Emergence Of Fair Trade Jewelry
Jewelry, perhaps more than any other object we own, has tremendous emotional, symbolic and talismanic value. A wedding ring, for example, represents one’s most cherished commitment to love, family and community.
For fair trade jewelry to gain momentum, the public and trade must begin to see the true value of jewelry as not only in its beauty and what it represents, but also in the live giving benefit to the broader producer communities.
As outlined in our FJA Vision Statement, jewelry can have a tremendously positive impact on those in the developing world. Many of these miners are also farmers who depend upon digging for gems as a way to supplement their income and survive.
Jewelry made from material that benefits organized small scale mining communities has tremendous potential. It connects our wealth directly to some of the poorest people in the developing world through the emerging fair trade movement in the mainstream jewelry sector.
Fair Trade Jewelry
The foundation of any fair trade movement centers on traceability and transparency. You need to know where your piece of jewelry comes from, all the way back through its manufacturing process to the source of the raw materials. Beyond that, fair trade, works within a set of principles and on the ground standards to assure real economic benefit and environmental responsibility to the producer communities.
If you stop to think about it, fair trade really should be the bedrock of any jewelry purchase. Jewelry is highly emotional and symbolic. For many people, it has talismanic value. It makes no sense whatsoever that a wedding ring, which represents our most noble sentiments and commitments, may feature a blood diamonds mounted on gold content that caused twenty tons of new toxic mine tailings.
Yet at present, the industry is totally commodity based and price driven. It is marketed with seductive romance yet sourced like lumber or oil.
The main focus of current reforms is in the mining sector. What usually come to mind when you think of mines are huge open pits and earthmovers with ten-foot tall tires. Yet between 13 and 20 million men, women, and children from over 50 developing countries work in small scale mines, often in impoverished areas associated with corruption, war, and terrible environmental conditions.
If you include families and communities, over 100 million people depend upon small scale mining for survival, according to the World Bank. These artisanal miners produce more raw materials and benefit more people than all the large scale multinational operations combined. For example, up to ninety percent of all gemstones come from small scale artisan miners.
The chaotic nature of small-scale mining districts can lead to unsafe and unfair working conditions and environmental damage. Artisanal mining can be a beneficial contributor to economic growth in the developing world only when destructive impact is mitigated, which is where fair trade comes in.
Yet today, purchasing directly from artisanal miners is challenging because the supply chain often has many links. Materials are mixed with other goods and marketed as a commodity at the lowest possible price. The question is, how do we support their best efforts and bring their products and stories directly to the jewelry case?
One organization that has helped is Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM) (www.communitymining.org) ARM provided capacity and technical support to small scale miners. ARM worked directly with Fair Labeling Organization (FLO) and has been able to bring third party certified gold to market in the UK. This was the first time that a mined product was actually certified by a major fair trade organization.
Meanwhile, many forward thinking jewelry manufactures, myself included, have been utilizing recycled precious metal and traceable “fair trade” gems that are ethically sourced from small scale miners.
What The Green Buyer Can Do
As the co-founder of Fair Jewelry Action (www.fairjewelry.org), a consumer and trade resource driving fair trade initiatives in the jewelry sector, I’ve watched as the mainstream industry seems content to continue in engaging in “certified” bogus “ethical standards” that allows them to engage in much of the same disregard to the environment and human rights as in the past.
For example, we still have reliance on the Kimberley Certification Process (KPC), which supposedly prevents blood diamonds from entering the supply chain. Yet a KPC diamond may come from the Marange Field in Zimbabwe where rapes and numerous other well documented, human rights atrocities have occurred.
If the jewelry sector is to change, it must be consumer driven. Diamonds, traceable to their source and mine to market gold and gemstones are indeed available from a few jewelers that care. If this were to take hold, it could have a greatly beneficial impact all over the world.
We are in a somewhat similar situation to where fair trade coffee was in the 1970s. How fast it takes to make this transition is up to you. Unfortunately, the only thing that is going to motivate the average jeweler is money. If just 5% of people who walked into a jewelry store asked for fair trade gems and wedding rings made from recycled metals, the industry would respond. How long it takes to make this moral standard the norm is up to you.
