Formation and Fair Trade

By Albert Tucker

Robin Murray and Michael Barratt-Brown, as leading Board members and drivers of Twin and Twin Trading, always had the ambition to draw on the experience and methodology of two key institutions, Mondragon in the Basque Country, Spain and the Northern College, which Michael played a central role in establishing, as the means of driving and assuring gold standard approaches to Fairtrade and the Twin Trading understanding of Fairtrade:

Using Trade as a tool for development
Farmer-centred and led approach
As ruthless about delivering the social economy as we were about finance/income
‘Forming’ the next generation of Fairtrade actors
Create a body of demonstration supply chains and brands to act as catalysts for change.

At the time, Twin’s rhetoric did not match its ambition nor did its practice. As a result, whilst Robin and Michael envisaged a physical ‘college’ rather like The Mondragon University or the Northern College, to which people came together and were ‘formed’ and trained in the methodology, the producer leaders were keen on strengthening the practice and methodology. Robin was particularly exercised by the fact that Fairtrade in general and Twin in particular had not codified and organised the system in order to be able to replicate and grow more easily. Our strategy was very much to embed and understand how we organised to deliver on the ambition of working in a farmer-centred way:

Working directly and planning with farmer leaders
Exchanging skills between North and South, North/North and South/South
Recruiting and training the right people to deliver on the social economy
Taking on the corporate and neo-capitalist businesses in their own markets
Building strategies to demonstrate the value of the social bottom-line of Fairtrade
Demonstrating this with strong, viable social economy-led supply chains and products
Be the trusted representatives of producers in the market and working with mutual respect

Twin restructured and brought the producers as allies more to the centre of its thinking and working. It diversified its staff, targeting younger people and people with origins from the countries we worked in. It held whole team quarterly learning and working sessions, often with input from producer leaders and managers, key external players and board members.

Recruitment targeted people who had a sense of the values and producer-centred market approaches Twin and its partners wanted to build, not just technical skills. New entrants were trained in the trading approach no matter what role they were to take, but also the vision of creating alternative social economy approaches to trade and development. Biennial assemblies with producer organisations and other fairtraders became strategic planning, review and implementation events.

We introduced a six week training internship module with the Twin Trading team for co-op General Managers, in order that they understood what was required in the global trading operations, why certain disciplines were important in the very strange but necessary market in Europe, but also met with buyers and retailers and promoted and told stories of their work and organisation to various actors.

Mutual learning and leadership learning exchanges were strengthened and developed. This area included programmes like the innovative skills exchange programme, ‘Strengthening the commercial, financial management and business capacity of small coffee producers/exporters in Mexico and Nicaragua’- in partnership with the International Coffee Organisation (ICO ) and the Common Fund for Communities (CFC). The exchanges included producer organisation leaders and managers, Twin and in some cases coffee policy people in the countries. On one occasion at Machu Picchu having a brief encounter with Latin American leaders, some of whom were curious about the collection of coffee co-op leaders exchanging skills and ideas. This was at the beginning of the rise of organic coffee production methods and market opportunities and I think that this summit and exchange played a key part in growing organic production and markets for small scale producers. At the time, 80% of the producers of organic coffee were represented in the exchanges. Twin shared market experience, skills and projections and producers exchanged skills, solutions and opportunities. The CFC and ICO saw the results and became much more supportive of Fairtrade and small-scale producers.

As part of the development of the Divine Chocolate brand, Twin worked with professional design agencies, did thorough market research on the positioning of a Fairtrade brand and got Ben Elton to support the approach through Comic Relief. To do this, it was necessary to refinance a commercial Fairtrade product through investment and loans. This was driven by Robin’s vision of being as effective using traditional tools and showing the value of the ethical model. We pioneered an approach where instead of asking the Department for International Development (DfID) for a grant we asked them to offer a guarantee and then drew down against that guarantee. The EU challenged this process, but Claire Short led DfID and two visionary members of her team faced off the challenge.

The vision that Robin held on to was that as Twin grew and embedded these approaches we would eventually launch the physical ‘Southern College’ which would grow, demonstrate and strengthen these approaches. The physical building is not yet there but most of the people who delivered these approaches continue working in these ways and sharing with those who they now lead, are working with or recruit are ‘formed’ in some of these approaches wherever they are.

August 2020

Formation and Fair Trade

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