Strongly believing in diversity, around 5000 farmers in Kerala have been preserving and nurturing seed diversity, over years. Exchanging and conserving not only seeds but also knowledge associated with it during their annual seed festivals, these 5000 farming families along with their collectives, are making an investment in the sustainability of agriculture and life on this planet.

With the increasing alienation from soil and life processes that we experience today, our thoughts and forms of living have become increasingly abstract, diminishing our capacity to engage with the immediate and physical. It is almost absurd: what is alienated and abstracted have come to feel immediate and real for us, dishonoring the real processes that sustain our life. Only a true engagement with soil and the ones who work with it and help sustain our bodies, can allow all other works that we do today, to become whole and complete.

With sustaining efforts of FTAK (Fair Trade Alliance Kerala), about twenty five thousand people from four northern districts of Kerala, (Kozhikode, Kannur, Wayanad, Kasargod) for the last twelve years have been procuring, preserving and exchanging all sorts of seeds, planting material, indigenous livestock, medicinal plants, indigenous and wild trees, and other living things in a focused and sustained manner.

Born at the peak of the agrarian crises in Kerala, FTAK was formed in 2005 by Tomy Mathew of Kerala’s oldest organic store, Elements in Kozhikode. The 300 families from Wayanad who were its first members initially were looking to increase market access for their farm produce and to negotiate better prices to ensure trade justice. The dignity of farmers was at the center of the collective. Now under its umbrella over 5000 families, adding up to about 25000 people, have made a mark in the hilly tracts of Malabar, by its pioneering efforts at fair market access for the hill produces of Kerala. The organization has been a trendsetter in procuring agricultural commodities like cashew, coffee, spices, coconut etc., from its members, at prices that match the cost of sustainable production.

The organization initially focused on remunerative prices and fair market access. Today the organization has managed to build on this and become a force in sustainable and organic farming practices, rejecting monocropping for biodiversity. It is thumping a finger at terminator technology. They are recapturing seeds for the public good. At another level, it is bringing the focus back on food sovereignty. The aim is to make each member’s farm a miniature rain forest with a multitude of fauna and flora, typical for the western ghats region, now a declared protected biosphere.

FTAK has become valuable as an institution for its members, not only for marketing their products for fair prices but also providing mid- and long-range proposals on how to improve their livelihoods and lives on a very regional and pragmatic way, with a strong democratic process.

Seed festival – a gathering of custodians of seeds

In this context, FTAK’s seed festival is moving and reassuring. It pulses with hope for the future. It seeks to enliven both the functional and symbolic spirit of the land and community. Its participants present a vision of life as abundance – an abundance of life. Not a wasteful or accumulative affluence, but satiation and sharing, where we remember and learn again from teachers who have come to us in different forms – soil, rain, trees, plants, birds, animals and elements, and from each other as a community. The farms and the venue of the seed festivals become a place for sharing experience and knowledge related to preservation and propagation of indigenous seeds.

We are living in a time witnessing an increasing aggression in our lives, fueled by obscure and abstract institutionalized forms of faith. Paradoxically, the innate and transcending nature of these faiths are being repressed and predictably producing seeds of threats and hatred. But in the seed festival, along with the preservation of life-sustaining seeds, the important values of caring, nurturing, preserving and sharing are also nurtured. So to my mind, it is not just about preserving seeds, it is about who is preserving them and how. It is often the people at the margins and the vulnerable are the ones who preserve many of the transcending visions, breathing them into the daily life. An observation from a visitor who took many rounds and spoke with each stall said, “What we get to see in the stalls are not just seeds but also the spirit of dedicated collectives. The seeds reflects their labor of love. Hence they spoke from their hearts. It expressed the dignity of their work, the beauty of the togetherness, confidence and contentment. They see the work as their contribution to the coming generation.”

If you went to view the exhibition the way we visit other shows, we would miss the meaning. Around sixty stalls all display seeds with extraordinary diversity, over 6000 of them: ordinary, extraordinary, unique, nearly extinct and common – all are there. Around 200 varieties of rice, one hundred and fifty kinds of beans (payaru), many kinds of brinjal, chilies, pepper, yams, spinach, tubers, fruits, nuts, medicinal plants, engendered livestock, all make a testimony. These are presented by those who have cared to keep them alive. Not just alive, but thriving with health and purity. As faith communities fight over issues of purity, here these humble farmers with urgency and mindfulness, with open eyes and hands, work in the soil to maintain its moisture, micro-organisms, air, warmth and all that is necessary for a seed to sprout, grow, and blossom to give healthy seeds again, year after year. That way they hope that along with all these rich diverse and interdependent forms of vegetation and other forms of life, our life too would regain health and sanity. One visitor said, “Their understanding of the holistic nature of farming was most erudite… I felt that if these were the women farmers, then there was vast wealth of potential trainers and resource persons inside the organization.” What is important is that most of the people who come to visit the seed festival are also keen to care for life and committed to learn the nurturing of it. So it is the place for the gathering of minds to share their seeds and the knowledge of preservation that to my mind is doing a duty that is sacramental. Because it is the true work for our times, an investment in the continuity of agriculture and the life on this soil.

If one visits any of the farms, half-acre to three-acre plots, one would see multiple crops like coffee, spices, coconuts, fruits and vegetables all on one farm and growing amidst each other. From the tubers underground to the tallest coconut trees, from the soil to the sky, many, many varieties of food and cash crops. A farm looks more like a very large tropical allotment. Here with the involvement of over 5000 farming families, with their collectives, we see the largest indigenous seed preservation effort in the western ghats of India. The focus of the seed fest now is on seed sovereignty, vittu swaraj.

Today each collective has become a seed bank. A seed keeper from a collective says, “Today, I do not even need to buy groceries, except for sugar, salt and tea. Everything is in my farm or the neighbors.” Seeds that were only with one person at the beginning of the seed festivals are now with many. When the farmers speak, we can hear how these seeds are cared for with personal attention. “All is done with our own hand … this needs to be experienced personally,” they say. If a visitor is not alert enough to the alertness of the seed keeper, he would miss this bodily connection she is whispering, the secret of Life.

