are now being sold the lie that we should buy in supermarkets, from local producers, to cut carbon emissions or to support the local economy, but again the food is usually more expensive. Why is that?
Well, this is because, all imported food is subsidised, by our own economy, by the WB/IMF, and pays no little tax, all to undermine our own country. Now you would think that these cheaper imported goods would surely profit some country, but no they only profit the corporations.

For the 'Morning Star' to be promoting Gerber Foods, unless i'm reading it wrong, really gets to me. Why would a socialist newspaper, be promoting a corporation?, the antithesis of what socialism is all about. Has it done any research on Gerber Foods?, does it know its now owned by Nestle, who themselves are always being accused of dodgy practises all around the world.

Look here for some small part of Nestles crimes:http://boycottnestle.blogspot.com/
or even here: http://www.babymilkaction.org/index.html

Or here for some other fairtrade scams: http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/fair-trade-coffee-scam-exposed.html
More fairtrade abuses here:
http://www.newint.org/features/wrong-label/171005.htm

Sorry TMI, but i'm surprised that the socialist newspaper 'Morning Star' does not already realise this, this is why I now only really trust my own instincts and never subscribe to anyones point of view when it comes under the terms of apparently helping others, unless i fully investigate what lies underneath.

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

I don't buy Nestle or coca-cola products. The morning Star and the CPB have direct links with Cuba and the CP of Cuba. Fidel writes regular articles for the paper. They are well aware of all aspects of 'Free Trade'.

One of the greatest people who I've ever had the privilege of shaking their hand is Father Geoff Bottoms, of the CPB central committee and political committee and chairman of the Cuban solidarity campaign and Free the Miami five. I truly trust these people and they have the Cuban peoples best interest at heart. This is an emergency after two hurricanes and over 40 years of a U$ ring fence (illegal) trade embargo.

the key points are....

"Fair trade is not socialism, but the fair-trade mark does guarantee farmers a minimum price and an additional "premium" payment."


"assist Cuba's rebuilding efforts."

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/
http://www.cosg.org.uk/
http://www.cuba-solidarity.org/
http://www.blackpoolandfyldecsc.org.uk/
http://www.cubasol-manch.org.uk/
http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/
http://www.freethefive.org/
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=fat...L_enGB257GB257
http://www.communist-party.org.uk/

Further to the comments about the ethics of buying Cuban products sold in the UK under the Fruit Passion label packaged in the UK by Gerber Juices of Bridgwater in Somerset. Gerber Juices are a contract packaging company who package juice for a large number of other brands indeed they produce most of Europe’s packaged juices. Gerber Juices is owned by London based Hannover Acceptances which is a private equity group which in turn is owned by Luxemburg based Quadriga Holdings SA . Which is 100% owned by Manfred Grovy and his family. Grovy who according to the Sunday Times Rich List is (or maybe was) worth £260million was originally from South Africa.
The US Gerber foods have gone through several incarnations from when it began as a leading producer of baby foods. It is now owned by Nestle. Whether this information makes buying fruit passion a good or bad thing I leave readers to decide the juice is 100% Cuban and fair trade the packaging maybe not what we would like but I don’t think that the Cubans should suffer for our inability to tame capitalism.
Yours fraternally,
Nick Matthews