Read the report here and see the video here

The jury of the 7th International Audiovisual Festival of Biodiversity was composed by:
Andrea D’Ambrosio (film director and president of the jury)
Giancarla Del Mese (film director)
Davide Marengo; (film director)
Michele Bozzano (representative of Bioverstiy International)
Michele Conforti; (film director)

This is the motivation of the jury:
THE BITTER TASTE OF TEA: a strong documentary that has a capacity to show with great
rigity and without hypocrisy the conditions in which workers of the tea plantations of Bangladesh
are being exploited. The film has an advantage of showing the real face of “fair” trade, where
everything just seems to be clear and ethical and in fact is not. In fact, these companies and
plantations are the places where, just like in “traditional trade”, people are exploited. The film talks
a dry, rigid language that makes it a reportage of a strong emotional impact.

Great news.

The Bitter Taste of Tea has been selected to take part in the Documentary Film
Competition of the 7th International Audiovisual Festival of
Biodiversity, that will be held in Rome from 19h to 23rd May 2010.

From 10th of May until the end of the festival the film will also be online at www.arcoiris.tv

People from all over the world will be given the opportunity to vote for their favourite film.

Read more here or download/listen to the podcast here.

We will be there to talk about the film, and to to do a Q&A with the audience.

And we are not alone. A handfull of some very exiting films will be shown during the week. Take a look here.

On January 20. The Bitter Taste of Tea was screened at UCLA International Institute Human Rights film series. More info here.

And no matter how accurate I present my questions any clear answer seems to evaporate as moist on a hot day.

Maybe it’s because that there are none – or to be polite – so few that any talk about “doing a difference” is a joke. What we know is that only some of the workers in a Fairtrade certified tea estate in Sri Lanka got a gas burner some 11 years ago. Last year they got a laundry basket and a cheap Chinese made thermo flask. That’s it. After 15 years as a Fairtrade certified estate that’s not a lot!

In another Fairtrade certified estate in Sri Lanka, the Fairtrade Premium has been used to build a so-called community house. But the doors are locked. The poor workers have to pay rent to open the doors to their own community house.

In other Fairtrade estates, workers have been on strike for almost a year. All they want is a minor raise in the low salary in order to be able to buy some food for the family. No luck – so far.

Fairtrade’s challenge in the tea business is that most estates are owned and organized by multinational companies – more or less – in the exact same way as the in the colonial days some 50-60 years ago. This is not a small farmers association as in many parts of the Coffee business, and it is not small entrepreneurs working at their homes producing handicraft-material sold in small shops in our part of the World. This is a gigantic, multi billion industry.

So what’s new?

Well, what Fairtrade did was to promise me (here we go again) that they would intensify the number of unannounced inspections in the tea estates in order to get a more un-biased look on what’s really going on.

However, Fairtrade had to admit that more than six month after the promise, no single unannounced inspection had been made.

Why is that, I asked?

Well, as the estates have to pay for all the inspections done by the so-called independent assessor, FLO-CERT (Invented by FLO, and stays at the same address in Bonn, Germany) the estate managers did not want to pay. It’s as simple as that.

And here we are at the center of the dilemma.

If you read what Fairtrade promise the consumers and how they work in e.g. the tea estates, where they claim that Premium money is being used to improve the poor conditions, anyone would say: “Well, that’s good – Let’s support that”.

My question is (and that has not yet been answered either):

“If it is so good, why is not every single tea estate in the World a certified member of the “do-good-industry?”

Can someone tell me that?

