All in the (Camel) Family

The View from Peru: Beneath the “Fair Tradar”

Fair Trade is extra-ordinary because it enables ordinary people like us to have a direct impact on the lives of families all around the world through the consumer choices we make every day.  But the Fair Trade consumer opportunities that are available to us are limited, and represent only a tiny fraction of the world’s commerce.  All around the world, hundreds of millions of disadantaged producers are working everyday to access local, national and regional markets on fair terms — a prodigious amount of activity that takes place beneath the radar of Fair Trade.  Here in Peru, where sustained economic growth has not led to a significant reduction in poverty, (and in countless other countries around the world) CRS and its partners are accompanying small-scale producers in their efforts and helping to make markets work better for poor communities.

Puno is a sprawling city on the shores of Lake Titicaca at the southern extreme of the Peruvian highlands.  It sits at more than 3800 meters above sea level, which means, among other things, that the options available to farmers in the region are limited.  The most promising line of work in the area is camel ranching.  Not camels, exactly, but some of their close relatives in the camel family: llamas, alpacas and vicunas, mostly.  These animals are raised for their meat, which is high in protein and low in saturated fat.  (Or so they tell me…as a vegetarian, I must take their word for it.  Is this more or less scary than eating guinea pig?  Post a comment and tell me what you think.)  Anyway..the sale of alpaca yarn, which is prized in the textile industry, is the primary source of revenue for camel ranchers.

Fine baby alpaca garments regularly retail for hundreds of dollars, (”Alpaca, the new pashmina”) which means that high-quality alpaca yarn can fetch good prices on local markets.  But for many years, camel ranchers were not focusing on the quality of their product.  With support from a local NGO called DESCO, the ranchers learned more about the market for alpaca yarn.  They learned that under their traditional system for bringing yarns to market — heaping together yarns of all different qualities and selling them on the basis of their weight — they were missing valuable opportunities to differentiate their product on the basis of quality.  So they developed systems to separate their yarns into different categories for different markets, fetching prices for their highest-quality yarns that were nearly twice as high as the market rates for undifferentiated yarns.  They built rainwater harvesting systems to irrigate the pastures where their camels graze and stables to protect them from the harsh winters that can kill camels that sleep outside — two interventions that greatly increased the quality of the camels’ fur and increased the value of the ranchers’ yarns.  In partnership with the CRS program in Peru, DESCO will spread these and other practices to hundreds of other families in the region.

It is possible that these yarns will find their way into the hands of an artisan cooperative, the weave of a traditional altiplano garment, and the pages of the Work of Human Hands catalog.  If they do, we as Fair Trade consumers will have the chance to support them directly through the purchase of these products.  But chances are that we won’t. All around the world every day, countless millions of people like these camel ranchers in Peru are working to find more equitable ways to participate in local, national and regional markets.  Because they are working in the conventional economy, their products disappear into the anonymity of conventional production chains, their identities are obscured, and their efforts to create a more equitable trade relationships from the bottom up will be invisible to us.  Since we at CRS support these kinds of economic activities in dozens of countries around the world, we have the ability to make these kinds of activities visible to you, and you have the ability to support them by supporting us.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2007 and is filed under Fair Trade, Sustainability . You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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