host on this show but to day we're putting you in the role of a guest more more like a guest and in fact you were the first guest we ever had fourteen years ago when we first went on the air and probably the same subject probably yes indeed the same subject because that interview was about fair trade and that's what we'll be talking about today as well partly because the global village christmas holidays seasonal whatever you want to call it store is open it's that time of year and we can it's a marvelous way of thinking about consumerism for one thing may be going there to find something it's nonprofit that is fair trade rather than buying the plastic stuff in other places so that's one thing but perhaps we could start by having you tell us really what fair trade is fair trade is an economic activity it's as simple as that you buy and you sell but you intend to do so with very specific ethical principles and it's getting better and better organized  old in the region it's all the time fair trade in attendance to make a beginning to right the wrongs that have been perpetrated by large scale  stockholder profit tongue businesses once in a while i think somebody just has a little mind blip substitute the word free for the word fair and of course fair trade is not we see in the international agreements it's in fact the opposite almost just from what you've just said oh free was a very carefully chosen modifier it was intended to l people into thinking something good was going to happen and if people haven't figured out by now that something bad is happening with free trade that attack today means the race to the bottom for our natural resources and our human resources  terms of rotten lousy then i'm afraid they haven't got their brains and here so yes i agree it's it's it's a question that we have to deal with all the time and we have to keep renaming re describing what we do i like to call it trade as if people mattered because the fairness part of it does have to do with not going for the lowest possible wages among controls at the same time yeah they have to be kept in balance so we're all about people do business it's a natural human activity to share out tech to vist to his and to to charge in one way or another for the activity that you deliver but we also think that fairness is an absolutely fundamental human principle it is the good it's what small children and idealistic adolescents understand it's what they say to their parents but that's not fair they may have a shaky grasp on what fairness is but they do know that fairness is much more important than profit ha and some decades ago economists who are not noted for understanding social issues so although i did train in social economics at the university of glasgow it's been carefully forgotten since then  economists introduced the notion of the three pillars of business now two of the pillars i think are perfectly understandable why rather see two men here so than than three three still because i'm going to take issue with the third pillar that introduce the three pillars p p p people planet prophet well i understand about the planet that's environment and that stop messing up the environment i understand about the people it's our species if we're not loyal to our species and careful to keep our personal species disciplined and balanced with the planet we're not doing a good job in whatever here for profit is that just an activity of people why does it take up over ninety percent of the return on doing business so i'm not a great fan of the three pillars and i am absolutely not a fan of adding other pillars which people tend to want to do what if we put in culture because we all know that culture if it's the way we behave culture isn't perfect the way we behave how we behave is the way we behave in our culture i'm a christian by culture not by inclination so for me there's a lot of economic direction to correct and one of the reasons that small groups like the global village society and i'm one of the reasons we do fair trade is its entry level education because we're proving that you can in fact with with no real capital whatsoever simply a budget for purchasing annually which has to be replenished by selling no capital so have very you can do international trade and you can be selective about how you do it and you can choose to do it fairly as it used to be done before corporate capitalism got out of control so it's a demonstration it's a first step and at the same time it provides life changing windows of opportunity for people none of us will ever meet now that's a little tricky because people i find i must be feeling really cranky today people i find i find it difficult to get their empathy in gear and i see who has a tough with some kind of gimmick i have never ever understood why buying a goat pretending to buy a goat is more important than figuring out who is doing good work and giving them some money to get on with it  yes and when you say the goat you're referring to is some non profits working in various parts of africa for example sub saharan africa who send out those nice a or done in in the group and it made them feel really good but at the same time it made me feel a bit cranky so doing fair trade to me is important and the way we do it locally is just our way of doing it we we want to be independent we want to be local we want the decisions about what this group does to be made in and imo way people who live here and we want to make the connections as effective as we possibly can and we seem to be gradually succeeding we don't make a huge amount of profit over here and partly that's because we live in and imo and we are not intending