I write about Fair Trade from experience, 33 years of it. PREDA Fair Trade, now a trusted brand, started with a small handicraft production unit in 1975 making wicker furniture and baskets to help small craftspeople get better wages and social conditions and train jobless out-of school youth in a trade. Since then, the PREDA Fair Trade project and brand has grown.
Several years later, I was determined to help small mango cooperatives and farmers who were exploited by a wealthy Philippine price fixing cartel of tropical fruit exporters. The farmers had to sell to the cartel at ridiculously low prices or see their fruit rot on the trees. The rich became richer and the poor poorer. Their children suffered most and many ran away to the bright lights of the cities and were soon swallowed by the thriving sex industry that catered to rich foreign sex tourists and pedophiles. This is the worst of all forms of unjust trade − modern slavery that we must continue to oppose.
SAVING CHILDREN
True Christianity and its missionary work is about challenging injustice, oppression and exploitation of all kinds by building a kingdom of justice where all people are inspired by love to help each other to be free from suffering, hunger and want. It was imperative to save children from the evil trade of persons sold to bars and brothels. We had to challenge the political and business community that allowed it and benefited hugely from it. They retaliated by harassing and threatening our development workers. The root causes were in the soil of poverty and the social and economic injustice.
Practicing and promoting Fair Trade became a vital mission for me and the dedicated Filipino development workers at the PREDA Foundation, an organization I set up in 1974. We began a mission to rescue women and child victims from brothels and prisons and provide them with protection in safe therapeutic homes and give them a future. We also brought abusers and traffickers to justice. But we were also determined to highlight and challenge the injustice caused by the fruit-buying cartels.
FIGHTING THE FRUIT CARTEL
PREDA Fair Trade entered into a partnership with a then marginalized struggling family who owned a dried-fruit processor. Working together, we bought mangoes at fair prices and processed the chemical-free dried fruit for Fair Trade importers and ethical commercial distributors in Europe. After ten years, PREDA Fair Trade has become a trusted Fair Trade brand and the dried mangoes have been a fast selling delicious, preservative-free product, almost addictive some say. Soon, the PREDA Fair Trade and our partner were buying hundreds of tons of fresh fruits at higher prices than the cartel and this deprived them of their cheap exploitative supplies. The happy farmers flocked to the buying stations set up in mango-producing areas even in rebel infested places.
This created a shortage for the cartel and they were soon competing with each other for a share of the mango harvest made scarce by the combined buying power of PREDA Fair Trade and our partner. The cartel was broken and soon disintegrated. The prices of mangoes continued to rise. PREDA found a market for mango puree and juice concentrate and we could buy even the smallest fruit which delighted the farmers since most buyers rejected these. As demand grew for dried mangoes, thousands of grafted mango trees were planted to bear fruits after five years.
EMPLOYING THOUSANDS
Thousands of workers are also employed in the processing plant by our partner with excellent conditions and pay. The plant is now of such high standard and quality that it easily qualified for ISO certification, a guarantee for highest quality. We had achieved our primary goal to break the cartel once and for all − but we have to keep it disbanded by remaining a strong buyer of fresh mangoes and that means increasing our sales. The earnings of the PREDA Fair Trade sales go to provide development assistance for the most threatened farmers of all − the indigenous people.
We are planting thousands of trees and developing organic mango orchards − our share to reduce greenhouse gasses especially CO2. Besides, with the Fair Trade earnings, we can fight modern slavery and save children. Fair Trade − it’s the hope of the future and a way to end poverty.
