Years of growing vegetables for supermarkets in the UK taught me that the free market can be a harsh place for small producers. Distant producers are even more vulnerable. So is Fairtrade certification the answer? Can ethics be measured, certified and delivered via a free market to customers 3000 miles away who want to use their buying power to make the world a better place?
These are the questions I found myself asking last December in a small field of organic pineapples 100 miles north of Lome in Togo, West Africa. The first of the fruit was ready for harvest, the culmination of fifteen months of planting and weeding with only a mattock to help, and of ten years of planning, agronomy and organisation by the French company Pronatura. The field, one of the largest in this village, is the size of half a football pitch and the orderly rows are interspersed with termite mounds, papaya trees, palms, bananas and towering kapoc trees. The scene is well managed, harmonious and productive; organic farming at its best and in stark contrast to the intensive, large scale, foreign owned monocultures that are typical of export-oriented production in Africa. The goal has been reached: an organic, fair trade pineapple from small producers which can reliably meet the demands of an English supermarket buyer.
How 16p turns into £2.50
If all goes well…read more
Thanks for the slide show – one feels so helpless here but I’ll enjoy my pineapple all the more now.
Agreed. I feel quite helpless. The whole fair trade effort seems to be unravelling in the face of free market trading. Seeing the hope and work end with wasted crops and effort is tragic.
Thankyou for going and bringing back such a truthful picture.
thanks for this report…I hope you (I am sure you do) have long standing arrangments with your growers abroad, I for one would buy a pineapple a week and other fruit such as melons/mangos and the like if they were to be offerred (I have to buy these from the supermaket/fruit and veg stall currently)
I agree with the pervious blogger I have to buy my mangoes / Melons and pineapples from the dreaded supermarket , always fairtrade and it is so sad to realise because of market forces fruit lies rotting in their fields .
Thank you so much for bringing to our attention.
What I havent ascertained from your brave and truthful piece is ‘Are you still buying your pineapple from Toga”?