to situate ourselves in having moved out of the downtown area and she told me that she had taken a bus to come up just to check that it was still the same group she booked eight dollars and thirty two cents worth of product and then we never saw her again that doesn't help us stay in business no no when you say profit i am as being that that's just that's revenues over expenditures which though you're also doing a good deed because if you didn't make enough money on sales you'd have to start fundraising or something i suppose and you already have profits we'd have to go back into being a charity which i think is abominable for many reasons including having to report to the canada revenue agency which i think is an abomination so then we'd be out begging along with huge huge like japanese told her screaming the bottom of the ocean how little organizations going to survive now that we're moved to the us model of getting people to do charity in order to provide social programs that we already pa for in our taxes right and that's a whole show in itself i think is yeah so doing business is about doing what humans do but doing it in a way that is not exploitive if that is respectful and that respects the dignity of the people that you're doing business with so we take great delight itself yes we have a full range of political opinions in our forty hundred volunteers and it's obvious that there's enormous delight when the when the boxes are opened twin the orders come in and they're so delighted at recognizing the regional art forms and what can be done to date with the kind of stone work  that is done within range of the taj mahal and where the traditional guatemalan or vietnamese or cambodian textile skills are going and how useful it can be in all of our lives and it clearly there are people who may not understand that this is a way of changing the economics of the wear old or else they're well aware that it's a long term project tell us about the range of things that are fairly traded now and you mentioned at the beginning of the show that this whole area is changing growing evolving whatever so i think that fourteen years ago when we first interviewed you some of the things that are available now in a fairly traded way were probably noughts back then but what are the things that there are too many for me to list ah yes ok are far too many for me to list and advice be who are really interested in this subject to go to the fair trade federation f that's the one with the square black and white bogle with two hands reaching out towards each other there there is a canadian version of this and they're the people who deal with all the businesses in canada who claim to be fair trade they're the people who it who have written or adopted the world principles and who make an attempt to monitor the fair trade activities of businesses in north america fair trade federation we'll give you that list of that list somebody gave me a bottle fair trade why not christmas we should be able to buy fair trade bananas because we go into the grocery stores lately and we see a some times maybe plug charlie brown's because they have i don't know about right now but i know they have carried for trade bananas in the past anyway and fair trade is it's it's the second pillar it's the people pillar it's looking after the people and it comes off to the hogan iker the planet the liquor first first you figure out what's bad for the planet and then you figure out how to help people do better by the planet and the people who live near where they produce goods they tend to look after their environment because they depend on it and they're living right in it sure so a lot of fair trade commodities the coffee the cocoa the bananas are organically grown as well be that pretty well that very reason pretty well have to be organic to begin with because they are on the margins of the large corporate field grown in monoculture methods of producing major commodities like like tea and coffee i think it's just fascinating that right here on vancouver island we have the woman who turned the entire continent of india around to recognizing that yes we could go back to growing organically we don't have to do it the tea plantation that way and i'm sure that wasn't her original intention but it was an accidental outcome concern to help people grow tea organically an idea and trusting so is that the tea that you carry in the global village store sometimes it isn't sometimes it isn't it depends on how the groups that picky is working with are able to produce but she has certainly developed a movement in which is one of the great tea growing regions of the world she certainly developed a movement there which provides the tea imported by the group and courtney that we buy our tea and coffee from so to begin with you see when she first started and they said to her because she lives near court well can we sell tea police now we're selling coffee can you get us to shouldn't say it's in a kind we have because actually this year we have tea from nepal and i haven't tasted the rhododendron tea yet told my goodness wow and i don't think i'm going to because it comes and beautiful pouches and people started buying them by the dozen so i think they're nearly all gone oh those are those death of these teas and that'll teach us to buy more from them next year so that people can sample the kind of teas and then fair trade like everything else suffers from the peculiarity that people have of renaming things or of acting as if a product yes so there's a loft a sloppy use of the word tea that's true so peppermint tea or something like that really isn't tea is it there is a tea