Thich Nhat Hanh said once that “if you are a poet you will clearly see that there is cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud there will be no rain, without rain, no trees and without trees, no paper.” If we take a moment to see the story in reverse, we will get to see the poems in the clouds and not need to write them on paper. So that the trees, rain and clouds all would return. These seed keepers see the poems in the soil and the seeds. It is the poetry of bodily connection, celebrating life.

The seeds stay together knowing each other

In keeping with the spirit of this mindful preoccupation, the fest itself is different from the exhibitions that we normally get to see. At a time when our tastes, without even our own knowing, are defined by the studio aesthetics of corporate world, the seed fest defies all that smartness. All who come there are part of one caring. The event carries the sensibility of land, done without event managers, PR agencies and media hype. A true farmer knows what is necessary, what is wasteful and how something is made functional. So it is not an exhibition for an alienated consumption, but reminds us of our own simple taste and shows us possibilities of how one can be light. It shows our own forgotten ways of togetherness, and how one can go beyond the financially-driven economy and participate in a social economy.

Conscious consumers

Sections of people today are becoming more sensitive to the effects of their consumer behavior and are increasingly trying to avoid a negative impact in the upstream value chain by making an educated choice. It is time for a conscious consumer to understand the real value of the produce they take away at a bargain.

Fair trade as a concept recognizes the skewed market and tries to appeal to the buyer’s sense of justice. It rests on the principle of consumers supporting producers directly and a willingness to pay more than the conventional market price in exchange for healthier products. As a visitor says, “FTAK’s effort is at the very heart of the struggle between a sustainable food system centered on the work and knowledge of small farmers, and an unsustainable industrialized food system dominated by a handful of multinational corporations.”

In a social as against a financially-driven economy, new ideas spread not by creating large corporations, but by the rich examples of forms that are smaller and in human scale. They inspire others and spread like seeds from a pod. FTAK in its short life has been just such an inspiration.

Ruchi Marshal writes about the Fair Trade movement and its role in promoting ethical consumerism.

Going organic is the new conscientious cool. Products with rustic packaging, tagged as ‘Fair Trade Certified’ have probably caught your eye, usually spotted on handicrafts, coffee, cocoa, tea, honey, spices, even gold. The concept is slowly picking up within the Indian market, but could do with wider embrace.

The movement started about three decades ago when a handful of Dutch pioneers and Mexican coffee farmers demanded a fair price for their produce. It has since inspired innumerable farmers, producers and artisans worldwide, to fight for their rightful dignity.

In India, the agricultural scenario is plagued by mounting debt from exorbitant seed prices, increasing costs of production, an absence of farmers’ land rights, and unstable market prices. This has resulted in farmer suicides and inhuman work conditions: over 3,00,000 farmers have committed suicide in India since 1995. That’s nearly one farmer death every 30 minutes. As a result, most farmers have had to resort to contractual work with large agri-businesses, or accept menial jobs with unfair working conditions.

WHAT DOES FAIR TRADE MEAN?

When a consumer buys products featuring the fair trade logo, it means that the producers and traders have met the fair trade standards, designed to provide farmers a sustainable livelihood, while also protecting the environment.

Fair trade as a concept, upholds safe and hygienic working conditions for employees, the prohibition of forced/child labour, the promotion of gender equality, and accountability of all stakeholders, with respect for environmental practices, and social welfare for marginalised communities. The premium paid by a customer for a fair-trade-certified product goes directly to the employees, who collectively invest them in healthcare, children’s welfare, women’s leadership initiatives and finance programs to ensure a more secure future.

In India, there are approximately 1,40,000 workers and farmers, working with about 80 fair trade certified producer organisations. In India, women workers form 55% of the workforce on fair trade certified plantations. As India’s middle class enjoys a larger disposable income, the fair trade movement is now shifting its focus to selling Indian-made fair trade products locally. Fair Trade Forum-India (FTF-I), the National Network for Fair Trade in India and Fair Trade USA are a few organisations that offer fair-trade certifications in India.

Tomy Mathews, co-founder of the FairTrade Alliance Kerala, explains it simply. “Responsible consumerism should focus on converting India’s 300 million middle class (equivalent to Europe’s population – also the primary destination for the fair trade products), to pay their dues to the largest manpower base of our economy — the farmers — by paying a fair price for their food.”

DOES ORGANIC MEAN FAIR TRADE?

Consumers don’t need to choose between organic and fair trade certified products, as they have overlapping attributes. Organic certified products conserve our environmental resources, keeping health and nutrition front and centre. Fair-trade certified products help those who feed us — help them earn the best price for their products, improve their quality of life, and have access to basic human rights. It also calls for maintaining environmentally friendly standards of production.

WHY SHOULD BRANDS SUPPORT FAIR TRADE?

Paperboat’s (Hector Beverages) fair trade certified chikki is a well-known fair trade certified food product. The company’s CEO, Neeraj Kakkar, saw fair trade certification as a natural step that put into practice his beliefs in farmers’ rights and environmental sustainability. The chikki’s main ingredient, peanuts, were sourced from a farmers’ collective in Rapar and Dhrangadhra (Gujarat). Fairtrade India’s CEO, Abhishek Jani says, “They were the main farmers’ organisation that enabled Paper Boat to fulfil their fair trade sourcing commitment of about 250 tonnes of peanuts late last year, and the farmers’ collective will be receiving a fair trade Premium of USD 110, for every metric tonne, over and above the market price. Sensitising brands about the impact of their decisions on markets, farmers/producers and the environment, can make a big difference.” Organic India, Makaibari Tea, Oothu Tea, Montevio Tea, Trubio Spices, PDS Organic Spices, Last Forests’s fair-trade certified spices, are some of the other fair-trade certified brands you can look out for.

It typically takes about 4 to 6 months for a medium-scaled registered organisation to get fair-trade certified, at a cost ranging from 1.5 lakhs to 3 lakhs, depending on the number of farmers/producers involved in the organization. It also depends on how many additional entities the organisation relies on, and the degrees of change it needs to fulfil the criteria of the certification standards. Looking forward to getting certified, Vijay Byrsat, who is the proprietor of Meghalaya-based, organically-sourced honey, Bee Natural, says, “Given that it is a premium product that is already doing well in the European market, we hope that getting fair trade certified gives us an edge over our local competitors.”

