1st training on CAMPAIGN

WHERE: Malta
WHEN: 5th-8th December 2009
WHAT: 4 days training to design a common campaign

In the 4 days of our first training, we experienced the sharing of information on a very crucial topic for a Fair Trade organisation (FTO): the campaigning. Indeed, FTOs are active at 2 main levels: on one hand, they promote Fair Trade products enabling their partners from the Global South to access the market and give Northern consumers a Fair option in their daily shopping. On the other hand, they commit to make a cultural change possible: to make every individual aware about the responsibility of his /her own actions, especially in the South. Indeed, even if FTOs believe in consumers' power, this is often not enough to change the rules of the game and a pledge for institutional change is needed also, when we look at the roots of the exclusion of our Southern partners.

In the framework of the contemporary challenge of our global world, we act in the middle of 3 major crisis (financial crisis, environmental crisis, food crisis). The several interconnections among the 3 different crisis underline the unsustainable neoliberal economic model, that Fair Trade aims at changing. We experienced that our partners are particularly suffering the effects of the so-called FOOD CRISIS, with high increase in crops' price that not always means higher profits for peasants but that, on the contrary, shows all the paradoxes and distortion of the global food market. We believe that the food crisis is not due to a lack of available food, as many say, but is the predictable result of a model that doesn't put the FOOD SOVEREIGNTY first, but the exploitation of man and Earth.

Our campaign consists, then, in the common claim for the RIGHT FOR FOOD as a fundamental human right to be assured for every human being. The right for food can be achieved by respecting farming agriculture and natural biodiversityy, by giving the Global South the possibility to enter a market without distortion and by promoting sounds patterns of production, such as the organic and Fair Trade ones.
 

Watch the interview to VANDANA SHIVA from the upcoming video "Seeds of Freedom"

Training materials available here