ploy out well you never know until you read the list of ingre sometimes there's some green tea in there sometimes there's some black tea in there sometimes there's something called gunpowder tea in there which sounds interesting but i've never done the research to find out  so there are all the commodities and we are moving further to the commodity spices are difficult to get here in north america spices and fresh the way they are in the places where the cuisine that these spices are used in comes from so we have we have a couple of good sources for spices and imo but i notice they've been learning how to charge more for smaller packages and i'm delighted to say that we have a fairly good range of spices and there's a bit of overlap some of them are from nepal which is great because we all know that poll has been through terrible earthquake trauma very recently and some are for certain other end of south asia so we've got chilean cardamom which is quite hard to find we've got to a person opposition no oh how interesting and i'm almost just different from other stuff and the other thing about it of course is if you if you're swallowing down some it's good for you oh yes it has a number of health benefits apparently so we've got the spices and we have struck up a very strong relationship with our back about man in toronto who imports from palestinian all of growers and he is wholeheartedly in support of palestinian liberation i use that word unashamedly and the palestinians need to be liberated from the pattern now and the craziness and the violence of the israeli administration  so he rip imports through a network that he understands from directly from palestine and so we have beautiful all of and you can get these commodities throughout the year as you don't because you sometimes say to be what i come could you bring me some coffee ok so you are the purveyor of these things when the store is going the air you're willing to publicize that are you of course because it's right there on our website if the store is closed and if you want to acquire some olive oil or coffee are cocoa or chocolate or any of these things until the supplies run out no that's not right actually we have we've developed a system whereby we receive new supplies if my supplies run out during the course of the rest of the year so people can just connect with me and i'll make an arrangement to for them or they can come and visit excellent i'm just going to bring up a website here global village it and i modelled thought tom yes indeed and we're right there it has the address  ok and there's lots of other information there's loads of information on there i think about the products the thing about the store location is that people only know how to find their way to thrift and the liquor store people are driving they get a bit when they don't know which bit to turn into so it's the first on your right when you turn off and showed oh right ok ok yes it is a bit complicated but you'll find it's not a problem i question marjorie about the fair trade federation and that is that i know we see fair trade logos on the commodities such as coffee tea cocoa sugar bananas if we're lucky enough to find them and so on but what about the craft items that you were mentioning before there are even things like fair trade supposedly fair trade diamonds which are not blood diamonds which were the ones that were used to fund the warlords and that sort of thing that caused a whole lot of grief in countries like sierra leone so if they're fairly traded presumably they are not those kind of diamonds there are other jewelry places that you can find online and so on with different kinds of fairly traded jewelry and of course the whole range of things that you have at the global village store which are mostly craft them so how are they though use certified if you would as fairly traded because i'm not sure that i'm seeing logos on little stickers on those you definitely aren't seeing a no go zone everything but you will see logos on a ship rising number of things and the trade for a long while people thought it was only coffee or a long while coffee was kind of the only thing that people understood about asking for fair trade and then they they wanted to know what does this mean at the other end and it can be very difficult for a small organization or small group of growers to go through the certification process but i think it's much more streamlined it just is different from direct trade the fair trade labeling process is essential to consumers because it's one of the pieces of information that consumers want now with coffee what they did because it's such a tricky market to operate in and it's the second biggest commodity market in the where and what they did for her right that's right you don't have mentioned the illegal substances so what they what they did was they agreed with the on a stable price that would be the same regardless of whether the market price fell below or went above the price the problem th growers found is exactly the same thing that our farm as find when they're trying to sell their local produce what this this is the sex plantation might classify had a bit if you have an inspired and hardworking grower of carrots and then i'm a region and that person wants to sell his or her cattle into the they supermarkets they will for of their produce so they will have to settle for trying to sell their products by nontraditional means at little pockets now picture global village is like a market stall in the w they will sell their premium price there and they will then maybe manage to sell about twenty percent of what i have in the whole year of their