The University of Houston Students for Fair Trade (UHSFT) recently won a major victory on their campus. Their university administration decided this month that Java City, a campus coffee shop located in UH’s student center will only serve fair trade certified coffee starting in the fall. This has been a major request of UHSFT for some time.
Some of UHSFT’s other victories have included:
Made fair trade coffee available in all campus corporate coffee outlets (but not the dining halls)
Made Fair Trade greeting cards available in UH’s Barnes and Noble-run campus bookstore
Helped make a small business, Hope for Women, become an official vendor for all Barnes and Nobles campus stores nationwide
Made fair trade coffee available in campus dining halls
Placed signage and brochures about fair trade coffee at every coffee outlet
Generated quite a bit of local and national publicity,
UHSFT has received Campus Progress Action Grants for two years now. Action grants make $200-$1,000 available to progressive issue campaigns led by college students and young people. Grantees will also get assistance with events, publicity, training, and other resources.
From breakfast foods to ice cream sundaes, bananas are in high demand around the world. Before this golden fruit ends up in your local supermarket, it travels through an international system of “free” trade. Eighty percent of the world banana trade is in the hands of 5 companies: Dole Food Company, Chiquita Brands International, Fresh Del Monte, Noboa and Fyffes. Since Central America is considered a valued hotspot for cheap labor and lax environmental laws, many companies control plantations in this region and compete with each other for profit. In fact, high demand by supermarkets and retailers have forced companies like Chiquita to seek cheaper sources of supply, creating competition between Latin American countries like Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Columbia and Ecuador to offer lower prices. Read More »
The University of Houston Students for Fair Trade, who have received a Campus Progress Action Grant, were featured in the Houston Chronicle yesterday for their long running and energetic campaign make all coffee sold on campus fair trade certified.
Students carrying a giant replica of a coffee bean stormed Chancellor Renu Khator's office at the University of Houston on Monday, the latest skirmish in their two-year campaign to force the school to offer only fair-trade coffee in a library kiosk. […]
The student government association last year approved a resolution supporting the proposal. Letters and other documents distributed by the student group indicated Aramark plans to install a Starbucks in the library, building the kiosk with $60,000 in student fees. (Starbucks buys some fair-trade coffee but not exclusively.)
The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently reacted to prohibited practices at one organic farm collective by banning all together a system that let collectives gain certification by having a random sample of the member farms inspected, Salon has reported.
Inspectors under ideal circumstances can inspect four or five farms a day, and it currently takes about 20 to 30 days at $150–270 per day to certify a grower group. Under the new rules, these farmers who are supposed to benefit from their collective organization will all have to be certified individually in order to use the "organic" label in the United States. For some, this means they're getting screwed in new and original ways!
[C]onsider the case of one co-op of Peruvian banana farmers, for whom the USDA ruling is especially ironic: The 1,500 growers formerly worked as tenants on a single plantation, but with agrarian reforms in the 1960s each family got a plot of the landlord's land. Had that plantation been maintained, it could have had one visit a year from an inspector. But because the property is now split among 1,500 families, inspectors will need to visit each farm on the land.
Right now, University of Michigan students are staging a sit-in to end the use of sweatshop labor for university licensed apparel. The students are demanding that the administration accept a Designated Suppliers Program and Code of Conduct for its licensees, that will actually reward factories for adopting fair and humane labor standards for its workers—thus reversing the “race to the bottom” trend, into a “race to the top.” The best part of this plan, developed largely by United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), is that the Workers’ Rights Consortium, in cooperation with the local union or union-like entity, monitors and evaluates their places of employment for compliance with the Code of Conduct. Workers can request that the factory be taken off the list of Code-compliant factories if violations occur.
Call, e-mail or fax the University of Michigan president, Mary Sue Coleman, now! Tell her that you support the students sitting in and want the University of Michigan to be an example to other schools committed to the dignity of workers everywhere. College apparel is a multi-billion dollar industry, and this plan has the potential to make real change.
Divine Chocolate Bars are launching in the U.S. just in time for Valentine’s Day. What’s different about Divine? Well, now you can enjoy the rich sweet taste of chocolate while being socially minded and supporting small farmers in Ghana all at the same time.
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