mango, papaya, pineapple and guava - new dried fruit from the Philippines

Why should you support these fruit farmers? what's the problem?

Middlemen - small scale farmers in the Philippines have been encouraged to spray potassium nitrate on their fruit trees to induce them to flower and control insects.  Frequently the farmers sign a contract to allow middlemen to spray the trees and in return they claim up to 60% of the farmers harvest.

Buying Cartels - farmers do not have access to a fair market. Most towns in fruit growing areas have a buying station usually owned by a wealthy family or by an export company who set a buying price. 

Subic Bay - The closing of the US naval base in Subic Bay in 1991 left a legacy of children born from prostitution to American fathers, some estimates put the number as high as 50,000. Consequently children were trafficked into brothels, were forced to live on the street or were abandoned.

and what's the solution?

Trade Aid's dried fruit comes from an organisation in the Philippines called the PREDA Fair Trade foundation - standing for peoples recovery, empowerment and development assistance. This is a non profit foundation founded in 1974 dedicated to furthering the human rights of local people through the establishment of fair trading practices.  

PREDA Fair Trade's primary mission is to work to win freedom and new lives for children in jail, trafficked into brothels, living on the street and for abandoned youth. PREDA Fair Trade is tackling the roots of this problem - poverty - in various ways and believe that if this can be addressed in the villages and countryside then this will have a positive impact on children’s lives.  PREDA has a multi-project approach for dealing with poverty and this includes providing help for battered women, indigenous people, running an environmental campaign and a fair trade fruit project.

A fair price -  the fresh fruit is bought directly from the farmers, paying a fair price by the kilo. In other provinces where there is a drying factory PREDA Fair Trade arranges for the farmers to sell their fruit directly to the processing factory,  bringing the farmers in more direct contact with the market.  The impact of this organisation for many small scale fruit farmers has been considerable: they can earn almost twice as much as they could previously in the open market.

Traditionally  farmed  -  PREDA Fair Trade assists small scale fruit farmers to improve production, encourages farmers to grow their fruit traditionally without using chemical inducers and opposes genetic modification. They offer the farmers organic fertilizer and trains and financially assists the farmers to produce this fertilizer themselves by setting up vermi-culture production units on their farms.

Better for the environment - small farmers are encouraged to plant more fruit trees on eroding land to hold the soil and the water and improve their irrigation and earnings. The farmers keep their chickens and water buffalo under the tree to fertilize them. They are encouraged to burn grass and leaves under the trees to help induce them to flower in a natural way. More and more farmers are putting small paper bags over the fruit when the fruit is a week old so they are protected from insects and birds and there is no need for pesticides.

So many benefits - These farmers can now keep their families together in the villages, their children can go to school and as a result, migration to the cities and abroad is greatly reduced. PREDA’s fair trade project helps keep the poor out of the city slums and children off the streets, where they are vulnerable to abduction into the sex trade.