business and human rights,
fair trade,
globalization
6:47 AM
Kit Kat has gone fair trade-with the certification label to prove it. Here is an article by Rebecca Smithers of The Guardian explaining the move.
The UK's best-selling chocolate biscuit bar, Kit Kat, is to receive ethical certification through the Fairtrade quality mark, it will be announced today.
After lengthy talks between the UK arm of the Swiss food giant Nestlé and the Fairtrade Foundation, the familiar blue and green logo will appear on the wrappers of Kit Kats in the UK and Ireland from January. Initially the certification will only apply to the larger four-finger Kit Kats but it will be extended to the smaller bars.
The move represents a major coup for Fairtrade, which earlier this year certified Cadbury's Dairy Milk, and means chocolate is now a mainstream Fairtrade product alongside bananas, tea and coffee.
It follows the October launch of Nestlé's global Cocoa Plan, a £65m investment programme over the next 10 years to tackle the key economic, social and environmental issues facing cocoa farming communities. Farmers living and working in Ivory Coast, the world's largest cocoa producing country, will be the main beneficiaries.
As well as the Fairtrade price (or market price if higher) for the cocoa, farmers' groups receive extra Fairtrade premium payments to invest in long-term community and business projects of their own choice, such as education and healthcare. The sugar in the product will also be Fairtrade certified, sourced from Belize.
business and human rights,
environmental sustainability,
fair trade,
globalization,
latin america
3:07 PM
I would normally get fair trade products for certain key items, such as coffee and bananas that are personally important to me (I used to live in several countries in Central America). How can we get grocery stores, particularly for example Sultan Center, to incorporate more fair trade products on their shelves. Anybody have thoughts?
globalization,
liveable cities,
publications and studies
11:46 AM
The Economist has published an blog entry entitled "An Alternative Big Mac Index" about a UBS study that looks how how many hours on average people in a city have to work to afford a Big Mac. This goes a little bit further than the purchasing power Big Mac index.
THE size of your pay packet may be important, but so is its purchasing power. Helpfully, a UBS report published this week offers a handy guide to how long it takes a worker on the average net wage to earn the price of a Big Mac in 73 cities. Fast-food junkies are best off in Chicago, Toronto and Tokyo, where it takes a mere 12 minutes at work to afford a Big Mac. By contrast, employees must toil for over two hours to earn enough for a burger fix in Mexico City, Jakarta and Nairobi.
globalization,
labor rights in the Gulf,
liveable cities,
urbanization fears
1:13 PM
This April 7, 2009 opinion piece from The Independent is one of the most forboding, but in-depth articles I have read on the perils of the Dubai city-model of urban development. It is lengthy but captivating, well-written and reflective.
"Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. Johann Hari reports
The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history.
But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed's smile. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new constructions – like the vast Atlantis hotel, a giant pink castle built in 1,000 days for $1.5bn on its own artificial island – where rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof. This Neverland was built on the Never-Never – and now the cracks are beginning to show. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun than Iceland in the desert.
Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history." (for full article, click here)
globalization,
labor rights in the Gulf,
poetry
11:07 AM
For some, globalization swallowed their lives, a big baleen whale that gulped in their entire ocean.
These men dressed in sandals and dust, scaling the construction scaffolds riskily under the desert sun
They are the tiniest capillaries of the economic crisis— they were always the smallest units of the chain.
big men who left their nowhere villages through a network of transnational agents passing them off.
The migrant labor to the GCC countries became the great baton race of the global economy
but they are truly the voiceless, not a genocide, not a humanitarian crisis, not anything spilling over to our edge.
The poetry in their story requires a squinting of the eyes, ears to the pavement, holding in a breath
to hear the muffled lifesong left behind in the trunks of the abandoned cars at the airport,
to feel the bodyache bad posture of the old luggage slumped on the sidewalk,
to see the loanshark lurking behind each eye inside each man made redundant
their wishes caught in wet concrete or pacing the construction cranes like stray cats unable to climb down
these little ants unload an unfinished skyscraper off their backs, clutching a plane ticket stub as they exit
for some, globalization is a about the wait—waiting for us to recognize them in these modern wonders
financial crisis and development,
globalization,
poetry
2:14 PM
Global Policy Innovations announces the Spring 2009 Poetry Contest.
Theme: Spring is a time of renewal, something that is clearly needed in the global economy in 2009. Carnegie Council'sPolicy Innovations invites you to write a poem that captures this time of growth and send it to us. What do innovations, ethics, and globalization mean to you personally? Paint a moment of emotion—an instant of transformation, personal or political—illustrating humanitarian heroics or global solidarity. We will select a handful of winning poems and publish them in a special issue later this spring. Feel free to send us your poem through email, as Twitter #haiku, or viaFacebook.
Deadline: April 15, 2009
Length: 10 lines or less
Original Work: All work must be original and unpublished reflections on the contest theme.
Publishing: The winning submissions will be published under a Creative Commons license on the Policy Innovations website.
Prize: Literary fame! Policy Innovations is a nonprofit, noncommercial global commons for ideas on crafting a fairer globalization. As such we run no advertisements and rely on thoughtful and generous readers and writers such as you.
Contact: info@policyinnovations.org
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