In recognition of more than 10 years of trading with Palestinian farmers, the UK Fair Trade Organisation Zaytoun has been named the winner of the 2016 Fairtrade International’s Trader Award. The Fairtrade Foundation’s Barbara Crowther reflects on her recent olive harvest visit to the West Bank with Zaytoun.
It was desperation that brought Abed Almoati Haydaria, affectionately known locally as “Abu Kamal” or “father of perfection” – to Fairtrade. His Palestinian family in the northern West Bank village of Al Rameh near Jenin had tended their olive groves for generations. Historically, income from the olive harvest had sustained the family, but by 2005, completely isolated from world markets, the local market was flooded and prices had collapsed.
“At that time, we were even forbidden from selling our oil in Gaza,” explains Abu Kamal. “All the local traders and middlemen were taking advantage of the situation and exploiting us. Even at a low price, I couldn’t sell my oil, it was just sitting in the house for months. In that year my eldest son finished high school with a score of 98% in his final exams and he wanted to go to university, but I couldn’t afford to send him. The price for oil was far below the cost of production.”
It was then that Abu Kamal met a farmer from another village who told him they had joined a new organisation, the Palestine Fair Trade Association, where farmers were earning two and a half times the local market rate. He couldn’t quite believe it, but quickly organised a village co-operative of 12 farmers and applied to join.
10 years on, I am sitting with Abu Kamal, his wife and their extended family in the shade of their olive trees. Children are playing around the trees, occasionally helping their parents to pick the olive fruit from the lower branches. The co-operative has thrived, the farmers have been able to increase the wage levels or shares in the olive oil production for their workers because they can sell their oil via the Canaan Fair Trade Association all over the world, including to the UK Fair Trade Organisation, Zaytoun (which, with beautiful symmetry, is the Arabic word for olive).
Most recently the farmers have used Fairtrade premiums to support the building of the local mosque, and also put safety railings around the village school. “I’m proud of that,” says Abu Kamal, “It’s where my own children went to school.” Today three of those children are at university. And as we share a delicious picnic lunch of traditional maqloubeh, sat under those gnarly trees groaning with green and black fruit, and gaze at the rocky but beautiful, biblical looking landscape surrounding us, it feels that these farmers are among the luckier ones.
However, as we move further south, to where the town of Beita lies 13km south of Nablus, we’re told of farmers who, several weeks into the harvest season have not been able to access their land. Beita is surrounded by an army outpost and three Israeli settlements in an ongoing encroachment into Palestinian land. Under the controversial 2000 Oslo Accords, the area around the town has been designated Area C, putting it under full Israeli military control. As we approach, we notice large concrete blocks on the side of the road. Hisham Alakhtash, the leader of the 12 strong local Fairtrade co-operative, says there were road blocks the day before, with no-one being allowed in or out of the village for five hours. “It happens”, he says, they do not know why. But the road blocks are not the reason that one of Hisham’s fellow farmers has not been able to harvest. “Every time they try to do the olive harvesting, settlers see them and run down the valley and start to shoot at them,” says Hisham. “Until today he has not managed to do one single day of harvesting.”
He’s not the only one. In nearby Burin, where 50-60% of land has now been confiscated for the construction of Israeli settlements, an international solidarity effort has had to be mounted, with farmers being accompanied during harvest season by international volunteers in an attempt to protect them from the vigilante violence. Yet, even they have been attacked – just days before our visit, 66-year-old British volunteer David Amos had sustained a very nasty head injury during an attack by a gun-wielding gang of settlers. These settlements have been ruled as illegal by the United Nations and UN General Secretary Ban-ki Moon recently called their expansion “an affront to the Palestinian people and to the international community”. And yet, land confiscations and demolitions continue, and settlers are allowed to attack farming families with seeming ongoing impunity.
In the five months since the start of October 2015, there has been a tragic escalation of violence in Israel and Palestine. By mid-January 2016, 160 Palestinians had been killed and more than 15,000 injured, and the attacks continue to this day. On Friday 26 February, Israeli forces shot and killed 17 year old Palestinian-American Mohammad Ali Sha’lan just north of Ramallah. Over 480 Palestinians, including 220 children have been left homeless in the West Bank in a series of demolitions by Israeli forces. Official Israeli figures confirm that 422 Palestinian children had been detained and imprisoned by security forces in 2015.
Against this backdrop, however, the farming families I met only wanted to get on with their lives, to tend their olive groves peacefully, and to be able to harvest and press their fruit to produce the delicious, lucid green and peppery extra virgin olive oil at their heart of their own culinary culture, as well as their main source of export income. More than anything, they want to maintain an attachment to their olives and their land that is centuries old, and for it to remain at the heart of their children’s future. “This is what we do, in the field, in the olive press,” says Hisham, with his four year old daughter Mais on his lap. “We hope they grow up to love it as we love it. The olive tree is a blessed tree in Palestine, so we have a blessed olive oil. We would like everyone in international markets to support marginalised farmers living under challenging conditions because we know how to produce quality olive oil.”
Here’s how to support Zaytoun and stand up for Palestinian farmers this Fairtrade Fortnight:
- Go along to one of Zaytoun’s events during Fairtrade Fortnight.
- Hold a Fairtrade breakfast with this delicious recipe for lemon and mint eggs (pdf) by Fairtrade Foundation’s Patron Allegra McEvedy.
- Join Zaytoun for the 2016 Olive Harvest tour.
- Buy Zaytoun Fairtrade olive oil, almonds and other products – find your local stockist here.
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