season sprout years and with that twenty percent they'll make he that eighty percent of what they produce provides them with old a twenty percent of the income and the same thing is true for the coffee growers right the farming issue it's about supply and to bond it's about distribution it's  values change from the beginning to the end another way of describing fair trade is that it is an attempt to make fairness happen at every link in the values chain from where the product begged to when seventy purchased it and that's what the world fair trade w f t o that's their job is to push for fairness at every link in the values chain and that's where they fell  the rain forest or the cold alliance the rain forest whatever it is did with some of the goods that they promoted they did what i call ethical trading and and that is the proper term ethical trading is when you try and persuade the big actors in global trade the major corporate deliverers of products to be more fair  have to lower your standards to do that so they lowered their standards oh my goodness in order to bring more goods to bring certain larger corporations more into the fold of doing some fairness i don't know whether that means the proportion of fairly traded product that we see i mean we all know that starbucks doesn't make its money out of fair trade coffee although they can claim that they have it and they sell stuff so if you're going to try and figure out the proportions that's something else again so i think mostly for for the average person and we're all consumers humans could see you all the time for the average person well we should be reducing what we have there are far too many people on the planet every one of us should be using less of the stuff that we take from the planet because we're already using far too much so basically we should be simplifying and buying this and being that should give us time to be burst of selective and to  on what we are buying because we're beginning to realize if it affects our health and it affects our global security hi yes and there is well i don't know if there is a meth i'm sure it's true actually that people who are who do consider themselves ethical consumers are willing to pay more sometimes you see that retailers will take advantage of that build up the price even if they don't have to just because the consumers who are interested in a particular product will be willing to pay more and i suppose if we are indeed consuming less that may leave us a little more wiggle room in our budget to pay more for something that's really good quality and that's it it's the way cultural and the way the room is our individual responsibility it's our duty to know what to do with the w room so the thing about reducing what we use and figuring out what we've got is exactly the same thing back to the farmer's markets and the local food movement the  be actually purchasing the product that he was selling himself as offend her in the market and selling interests as if he had grown it and there's always a place for fraud there is i say this to chili the snitch this may or may not make sense but this is true about people's behaviors in societies and in meetings you have very little protection from deliberate mischief sure to true although i understand that most farmers markets now have a rule that you can't sell at their market unless you have produced it yourself and we have to cut people some slack because we all use stuff that maybe he is creating problems somewhere that we know not home and we have to recognize that some if they the ingredients in the value added goods have to be imported without much provenance without knowing where they came from how they were used whose land was exploited way where have we have to gradually work towards i love that the federation idea that they're interested in promoting fairness at every link in the fowl you chain him so that you're not exploiting somebody with the goods that you're using to sell at a fair trade market i don't quite know why but as you were saying those things cookies popped into my mind the supermarket is pong oil and palm oil as i understand it is grown on plantations that have replaced the natural rain forest and therefore have replaced wildlife habitat and probably even indigenous people in some places so that's something that we can watch for just as consumers  going about our ordinary purchasing with though you know without even going to fairly traded we can look for those little red flags i think but i think what you're picking up on is something i said about trying to make sure that we're being fair to the people at the other end where they landed and the people where exploited in art are i mean there's a good meaning for exploited as well as a bad meaning in order to provide a product of people yearning the lowest wages in the well and that is outrageous and if if somebody says to me you should be using palm oil for the next thing because it's good for you i say what's good for me improves so i think we should be eating what is locally available for the most of our diet and acquiring what has locally have a bailable the fair trade aspect is fair are they ex and it's not supposed to be about maximizing profit which is what they mean and school of economics is about trade is supposed to be about people doing business with each other and not turning themselves into  scrooge yes yes well ebeneezer scrooge on one hand and people just move not even earning enough money to live on at the other end well that vision of christmas past i think was his to starving children under the robe that was when he started to get the message he had some responsibilities