Spring Break
Fair Trade Party Rocks a Packed Gopher Hole
Rachel Horst
Issue date: 12/9/05 Section: News
When Shlayma Shamberg traveled to Ghana this past summer with American Jewish World Service, a nonprofit organization based out of New York City that provides small grants to NGOs and service programs in the developing world, the purpose of her trip was to learn about a foreign culture and engage in service there. The main project consisted of constructing, alongside the village locals, a community library located next to the local elementary and middle school in Kpeme, a small village in the Volta region of the country. Yet during her seven weeks with this program, she also got to talking with a lot of the neighboring local inhabitants, many of which were small cocoa farmers. Through her conversations with the farmers, she constantly heard the same story: they produced cocoa, sold it on the market, and received extremely low revenue for their product. The prices they sold the cocoa for were so low that it was barely possible to sustain their own farms.
Ghana, the number one exporter of cocoa, is no stranger to the disadvantages of the world market, nor those of another major factor in developing countries,debt. Many Ghanaians rely on agricultural products to make a living. Yet "instead of benefiting from that arrangement," says Shamberg, "they are being disadvantaged from it." The low prices the cocoa is sold at, however, in turn make it impossible for it to be processed within the country, and the price of the final product when it re-enters the country -chocolate- is too high for those very same producers to even afford purchasing it.
After her conversations with the farmers and her experience working with the locals, Shamberg realized that while the words "fair trade" are a hot phrase with regards to products such as coffee, the same issue arises with many other products as well, such as cotton, sugar, tea, and in this case, cocoa. With this new perspective on international trade, Shamberg returned to the United States, where she educated herself further about fair trade organizations. She says of her experience,"[Ghana] is trying to work itself into Western ideals, democracy, capitalism...They see this as the only option they have. I don't know if people are educated enough to know if there are other options unless it is presented to them."
Ghana, the number one exporter of cocoa, is no stranger to the disadvantages of the world market, nor those of another major factor in developing countries,debt. Many Ghanaians rely on agricultural products to make a living. Yet "instead of benefiting from that arrangement," says Shamberg, "they are being disadvantaged from it." The low prices the cocoa is sold at, however, in turn make it impossible for it to be processed within the country, and the price of the final product when it re-enters the country -chocolate- is too high for those very same producers to even afford purchasing it.
After her conversations with the farmers and her experience working with the locals, Shamberg realized that while the words "fair trade" are a hot phrase with regards to products such as coffee, the same issue arises with many other products as well, such as cotton, sugar, tea, and in this case, cocoa. With this new perspective on international trade, Shamberg returned to the United States, where she educated herself further about fair trade organizations. She says of her experience,"[Ghana] is trying to work itself into Western ideals, democracy, capitalism...They see this as the only option they have. I don't know if people are educated enough to know if there are other options unless it is presented to them."