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Travel and Fair Trade

In addition to importing and selling fairly traded Palestinian products, from herbs to books, carved wood to olive oil and embroidery to CDs, Olive Co-operative also runs tours to Palestine and Israel.

These are intended to allow people to see the situation there for themselves, visiting Israeli cities and Palestinian refugee camps, and meeting with people from all communities – Arab and Jewish, Muslim, Jewish, Christian and secular – struggling for the cause of a just peace in the region.

This autumn, two of our tours tie in particularly with the fair trade aspects of our business. The Olive Harvest and Agricultural tours offer travellers the opportunity to meet fair trade producers in the West Bank – mainly olive farmers who produce the olive oil and fruit which is the mainstay of the rural Palestinian economy.

The Al-Zaytouna Co-operative, for instance, based in the Salfit area of Palestine, is working closely with UK organisations in the hope of being the source of the first fully certified fair trade olive oil. The tour also takes in organisations such as the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (PARC), an NGO set up to help Palestinian farmers market and transport their produce under the very difficult conditions they face day-to-day.

On the Olive Harvest tour visitors are also invited to join in with the autumn’s olive picking, providing a presence which makes farmers feel safer, as some are attacked by settlers while accessing their fields.

Olive’s tours are, as is obvious, not just an opportunity to see a beautiful, if troubled, country and visit its remarkable cultural and historical sites. They are encouraging people to engage directly with what fair trade means. Far from just buying fairly-traded items in a shop back home, it allows British and other visitors to gain a real understanding of what fair trade can mean, in terms of improving the lives of people in other parts of the world, and to build solidarity with them person-to-person, rather than as abstract concepts.

Opportunities for ‘fair trade tourism’ are slowly increasing, with other examples such as the educational tours run by the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign (www.nicaraguasc.org.uk) giving people with an interest in fair trade the chance to increase their understanding and, hopefully, enthusing them to continue campaigning and promoting fair trade back at home. Olive Co-operative’s past visitors have gone on to show just such enthusiasm, volunteering with diverse organisation to promote encounters between Palestinian and Israeli youth, encourage Palestinian fair trade through churches, mosques and synagogues and work with health organisations in the region.

So-called eco-tourism is a rapidly growing sector in Britain, with increasing numbers of people wanting holiday experiences which they feel do not damage the culture or environment of the places they visit. Fair Trade tourism is often at the ‘deep green’ end of this market, offering products which appeal to people who are already highly involved and interested, and might not attract those looking for a relaxing time of it. Fair trade trips are also likely to be run by not-for-profit groups like Olive Co-op and the NSC.

In the absence of any labelling scheme for eco-tourism, there is increasing concern amongst groups committed to socially and environmentally positive travel that companies are using the ‘sustainable travel’ or ‘eco-tourism’ claim without real cause. Because there is no set definition of these terms, or many others used for such trips, anyone can make these claims without real reason.

In the absence of such assurances, travellers wanting to find genuinely ethical holidays which contribute to the communities they visit and which do not damage the environment which attracts them in the first place should ask some basic questions. These should include things like:

• How many of the people employed on the tours are local rather than international guides, agents etc?
• Are locally-owned businesses being used for accommodation, meals and transport?
• What arrangements do the tours make to try and minimise waste, water use and other environmental impacts?
• Do the organisers of the tour work with local NGOs to contribute to the places they visit?
• And what sort of information is provided to travellers about how to be sensitive to their host culture and environment?

Problems with the massive contributions of flying to climate change notwithstanding, well-thought out sustainable tourism with strong relationships to the local community and environment can be a vital way for people to learn about other ways of living and working, and building real solidarity and understanding of fair trade producer communities. But, as with the fair trade and organic movements in their early days, a good labelling scheme is still needed to ensure that genuinely responsible operators are set apart from those trying to jump on the eco-bandwagon.