Thoughts on fair trade from Alleson

We've been back in Canada one month now. We've had a booth at 2 local shows and are planning 2 large textile events in Halifax and Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia to coincide with World Fair Trade Weeks (May 1-15, 2008). We've had a chance to reflect and I want to share some of my thoughts with you about some of the challenges of this work.

Most challenging is the wide variety of producers, locations and conditions associated with the pieces. Classification or certification, whether for fair trade, organic or Canada Customs, always involves standardization; and the artisans we meet and the textiles we trade defy standardization.

There are so many steps involved in handmade textile products that a dozen or more farmers and craftspeople are usually involved in making a single item. Take, for example, a baby’s sunhat. There are a number of people involved with the production:

• the farmer who grew the cotton, organically but without certification
  
• the group of grandmothers who fluffed and spun the yarn by hand
  
• their neighbour and or daughter who wove the cloth
  
• the artist who designed the hat and made the pattern
  
• the tailor who cut the cloth and sewed the machine stitching
  
• the natural dyers who dyed the cloth for decoration
  
• the embroiderers who made and assembled the appliqué detail
  

And, to make matters more complicated, these people don’t all live in the same province well enough village, few of them speak English nor know how to effectively market their work internationally and few are online.

So, first of all there are the logistical problems of all those people working together. Luckily we’ve met some incredibly connected and dedicated Thai community development workers who do knit these production “chains” together. With patience, flexibility and a lot of lead time, those challenges can and have been met.

But whether these complex production networks can be examined, analyzed and certified is another matter. Very likely their way of working doesn’t fit any of the existing models. Perhaps to do so, one would have to sacrifice the conditions and traditions that created the product.

Consequently, we prefer to meet the producers and, when possible, visit the villages where they live and work. That’s the best part of this work but also the most unpredictable.

We have sometimes travelled all day, introduced ourselves in our halting Thai and explained our intentions to incredulous villagers, who of course want us to buy their work, regardless of whether it meets our criteria. When it doesn’t, we usually buy a few pieces anyway to soften their disappointment and, more importantly, to avoid their loss of face, which in Southeast Asian cultures is something always to keep in mind.

We’ve also had crazy situations, like when our rented motorcycle, fully laden with us and our overflowing shopping bags, gasped to a halt as sunset approached. We were nowhere close to a bus, well enough a hotel, and we ended up hitching a ride in the back of a truck.

These challenges are worth overcoming though – especially as we begin to build stronger relationships both with the women artisans we buy from and with women here in Canada (and elsewhere) who also love and appreciate textiles like these and who like what we're doing. It's a good direction for us.

Alleson

Peace, women and Lao silk

Laos, a small, impoverished and thinly populated country land-locked between China, Thailand, Vietnam and Burma, is renowned for its silk. In recent years, however, a flood of low-quality silk threads and finished weavings from China and Vietnam have overwhelmed the Lao marketplace, resulting in a mishmash of qualities of 'silk' textiles available in Laos and Thailand.

So we were excited to find the not-for-profit Lao Sericulture Co. -- a source of high quality, organic, naturally dyed silk textiles, sold under the name Mulberries.

In 2006, Mulberries was certified by IFAT, the global network of fair trade organizations, a designation earned for its fair trade and poverty alleviation practices.

We're equally excited that Lao Sericulture uses no chemicals anywhere in their cycle of textile production; they (and we) can rightly assert that their silk is 100% organic!

When we were in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, we had the great honour to meet with the founder of Lao Sericulture Co., Kommaly Chantavong, who was a nominee for "1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005." A quiet, dignified woman, Kommaly is well described on the Peacewomen Across the Globe website:

Kommaly was 11 years old when her village was destroyed by US bombers attacking the Ho Chi Minh Trail. She walked for a month to Vientiane, the capital, bringing with her silk weaving skills that her family has been engaged in for generations. “I learned to weave from my mother when I was six years old, and I loved it”, she recollects.

Kommaly studied nursing, but then she found the goal of her life: “I met many desperately poor families displaced from rural areas without any marketable skills,” she explains, “so I started to teach the women how to weave silk...Our goal is to strengthen the position of women by giving them a dependable income and thus improve the chances of their children,” says Kommaly with a gentle but radiant smile.

Lao Sericulture has a production and residential training facility on a farm in Xieng Khouang province, which employs 60 people who:
- raise mulberry trees and the animals that produce the manure to fertilize them;
- raise silkworms and produce silk threads;
- grow the materials they use to naturally dye the silk threads;
- and weave high quality textiles.

Understandably, more than 17 people might be involved in the production of 1 scarf!