for his money grubbing ways yes so the whole thing about money is is what fair trade is about it's about making really good news of small amounts of money because you don't want to be flooding a lot of money into a small community with a lot of unsophisticated people in it because if you do that the human sharks will show up attracted by the smell of money and they will start to organize and insert themselves and change  the revenue streams in a way that benefits themselves so you have to do it like everything worth doing gradually and steadily and carefully so when people come to us at the global village board and say why don't we give a ground to an organization a poll was a very good example my response on the board was to say if we make extra money then i want to spen hours and properly paid for ah yes more stuff of the work in the store is done by volunteers at this point right which is one way to keep the prices very interesting best police people because last year they wanted to know if they beautiful shawls from north india made by tibetan refugees were really made of  when we when we investigated we found no they were no zero zero so that particular trading group went off our list for a while and even even today there tears so i asked the question when i said wanted the proof oh good for them that's excellent well you've got lots of brains working together there which is fantastic yes yeah  so that's a piece of it the other piece of it is that it's an economic activity and when you have a minute i have i have a little poem that i will read to people which i think very brilliant delineate the problems that we have with some of our assumptions about money and and the way money has is shared and distributed the fairtrade is about living in a monitor r global culture where almost everything has a price on it we can't any longer say the best things in life are free we're being charged for fresh air we're being charged for clean water we're being charged for access to sunlight i think have a feeling that that whole friedman's school of economics is beginning to crumble around the edges which is a very good thing couldn't happen quickly enough really but yes that's certainly still the direction that many corporations are going his faith difficult to make a change because they have a lot of people depending on them and a great deal invested more than just money invested in those systems but there's no question that that global economic system is crumbling the wars that were necessary to keep the corporate gemini over resources throughout the world are coming home to roost with the refugee crisis in europe and it won't be long before those refugees will be also climate refugees who will be flooding into places like canada and we better take a good look at what chancellor merkel is doing in germany and learn from her oh yes other countries like denmark and so on as well i just got an email this morning that said the oil companies are planning to pile in on the climate talks later this year in paris adding meanwhile the people in the small in many of those countries the small island countries in the south pacific for example in the indian ocean they're starting to look at an escape plan i guess for the day when they can no longer live on their islands because because they'll be under water so that's the reality we're going to be looking at refugees from other places as well that are so affected by drought and other be climate refugees and they'll be refugees who are ultimately refugees because they live in areas of the where a lot that are in resistance against what was imposed on them off to the first and second world wars and the violence just increases just as the violence in the united states has started to increase again there are so many multiple killings at the united states now they don't report them in the same way anymore they are and they're no longer a big surprise yeah apparently they're happening on a daily basis it's really really frightening i am what you know what's going on there i'm sure there's some analysis of why that's happening well if young men can't get decent jobs if they c some sense of self worth they're contributing any one of us knows that we feel lousy when we feel that we're not aware well him and being so if you push people into the position where they feel they're not aware of why the human being then they go looking for a bunch of other people that they can catch up with and then exercise some power that way so the whole the whole idea of fair trade is a very very simple one it's an elegant place simple economic measure that says we can make a bit of a difference and help some people who otherwise would have no opportunities whatsoever simply by buying their stuff and selling it and being honest with them and giving them feedback saying i can't sell that here or this was not up to standard or you did this right so that we're talking to each other the weight we talk to our family our friends where we're laying things on the table and we're just doing business yeah it's a relationship of peers it's not as if you are by you know we've seen situations where the buyer from the big department store chain well this i was in a film actually a documentary on blue jeans being made in china blue was in the title but i'm not absolutely sure about the whole title anyway but there's the spier from from some big department store chain and negotiating with the owner of the factory in china and saying well we won't pay four dollars a pair for these jeans will only pay three dollars or something like that and or even less of course they they had will turn drilled and sell them for sixty