Fairtrasa – A Fair Trade Bike Ride

It is 7am the next day and I am with Mario outside the Fairtrasa office in Trujillo. Already his mobile phone is glued to his ear. On our way south towards Chao, in between his calls, I tried to find out more about the local producers. Fernando and Carlos, from a US-backed NGO, remained quiet in the back.

Fairtrasa work with several associations here, including Mocha and Santa Catalina. Today we visited members from PROPALTO. All export their produce to the USA, Canada and Europe. As well as avocados, some producer members grow mangoes and bananas for export, though they generate a lower income than avocados.

The increased return for avocados has typically been due to the rise in demand in North America and Europe for the Haas variety. Fuerte is a more traditional variety and far more common, going back nearly 100 years. Haas is a recent convert but it generates more demand and higher prices for export. It takes time and money to switch avocado varieties from Fuerte to Haas but all the producers I met were willing to make the change.

I met Mario at the Fairtrasa at 7am, along with Jorge, our driver. Our destination for the day was the area around Chao, south of Trujillo.

Narciso and his wife Rosa were the first producers we visited. He was quite positive about fair trade and its higher prices it generated for him and wanted to convert more of his existing mango trees to avocado. Fairtrasa has committed to buying all their harvest at fair trade prices. Their farm was small and they harvested the production themselves.

Narciso at the entrance to his house. Most producer families live in these types of single story, simple dwellings. Many don’t even have a concrete floor inside.

The children were generally bemused by our presence, and seemed a lot happier tucking into pieces of mango.

The sheltered side of Narciso and Rosa’s house. Their ‘kitchen’ is in the foreground. All the trees are avocado.

Next we met Isidro and Maria. Their situation was similar, farming 4 ha of avocados, though they had plenty of animals too – chickens, sheep, cows and guinea pigs.

Despite only having mud floors, they try to keep things tidy. An elderly neighbour is giving the place a sweep and wash. Isidro built the house himself.

Maria (left) and her neighbour.

The guinea pigs had their home beside the house, but not necessarily for long. I later learned they are a popular local snack.

Isidro and a neighbour tend to their avocado trees.

You can hang your hat, or hang your pet…

Isidro and Maria chatting about avocados with a neighbour…maybe

Catharina and Carmilo lived in the town of Chao on the main road. Their situation contrasted heavily with everyone else I had met. The most prosperous-looking of everyone, they owned a two-story cement house with a garden and a car that they kept in a garage. Carmilo works the land though he also employs two workers. Like Narciso, they had mango trees but wanted to convert them to avocados. Their married son, an electrical engineer, had lived in Italy for 20 years. They had yet to visit them there.

Catharina enjoyed talking and was much in favour of fair trade. Currently they farmed three ha, all organic, but wanted to invest more.

Before we left Chao I was treated to some home brew courtesy of Luis Sanchez, from the NGO. It was merely an aperitif and he seemed genuinely upset when I told I couldn’t join him for mango pisco sours.

A couple of the Fairtrasa office crew in Trujillo.

The Fairtrasa office. All work and no play makes…

CO-OP INFO:

Comprises more than 75 members (PROPALTO)
First year of fair trade certification. It took 3 years to transition to fair trade, organic
Typical producer cultivates less than 5 hectares (ha)
Also looking at obtaining fair trade certification for mangoes

The first avocado farmer I met made an impression on me of the kind I didn’t expect: his perhaps slightly overweight resemblance to the actor Vince Vaughn. He sported a slouched sombrero, wide-necked shirt and jeans and drove a decked-out, twin-cab Ford pickup truck. I thought I might be in Texas, not northern Peru.

If I had been in Texas, it probably would have been guacamole with everything. In the US avocado really means guacamole. Promoting avocados during this year’s Super Bowl was big business when consumption is peaks. “Avocados from Mexico”, the company behind the Super Bowl advert, proclaim that guacamole is the #1 use of avocados. Nachos anyone..? But let’s look a little beyond this – avocados aren’t only grown in Mexico. I was in dry, dusty Trujillo in northern Peru to see what was happening in the smaller world of fair trade, organic avocados.

