With respect to the 20th anniversary of Media becoming a Fair Trade Town, our committee member, David Johnston, wrote this article about how our work in Media is redemptive of the historic transatlantic slave trade.
The transatlantic slave trade, which for over 300 years brought enormous wealth to Europe and the Americas and unimaginable suffering to millions of Africans uprooted from their lands and families, was finally abolished in England in 1807. Member of Parliament, William Wilberforce, had worked tirelessly for thirty years with an alliance of civil society activists to make this happen. They largely succeeded through boycotting sugar—Britons consumed sugar more than any other Europeans—because it was produced through slave labor in the West Indies.
The Fair Trade movement today is also about educating consumers, this time not about boycotting but rather about choosing to buy ethically traded products, from coffee to chocolate, from bananas to spices, and from clothing to handicrafts. Further, the Fair Trade Town movement started in Garstang, England, in 2000, has also drawn a direct line between the transatlantic slave trade that brought both wealth and shame on their region and the opportunity to correct some of those past evils by engaging in Fair Trade today. The movement’s founder, Bruce Crowther, set up a museum on this theme to educate the public.
Hal Taussig, founder of Untours in Media, got wind of this movement and wanted to be a part of it. He had already established rapport with coffee growers in Mexico and realized the potential of partnering with the Fair Trade Town movement, which today counts over 2,000 Fair Trade Towns and cities in 34 different countries. Hence, the declaration of Media as America’s First Fair Trade Town in 2006.
One of the towns Bruce Crowther rallied to the Fair-Trade cause was New Koforidua in Ghana, a town where there is a coffee producing cooperative. He saw this as not only a wonderful way to salute this 100% employee-owned coffee plantation (now internationally known as Divine Chocolate) but also to officially join together Garstang and New Koforidua as official “twin towns.” Since then, following Bruce’s advice, Media has also declared New Koforidua and Garstang twin towns, officially orchestrating a redemptive Fair Trade Triangle, and thus seeking to repudiate and repair at least a little of the heinous past of the Atlantic slave trade.
*** You can read many more details in my 2024 blog post on the Fair-Trade Triangle and my comments on Bruce Crowther’s autobiography, Not in My Lifetime. A delegation from the New Koforidua coffee plantation came to visit Media in 2019. It was an unforgettable experience when we set up a video call with them and Bruce Crowther!