"Each relation is not just a posture or
attitude, but a mode of existence... Fair Trade is a way of reclaiming our
humanity and those who are less fortunate."
~Yann Martel, author of The
Life of Pi
“I used to think that the Fair Trade struggle was just our own…but it fills me with joy to realize that there are other people struggling for Fair Trade around the world.”
~Alfredo Rayo
USFT's 2005 national convergence, to take
place in Chicago, IL from February 18th-21st, will both
reflect on the accomplishments of the past year’s organizing, and continue to
advance USFT’s mission to educate, activate, and empower student
organizers. As the philosopher Martin Buber wrote in I and Thou,
“Everything is meeting.” ‘Convergence’ means diverse forces coming together:
Foremost, the Chicago convergence will weave together essential relationships
that serve as the foundation for today’s student Fair Trade movement.
The convergence offers an important opportunity
to exchange accounts of victories and challenges with Producer Cooperatives,
creating a rare space for understanding the transnational dimensions of the
movement. Several leaders from Fair Trade cooperatives, as well as student
leaders from within the cooperative movement, will join us to share their
experiences and explore questions about North-South power relationships and
solidarity between landless workers and small farmers. This and many other
activities will continue to inform and motivate a new generation of student
leadership in the Fair Trade movement, that is committed, connected, and
critical.
We will share our creativity and experience,
translating it into action across the nation. National conferences often serve
as the high point of a student organization’s annual activities. While the
Convergence will likely be the largest meeting of the year exclusively devoted
to Fair Trade in the United States, and a significant contribution to the
greater Fair Trade movement, it is foremost a rallying point that will spark
coordinated student activism throughout the important Spring term, and beyond.
At the Convergence student activists will connect with their USFT Regional
Organizers that have emerged out of the 2004 Convergence and the Nicaragua
Summer Leadership Summit, to harmonize and map their collective vision for
regional campaigns being hashed out this year.
The Convergence is a forum for student activists to share skills, experiences, passions, and ideas. We will focus on increasing and sustaining the leverage of student groups working on Fair Trade, while exploring new linkages to other movements that share key values and constituencies with Fair Trade. Through an interactive workshop-based format—from Fair Trade 101, to in-depth producer-led workshops on Fair Trade in the field, to skill building sessions led by experienced student Fair Trade organizers—students will deepen their understanding of the Fair Trade movement, and leave empowered to take action on their campuses and in their communities.
The 2004 USFT Convergence, and the
regional conferences and speaker tours that followed, was a tremendous step in
bringing together students working on Fair Trade initiatives across the
country. This August, 13 regional leaders ventured to Northern Nicaragua for
USFT’s first international encuentro, infusing the student movement with
a producer perspective. Today, with a critical mass of local and regional
organizers, the USFT network provides a powerful community for students to help
change their global and local economies.
Universities can serve as an arena for raising
awareness about the inequities inherent in a corporate-centered model of global
trade. However, academic curriculum often stops short of suggesting viable
alternatives like the Fair Trade model. For this reason, student activists
have begun to take hold of their potential for constructive action. In the last
five years, with the guidance of several committed non-profit organizations, the
Fair Trade student movement has gained considerable momentum in the United
States. Over 300 campuses report at least partial conversions, and many others
have initiated campaigns to follow suit. The growth of Fair Trade hinges on
consumer education and increasing demand for a product with a triple bottom
line—economic, environmental, and social. This redefinition of the
producer-consumer relationship has provided a lens though which tens of
thousands of students have made the connections and the commitment to social
justice.
As developing nations take a stand and
international civil society gets a foothold in the debate around globalization,
student organizers must also move to take advantage of a uniquely teachable
moment. Fair Trade is by no means a comprehensive solution, but it is a
positive example of a socially-based model of trade that prioritizes the
fundamental elements of human dignity.
Fair Trade helps citizens, students and
community members think about the meaning and origin of the foods, clothes and
crafts that fill our lives. It offers an opportunity to confront growing
alienation--it invites a moment of reflexivity, one way to more directly engage
the connection we share to the cultures, livelihoods and landscapes that sustain
our daily existence. Lacking an alternative, this moment of reflection remains
a purely mental experience. Fair Trade, like farmers markets, community
supported agriculture and other initiatives, provides an alternative for action.
While the convergence itself aims to
build relationships and momentum toward the multiple goals stated below, there
will be a particular emphasis placed on strengthening the structure for
follow-up that secures tangible results on the ground. The urgency for
broadening the Fair Trade movement and continuously raising the ceiling of
demand is coupled with a distinct need for building a committed and critical
base of the movement, as well.
Students will use their time together in
Chicago to develop campaign objectives and strategies within their regional
organizing network. Born at last year’s convergence, this decentralized
structure of USFT enhances sensitivity to the particular characteristics of a
region, while rooting the network in local action. Each year the Convergence
takes place in the heart of a different region to learn from the experiences of
a different community. Last year we explored the unique story of California,
where the Fair Trade movement is just making its first inroads into the 427
institutions of higher learning that house over 3 million students. This year we
will focus on the Chicago Fair Trade Coalition and other initiatives in the
Midwest such as the Cincinnati Fair Trade Campaign started by Oxfam America and
Global Exchange, respectively.
Mapping our Fair Trade landscape within the
context of a wide variety of social justice issues is a crucial step in the
student Fair Trade movement. Being able to identify intersections helps to
popularize a cause on a campus and create functional networks. The diverse
combination of alternative trading practices, including expanding markets in
organics, direct distribution, and Fair Trade is only part of a story that
includes hundreds of local approaches, including the movements for greater food
sovereignty, land rights, domestic Fair Trade, and seed savers, to name a few.
