Fairtrade gets muddy at Glastonbury

By Veronica Pasteur, Head of Campaigns, Fairtrade Foundation

A small team of Fairtrade staff and volunteers made the pilgrimage to Pilton for the annual Glastonbury Festival last week. It’s not just about the mud and the music you know…

Greenpeace – one of the main charity partners of the Festival – run an area at the festival and invite a number of different partner organizations like us to have stalls on their field. Over the five days of the festival, in our little spot next to the Farmers’ Market and the Soil Association stall, we talked to hundreds of people about Fairtrade and gave out loads of delicious Tropical Wholefoods snacks.

About 600 metres of our Fairtrade cotton bunting was hung on the field, as sails of the Rainbow Warrior styled solar showers, and punters waiting in the queues for up to three hours (!) were able to read all about the Great Cotton Stitch-Up campaign.

The Fairtrade Foundation is also a partner in the Green Trader Awards which recognise the efforts of over 700 traders on site to reduce their environmental impact and improve their social impact. As well as Gold and Silver awards for the best food and non-food stalls, there is a Fairtrade Award, which this year went to Love Zimbabwe. They have limited products with the FAIRTRADE Mark, but mainly sell crafts from Zimbabwe as well as being very involved in Fairtrade campaigning in their home community in Abergavenny (a Fairtrade Town) and displays about this in their stall and efforts to promote the fair trade message to their customers is what won it for them!

Glastonbury Festival continues to support Fairtrade more than many other festivals by demanding that only Fairtrade tea, coffee, hot chocolate and sugar is sold by traders onsite. You can read more about Fairtrade at Glastonbury and other green initiatives on the official Glastonbury Green Blog. Also, for the first time ever the official Glastonbury chocolate bar was Divine – their beautifully packaged bar was in high demand and one lucky Fairtrade chocoholic was able to go and watch Plan B from the side of the Pyramid stage courtesy of Divine.

So, despite the mud, the weekend ended on a high for Fairtrade at Glastonbury…see you there in 2013?