New Internationalist 322 April 2000

Fair trade

 Small change, big difference
Transnational corporations prefer their trade 'free' because they run two-thirds of it and don't take kindly to democratic control. David Ransom weighs up the alternatives.

The level playing field
Or how colonialism turned into globalization, in three easy stages.

Photo: NIKKI VAN DER GAAGDream scheme
Tea for three. In southern India, tribal people have taken over the colonial tea plantation. Mari Marcel Thekaekara describes the twists of turning a bright idea into hard cash.

The percolator
Murray MacAdam follows Ten Thousand Villages into an upmarket retail location in Toronto.

Trading out of trouble
Reports from Kenya, Sri Lanka and Peru by Carol Wills and Emmeline Skinner.

FAIR TRADE - THE FACTS

Sleepless in Seattle
Anita Roddick's diary - how her search for ideas and inspiration almost ended in tear gas.

Illustration by IAN MOORECamels and coyotes
The fair-trade game anyone can play.

Good busy-ness
Trading fairly in a world branded by big business is hard work, says Pauline Tiffen.

ACTION
What you can do - the principles, the players and who to contact in the place where you live.
THIS
MONTH'S
THEME
Click here to 'Shop with Attitude' @ NI on-line.
FROM THIS MONTH'S EDITOR

As you can see, the magazine has had a spring clean. There's a new logo, a new layout and other 'tweaks' designed to make it easier and more enjoyable for you to read.

And we've rearranged the furniture. You get the same overview of a topic, and an in-depth background briefing, in slightly less space. This makes room for more variety and some new regular features, while others stay much the same but with a different name. Only your Letters and the redoubtable Country Profile remain unchanged at the front and the back of the magazine respectively. Some things are sacred, even for us.

What with the launch of our Readers' Representative Scheme and an overhauled website (www.newint.org) the NI has had a major renovation.

Photo of this month's editor.But we haven't moved house. New Internationalist still reports on what's really going on - good as well as bad, the ideas as well as the action - behind the gloss of globalized news.

In any event, you the readers are judge and jury - please do give us your verdict.

The editor's signature.

David Ransom
for the New Internationalist Co-operative
davidr@newint.org

NICK COBBING / STILL PICTURES
REGULAR
FEATURES

 

 

 

 

 

Letters
Dirt-simple economics; stop bombing Iraq - start covering Nigeria; the atrocities of PR.
PLUS Letter from Lebanon by Reem Haddad.

Factfile - Water
The bare essentials of a basic necessity.

View from the South
Urvashi Butalia on the loss of small things in India.

Currents
Denouncing the dollar in Ecuador; The arms-sales show goes on; coconuts kill mosquitoes; mums are smarter.
PLUS Polyp's Big Bad World.

Mixed media
Books: Smile by Paul Smaïl; Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo; The Brazil Reader; Bulletins from Serbia by Aleksander Zograf. Film/Video: Cradle Will Rock; The Insider. Music: Joko by Youssou N'Dour; Banba Gueej by Cheikh Lô.
PLUS Sharp Focus: Steve Kulak on the tributary of sound at ECM. PLUS Webwatch.

Ether Street
Night in a deserted farmhouse. Trembling with anticipation, three truth-seekers transcribe a message from beyond the gravy.
PLUS NI Crossword.

Worldbeaters
Why Rupert Murdoch deserves a thrashing.

Essay - the man we called Juan Carlos
The unquiet times of a Guatemalan peasant turned Mayan activist and priest, recorded by filmmaker Heather MacAndrew.

Country Profile - Sierra Leone

 

 

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