Fair’s Fair By LINDA GARSON Photography by INGRID KUENZEL
Wine producers face problems all over the world, but in developing countries such as South Africa, Chile and Argentina, they also face unique economic, social and political challenges. This can mean many smaller growers are unable to compete, and when they can’t generate enough income to meet their family’s basic needs, they end up losing their farms and going out of business.
Enter Fair Trade. You may have heard of and seen Fair Trade coffee and chocolate in our stores, and increasingly, Fair Trade wine is becoming available. But what is it and what does it mean? In 1979, family wine group Bodegas Torres was the first foreign company to back Chilean vineyard production, acquiring a small winery in Curicó, in Chile’s Central Valley. Just over thirty years later, they became the first major Chilean winery of Chile to be certified Fair Trade. We caught up with Miguel Torres Maczassek, managing director of Bodegas Torres, while he was in Calgary recently, to learn more about Fair Trade and its benefits to producers and consumers. Why did Torres decide to pioneer Fair Trade in Chile?
Torres describes the effect of the huge earthquake that hit Chile in February 2010. The company helped their staff, suppliers and partners – even turning their cellars into woodworking shops to build forty houses for their workers and other local people who had lost their homes. “After the earthquake, we decided to start the project with Fair Trade as we had the idea to do a project that would help our workers every day, not just after an earthquake. We had to fight a bit too as the Chilean government did not know much about Fair Trade, so they taxed the donations, but now they don’t have to pay any tax and the full percentage goes to the winegrowers. We fought for a year for that,” he adds. And what standards does a winery have to meet, to be accredited Fair Trade? There are four central pillars to which they rigorously adhere, Torres explains:
1. “We make sure the price the grape producers get for their grapes is a high enough price that they can have a profit every year. This gives stability, which is very important. It sounds very simple, but it doesn’t happen because in agriculture, many years people can’t cover their costs.”
2. “The growers get a percentage of the cost of production. Between 5-10 per cent of the cost goes into a bank of money, and it goes back to the