CEDEPAS is the local cooperative that until recently produced only conventional avocados. And different varieties too. Most of the exports to North America and Europe are Haas, but there are plenty of others. Haas tends to get the highest price for export, but producers here also have varieties such as Fuerte and Nava, sold locally. Luckily, no such thing as the avozilla.

Fairtrasa started working with the coop three years prior to my visit, at about the same time as an outside NGO. Fairtrasa works with small-scale, marginalised farmers and manages their supply chain, from farmer to the end customer. They helped CEDEPAS transition to organic and fair trade. Organic and fair trade avocados receive higher prices for the farmers despite having to put up with a couple of tougher transitional years.

The advantages of organic and fair trade certification is clear for the farm owner with higher revenue from the better prices. But it was still too early to know the full extent of the benefits for the hired workers. This being their first full year of fairtrade/organic supply, the value of things like the fair trade social premium weren’t fully known. Theresa, a mother of two young daughters, was one of seven workers at the farm we visited. She works on several local farms but the work can be sporadic, not always available. She works on fair trade certified farms but knew nothing about what fair trade was. The seven workers I saw typically bring in 80-100 boxes per day. For this they’re paid 30 soles each (approx. CAN$13).

The transition to fair trade and organic requires more work (including paperwork) and more investment. For example, each tree requires a lot of water. Gallons of water are used to create a ‘moat’ around each plant which is left for 10-15 days. The cycle is then repeated. The new system the farm invested in is more efficient, using a release mechanism underneath the soil to release water each day. But some hard work can’t be changed – weeding is constantly required.

One of my Fairtrasa companions for the day, Sophie, from France, clearly caught the attention of “Vince”, who tried to impress her on our drive home in his pickup truck. He barely noticed that I was there with them. I heard later from Sophie, who hadn’t been enamoured with Vince’s greasy eye-mongering that his main concern for his avocado farm was to make more money. If fair trade allows him to do that, he’ll adopt it. He wasn’t an advocate for fair trade and Sophie indicated that it would be difficult to get him to understand fair trade/organic production and why it exists as it does.

The larger farms like Vince’s rely on hired labour at harvest. But even at the coop/producer Association level there is no formal process yet in place that would give guarantees to the local workers. The farm owner likes to rehire the same workers, but at best it seems to be only based on a verbal agreement to do so.

Fairtrasa’s role has been to share their expertise in order to help bring producers like Vince into the fair trade and organic export market and to help them take advantage of it. It does mean they work with the larger producers so that they can get sufficient volume to ship abroad. Fairtrasa also tries to get large groups of smaller producers together.

The model for fair trade avocados is still developing. In this case, Vince was clearly doing ok for himself, but it his workers had more of a struggle. Would fair trade change any of that for them?

Later we returned to the Fairtrasa office in Trujillo. It was a small, open office; very ‘no frills’. Plenty of thick binders sat on shelves. Computer equipment straggled across simple veneer desks. One lonely table; a whiteboard; a wall calendar. Brown veneer panelling served for wallpaper. It felt very 1970s. But the office had a busy atmosphere, as any typical office would, working on spreadsheets, doing accounts. Despite an imminent audit, the Fairtrasa staff within certainly brought the place to life.

I’d spent the day with Sophie and Jorge (our driver) and now met the rest: Juan, Mario, Juan Carlos, Ivan, Johana and Luis (Luchito). Luis and Mario had phones stuck to their ears, and the others needed to crack on. I knew I would be back the following day so I left them to their work, descended the concrete stairs and headed out into the warm Trujillo afternoon.

Tired workers rest up after a typical day harvesting avocados

The coop also run a horticulture enterprise. The desert climate means creative growing methods are used

Layers of greens bake in the hot sun

The sign behind the workers indicates what lies beyond – land and owner details, avocado variety (Haas), number of trees planted (700) and when (2007)