by Miles Litvinoff

December 2005

There’s a growing range of enjoyable Fair Trade wines from the New World on the market. If you’ve ever wondered what makes these brands different from the rest, the award-winning Los Robles label is as good a place as any to start.

Vinos Los Robles is a wine cooperative in Chile’s Curicó valley, a few hours south by bus from the capital Santiago. Owned by its 67 members - small and medium size wine growers - it employs between 80 and 90 people all year round and up to 250 during harvest time. There are not many wine coops left in Chile today - the Pinochet dictatorship put paid to most of them in the 1970s. Los Robles, established in 1943, is one that survived.

The coop’s Fair Trade connection began in 1990 in association with Oxfam Belgium and Max Havelaar Netherlands. Fair Trade links with the UK (Traidcraft), Germany (GEPA) and Switzerland (Claro) followed, and now independent retailers and supermarkets are in on the act. Today 15 to 20 per cent of Los Robles wine is Fairtrade certified, exported to Western Europe, and it’s aiming for 100 per cent certification.

Ecological and Social Fund

The key to Los Robles’s efforts to make its part of the world a better place is its Ecological and Social Fund, established in 2000 with money from the “social premium” (extra payment) that Fair Trade importers pay for its produce. This fund supports an impressive range of activities that benefit not only employees of the cooperative and of its Fairtrade-certified members but also small poor farmers and their households in the surrounding towns and countryside.

Benefits for employees have included major pay rises for the lowest paid, help with home buying and repairs, supplementary health insurance and support during personal and family emergencies. All good stuff, but nothing remarkable for any decent employer perhaps.

But when it comes to working with some of the poorest people in the surrounding communities, and the range of social partnerships that the coop has entered into -- the approach begins to look really impressive.

In partnership with a non-governmental anti-poverty programme, Los Robles supports young graduate agronomists and social workers who live and work with local communities.

Finding that local children were often unable to get to school because private bus drivers did not want to pick them up and collect only a child’s fare (lower than adults’), the coop used money from its Ecological and Social Fund to buy a school bus and donate it to the nearest municipality.

Another project involves using Fair Trade money to help low income people buy land, grow produce and build their own homes. This time the partner is a specialist housing foundation for poor rural areas. The local mayor’s office and community groups have a say in who benefits.

Los Robles also has a joint project with the University of Chile’s social science faculty that supports the formation of student cooperatives in local schools. The aim is to enable school students to experience democratic decision-making and to address problems of low self-esteem that are common among poor rural people. One activity involves students in choosing books and materials to buy for community use.

There’s more. Los Robles uses its Ecological and Social Fund to provide computers and printers for community IT classes for children and adults. There’s a micro-credit scheme and support to local smallholders in the production and domestic marketing of chillies and olives. Los Robles works with the community in lobbying for public works such as riverbank flood defences. It organises transport and visits by smaller wine producers to other growers to improve their skills, and arranges educational outings by bus for low-income mothers and children. There’s support for poorer households in paying university fees for their children too.

Just starting in 2006 is an English teaching programme in local schools – both as a practical skill and to raise self-esteem. The partner for this activity is the University of Northumbria from the UK.

What’s next for Los Robles? Organic production is one target. Another is to see the benefits of its social and environmental programme broadening to include all the 53,000 people who live in the surrounding municipalities. And the coop wants to keep winning prizes for the quality of its wines too.

Notes

Miles Litvinoff interviewed Sergio Allard Neumann, Export Director, Vinos Los Robles, in Santiago, Chile, 22 December 2005.

(C) Miles Litvinoff 2006. This article is from Miles Litvinoff’s forthcoming book with John Madeley, 50 Reasons to Buy Fair Trade. No permission is needed by Fair Trade organisations to reproduce the article, provided that Miles Litvinoff is acknowledged as the author and notified of its use (miles.litvinoff@phonecoop.coop).