April 26, 2004
World Fair Trade Day happens to fall in the midst of our "Pencils and Pandemonium" Midwest Activist Conference and Bookfair - so I imagine we can do some education in conjunction with that. The Madison Fair Trade Action Alliance (MadFTAA) will have a table there all weekend. For more details: www.madisoninfoshop.org I did just give a talk last night on "fair trade vs free trade" at Beloit College as part of their Earth Week celebration.
Also, you may be encouraged to here about the "Cafe not CAFTA" action we did on the UW-Madison campus last week (we being MadFTAA, Family Farm Defenders, and U.S. El Salvador Sister Cities Project). Basically, we had free fair trade coffee and homemade cookies for anyone who called Sen. Kohl's office (using our handy dandy cellphones) to complain about CAFTA and AUSFTA. The result - over a hundred calls (!), and an immediate response to a request for a meeting between us and Kohl's trade aide. We'll probably be doing this again since the weather is now getting so nice.
January 29, 2003
This Valentine's Day, we'll be doing a Fair Trade chocolate action again similar to last year, where we basically went up and down State Street and UW's Library Mall over the Noon hour on Valentine's Day with signs, handing out updated flyers on the issue with local fair trade alternatives (we have half a dozen stores now selling fair trade chocolate in Madison! - did I send you a copy of our flyer last year?... if not, I think it is also on our webpage: www.sit.wisc.edu/~infoshop), getting folks to sign the M&M postcards (we already have a bunch) and giving out free "fair trade" chocolate samples. I'm not sure if we still have our giant heart costume dragging paper chains from last year, but we can easily make another. We'll be sending out a press release since our local media is pretty receptive already. We'll let you know how it goes!
November 2002 (John Peck)
Here in Madison, WI we continue to do a lot of Fair Trade activism. There was a workshop on "Free Trade vs Fair Trade" at the "Activism Not Reactivism" Conference organized by Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) at UW-Madison on Sat. Oct. 19th. About 200 people attended the conference and about 35 were at the workshop. Many community activists made a point of only giving out fair trade chocolate for Halloween, and this helped generate an article in one of the campus papers on the issue.
With the annual Holiday Season of Conscience approaching, we are doing a lot to expose sweatshops and offer alternatives. There will be a second protest at the GAP on State St. this Sat. and other Buy Nothing Day activities are planned for Nov. 29th at area shopping malls. As in years before, we will be handing out copies of our "Sweat-Free Holiday Shoppers Guide" along with copies of the Fair Trade Federation's "Conscious Consumer" brochure. Dec. 7th is also our 6th annual Fair Trade Holiday Fair which in the past has attracted over 30 vendors and various social justice organizations, as well as several hundred shoppers and other curious passerbys. Once again, we will be running a "Santa's Sweatshop" outside to attract people to the fair and will be singing a variety of anti-sweatshop carols. You can also check out what's up here in Madison by looking at our various websites: UW Infoshop: www.sit.wisc.edu/~infoshop Madison Fair Trade Action Alliance: www.mad_ftaa.org
March 2002 (Matt Earley)
Us Madisonites are working to put on a FT conference at the UW in April, as well as a benefit for the communities in the Nuevo Luz del Cielo coffee co-op in Chiapas, who some of us are working on a FT coffee project with. I don't think that I have the time to take the lead in doing the Folgers Day of Education/Action in March, but I will forward this on to some other folks here who might be able to be the organizers. Good luck.
January 2002 (John Peck)
UW-Madison doesn't start again until Jan. 22, so it is pretty quiet here right now. I can share some of our tentative plans, though, for this spring.
Fair Trade Coffee: We are already circulating the Folgers petition at several fair trade coffeeshops in town. I'm not sure what interest level there is in actually picketing against Folgers at supermarkets. No one wants to target the little "mom and pop" grocers downtown, and all the evil corporate supermarket chains are in suburban sprawl-land and hard to access without vehicles. I'll see what folks think is doable at the first Greens meeting in a couple weeks. I know for sure we'll be doing more Starbucks pickets and coffee dumps since they are so obnoxiously close to campus and everyone already hates them so much.
Fair Trade Cocoa:
People are very excited about this - in fact, the WI Fair Trade Campaign has already done some protest actions in Milwaukee on the cocoa issue. There is apparently some national chocolate wholesale dealer located there - you probably know about that already...if not, you might want to call Steve Watrous and see what more they have planned. At any rate, since there are no Sees outlets in WI, we'll find some local equivalent to go after - or maybe just march up and down State St. on Valentine's Day with "Have a Heart - Don't Buy Slave Chocolate" signs and educate passerbys. No doubt, the local chocolate peddlers will call the cops on us, but as long as we're on the sidewalk moving and not blocking their doors we're perfectly legal!
Please send us the Valentines and any other materials you have on the cocoa issue - I'm sure we could also get some press coverage for whatever we do on Feb. 14th, and maybe even an indepth article in Progressive Magazine (which happens to be based in Madison...)
March 21, 2001 (John Peck)
Just had Starbucks demo, now trying to get Fair Trade coffee on campus (there is a mobilization of more numbers, so this could be happening soon). Speakers coming from Mexico to speak on Fair Trade pre-April 20/21 for FTAA kickoff weekend.
December 12, 2000 (John Peck)
Here's the latest on fair trade in Madison. We had a great Fair Trade Holiday Fair last weekend (12/2) at the Pres House, cosponsored by all sorts of groups and which attracted hundreds of socially conscientious shoppers. During the fair, the UW Greens also had a "Santa's Sweatshop" outside, exposing the horrors of the corporate alternative with a sewing machine, enslaved elves, and so on. Got lots of press coverage and positive feedback - I'll send you some of the articles and handouts. Fair trade coffee was one of the staples at the fair and being sold by many vendors.
As far as I know, the UW-Madison Memorial Union offers organic fair trade coffee as just one of its gourmet "alternatives" and they use the Alterra brand. We (obviously) have been pushing them to devote more time and energy into promoting such and would prefer that ALL the coffee at the union be organic fair trade shadegrown - but that's "pie in the sky" (we can't even get them to stop buying apparel from sweatshops...) A much better example is offered by Edgewood College in Madison (a smaller Catholic school) where ONLY fair trade coffee (I think it is Equal Exchange) is available in their cafeteria - they also sent a whole busload of people to SOA, so they practice what they preach.
As for Starbucks, we are still boycotting them despite their token effort at offering fair trade coffee since they are so vehemently anti-union and engage in numerous other disreputable business practices - like saturation marketing, buying leases out from under locally owned coffeeshops, leveraging exclusive contracts with suppliers, lobbying for monopolies in quasi-public facilities, etc. etc. UW-Madison is currently invested in Starbucks (via its Trust Fund, as are probably many other publics schools) and we included Starbucks among our "Filthy Fifty" list of irresponsible corporations when we testified at the Board of Regents annual socially responsible investment forum in mid Nov. As far as we can tell, the regents' socially responsible investment policy is just hollow rhetoric - we have no evidence of any active negative screening.
April 13 (John Peck)
We organized a Starbucks action with free samples of Fair Trade coffee
We have had a long campaign against Starbucks, to keep the chain out of neighborhoods and keep their exploitation coffee out of Madison.
