A First for Baildon.
Salt Grammar School practises fair trade
A trainer-making factory in Salt Grammar School was set up on October 20 2006 by all 240 Year 8 students.
In groups which simulated family producer cooperatives, pupils worked hard, despite interference from money-lenders, banks and grindingly low wages, to produce replica trainers to make a living. The pupils learned how poor many of the trainer-makers were; and how difficult for producers it was to make a living in the trainer-making industry. In addition, pupils heard first-hand African experiences from Jim and Liz Parrish and Ruth and John Anderson. The aim of this Fairtrade Day was to help the pupils think about and support Fairtrade for the benefit of poor producers.
Dani Mistry, Bradford Council Policy Officer, presents the official Fairtrade town certificate to John D Anderson, convenor of Fairtrade Baildon, at a market where Fairtrade goods were on sale on Saturday September 24th 2005.
For 24 years there have been regular Traidcraft stalls in the Baildon churches. ‘Traidcraft’ is the trade name for a supplier of fairly traded goods. The step change in fair trade activity came in the nineties with the launch of the Fairtrade Mark and the sale of certificated Fairtrade products in mainstream shops. From 1993 Baildon had a One World Group under the aegis of Churches Together in Baildon. It persistently encouraged the use of Fairtrade goods.
Every March in the national Fairtrade Fortnight, the Group distributed Fairtrade publicity and sample products in supermarkets. In 2004 the One World Group established the Baildon Fairtrade Steering Group, consisting of themselves and other interested people.
In September 2005 Baildon was awarded Fairtrade Town status by the National Fairtrade Foundation. The drive to this had been spearheaded by the One World Group of the Churches Together in Baildon. 18 people had visited 50 businesses in the town to check on, and encourage, the usage of Fairtrade goods. A directory was published in 2005 showing the 2 retail, 3 catering and 24 businesses which sell or use Fairtrade products. By 2005 a separate, fully fledged, Fairtrade Baildon Steering Group had developed including a councillor and the deputy manager of the local coop.
Every year in Fairtrade Fortnight in March, Fairtrade Baildon staffs a Fairtrade advocacy stall in Baildon Coop for two days. 48 volunteers give away samples and leaflets. There is a fourfold increase in the sale of Fairtrade products as a result.
The Ethiopia Connection
The former Convenor of the Fairtrade Baildon Steering Group, John Anderson, had spent 2001-3 in Ethiopia and had seen the conditions of coffee growers there.
From 1997-2002 the price they had received for the coffee halved because of the low prices being paid by most buyers.
One coffee farmer whom John Anderson saw had destroyed 1500 coffee bushes and used them as fencing. The distraught farmer said that, as he could not eat coffee, he had planted cabbages as food. His children have had to leave school; now, he said, ‘they just sit and look at me.’
The farmers, his visitors and his cabbages are shown here (See right). Some of the Fairtrade visitors were going to buy coffee at guaranteed prices from the Co-op, thus allowing it to pay its farmers sufficient to have enough to eat, to send their children to school and buy medicines.
In 2006 the Baildon Group elected a new Convenor, Norman Warner, of the Methodist Church.