THE BURDEN OF ETHICS

Conscious consumers and environmentalists believe that the burden of fair trade/organic certifications borne by the farmers/producers, should be shifted by taxing those using commercial practices (pesticides/chemicals), via reforming policies. Rudra Chatterjee, Director of Makaibari tea, opines, “Taxing discourages misuse. Our brand is naturally organic and practices fair-trade concepts since its inception, even before being certified. Our partnerships are genuinely invested in our employees’ wellbeing. Cultural practices upholding dignity of labour, directly contributing to social well-being of marginalised communities, environmental conservation and building awareness on these values, is the need of the hour.”

Jani adds, “We suggest certification only if the farmer organisations are getting more benefits or fair trade sales or a fair trade premium, than their costs of certification and investment in sustainability practices. The certification is not an end in itself, but a tool to address the socio-economic issues, via capacity-building, training programmes and annual quality audits.”

WHERE IS YOUR RUPEE GOING?

Consumers need to understand why they are paying a premium of 10-20% for fair trade products. Jani explains: “Ever thought about how every purchase is a political decision? It endorses how resources are split across labour and capital, and how the environment is treated.”

While the fair trade movement in India currently hinges on awareness, advocacy and the goodwill of ethically conscious consumers, farmers are combining this concept with their belief in food and seed sovereignty. In the words of Anna Lappe, an expert on food systems and an advocate of sustainable food, “Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.”

So what kind of a world are you paying for?

With the Asian Elephant suffering so much hardship through persecution where it feeds and massive losses of its natural habitat, it’s great to hear that Harry’s Nuts! Are grown so responsibly that they are benefiting both the elephants and the farmers.
Harry’s Nuts are the delicious salted nut snack from Harry Hill, and have been declared as being Elephant friendly thanks to the work of the Cashew nut farmers in India who are working so hard to protect the endangered species.
These snacks are available from Waitrose, Sainsburys and many other outlets and with every munch you take of a Cashew nut you are giving the environment a boost too.
The cashew farmers have used some of the extra money which comes with Fairtrade to protect wild Indian elephants which had been trespassing on their farms from the local forests. Farmers had found trees they had been growing for twenty years felled by the power of these elephants. Wanting to protect their crops, farmers often fought back, risking both injury to themselves and the elephants.
The farming organisation Fair Trade Alliance Kerala (FTAK) decided the farmers, their trees and the elephants needed to be protected and studied ways of keeping the animals at bay without hurting them. FTAK came up with the idea of investing the Fairtrade premium on solar panels to power electrified fencing around the farms. This provides a very mild shock.
“The shock deters but does not injure the elephants, so these cashews are now elephant-friendly,”
explains FTAK’s Tony Mathews. Dan Bucknell, Head of Conservation and Campaigns of the charity
Elephant Family, says: “With the Asian elephant suffering from massive habitat loss and persecution where it feeds on crops, it is refreshing that Harry’s Nuts! are grown in such a responsible way that works for both the farmers and the elephants.”
The 3,200 cashew nut farmers are all part of an organic conversion programme and 45% of them have
already achieved this certification. Organic methods are seen by the farmers as the best way of
protecting their crops while protecting biodiversity.
The farmers are operating in a ‘biosphere’ of exceptional biodiversity and take protecting this
environment extremely seriously. There is also a focus on replanting indigenous breeds of cashew trees which produce a better crop.
The farmers were also concerned that an indigenous breed of goat, the ‘Malabari’, was becoming
extinct – a breed which has far greater immunity to disease than crossbreeds, eats less fodder and is much cheaper to rear for milk and meat. They have started a breeding programme which sees a farmerbeing given a male and female goat and then passing on the offspring to another farmer.

Harry Hill works with Fairtrade nut company Liberation Foods on Harry’s Nuts!, currently available in two varieties – salted peanuts and salted cashews. Liberation’s biggest shareholder is a co-operative of nut farming and gathering organisations including FTAK. Managing Director Kate Gaskell says: “All of the nuts in Harry’s Nuts! are transported to the UK by sea – the most environmentally friendly form of long haul transport. Everything we do in our business reveals a respect for the environment as well as the farmer.” Fairtrade has strict environmental criteria though it is, of course, best known for the fair prices it guarantees to farmers.
Harry’s Nuts! are popular for their taste – they are cooked for longer than other salted peanuts and cashews to give them an extra crunchiness and deeper flavour. They have been backed by celebrity food writer Sophie Grigson who says: “The peanuts have a very appealing creamy texture and a delicious sweet, rounded flavour enhanced by just the right degree of salt.”
Harry launched the products after travelling to Malawi and meeting some of the peanut farmers, many of whom are women looking after Aids orphans. He heard that the benefits which come with Fairtrade are a huge help to them.
Harry, a big peanut lover, says: “These Fairtrade salted nuts are an extra tasty version of my favourite snack and there’s no money in it for me (what a mug!). I’m working with Liberation and it’s great that the company is run to benefit the farmers and their families.”

I come from the South Indian state of Kerala. Yes, Vasco da Gama of Portugal landed on our shores – in fact, on the shores of the very town in which I live – over 500 years ago and heralded the advent of colonialism. He came in search of spices, particularly Malabar pepper. But this might be news to you: from the 15th century through most of the 19th century, the Malabar region of India did not actually cultivate pepper. Our predecessors instead collected and gathered pepper. Pepper vines thrived wild in the homestead farms of the Malabar region, along with probably a hundred other crops which had nutritional, therapeutic and nutraceutical values.
A homestead farm in Kerala was a veritable forest farm. It would appear disorganized, not favoring assembly-line economies of scale and production, and not amenable to organized and efficient methods of fertilizing, irrigating and harvesting. The fact is, it was actually a nuanced, evolved and intricately engineered system whose nerve center was the family kitchen. And the matriarch, the woman, for the most part decided what grew on the farms, what was needed for the daily kitchen, what was to be stored for the rainy days, what was to be shared with neighbors, what was to be fed to animals, and what, if anything remained, the men could take to the market and sell. This is what once characterized farming in Kerala, but it is now a thing of the past.
The spoiler: the market! Actually, the modern market, as we know it today – that which demands quality and quantity not dictated by nutritional needs, environmental balance or the food security of families and communities. And so, suddenly, the power equations within the homestead changed completely. Now, the matriarch has little say in the affairs of the farm. The market dictates, and men mediate with the market. Notions of value and usefulness have changed. Hundreds of trees, shrubs and medicinal plants that once thrived as wild growth are no longer valuable; instead, they have become a hindrance to an orderly, efficient farm that needs to cater to the market. The food basket has changed, too. Wild food has disappeared completely. Tubers have diminished. Fruit trees have dwindled.
Today, Fair Trade Alliance Kerala (FTAK), the small-farmer collective I work for, is involved in an effort to recapture the homestead farming traditions of Kerala. It is a small dream. Our goal is to grow to a collective of about 10,000 small-farmers over the next couple of years. Small-farmers in Kerala have really small holdings, about 3-4 acres on average. So that small dream means about 10,000 farming families stewarding about 40,000 acres of farmland, creating conditions that are akin to a tropical rainforest in crop diversity and biodiversity.

