By Fr. Shay Cullen, MSSC

Fr. Shay Cullen is known throughout the world for his work in rescuing child prostitution and in charging the international law to make children safer. Less known is the other work of his PREDA Foundation in Olongapo which runs a Fair Trade Program, here is a simple story to keep you understands what fair can do for those on the margins of life. After all isn’t that what mission is about: bringing good news to those who hungry.

Sold like Slaves

Juanito de la Paz was a poor hard-working man who lived in a small bamboo and grass house on the hillside of Olongapo City. His children played outside the perimeter fence of what was then the largest military base in Asia – Subic Bay. He earned just enough for the bare necessities of life, like millions of our people in the world today who live in squalor surrounded by plenty. I said the ‘was’ poor and ‘did’ lice in poverty because that has changed, and I want to tell you why and how. That military base and hundreds like it swallowed up vast amounts of the Philippines natural resources and created wealth for a few families who has contacts with the military or owned clubs and bars where women and children were sold like slaves in a cattle auction.

Rattan Baskets

So Juanito used a minimal amount of the raw material growing in the forest around him to make baskets. The rattan grew back again and his basket making was sustainable. Juanito took his baskets down the mountain, and stood after day on the side of the road selling his baskets to the tourists from the base and Manila. The people who could afford his beautiful baskets would not pay a decent prize for them. They haggled and bargained and brow beat Juanito with their superior ways saying they could buy cheaper elsewhere. Rich as they were, they wanted everything as cheaply as possible. They took advantage of his lack of education, his inbred docility and the submissiveness that came from hunger.

Blind to Real Value

"My children couldn’t eat the baskets,” he said. “I had to sell them for whatever they gave me eventhough I knew they cheated me and they only bought one ore two. It’s good we planted vegetables and raised some chickens and had a mango tree. Otherwise we would starve,” he told me. These better-off shoppers sis not value the skill and the time consuming labor that went into the gathering and preparation of the raw material for the baskets and skill of weaving and shaping then into a symmetrical and pleasing form. Nor did they see the artistic value of a unique hand-made product, the same people, without thinking would pay five times as much for a machine stamped plastic basin, that came from oil and was not biodegradable.

Better Deal

One day Juanito came to Preda (our foundation) and asked me to go to his house and see his products. I went gladly and saw for myself the poverty. Soon Juanito was making baskets by the hundred for Preda’s customer like Global Village, for which he earned a lot more than he received previously. His brother and a cousin were quickly employed and the n he begun to teach his equality poor neighbors. Immediately his eldest went to school everyday, and they cast off the threadbare t –shirts for a new brightly colored t-shirts and blouses.

Life Improved

Pride and dignity came back, and Juanito, who had become a drinker of cheap liquor to stave off hunger and his misery, was sober alert and a busy improving his house. From his and his brothers’ savings and a grant from Preda he has a solid concrete house today, impervious to typhoons and floods. It is a common storage area for raw material and the finished baskets of the neighbor, too. They are doing much better as a direct result of the fair prices.

That’s Fair Trade

That is what FAIR TRADE does. It immediately injects cash into a family and a community, the positive effects are seen at once. No decade long waiting for the promised ‘trickle down’ of improved living standards from the overflow of the bubbling pots just earnings directly into the baskets of the producers.