Belén, our Ecuadorian Intern

Belén Sanchez starts a seven week internship with Pachacuti today. I met her from the train station and I am really excited to work with her on the fair trade label over the next few months. She is currently taking an MA in Microenterprise in Leipzig and has worked in Ecuador with small co-operatives teaching them how to cost their products and how to manage the organisation of their business. I am sure that she will bring a lot of knowledge to our work on the label pilot and will be invaluable in preparing a lot of the paperwork in Spanish.

Sustainable Fair Trade Management System Pilot in Thailand

I have spent the past five days in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand where the pilot project for the SFTMS has been taking shape.

Several years ago, when peope started talking about the possibiity of a Fair Trade label for handicrafts, I thought that Panama hats would be the perfect product to bear this label as they once symbolised colonial rule, but our Fair Trade panamas now demonstrate the benefit of putting the power in the hands of the produers. A few months ago I was informed that Pachacuti had been selected for the pilot project which is very exciting.

The Sustainable Fair Trade Management System is being established to address a significant gap in product labelling of Fair Trade goods and their production processes. It is intended to provide an independent, transparent and robust third party certification process for Fair Trade Organisations that have Fair Trade at the heart of their mission.

This will be the first international fair trade label which guarantees a fair trade supply chain, as opposed to the FLO label on the commodity, and the label will be given to Fair Trade Organisation who can demonstrate that Fair Trade and sustainability permeate their business practices. Our first challenge will be to carry out a baseline assessment of the majority of our producer groups in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. This will include partipatory workshops with our producers to look at the supply chain, waste management, energy efficiency, health and safety, business capability, product design and quality, producer wealth, indigenous resources, skills and knowledge.

I am looking forward to the challenge of carrying out this pilot project and producing working models which can be replicated on a large scale by other Fair Trade Organisations. As many of our producers are illiterate, a lot of the participatory assessments will be based on eco-mapping and weather map models which are visual and easy to understand by all involved in the process.

Work/Life Balance

It’s my daughter Sienna’s birthday and I have to go to Thailand for a conference. I know that she doesn’t mind the fact that we only have time for a brief ‘birthday breakfast’ before I fly out to Thailand for the week, but I have missed her birthday so many times for work engagements and wish I could be there more often. However, I do feel that I have really started to establish a much better work/life balance over the past two years, partly down to having more and better staff who can be left in charge of running the different sections of the business. I have spent so many years juggling working an 80 hour week with bringing up my daughter, that I am relieved to feel that a work/life balance is starting to materialise. I still work a full day and most nights until late, but I at least have a scattering of weekends at home over the Summer now, which is something which never occurred before. My husband, daughter and I even had our first fortnight family holiday together this year. It's the longest time I've taken off work since I started Pachacuti 16 years ago (even when Sienna was born I was out working at a show after 10 days with her slung in a hammock under rails of dresses!)