In the process, we are committed to becoming net food suppliers – and by “food” we mean not coffee, pepper or cashews that we grow for distant markets, but “food on the table,” such as rice, fruits, vegetables and tubers for our own local families and communities. And we expect that women will reassert their traditional role and space in the management of the homestead farming economy. Biodiversity for us, therefore, is a food security issue as well as an issue of gender justice.
What role will the market and trade, particularly international commodity trade, play in this scenario that we strive to engender? Undoubtedly, the massive haulage of commodities across continents is unsustainable for a climate-challenged planet. Food miles and the ecological footprint of our consumption can be ignored only at our own peril. But trade is as much a cultural exchange as it is a commodity exchange, and, albeit in reduced volumes, it is here to stay and desirably so. There is thus the inevitable question: what type of trade must prevail when our planet is in peril?
Well, let me give you a glimpse of the beneficial effect the type of international commodity trade that we practice has on the most formidable challenge confronting humanity today. Our farmers reside in the Western Ghats region of India, and the United Nations recently declared it a World Heritage Site. The environmental sensitivity of farming operations here is critical, not just for us but for the whole world, given the climate-challenged times we live in. A significant portion of our farmlands adjoin tropical rainforests. With the stress that human development has brought on the forests, and with the size and productivity of those forests shrinking rapidly, conflicts between man and animal have grown. What if a marauding troupe of wild elephants get to your farm and destroy what might be the result of thirty or forty years of toil? That is exactly what is happening in several of our farming communities, and yet we almost intrinsically know that farmers and wildlife have to coexist for our environmentally secure future.
FTAK was born in the midst of an unprecedented farming crisis in Kerala created by the plummeting prices of agricultural commodities. One of the first investments we made with the social premium funds secured by selling our products under the fair trade regime was in benign solar-powered fences installed between the forest and many of our farmlands. The fences act as a mild deterrent that keeps the animals within the forests.
The cashew industry refers to large cashew nuts as “jumbo nuts.” But the organic and fair trade cashews that Equal Exchange brings to U.S. consumers, sourced from FTAK, could also claim to be “jumbo nuts” – not based on their size, but instead because they are indeed “elephant-friendly” nuts. That bin of organically-grown and fairly-traded cashews that you come across in your local food cooperative is testimony that global commodity trade in a climate-challenged world can in fact chart a fair and sustainable course.

In photo- From left to right, Tomy Mathew, Robin Murray, Michael Barrett Brown and Michael Ward.

Robin Murray was an economist. But I have come across no other of that tribe who, like him, showed economics its proper place in the larger order of human pursuits. He refused, with the resoluteness of a conscientious objector, to let the black and red pencils of the auditor decide the fate of enterprises committed to humanising the exchange of goods and services. If today, against the pervasive corporate appropriation of the fair trade narrative, we are able to celebrate entities like Cafedirect, Divine Chocolate and Liberation holding aloft the flag of trade justice, we owe it in no small measure to Robin’s indefatigable story telling.

The narrative was key to Robin. Without it the best of numbers was unimpressive, but the most dismal of numbers was still redeemable with a narrative of human endurance to bet on and outlive. I saw this power of the narrative put to telling effect at the global assembly of Liberation held in 2008, in the nondescript village of Kelakam in Kerala. Born in to the lap of the global economic crisis, Liberation had almost wiped out its equity when its management walked in to the Assembly. Robin made no attempt to window dress the gravity of the situation. We are scratching the bottom of our chest, but even if it is the last thing we did as a company, we would hold this Assembly, Robin emphasised. ‘For we are about people and community.’ Mind you, as his voice boomed over an audience of about three thousand plus farmers and delegates from four continents, number crunchers back in London were vacillating if it wasn’t time up to intimate the receivers. Liberation still lives to tell the tale.

Like all true adherents of the dismal profession, Robin was acutely conscious of the trade off between the short term and the long term.But unlike the pessimists of his profession he refused to concede to their maxim that ‘in the long term we are all dead’. In the long term those steadfast to the narrative prevail. And they were for the most part not mega narratives. They were narratives of small farmers with smallholdings; narratives of Brazil Nut gatherers who declared the Brazil nut tree and its surrounding forests as patrimony to humanity; of the Kerala Seed Fest being a precious creation; of FairTrade being like a dance and a community meal; of the woman chair of Kuapa Kokoo defying patriarchy in her village.

I heard the news about this master storyteller’s vanishing act only on the third day of the fete. All of 5500 farmer members of Fair Trade Alliance Kerala heard it though in the very next hour since and lowered their flags in salute. Another of those stories for our common repertoire, Robin.

Following a trip to cocoa producers, I visited the “Fair Trade Alliance Kerala” (FTAK) in Kerala two weeks ago at – the producers who had delighted me with the wonderful products in the first Crowd-Container-Package. That one can visit the producers of their own food far in the distance is not common. Too often, only glossed pictures are shown for the marketing in Europe to be in line with the do-good wishes of the consumers. With my own background as a producer (herbs and citrus fruits in Morocco) and as a sourcing manager (fresh pineapples from West Africa and Central America), I am strongly aware of fair trade between North and South. Even more, I appreciate the initiative of Crowd Container and the FTAK, which through transparency and a direct link between the producer and the consumer allow for truly fair trade and exchange.

