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GOOD BUSINESS December 2006HAPPY NEW YEARI HOPE that you all enjoyed a busy Xmas trading period, that you have survived the trials & tribulations of the festive 'holiday' and that you now face the New Year in good heart. For many of us 2006 was a scrap and I am sure 2007 will be too. We will still be here, using anothers years' hard won experience to explore our interests, expresss our principles, retain our independence and make a modest living. A battle, but a good one. SALE ONAS USUAL we have a some heavily discounted lines to offer you. Have a look at the attached sheet & order form. Please get you order in on or before January 8th if you want quick delivery. The discounts will be available until the end of February. I will also be taking forward orders (and offering a modest discount) for certain very popular lines. Get in touch if you have any suggestions. BAG PACKEDWONDERWORLD will be more or less closed 12am January 9th - 19th. I will be in Jaipur & Kathmandu during that period. E-mails will be answered and ansa-phone messages will be collected. I can't guarantee the fax system during my absence. ALL invoices fallen due should be paid
immediately, I need to get my purchase orders moving very quickly. A FAIR TRADE COMPANY or A COMPANY THAT SELLS FAIR TRADE PRODUCTS?WONDERWORLD has engaged with the fair trade movement for more than ten years. Since a customer sent us a questionnaire about our trading practises. That customer was a member of the fledgling BAFTS. They were helping to put together the first BAFTS Importers Directory, a document that tries to give some validation to UK importer suppliers relationship with fair trade outside the Fairtrade Foundation Fairtrade brand system. Unsurprisingly this effort has often been fraught with difficulty and discussion is ongoing about better ways forward. AT THE BAFTS AGM in Bolton last year the suggestion was floated that BAFTS focussed less on the organisations supplying products but on the products themselves. There wasn't time to explore this approach in any depth in Bolton so I can't say exactly what was being considered. However the overall idea chimed with my own thinking & experience in this area. FAIR TRADE (as opposed to Fairtrade) is a very loosely defined concept. Agreed statements such as the FINE wording are vague in my opinion. In practise - all sorts of interpretations are in operation. I am a broad churcher who wants to see commercial organisations at the heart of fair trade as well as the NGO/ATO pro-poverty/collectivist 'pioneers'. However even I have become uncomfortable that it is just too easy to tag yourself as a 'fair trade' business or organisation without any substantial justification being offered. THE IDEA that we focus on products offers a handle to help all of us get a grip on this. Suppliers would be expected to say specifically why each individual product that they offered conformed to fair trade criteria (however they chose to think about them). Suppliers would have to work harder to offer achieve this (and in itself that would deter some from arbitrarily associating themselves with fair trade). IN REALITY I think most suppliers, even the 'pioneers', offer products that represent a range of relationships to the fair trade ideal. All suppliers will have strengths, weaknesses & action points - ie. fair trade as a process. Even amongst NGO/ATO pro-poverty/collectivist 'pioneers' not all producer organisations are equal however correct their rhetoric. Lets find a product by product way of auditing the criteria so that we know specifically what we are buying into. THE MATRIXIN WONDERWORLD we have been using a crude
distinction between 'Prospects' and non-Prospects for several years,
non-Prospects being goods we offer some justification to describe as 'fair
trade'. We are now going to beef that up - considerably - by creating an
on-line spreadsheet that we shall call THE MATRIX as a working title until
I think of something a little less silly. OUR MATRIX will be a list of all our products cross referenced to a list of fair trade points and evidences. So, for example, our block printed cushion cover CC-D28A will be linked to fair trade criteria like pre-funding of production, regular visits to production unit, health & safety audit, no child labour guaranteed, accessible accounts, externally monitored by credible fair trade agency, capacity building carried out and so on. For CC-D28A cushion cover there would no link to values like significant worker participation in decision-making, collective ownership or poverty reduction as the prime motivation of the organisation. That would leave you with the final decision whether you felt CC-D28A was a fair trade product or not. ANOTHER product - say singing bowl RA-SB-D trafficked from Manipur via Kalimpong to Kathmandu would have hardly any links to fair trade criteria because we know virtually nothing about the supply chain before it reaches Nepal. As a product it helps us maintain viable consignments out of Kathmandu and is in demand by many of the customers we deal with - so we sell them. RA-SB-D are not fair trade products in any shape or form and our Matrix would make it even clearer. CONVERSELY our Kerala cottage industry soap, not yet offered for wholesale but available on WONDERWORLD's occasional retail stalls, would be indicated for collective decision making, for poverty reduction & social justice context as the prime motivation and for targeting extremely marginalised producers from the poorest of the poor. It would not be linked for any external monitoring - unlike the cushion cover. So how do you balance the value to fair trade offered by a product like the cushion cover that was produced in a commercial environment objectively verified as acceptable by a credible fair trade organisation versus soap produced in an deeply grassroots ngo/social justice context but verified by no-one - except me. Again - the Matrix would provide you with the information, but the final decision would be yours. WE'LL GET our Matrix operational by Easter and see what people think. Within it I will offer our view but you will have a lot more information to work through for yourselves. IN THE meantime you will notice that WONDERWORLD is culling any general characterisations of ourselves as a 'fair trade' company. Nothing has changed. We have many products that embody fair trade strongly. We will tell you about those products very specifically. Most of our range will remain, in our view, fair trade and we will still assert that we have a full role to play in the fair trade movement as a small scale company operating in a commercial environment. We still want the fair trade net cast as widely as possible into regular trade. On the other hand we want the net made finer so that only products of genuine fair trade quality are caught. HIGHLAND LEAGUE RESULT:
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