A Fairtrade farmer at COP17

By Tomy Matthews, Fairtrade Alliance Kerala

Tomy Matthews, from smallholder co-operative Fairtrade Alliance Kerala in India, has been at the COP17 in Durban. After a packed first week of events and meetings, he shares his thoughts and insights on the climate change conference.

Being a Fairtrade producer at the COP17 has been interesting, for example last week I was in the China Pavillion where the buzz word is PRA and RRA. These are the smart solutions for generation and access to data related to climate change says China. Participatory Rural Appraisal and Rapid Rural Appraisal, for the uninitiated.

Impact assessments of the conventional variety are time-consuming, costly and often fail to capture the true impact of climate change on Chinese communities according to ACCP - Adapting to Climate Change in China. PRA and RRA methodologies - venn diagrams, historical time lines, transect walks and participatory resource mapping, all have been deployed to capture not just impact but the progress on adaptation and mitigation efforts.

Some lessons for us in Fairtrade, and not just related to assessing the impact of climate change on farmers but actually a pointer to smart solutions for the impact assessment of Fairtrade, a matter that has been engaging us all for quiite some time now.

Fairtrade has received a warm reception here. ‘I risk being called reckless, and don’t mind it. But what is playing out before us is climate apartheid.’ That is Kumi Naidoo for you, speaking at the Institute for Democracy in Africa (IDASA) side event: Africans dealing with climate change - citizens’ approach to COP 17.

Climate change may be colour blind but not the political economy underpinning the global response to it. Kumi was, in more explicit terms perhaps, echoing the articulate Dr. Nancy Dubosse, the head of the Economic Programme at IDASA, who incidentally felt that the Fairtrade response to climate change merited closer attention.

The fundamental premise of Fairtrade’s response to climate change - that it is not fair, that its negative fallouts affect first and worst those that have least contributed to it, found abundant echo and in fact was the implicit logic of all the deliberations at the IDASA side event. Kumi Naidoo’s (prominent anti-apartheid youth icon and presently head of Greepeace) blunt speak brought the iniquitous nature of the current global response to the crisis into sharp focus.

For more information on Fairtrade at the conference see.
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=160323

See http://allafrica.com/stories/201112021408.html for a little article about our event.