My first contact with the producers in Kerala was at the organic shop of Elements, the local export partner of FTAK. The store could be located somewhere in a European metropolis and would not attract attention to anybody as a foreign body. On the contrary, while in Switzerland unpacked stores sprout from every corner, the Elements Organic Store Calicut has been the standard for almost 30 years. We went on to the coconut oil factory, a few hours north of Calicut. I was not even sure if the factory was operating at all. There is nothing hectic, nobody is shouting – but on closer inspection it is noticeable that people are working hard, but with a soothing calm and concentration. At the latest, when I had lunch in the company-owned cafeteria, I wanted to apply for a job. By far the best meal I had eaten on my whole trip. Also, this factory is not simply a factory, but there are cycles, analyzed, used and lived, down to the last detail: Food waste and coconut water become biogas, which is used for cooking in the canteen for the workers. The waste water from the biogas plant is cleaned by plants and then reused, to name only two examples.

The following day I visited some producers on site. I am used to see pineapple mono-cultures by hectares, the form of production in mixed cultures and the associated biodiversity was already a pure visual benefit. While most species were already known to me, there was still a lot to discover, for example the inconspicuous cardamom. Also, it was very exciting to learn and see how the cooperative is functioning and organized. With 5000 members, I imagined it to be rather difficult. But from my little insights I had a good impression. The whole cooperative is organized in small, manageable units, each with about 30 farmers to ensure that every farmer has a voice.

Finally, I would like to thank the FTAK and Elements for the delicate products and the exciting insights into Kerala.

We believe that the world’s greatest challenges will never be solved by one person or organization alone. We need to work together! We are introducing our new series #MeetTheCreators with a monthly interview with a member showing his/her impact and work for reaching the sustainable development goals.

Meet our SDG this month:

The Sustainable Development Goal Nr 12 wants to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.

Meet our creator this month:
Member: Tobias Joos
Organisation: CrowdContainer
SDG: Nr 12 – Responsible Production and Consumption

Tobias Joos is the founder of Zurich based Crowd Container. His team and him are currently running their third crowd campaign to supply customers in Zurich and Bern with delicious and sustainably grown products directly from farmers in Kerala.

How is your project contributing to Sustainable Development Goal No.12 – Responsible Production and Consumption?

Crowd Container fills the big gap between sustainable agriculture and responsible consumption. Sustainable agriculture is mostly based on small scale, mixed crop, ecological farming. Often it is based on the principles of organic agriculture. However, industrialized agriculture, which uses lots of chemical inputs, has big advantages when it comes to trading. The mainstream marketing channels such as the big retailers and the food industry are ideal outlets for the commodities produced by large-scale agriculture. It is very hard for small farmers who are committed to sustainable agriculture to sell their produce at a sustainable price. We try to fill that gap by building a direct marketing channel for small producers to reach the end customers more directly. We do that not only in a regional setting, but also on a global scale.

What makes it so hard for small farmers to feed their products into the larger supply chain?

Small farmers often grow ancient varieties and different crops on the same plot. They get many different products in small quantities and the products are not standardized. I once tried to sell turmeric powder to a supermarket. We agreed on the price and the quantity and delivered the product. What we did not anticipate was, that the spice glass in the supermarket stayed half empty after filling them with our turmeric powder. Of course, it turned out to be a huge problem. It was very clear that our turmeric powder from the small holder farmers was better in taste, however, it also had a higher bulk weight and that meant that the glass didn’t fill up.

And you can’t foresee all these factors in the product?

You could probably solve the problem with the turmeric by introducing new packaging, but for the supermarket, the worst case scenario is an empty shelf. So the supermarket has to find five more suppliers who can produce exactly the same product to be sure to have it always available. And then, of course, they will buy the product from the cheapest supplier. That doesn’t fit the logic of sustainable agriculture where you have to make long-term investments in your land and the fertility of the soil. In many cases this also involves growing perennial crops such as fruit and spice trees, coffee or cocoa. You cannot shift to growing a different product for the market from one day to the other. Here in the city, we are very much disconnected from the way our food is grown. We just want the same pack of coffee at 6.50 CHF any time of the year.

It sounds like you are working on the problem from two sides. One side is on the production and supply chain and the other part is the consumer behavior?

Exactly, so the second big effort we do apart from working with small farmers on the supply chain is raising awareness among our consumers – why should I buy the food directly from the farmers? And what does it mean to get for instance pepper from India? It’s such a common thing that you always have pepper on your table. You never really think about what it takes to bring it here. You never think about what it takes to grow this pepper and who are the people involved in it. Therefore, we try to show that to our customers. Part of it is, that they have to pre-order the product and then wait for it. While they are waiting, we tell them the story behind their food.

Does that mean you use the waiting time to fill in the information about how the food is produced and where it has been produced and how to cook with it? So by the time the Päckli arrives in Switzerland, the consumer has much more information about the product than he`d have if he had bought the same product in the supermarket.

Exactly. When people decide to spend 150 CHF for a box and then have to wait for it to arrive, they are much more interested in knowing more about the products they`ve ordered. For us, it is of course a challenge to have customers commit upfront and then have them wait for their orders. But by doing so, we can eliminate all the uncertainty in the supply chain and all speculative elements of the trading. This allows us to be really transparent, even about our margins. And that’s the other crucial part of our model.

It sounds like there is a lot more communication involved than in the “traditional” process?

Yes, it’s a lot about storytelling and explaining the differences, also because there is so much waiting involved in the process. Marketing and communications are the biggest challenges for us.

What’s the best thing for you about being an entrepreneur working on such a big change?

I just thought about this yesterday. 90% of the time I feel motivated and have a really good time at work and that’s different from any job I ever had before.

What is the most annoying thing about being an entrepreneur for you?

When you don’t get lunch (Tobias laughs and explains to us, he didn`t get to eat before the interview).

One of the main difficulties is resources, especially if you are in a phase before you get investments. Our resources are extremely limited. Of course it’s about failing forward and somehow that`s how it should be. But for instance, if we fail now to get our orders in, I don’t know how it will continue. And if it will continue. Because basically, in case we fail, we`re broke. That’s sometimes so unnerving. I am really convinced that our vision of direct and transparent online trading has a future and that we are on the right path. But currently the margin for error is so small. You can be wiped out tomorrow if you make a mistake. There is a bit of a contradiction between the trial and error methodology and the ideal of being small and agile. You actually don’t have the margin to fail. You try – and it has to work.