Together these multiple responses, including all their intellectual, cultural
and ecological diversity present alternatives to the “monocultures of the mind”
behind the neoliberal agenda. Many of these alternatives coexist in practice
among the producing communities linked to Fair Trade, yet too often
organizations and movements compete for resources and miss opportunities for
finding these synergies.
“When we talk of ‘fair trade’ or of
“sweatshops” one thinks of Mexico or of Africa...People never think about here
inside the United States,” said Lucas Benitez of the Coalition of Immokalee
Workers. You don’t need to go to Guatemala or Asia to see sweatshops. Come to
Immokalee…We are living in sweatshops in the fields.” USFT believes that it is
essential to implement Fair Trade practices in our global community and
within our domestic boarders. “We were small farmers in our countries. Sadly, so
many free trade agreements, destroyed rural Mexico,” Lucas explained. “It is for
these reasons that we have a very strong connection, our struggle and the
struggle of the small scale farmers that have their cooperatives…in Mexico, in
Guatemala, and all over Africa.” Through interactive workshops students will
explore and deepen our understanding of the connections between trading
relationships abroad and immigrant-farmworker issues in the US.
One of the most poignant critiques of the
Global Justice Movement within the U.S. is its lack of diversity. The Fair
Trade movement has not avoided this pitfall. As activists working to revoke
global apartheid, it is critical to demonstrate inclusiveness and celebration of
difference within our own struggles. This year we are working with local
community organizations such as the Latin American Youth Center in Washington
DC, and Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, and Comercio Justo in Mexico,
to connect with young immigrant communities and create space at the Convergence
to listen to their perspectives and experiences.
Who has skills? We all do, and
the Convergence is a place to share and hone our strategies, tactics, and
tools. Through innovative student and community organizer-led workshops,
students will leave the convergence with new skills and a “plan of action” to
bring the movement home to their respective campuses and communities. Case
studies will be used to show how student organizations have confronted different
scenarios, built leverage, and voiced their demands to administrations and
businesses and community organizations effectively. We will strategize around
barriers to ongoing campaigns, explore creative tools for popular education and
mobilization, and learn how to utilize resources within the Fair Trade
community. Students will help generate ideas on how to strengthen USFT as a
resource organization and a space of continuous collaboration across the USFT
network.
The great challenge of student organizing is
the short cycle of leadership. Workshops will focus on methods of deepening
involvement and passing the torch to new generations of student activists within
campus organizations. Active follow up will be a primary objective of the
convergence and regional coordinators will maintain contact with convergence
participants in their region. USFT’s High School Organizer will be involved in
the planning to create a space for young leadership. Building relationships
between emerging and experienced leaders will help add to the longevity and
vitality of USFT. These relationships will also give students the tools to
embrace and empower other interested students.
Fair Trade is a transnational movement with roots in correcting the plight of producers in developing countries. Most Northern students, however, have no experiential knowledge of the realities in the Gobal South that motivate their activism. There is a continuous need for a more proximate relationship and deeper listening between activists and producers. Last year five representatives from producer organizations joined us from Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Costa Rica, to share their reflections with students. This year cooperative leaders will join us to lead workshops on some of the more challenging questions the Fair Trade movement is confronting.
While a basic primer will be given via mail on
the theory and history of Fair Trade, most of the agenda will push participants
to actively engage in dialogue. Sessions will include break-out groups, and
ample time will be taken for report-backs and group discussion, as well as
Open Space Technology, to access the collective knowledge and experience of
the participants. Session facilitators will be encouraged to minimize their
presentation time, and maximize time for interaction and idea-sharing.
Students being introduced to the basic
principles of Fair Trade glaze over at the run-of-the-mill academic delivery.
The convergence will be an illustration of a high-energy dialogue that
proactively engages and inspires. There will be a focus not only on supporting
creativity and questions, but coming up with decisive post conference strategies
to implement those ideas within student communities.
Trust is the most fundamental building block
for collaboration across distance and difference. An atmosphere will be
constructed at the convergence that lends to connecting with each other on a
personal level. “Hallway” time will be prioritized as an opportunity to meet
people outside of the structured agenda.
Even though the professional Fair Trade world
has generated some very eloquent presenters, the convergence will be as
student-centered as possible so as to model empowerment, and diminish the
intimidation factor. The convergence will challenge the disempowerment that
keeps so many students from taking to a cause.
Students Fair Trade activists are part of a
local and international community working together to rise up against global
apartheid. Emphasis will be on understanding the relationship between local
action and global impact, between small-scale farmer cooperatives in the Global
South and migrant farm worker struggles in the US. A core principle of the
Convergence will be strengthening our listening skills and ability to embrace
and celebrate difference across cultures and experiences.
If you are
interested in supporting USFT’s efforts at the convergence, please contact our
Convergence Fundraising Coordinator: Isaac Grody-Patinkin, at 917-435-1398, or
via e-mail at
Isaac@nyu.edu
If you would like to attend and/or set up a table at the convergence, please
contact our Convergence Outreach Coordinator: Christina Synowiec, at
502-419-3389, or via e-mail
Synowics@muohio.edu
or Midwest Coordinator/Convergence Organizer: Melanie Benesh, at 402-215-3159,
or via e-mail at mbenesh411@yahoo.com .
See you there!