Hannah Reed, Campaigns Co-ordinator at the Fairtrade Foundation, travelled to Bolivia to find out more about how nut gatherers are benefiting as co-owners of new Fairtrade nut company Liberation.
Standing in the wet, humid rainforest with nut gatherer, Ronal Quispe Torres, I am learning about brazil nuts. Grapefruit-sized pods containing up to 25 individual nuts drop to the forest floor during the rainy season and are gathered up and sold by local people. I have come to this isolated forest community in north west Bolivia to meet members of COINACAPA, a co-operative founded in 1998 by 15 local families. The co-operative was certified Fairtrade in 2002 and sold its first container of nuts into Europe through Equal Exchange in 2005. Before COINACAPA, the only way families who owned deeds to land could sell their nuts was through unscrupulous traders who paid them ludicrously low prices then sold the nuts for a lucrative profit.
Ronal tells me how life used to be. ‘The owners left families in the forest with no access to water, services or education. At the start of the zafra (collection period) they’d bring sacks of rice, sugar and vegetable oil and deduct these from the final price paid for the nuts. Many people can’t read and were cheated. If they collected four bags, the buyers said they owed five. Everyone was in debt and each year it became worse. Now it’s different. The slaves have become the owners.’
Hope for the future
In remote Puerto Oro I meet Ronal’s parents Ernestine Cauco Mamio and her husband Feliciano Quispe Torres. They tell me how life had changed and their hopes for the future. Ronal’s mother said ‘Before, we were practically slaves working for los patrones [the bosses]. They paid the prices they wanted to, often as little as $5 for 70 kilos of nuts. Now we’re free. We want to work; all we ask is that we receive a fair price for a hard job.’
The freedomRonal’s mother Ernestine spoke of was hard won. In 2000, Ernestine and Feliciano joined nearly 7,000 rural workers to march 900km to La Paz, the highest capital city in the world, in protest against the conditions under which they lived and to demand ownership of the land they lived from. As Ernestine said, ‘the blisters were worth it’ and tracts of land were redistributed in favour of the families who relied on them for a basic income. I asked Feliciano about his hopes ‘We fought hard to get where we are and life is better than it was. I want my children and grandchildren to benefit from what we fought for and from what we are building now.’
New confidence
Through the co-operative and Fairtrade, Feliciano and Ernestine’s children and grandchildren have confidence and opportunities their grandparents never dreamed of. Their youngest granddaughter told me she will be both a lawyer and a top supermodel by the time she is 21! Her father, Luis Alberto Rojas Magrobejo talked of difference Fairtrade was making ‘The most important part of Fairtrade is the guarantee it gives us and the people who buy our nuts. Fairtrade is a long-term project and this means we have the security we need to move forward and improve our lives.’
Learning from each other
Through the Fairtrade premium COINACAPA has been able to provide healthcare to members and their families and has recently opened the first public Internet café in Pando, with funding accessed through Equal Exchange. Fairtrade has not only increased incomes and created long-standing trade relationships; it has also united Fairtrade nut co-operatives across the Amazon region of Brazil, Bolivia and Peru.
During a meeting I attended, representatives from six Fairtrade co-operatives spoke of setting up a collective processing plant, exporting directly to Europe, and of starting an exchange programme between members and staff that would share best-practice and enable the cooperatives to learn from each other. I listened to confident, optimistic people planning how to develop their business and ensure the continued social and economic development of their members.
©Summer 2008 Fair Comment