Not all of Mulberries' producers are at the farm; more than 2,000 people benefit from their involvement. Lao Sericulture provides silkworm eggs to weavers in numerous villages in several provinces. Women in each village bring a different set of skills to the production cycle: some raise silkworms and produce threads, some are expert with dyes and others specialize in one of the many types of weaving evident in Mulberries' products.

Lao Sericulture also plays an important role in training: there are 40 looms at the farm where village women train free of charge for 3-12 months before returning to their villages to train other women. Because they work with villagers in different provinces, they are able to offer designs that are specialties of each region: ikat (mutmii) from the South, supplementary weft from the central region and discontinuous supplementary weft from the North. (This information is probably of most interest to the weavers among you!)

We bought dozens of 100% organic, naturally dyed scarves and shawls in deep magenta, soft amethyst, vibrant copper, subtle latte, buttery beeswax and more! We are delighted to bring these beautiful textiles to Canada, along with the story and the spirit of Lao Sericulture.

If you'd like to learn more about Kommaly and the 1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005 Campaign, visit the PeaceWomen Across the Globe site.

Ellen (Luk Nok)
and
Alleson (Pii Tem)

Panmai Group: silk art!

Our next visit was to Panmai Group, another women's weaving group in Isaan (Northeast Thailand) that has been organized for almost 20 years. Like Prae Pan Group, it was started to help women earn income so they could stay in their villages, continue traditional work that they learned from their mothers and grandmothers, and supplement their income from rice farming.

Panmai has members in villages spread throughout 3 provinces in Northeast Thailand, close to the border of Cambodia: Roi Et, Surin and Si Saket. We arrived at their office tucked away in a small market town of Roi Et province and settled in for 3 days of work together.

Our goal: to learn what Panmai needs from us to be able to receive orders from us in Canada, and to help them build their capacity to handle international orders, such as ours, by learning how to ship to Canada. (Each country has its own requirements and we are their first Canadian wholesale customer.) Our training included how to fill in the appropriate forms needed by Canadian postal and customs authorities. We did this training, amidst much laughter and language exchanges, with the help of a new staff person who has been hired to work with international customers. At the same time, they taught us how to order in ways that make it most beneficial to the group: we learned the minimum and maximum numbers of scarves to order, for example, which will allow a weaver to most efficiently "warp" the loom (i.e., string the lengthwise threads onto the loom) so that she might make the ideal number of pieces.

We also learned more about the group and its work. We knew they were respected, even renowned, for both their subtle and dynamic natural dyeing of silk, but we also learned that:
- all the silk they use is hand-reeled in member villages (or in other villages in Surin province if Panmai members cannot produce enough at a particular time)
- all mulberry leaves fed to the silkworms are organic and all natural dye materials are organic, so all the Panmai silk is 100% organic!
- members (250 at present) weave 11 months of the year, but are unable to continue the work during the heaviest of the rainy season months
- about 100 members weave in silk and about 50 members raise silkworms and hand-reel the silk, a process called sericulture; they are hoping to expand their capacity to do sericulture in future
- an annual dividend is paid to all members

Most exciting was a new product that we developed with the help of staff and members of Panmai: silk squares for art quilters!

With their help and artistic advice, we developed an attractive package of silk squares in 4 colour combinations, each package containing 4 solid colours and 1 mutmii square (mutmii is a traditional technique involving tie-dying thread to create a beautiful pattern that appears during weaving). We hope that this new product -- which we describe as "100% SILK. 100% ART." -- will be perfect for art quilters who want to incorporate these unique, hand-reeled, naturally dyed, handwoven pieces of silk into their quilts.

Because quilting is not a traditional form of handwork in this part of Thailand, we initially had some trouble explaining what the squares were for. Following the adage that a "picture is worth a thousand words," we went online and introduced the staff to the work of 2 internationally known quilters from our area in Nova Scotia, Canada -- Laurie Swim and Valerie Hearder. The Thai staff members were fascinated by the quilts that we showed them, which we described as "painting with silk," as this was a new art form that they had never seen before.

We plan to return next year with reports on how these pieces of 'silk art' were received by art quilters in Canada, after their debut this June at the 2008 Quilt Canada conference to be held in St. John's, Newfoundland.

Although Panmai also creates beautiful handwoven cottons, our visit with them was a silk extravaganza! Our time together ended with the packing of several boxes of silk squares, scarves, shawls and fabric in the gray-blues of a flower called anchan, magentas and pinks from krang (an insect resin), greens from (lemongrass), oranges and golds from the wood of kanoon (jack fruit trees) and more.

It was an enriching visit for all of us, and we hope that introducing their art to Canada will be as well!

Ellen (Luk Nok)
Alleson (Pii Tem)