or seventy dollars or one hundred dollars maybe depending on who puts their brand on it yes right right that's the thing too those factories make for a lot of different labels right well that kind of takes me back to the beginnings of this it was not always that's so we can remember a period in which business people act prided themselves on their ethics there was unfortunately a lot of sort of charitable motivation but but they were pretty straight people what happened after the second world war was that  mart company was chests beginning to make a place for itself make a niche for itself at the same time the technology came through to move the goods really quickly that's a still big in britain are still huge in britain and it's still very much treasured because if they're they have a lot of ethical attitudes and they have very good attitudes to their employees anyway what happened with wal mart was by being on the cutting edge of moving the merchandise when a position to put pressure on the manufacturers of the goods they were selling before well mark manufacturers set the i have the feeling that the entire welton family isn't it funny that they have the same name as that left a fuzzy sitcom family of television the entire  founder must have that ability to he probably had it in his local community but he was not able to grasp the cruelty and that's what it comes down to yeah it's the difference between kindness and cruelty it's nothing to do with charity it's nothing to do with profit it's to do with being the best kind of human being you can be and it's very hard when the entire global economy has given itself permission to abide by half of the seven deadly sins it's actually right it is the worst in people instead of the best in people and i don't want to be and i don't want to imply that i don't have lots of lots of weaknesses like like we all do but i do feel really good about the fair trade that we do and i do like the end of simplicity of not imposing our futures on the people at the other end and some of the people we buy from are people who are doing tire trade they're too small and they don't have enough money to do the they labeled certified fair trade so when you see a direct trade you have to ask a couple of questions and say who don't mislead folks tell me a bit about what are they being paid and that's the case in tea and coffee because world community they know these people they know the coffee growers in nicaragua and cuba that they buy from so that's why it's so important and not i'm going to read my point now because it absolutely sums up the kind of insane assumptions that we all of us make and this was written by cecille read gendron who i think is a west indian poet and it's called statistics statistically it was a rich island income per capita one million that it was a shock to hear how the population had been carried off was a rich island income per capita per annum one million you've heard me with that one before haven't you i think it paints the picture very clearly about ou grounded in absolute imagination on sense i know but i think it was john stuart mill back in the nineteenth century who actually said something quite similar he said oh we're told that the average income of great britain let's say is so much or that where britain is doing well well so and so you know some rich person who might be doing really well but this is certainly mean that i am you know and certainly i mean that was written in an era when you had street urchins and the dickens all the dickens did business and in a very fair minded and ethical way and thought nothing of it so long as they were doing well and had a nice house and could feed their family and where well respected in the neighborhood so up at the global village store and in longwood station there's lots of good stuff stuff you can use stuff you could conceal stuff you can give us if it's reasonable prices and what it means when you buy there is that we can afford to buy more from the people who make these things and produce these things we we can increase the amount of fairness and you just have to think about the woman and i have village who is because of the extra bit of income she could make from that weaving she can afford to do things that will change the life of her family and her neighbors factory and there is i see a product from west africa you write the basic stuff is brought in from from there but household and kitchen items musical items jewelry and accessories clothing children's toys decorative items greeting cards books calendars stationery journals wrapping paper d v d s posters and come oddities the famous commodities the coffee tea chocolate sugar and the all of oil of course so that's huge there there are some lovely pictures i'm not sure that i'm seeing those right now but i think they all came to people who are on the mail list yes some down quickly we have goods from mongolia there is some on go the other to separate from china oh there is some large mongolian province within china they stand group is back we lost them for a while and they're wonderful actually out of time so i need to thank you very much for coming in and filling us in on a what this is all about and we should mention again that the global village inn and i most store is open monday to saturday tend to fall i have right until december twenty fourth christmas eve it's in longwood station next to casey's boutique and kind of a right in front of the longwood brewpub so do check it out it's lovely it's just wonderful and the volunteers there are fantastic and that's our show you do tune in again next week and on behalf of our production team thanks so much