This week, pupils from Liss had their final lesson on Fairtrade. We looked to summarise our learning over the unit, therefore the pupils carried out the same activity as the first lesson of putting beans in pots according to what they thought causes poverty. The children were given 3 beans each and were asked to investigate nine statements. When they found a statement that they felt was most accurate they could place one of their beans in a cup next to the statement. If they wished, they could place all their beans in a particular cup.
The results were as follows:
A quick analysis of the results shows that the children’s thinking had changed dramatically over the course of the unit. There was a strong recognition that while climate change and war were causes of poverty, international trade was a massive factor in ensuring that people stayed in poverty, and that people in richer countries help ensure this is the case by wanting to pay less for goods from poorer countries. The pupils were also angered by the fact that many big companies avoid paying tax to countries in the developing world. They saw this as fundamentally unfair.
Over the course of the unit, the teachers at Liss were really pleased at how our pupils developed their understanding of Fairtrade and how important it is to people living in the developing world. Ultimately, it is down to us to ensure that we buy Fairtrade products when we have a choice. We can choose to be part of the problem or do something about it.
Following our last lesson on Fairtrade chocolate, the children today wrote letters to a major supermarket asking them to stock Crested Crane Chocolate, their own Fairtrade chocolate bar creation. The letters show a range of persuasive devices but also explain why Fairtrade is really important.
To begin today’s lesson, Mr Stanley drew two chocolate bars on the whiteboard and asked the class to deliberate on what factors would lead to them buying one bar or the other. The children came up with the following considerations:
Taste/texture
Price
Size
Special offers/promotions
Fairtrade mark
Advertising
Brand
Type (dark, milk or white)
Quality
Condition
We then looked at what the Fairtrade mark actually means and identified the four key components of this:
It means farmers and workers get better wages and working conditions
It guarantees a fair price for the producers
It provides extra money to go to the community
Allows small farmers to join together in cooperatives to sell their products.
We discussed how community money might be used to improve sanitation, provide teachers for a school,improve medical care or to build housing. Next, we looked closely at the different stages of the journey from producer to consumer and arranged them in the correct order.
After he has scraped the cocoa beans out of the cocoa pod, the farmer leaves them to dry.
The dried cocoa beans are weighed.
The sacks of cocoa beans are loaded onto a ship, ready to be brought from Africa to Europe
The cocoa beans are ground. Milk and sugar are added to make chocolate – yummy!
Chocolate bars are formed, wrapped and packed. Then they are delivered to the shops.
Mr Stanley then outlined one final task before we evaluate the learning unit. The children have been set the task of writing to Tesco persuading them to stock a new Ugandan Fairtrade product – Crested Crane Chocolate. They have also been asked to design the chocolate bar and a new Fairtrade Mark. The results of this will be seen in the next blog post.
Following on from last week’s fair trade lesson, Rowan class started off with a quick recap of the previous week’s learning, in particular a renewed discussion over how much people should be paid for the process of growing and selling bananas. The children decided to write their thoughts. Here are three of the children’s arguments:
After the children had completed their writing, we repeated the previous exercise when the children had to sell their bananas to Mr Stanley in his role as representative of the Big Banana Company. However, this time some of the children were given fair trade tokens. When Mr Stanley came to buy their bananas he gave each of these pupils 8 tokens instead of the two which he gave to the rest of the class.
This then led to a discussion on what Fairtrade means to the growers and the children completed an exercise on the difference between a banana and a fair trade banana.
The children came to the following results:
For a fairtrade banana
My workers have better homes and better education
My farmer has a guaranteed contract
My workers spent many hours looking after me
My workers are members of a co-op. They can make their own decisions.
My farmer doesn’t use dangerous chemicals on the banana plants.
For a non fairtrade banana
My workers have poor housing, poor education and poor health
My workers have no union and no say in how their lives go
My workers had to work 12 hours a day, six days a week
My workers could lose their jobs anytime
My workers used dangerous chemicals to kill any pest which might damage the banana plants.
We finished the session by discussing what fairtrade means and came to the conclusion that fair trade allows the farmers and growers to obtain a fair price for the work they carry out in producing many of our staple foods. It also stops big companies driving down prices at the expense of the growers just so we can have cheap food
This morning, the Year 6 classes as Liss Junior School began to take a detailed look at fair trade. We began by discussing what causes poverty. The children were given 3 beans each and were asked to investigate nine statements. When they found a statement that they felt was most accurate they could place one of their beans in a cup next to the statement. If they wished, they could place all their beans in a particular cup. These are the results for Rowan Class:
Statement
Votes cast
Percentage
Climate change means flood and droughts
19
26%
International trading system is unfair to poor countries
5
7%
People can’t grow enough food because of wars
13
18%
People are too poor to buy food
15
21%
Food grown on the best farmland is sold to rich countries
3
4%
Many big companies don’t pay the tax they should to poor countries
2
3%
People in rich countries want to pay less for things they buy, so wages in poor countries stay low
2
3%
Corruption and bad government in bad countries
1
1%
People in rich countries don’t give enough in aid and charity
13
18%
Casting votes for the causes of poverty
There was a lot of thought and discussion
Once we had calculated the percentages, we had a discussion as to why the pupils had made their choices. What became very clear was how aware the children are of the issues relating to climate change and war – the situation in Syria was mentioned several times. Where the children had less awareness was on the issues of corruption and bad government. This is not necessarily surprising as they are not at an age where they would study politics yet.
With this opening task complete, our next task was to find out where much of our food comes from in the UK. We used a world map and identified which countries supplied the UK the following foods:
Bananas – The Caribbean, Costa Rica
Soya – Brazil
Pineapple – Costa Rica
Cocoa – West Africa
Sugar – The Caribbean
Palm Oil – South East Asia
We noticed that many of these ingredients came from poorer parts of the world. This raised the question – if all these poor countries are selling us lots of good then why are they so poor?
We then looked at the ingredients in a chocolate bar and found out that only one of the ingredients is produced in the UK. A discussion followed about why chocolate was so cheap in the UK when so many of the ingredients were imported. Mr Stanley told the children how big companies will pay producers very low prices in order to ensure that prices are kept low in richer countries like the UK and to ensure that their profit margins high.
Next, Mr Stanley got the children to undertake an exercise. He asked the class to draw their own bananas to represent bananas that were grown.
Drawing bananas
Once the children had finished drawing and cutting out their bananas, Mr Stanley said that he would return to the class in five minutes to make the class an offer for the 25 bananas that had been produced.
When Mr Stanley returned to the class, the children had discussed the sale carefully and come up with a price of 1000 counters for all 25 bananas. Mr Stanley said that he would consider the price and would have a think about it. After 30 seconds Mr Stanley made the class a counter – offer of 50 units: one – twentieth of the price the children had asked for. This caused understandable outrage in the class, but Mr Stanley told the class that BB (Big Bananas), the company he was representing had been to another class who had accepted this offer. If Rowan Class weren’t prepared to accept his offer then he would do business with the other class.
With the exercise over and the children very angry, Mr Stanley took the children through the stages from a banana being grown to being sold in a supermarket in the UK. This can be seen below:
We discussed who should get the most money from the sale of the banana. The children thought that the grower should receive the majority of the payment or at least an equal share. They were genuinely shocked when they saw how little the grower was actually paid. One pupil was so angry about this that she was almost speechless.
In our next lesson we will be writing about what we have discovered so far as well as beginning to investigate what fairtrade actually means.