Is there one partner you are dying to work with?

Our vision is to build a the platform that allows our customer to order unique food directly from small producers. There, I see some similarities with AirBnB. We want to become the AirBnB of Fair Trade. You know, I think buying from the supermarket shelf is as boring and convenient as staying at the big three star hotel near the train station. It’s much more exciting to go to someone’s home, maybe it’s also a bit more complicated, but it’s a fascinating experience. So yes, I would love to learn from AirBnB how they built their platform.

Our shareholder cashew farming co-operative Fair Trade Alliance Kerala (FTAK) has over 7,000 members. Their small ‘homestead’ farms are scattered around the tropical, rugged Western Ghat mountains, a United Nations World Heritage Site.

So it’s not surprising that we meet new farmers every time we go, as well as seeing familiar faces.

During his recent trip, our Technical Manager Dan met 67-year-old Thomas who has been farming since he was 15 years old. Thomas learned his farming ‘trade’ from his father and grandfather and today farms with his son. He says that, for as long back as he can recollect or has heard, the family did nothing but farming. They are a farming family.

Thomas’s favourite time of the year is during the cashew harvest, which falls between February and May. Cashew is Thomas’s most important and lucrative export crop – certainly since he joined FTAK and Liberation and started to sell his cashew nuts under Fairtrade and Organic certified conditions. The crop now provides a secure annual income for the family.

Thomas leads the farmers in his local area in plant and crop diversity. He meticulously records all the crop varieties in his 3-acre farm, which now has over 130 different varieties of crop!

Thomas’s crops include mango, grapefruit, starfruit, yam, jack fruit, pineapple, various potato varieties and numerous spices including cinnamon, nutmeg, clove and ginger – he also produces honey on his farm.

By being such a champion of crop diversity Thomas is improving his family’s diet, reducing their food bills and reliance on imported produce and really enhancing the quality of his soil. Quite a virtuous circle and one that we are delighted to feel part of. Thank you Thomas.

Tomy Mathew is the founder of Calicut’s and Kerala’s first FT Organic Grocery store.  Tomy and his wife Seepja founded Elements in 1999, after moving back from Chennai. The establishment of Elements allowed farmers of Kerala to catalyze the now thriving Fair Trade movement in Kerala.

Tomy’s journey into the Fair Trade movement was birthed from his involvement as an activist in the New Social Movements of Kerala. He was among the founding editors of the avant garde journal Patabhedam, that introduced Kerala to the themes and concerns of the new social movements. This also took him in the early 1990s to the Iraqi Saudi border as a member of the International Gulf Peace team, an interventionist group that worked on the ground in Iraq to stop the war. His experience in Iraq added to Tomy’s awareness of  the the interconnective web of injustice.

In 1999 Tomy returned to his home state of Kerala. Seeing that there was no outlet for selling organic produce, Tomy and Seepja opened Elements. They established Elements to bridge what Elements described as the physical as well as  the emotional distance between the Sensitive Farmer and the Conscious Consumer.

Elements business remained primarily as an organic store until 2003 when a farming crisis, most critically caused by the plummeting prices of agricultural commodities, struck India and particularly Kerala. The crisis caused such volatility in the market, farmers were burdened with mounting debt, incapacitating their farms and families with desperate measures by farmers even ending their own lives. It was at that time that Tomy (and a handful of people involved in the Farmers movements in Kerala) started researching Fair Trade on an organizational level and seeing how it functioned systemically.

Around the same time, Simon Pare, the Director of Max Havelaar France came to India to visit a mutual friend, Balz Strasser (who was researching the small holder farming reality of Kerala). Simon heard about the group’s interest in Fair Trade, and sent Karine Laroche, a staff member of Max Havelaar, to meet with the group of farmers to discuss how best to organize and structure a Fair Trade model.

Meanwhile, the farming crisis was mounting. Farmers in Kerala organized themselves independently under various banners and  took to the streets to protest the organizational systems that were perpetuating and profiting from the crisis. The farmers in the hill tracts of Kerala who primarily grew cash crops for the international markets were in the forefront of these agitations.

It was in this milieu that FTAK (Fair Trade Alliance Kerala) was established. They became formally constituted in December, 2005 and Fair Trade Certified in April, 2006. The organization’s membership was primarily drawn from the mass movements of peasants in the Northern districts of Kerala.

Elements became an Alternative Trading Organization (ATO); a partner and channel for FTAK to organize, negotiate, communicate and execute sales. The FTAK model gained incremental successes because they worked through consensus, giving voice to all members. They negotiated small scale production sales, so as to not boom and bust. Other international FT organizations began to take notice of FTAK, particularly those committed to upholding the small farmer centrality of Fair Trade. Unlike other FT Farmer models, FTAK did not become a Cooperative in its legal sense. In India, organizations that incorporate as Cooperatives (Cooperative Societies) are subjected to host of regulations that can undermine farmers agency and even lead to Government takeover. There are several examples in India of farmer cooperatives or marketing cooperatives being subjected to political control and being subservient to the interests of political parties. Therefore, FTAK incorporated as a Membership Society which protected their status as an autonomous working collective.

FTAK started to gain notice from new customers. A French food packer sought to source all of their cashews from FTAK, which lead to the rapid increase in its membership to about two thousand in its first year (although Tomy and the other promoters would have preferred a more incremental growth in membership). Ultimately, the order from the French company only came to be one container. Regardless, the initial interest forced FTAK and Elements to work overtime to find buyers for the cashews they had harvested in response to the initial request.

Even though FTAK was not yet Fair Trade or Organic certified by 2005, FTAK and Elements were gaining a highly respected reputation as businesses of integrity. They received their first order from CTM Altromercato in Italy before becoming Fair Trade certified, and several entities firmed up orders pending certification, having witnessed first hand the vibrancy and integrity of the organization.