The Jury’s justification for the choice of Tom Heinemann as a recipient of the Timbuktu Fund price for critically journalism on developing countries:
Tom Heinemann has for many years worked with radio and television documentaries as his primary journalistic platform, but in a form and with a content which has enabled him to dominate the developing country information and journalism for many media platforms, primarily in Denmark but also in several other countries.
These programs have had an impact, which often made their content to news materials in both print and electronic media.
His features are well-researched, information-saturated and critical radio and television documentaries focusing on issues that show the close interaction between our world, trade and consumption and the production and working conditions conducive to human conditions in some developing countries.
The 3 TV documentaries: “A Killer Bargain”, “A Tower of Promises” and “The Bitter Taste of Tea” have all documented the exploitation of people and unpleasant contexts in economics, production and consumption between rich and poor countries, and they have done so in a way that has caused debate and media interest beyond the particular developing country interested audience.
The programs which are an extension of an even more extensive production of radio documentaries, including Tom Heinemann’s “Tøjslaverne from Burma” (“The Real Slaves of Fashion from Burma) from 2003 is the best known.
The debate has taken place both in the popular media and various organizations, and its impact has been great. Large companies have had to apologize and assert that they would change their policy.
Critical journalism requires diligence.
The critical programs challenges and insult strong players with plenty of access to expensive lawyers. Therefore, the requirements for precision and accuracy are very high.
Tom Heinemann has worked for countless years of this kind, and he has done it in such a serious way that nobody has been able to challenge the seriousness or integrity.
The risk of litigation is a major cause of journalistic thoroughness and care.
But it is an almost equally big challenge to finance this type of productions. Normally, the cooperation of several television stations, each of which must rely on unassailable and seriousness.
Therefore, the assumption of fundraising including the documentation to ensure that the debate about the programs will focus on their core content and the prosecutor, not on the outside works.
It is not didactic finger programs, but the quality of journalism in an area that is often overlooked and marginalized.
Tom Heinemann’s works show that the global journalistic histories of Danish and European relevance are available.
His work is based on a true and insofar as the traditional kind of journalistic thinking that says that when the story is good enough, it can also become journalistic news, no matter how far it is from the daily fast addictive journalistic practices.
He also tells a comprehensive story that the big media and their executives can learn a lot from – if they dare.
Persistence, continuity and consistency
Tom Heinemann was in competition with a total of 13 nominees.
Three of the thirteen were nominated for the final assessment.
Besides Tom Heinemann was the photographer and journalist Jørgen Stjerneklar and the ngo, DanWatch.
It was a very strong field, but Tom Heinemann receives the price because of his stubbornness, continuity and consistency over the many years he has worked to develop the traditional critical developing country journalism in a way that irrevocable has documented the important links between rich and poor countries .
He has done so in a way that has created surprising and important journalistic news.
And they are driven much further out than usual when it comes to developing countries journalism.

The dream of the perfect is often the worst enemy of good.

The journalist Tom Heinemann continues his hunt on Fairtrade. The question is, who it really is beneficial for.

Last week, Information printed a new comment from journalist Tom Heinemann. Again Heinemann argues that Fairtrade does not make a difference in the tea plantations in Sri Lanka and that Fairtrade does nothing to improve its system. Both are wrong.

Heinemann believes that there should be more progress out on the plantations. We agree, but as I have previously argued, it requires that there should be sold more Fairtrade tea.
Because the sale is in direct proportion to the improvements that can be made. That is the Fair Trades logic and restraint. But the mother, who was able to give her children an education because of microcredit from Fairtrade means giving Heinemann’s “all or nothing’ philosophy makes little sense.

Fairtrade also makes much of constantly developing our system. There is no doubt that we will be even better to support the workers, so the democracies, yet only in their infancy, can function better. But again, because the attempt to establish a democracy in a post-colonial context is not without fault, is it equally significant in that it will completely fail? We must also work with cooperatives, which are the cornerstone of Fairtrade, but should the many plantation workers are left without any attempt to improve their lives step by step?

Things take time

Since the broadcast of ’The bitter taste of tea’ was sent in autumn 2008, Max Havelaar promised to look at whether there needs to be adjusted in the control system, including the number of unannounced inspections. The debate is currently in the Fairtrade system. And it is a technical discussion: we must do what works best, not just what is urgently makes journalists or others happy. Possibly a half or full year’s professional considerations seem long, but there it is now, when you work in an international democratic system, which includes representatives from the workers and peasants, as it is all about, is helping to decide rate.

Fairtrade is not in the pockets of plantation management, which Heinemann argues. I would like to make an actual example. The Greenfield plantation in Sri Lanka is currently suspended from Fairtrade because the estate has not addressed the remarks given by inspectors. Over the next three months, these thing has to be put right. If the management doesn’t do something serious about this, the estate risks to be thrown completely out of the system.

Please come, Heinemann

Heinemann mentions a number of other problems in the plantations, whose names he did not divulge. If he really wants to help the workers, it would be constructive to Heinemann came to Fairtrade organizations with this information. Then I will promise that they will be investigated.

And it is clear that there will always be problems when working with development among the world’s poorest workers. There will always be gaps and things that have not been addressed 100 percent. up. So when Heinemann or other journalists return to the plantations, they will also experience this. For those of us who work with Fairtrade, there will not be a juicy ‘disclosure’ but instead a proof that the conditions in the ‘global south’ has not changed over night.

That’s the conditions, and you have to accept the premise.
As a friend said to me the other day: The dream of the perfect is often the worst enemy of good.