Fair trade will be the protagonist on Saturday 11 May at the headquarters of the Officina Solidale association and MondoMangione in via Bernardo Tolomei 7, in Siena with the Monna Agnese institute.
In fact, at 11 am there will be a meeting with two coffee producers, Urania Lisseth Hernandez and Fatima Ismael, respectively president and director of the Soppexcca Cooperative, which brings together Nicaraguan coffee producers in more than ten cooperatives. The initiative takes place at the end of the project “Consume or choose? Food supply chains and sustainable consumption”, which received the contribution of the Ministry of Labor and Social Policies and the Tuscany Region. The leader is the Villaggio dei Popoli association of Florence, with supporters in Siena, Officina Solidale and the Monna Agnese Institute of which some classes were involved (two first classes of the linguistic high school, a second of the technical institute for biotechnology ), through a role-playing game that aimed to make people understand the dynamics of world trade, which penalize small producers and poorer nations.
Some students from Monna Agnese of Siena will be present at the meeting on fair trade: they will also collaborate in the translation service from Spanish into Italian and will be guests at the lunch which will be held at 1pm at MondoMangione, the place managed by a cooperative which is deals with small distribution of organic, local and fair-trade food through direct contacts with producers. For lunch it is possible to book on 0577 226864. In the afternoon at 3pm the role-playing game on Fair Trade will be proposed, which has been brought to schools, creating a lot of interest and debate.
The “Consume and choose?” project it is part of the broader one called “Climate Heroes: fighting poverty with reforestation and strengthening natural ecosystems” which is implemented in Nicaragua, the second poorest country in Latin America. More than 40% of the population lives in poverty, 15% in extreme poverty and almost one in three children under five suffers from chronic malnutrition. The context is aggravated by the population’s vulnerability to natural disasters, including droughts, floods, landslides and hurricanes.
The beneficiaries of the “Climate Heroes” project are 496 coffee producers, of which 156 are women, members of the UCA Soppexcca cooperative, in the Jinotega, El Cuá and Bocay areas.
The project is managed by the Altromercato Foundation and will strengthen the agroforestry system of small farmers, renewing their coffee plants with species more resistant to climate change, planting thousands of new fruit trees to increase biodiversity and the food sovereignty of families. Soppexcca farmers will be connected to the ACORN platform which will record the carbon removal units (CRUs) generated by reforestation. The sale of carbon credits will guarantee the integration of family income.