As the prospects of Fair Trade exports loomed, Elements (which was till then a single organic store selling products in Calicut) had to build its infrastructure and financial resources to meet the requirements of a professional business, that could tackle the international market place. Elements needed investor support to maintain the burgeoning infrastructure. Initially, Tomy asked Balz Strasser if he could have a short term loan from his friends in Switzerland. Ueli Baruffol, was happy to be of assistance. Realizing Ueli and Balz’s interest was more lasting and sustainable than just a short term loan, Elements offered them equity participation: 44% equity stakes to 3 Swiss friends, while Tomy and his wife hold the other 56%.

As sales began to steadily grow, FTAK asked its members to think into the future and plan for systemic sustainability. They created what they now call the FT + 3 model. It was a metric for measuring the organizational success of FTAK. The model evaluated not only the effectiveness of FT, but the effectiveness and systemic inclusion and planning for Biodiversity, Food Sovereignty and Gender Justice in their farming, sales and business transactions. It is this model that is in effect today.

Elements continues to broker sales for FTAK, but do so under the edict that FTAK is obligated to seek the highest price they can for the product they are selling. It is not only understood, but expected that if a buyer offers a higher price for a product than what Elements can offer (on behalf of a buyer), prior to signing a contract, that FTAK is obliged to take the higher price offer. This is agreed to as a business practice in order to protect the farmer, and uphold the intention that FT puts the farmer first.

This blog post was written by Kara Powis, our Organizational Development Director, after her visit to the FTAK cooperative, where we source our organic and pure coconut oil for all four varieties of our chocolate truffles.

Coconut oil is nothing new, many people have been using it for skin care, hair care, and cooking for quite some time, but recently coconut oil has seen a renaissance of sorts, showing up in more and more stores and at the top of many conversations. But what is the big deal with coconut oil? As it turns out there is a great deal of goodness that goes along with this coconut byproduct. Not only is it what makes the inside of Alter Eco chocolate truffles so smooth and creamy, but it’s also a sustainable alternative to palm kernel oil, containing health promoting properties, and versatility in the kitchen.

Palm oil in its purest form is not detrimental to health, but the way it is produced and harvested is detrimental to the environment and the local economies it envelops. Its popularity has increased due to the fact that it is a high yielding crop, is versatile and has low production cost. Today Indonesia is the number one producer and exporter of palm oil in the world and it is wreaking havoc on their land and the larger environment. The World Wildlife Fund has reported that an area approximately the size of 300 football fields of rainforest is cleared each hour to create more space for palm oil production[1]. But at what price? According to the World Bank, Indonesia is the third largest greenhouse gas emitter globally due to the fact that it has the highest rate of deforestation in the world[2]. The high rate of deforestation is jeopardizing the lives of animal species that are vital to the ecosystem, such as orangutans, Sumatran tigers, Sumatran rhinoceros, sun bears, and pygmy elephants.

As a result of its low cost and high demand, palm oil has become pervasive in all kinds of products including shampoos, soaps, toothpaste, packaged foods and cosmetics. Unfortunately, palm oil is rarely clearly labeled on an ingredients list, so avoiding it at the grocery store can be difficult. In fact, there are more than 170 different names that manufacturers use on their packaging to avoid saying the words “palm oil”. Taking a look at your shower products, almost anything that foams contains sodium laureth sulfate, which is often derived from palm oil. And it can often be hidden under the generic term, “vegetable oil”. According to USDA data the US alone has doubled the amount of palm oil it has imported between 2005 and 2012. The average Western citizen consumes over 22 pounds of palm oil annually.

As a renewable resource, coconut oil has become a much more sustainable alternative to palm oil. Coconut trees can grow in almost any soil, even in sandy coastal soils, and can bear fruit for more than sixty years, allowing farming families to sustain their crop through 3 generations. Fair Trade Alliance Kerala (FTAK) on India’s Malabar Coast has been sustainably harvesting coconut since 2005. This farmer-owned co-op practices jaiva krishi, a sustainable farming method that mimics virgin rainforest, where many crops grow harmoniously together, and many animal species — including wild elephants — roam safely.

Fair Trade Alliance Kerala is the source of the pure, organic coconut oil found in Alter Eco’s newest chocolate truffles. Once the coconuts have been harvested, split, the meat dried, ground, and pressed this lauric-acid rich oil is the perfect complement to antioxidant-rich dark chocolate. Deep dark smooth chocolate surrounds these sumptuous bite-sized delights. And pure coconut oil, combined with milk and cacao creates the silky-smooth, melty filling. But beyond making our truffles delectable coconut oil is great to use in your own kitchen (if you aren’t already). There are two types of coconut oil you will find in the store: virgin coconut oil and refined coconut oil. Virgin coconut oil has a stronger coconut aroma and imparts a more noticeable coconut flavor in cooking, whereas refined coconut oil is better for cooking at higher temperatures and has a less pronounced coconut flavor. Whether sautéing vegetables or baking, coconut oil is a great ingredient to have on hand in the kitchen and try in a variety of ways. Or you could always just eat a truffle.

Sources:

After hearing Tomy Mathew, one of the founders and promoters of Fair Trade Alliance Kerala (FTAK), present at Twin’s Climate Change roundtable in March this year, I am curious to find out more about FTAK’s Fair Trade + 3 strategy. The main focus of my visit will be Gender Justice, learning about the situation of women in FTAK member families, and their contribution to the production of coffee and cashew, the two crops which Twin Trading buys from FTAK. But the trip also offers the opportunity to get a fuller picture of FTAK’s two other key areas of work and how the three interrelate.

I fly to Calicut in Kerala, one of India’s most developed states, and travel on to FTAK’s new office in Kannur in search of Tomy. I arrive a little dazed from the journey to find I have missed the first day of a series of strategic meetings, but the atmosphere is positive and Tomy fills me in. FTAK’s strategy takes Fair Trade as a starting point, and has three main cornerstones: Biodiversity, Food Security and Gender Justice. Day one focused on biodiversity, with members mapping out their farms to identify ‘gaps’ for planting new plants and trees and forming a task force to take the strategy forward.

Food security and sovereignty

The topic for Day Two is Food Security. Tomy explained that the aim is for each farm to produce more calories than the family consumes, even if they end up selling or buying some produce. The attendees work in small groups and begin by making a list of foods they eat; identifying which foods are grown locally, what is brought from outside, and how this has changed over time. Seed and food sovereignty is a key issue – farmers are strongly opposed to GM crops, not only due to health and environmental concerns, but also because they want to protect ownership of seeds from corporate patenting. Each family is encouraged to re-introduce forgotten traditional crops, looking to each other to provide seeds if they don’t have them. This builds on FTAK’s Seed Festival, an annual event which began in 2011 that encourages members to swop seeds.

