The founding of what is now called TradeAid by Vi and Richard Cottrell is a story in itself. here is an excerpt --------
The heat was oppressive, the plumbing erratic, the children wouldn’t eat the food, and toads and rummaging pigs populated the streets. “It is,” wrote Vi Cottrell nine days after arriving in Delhi in 1969, “all sort of hopelessly funny.”
“I remember two things about those first few days,” says Cottrell now. “An old man with about two teeth singing Christian hymns till two or three in the morning. And a huge rat, skidding over the verandah.” We’re in the summery garden surrounding a historic mill house in North Canterbury, home to Trade Aid co-founders Vi and Richard Cottrell. Propping open the front door is a small dark figurine, a woman pounding maize, carved from african blackwood from Tanzania. It is one of the surprisingly few reminders of the 40 years that Vi Cottrell, now acclimatising herself to the idea of retirement, spent working with an organisation built on the singular premise of providing market access to poor craftspeople and artisans in the developing world.
“And I was really homesick,” she adds. “Which was not what I expected at all.” Nothing could have prepared the Cottrells for the dramatic change of lifestyle as they left friends and family in Christchurch for a two-year work contract in India. Vi was a former English teacher, educated at the sort of boarding school that “fitted you out to be a good wife”, with little knowledge of India beyond romantic tales of the Raj and images of grinding poverty. Richard was a partner in his family’s law firm. “We had the house, the car, the children, but we were keen to go away, to do something.”
That opportunity came by way of a small advertisement in the Press for an adviser for a resettlement scheme for Tibetan refugees in northern India. While Richard travelled between the various settlements, Vi was responsible for developing markets for the hand-woven carpets made by the refugees in the face of dwindling funds, serious in-fighting, and European aid initiatives that often ignored the needs and experiences of those they were meant to help.
THE BLOSSOMING OF A MOVEMENT
On their return to Christchurch in 1972, they managed to negotiate New Zealand’s strict import licensing system to bring in enough carpets for an exhibition at the Canterbury Society of Arts gallery (now CoCA). The show sold out in 15 minutes and the vague idea of establishing an importing company took a further step towards reality. Later that year Richard invited eight people, four from the business sector and four from local development agencies, to set up an independent company to “trade with underdeveloped countries and so support the work of self-help organisations through long-term trading relationships”.
“We didn’t use the term fair trade – I guess it was implied we would pay a fair price – but we did talk about people being properly rewarded for their skills. ‘Trade is the best form of aid’ – that is what we used to say. And we talked about dignity. Dignity being the difference between being given a grant and earning something – to me that is quite clear. But there is also dignity in having control over what you are doing, and any kind of intervention that doesn’t give people that control is not worth doing.”
Initially supported by those on the radical edge of Corso and various church-based organisations, the pioneering fair-trade organisation grew from a scattering of Corso-related shops and Third World stores into a nationwide chain of 29 shops selling craft and food items on behalf of thousands of farmers and craft artisans in 30 countries. In the last financial year, its importing programme brought in 1007 tonnes of fairly traded organic green coffee.
New Zealand now boasts the highest sales of fair-trade craft per head of population in the world, and sales continue to charge up the growth chart – a record $19 million in the 2011/12 year. Trade Aid-imported coffee, tea, chocolate and other foods are sold in supermarkets, cafes, roasteries and health-food stores around the country. Because of the success of its trading model, Trade Aid has been invited to help develop fair-trade retail outlets in Africa and India; manager Geoff White now sits on the executive board of the World Fair Trade Organisation.
