Excerpt…
To help them launch their new products, Zulfiqar Ali Ghazi from the Fairtrade Pakistani company Mountain Fruits will visit the UK during Fairtrade Fortnight. He will explain how sales of Fairtrade Sun Dried Apricots have enabled remote village communities in the Karakoram and Hunza regions of Pakistan to install new irrigation systems and develop their farms. With the stable and profitable prices they receive through Fairtrade, families have been able to keep their children in school right through secondary education.
Mr Salman Ali, Shishkat Village, a Mountain Fruits farmer, is married with 6 children who are all studying. His main source of cash income is potato, with apricots providing 15 to 20% of his income. He also grows wheat (for animal forage and flour), apples and almonds for personal use. Health and education are what he says he spends any spare cash on. This is the reason he is unable to save money. Apart from farming he has no other income. He likes Mountain Fruits as it “holds the hand the poor. If Mountain Fruits were not buying directly from us then people from the bazaar would play with the prices and we would probably get half of what we get now.”
Tropical Wholefoods first started working with Mountain Fruits in 1999 when they were approached by the Aga Khan Rural Development Programme who wanted a partner to help farmers improve their fruit drying systems and to gain better prices and more stable markets for their products. Staff from Tropical Wholefoods have worked with Mountain Fruits since then, helping to install a new processing factory. Exports are now at 50 tonnes of dried apricots a year and with the addition of new products such as walnuts, almonds and apricot kernels, are expected to rise still further in forthcoming years.
Ismailimail 