Participants also considered what foods they consume and whether the balance could be shifted away from rice back to more traditional staples such as cassava and jackfruit (which I later sample at Thomas, the Chairman of FTAK, and his wife Molly’s house and is absolutely delicious and very versatile – it appears in several guises over the course of the week, including crisps). The group finished by mapping out each period of the year and what food crops could be cultivated. The goal is for each household to have at least five varieties of food crop planted on their land.

The day rounds off with a heated discussion about how to protect vegetable plots from hungry elephants and wild boar, and the cost of fencing. Some suggest that they could grow vegetables in adjacent plots, and club together to fence off the whole area, thereby reducing the cost. There is mention of examples of the successful use of solar fencing, which uses solar energy to produce a mild (but safe) electric shock. During the rest of my visit, fencing is a hot topic (although I don’t catch sight of any wild board), and I see widespread evidence of a healthy diversity on farms. My mouth practically waters when I hear the combination of fruit, spices and vegetables that are grown on most farms – pepper, ginger, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, coconut and mango, jackfruit, and aubergine, lady’s fingers, bitter gourd and beans!

Organic production

On my last day, I visit Mary and her husband Thomson in the village of Kanjirakolly in Kannur. Mary is now entirely self-sufficient in her vegetable production. She consumes or dries everything she grows, only going to the market to sell a little of her aubergine crop. There is a strong consciousness amongst the members of FTAK of food safety and a commitment to organic principles, in part due to publicised health scares about chemical residues found in vegetables and curry leaves in the last few years. Some members are considering setting up a local organic vegetable shop, to market their surplus produce, as it is hard to distinguish in the local market between organic and non-organic produce.

The work that FTAK is doing in this area turns the argument that small farmers in the developing work should focus on subsistence farming rather than cash crops, on its head. It brings to mind Twin’s work with NASFAM, the National Smallholder Association of Malawi, to ensure that the groundnut crop is free from harmful microtoxins not just for export but also for local consumption. Both NASFAM and FTAK are using the infrastructure of a Fairtrade, cash-crop oriented organisation to enhance local food quality and security. I am excited and inspired to see this work in action – a model I hope will be replicated in other Fairtrade cooperatives around the world.

I am visiting Fair Trade Alliance Kerala (FTAK) to understand more about the role of women in the production of cashew and coffee. It is also a chance to learn about how FTAK is supporting women to participate in the organisation, through the creation of women’s groups and a fund for additional income-generating activities carried out by women. The research carried out here will help Twin develop its strategy for work on gender with farmer organisations and to share any examples of best practice with other producer groups. Having met with 36 women members at a lively meeting at FTAK’s office on Saturday, I am beginning a week of small group meetings across the different areas where FTAK is active.

I am visiting FTAK members Princy and her husband Sibi, on Manjumala, meaning ‘Misty Hill’. It is aptly named – one of the founders of FTAK Father Joy (my translator for the week) and I trek up a rocky path, admiring the views and secretly catching our breath. We find Princy who has come to meet us half way. She leads us along an intricate web of paths, across her neighbour’s new rubber plantation, and a slippery stream. It is another half an hour to her house, and I think about how she must do this journey twice a day, without doubt in half the time.

Princy is secretary of the local FTAK cell, managing the savings and credit scheme for 12 families. They each contribute 50 rupees/week (recently increased from 20) and are able to borrow larger amounts when needed, for example for buying animals, school feels or planting a new crop. There is also a communal fund for emergencies such as taking family members to hospital.

She is also involved in another government led women’s group, and teaches at Sunday school. Sibi smiled when I asked how he felt about how busy and active his wife is outside the home. He said he was very happy: “We need to sensitise women to fight for their own justice. They are not aware. Each one should be aware of their own situation as a starting point. Change is taking place. Men are supporting women to participate, it is very positive.”

As well as managing the farm, they both do around 150 days work a year outside, Sibi in construction, and Princy sewing bags for a local tailoring business. Their biggest expense is their children’s education. They have three children in school, aged 7, 11 and 13. Travel alone costs 1500 rupees per month, and they must also pay for uniforms, books and textbooks.

In conversation, Sibi and Princy demonstrated a strong emphasis on partnership and working together, an approach which FTAK encourages. From the start, FTAK membership has been for the whole family rather than the head of household, and in 2011, they began to more actively encourage the involvement of women in the organisation and to develop their skills and confidence outside the home.

Later that afternoon, I meet other women in Princi’s area who are part of a women’s group, including the current vice-chair of the organisation, Aniamma Kulathinal Mathai. She describes the impact on women’s increasing involvement in FTAK:”There is an increasing recognition of women’s contribution, and more mutual understanding. We have been given the opportunity to go beyond the kitchen. We now go to different places for meetings. My fear has gone, I can now speak in front of other people. I have a sense of confidence and can talk to others. We understand what organic agriculture is and share with each other, at the seed festival. These are all new experiences, seeds which we have planted and are developing. Sometimes household duties are neglected but men are supportive and encouraging.”

The first pillar of Fair Trade Alliance Kerala’s Fair Trade + 3 is biodiviersity. The aim: that every FTAK’s farm should be like a tropical rainforest boasting a rich, dense, diversity of crops. The Western Ghats area, where many of FTAK’s farmers work, has recently been declared a world heritage sight. This was in recognition of the sites biophysical and ecological processes, which also help to regulate India’s monsoon rains. It is the 8th most biodiverse place on the planet, in fact there are 325 globally threatened species of flora, fauna, birds, amphibians and reptiles and it’s one of the few places left in the world where new species are still being discovered!

Despite the world wide recognition that comes with the World Heritage Site award, there was local opposition from the Kerala local government and in particular Karnataka local government who voted unanimously to oppose the status.  The local authorities were not alone in their opposition and were joined by the church and the vast majority of farmer organisations (FTAK being the exception to the rule)! The reason? There is a perception that the rules and regulations which come along with status would hinder the development opportunities of the area.