Just came back from my first visit to Zimbabwe. You hear so much about Harare, I really wanted to see it for myself. Actually it’s a beautiful city with a fine infrastructure and the people are really friendly and helpful. The traffic though, would drive you crazy. So much of it – and a huge number of one way streets around the city. Good grief.
As you probably know, the world in Zimbabwe is a divided one. Life can be difficult and the farm I visited is trying hard to keep up good standards. Luckily they have a good understanding of how things need to run and, as a consequence, they stay in business!
The Selby farm produces vegetables such as sugar snaps, mange tout and passion fruit. We honored our relationship with Selby by keeping up purchases all the way through the difficult periods. And now there’s a big, new - but good - challenge coming up.
We’re going to try to get Fairtrade certification for all of Selby’s produce. We contacted the Fair Trade Labelling Organization (FLO) in Bonn and, sure enough, as usual, there’s a lot of work to be done to get this thing going.