Traidcraft by Joe Osman

Author:Joe Osman [Osman, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9780745981031
Google: 9fL0DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Lion Books
Published: 2020-08-21T03:08:39+00:00

I had been involved with Traidcraft since the mid-1980s, initially as a volunteer seller of Traidcraft products. At this time, I was early in my career in the tea industry with Typhoo and starting to travel to meet tea farmers. This brought some internal challenges. While I was committed to the Traidcraft principles of helping small producers, I was unhappy with much of the negative messaging used to promote the products, which I knew to be unfair generalizations based on “worst cases”. There were some good things happening in the industry that could be supported. I stepped down from my volunteer role for other reasons but continued to stay connected with Traidcraft and attended annual conferences, even appearing on some panels as a corporate bod to provide a bit of contrast.

The challenge to find a way of supporting good working practices in the mainstream tea industry became a focus for me and resulted in the Typhoo Quality Assurance Project (QAP), which we launched in 1990. This was built on a quality assurance platform, but included sections on employee wages, welfare, and safety. This was a pioneering idea at the time and required some careful selling to the producers. Crucially, it was underpinned by two key principles: recognition of good practice already in place, and commitment from us to support this good practice with a long-term purchase commitment. I can trace this very clearly to Traidcraft’s values.

We embarked on a programme of visiting every producer, and the project was ready to go public in mid-1992. Sometime around then we agreed to a meeting with Richard Adams (Traidcraft’s founder), who was involved in the early stages of the development of the Fairtrade Mark and was doing a tour of the UK tea industry. I have very good memories of that meeting as we put the QAP on the table and rather interrupted Richard’s script. There followed a year of working together with Traidcraft and other NGOs trying to make Fairtrade work with Typhoo, but it was too much of a stretch on both sides and we couldn’t make it happen. The legacy from my side was some good working relationships with NGOs and also with trade unions that led to my involvement in the formation of the Ethical Trading Initiative in the late 1990s.

I continue to believe strongly that Fair Trade needs to be producer-focused, recognize and reward good practice, and that it should involve tea brands in commitment and cost. Unfortunately, most of what I see now are top-down corporate PR-driven models that leave the farmers invisible and powerless. Maybe this was inevitable once Fair Trade became more mainstream, but it is a long way away from the values that created Traidcraft and drove my own involvement over the years.46

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