Fair Trade Discovering Travel Trade

Judy Murchie is well-travelled. Africa, in particular, has got under the 31-year-old’s skin, and recent trips include the well-trodden route overland from Nairobi to Cape Town. “It was great fun,” says Murchie, a studio manager in the UK, “but touristy. I felt I wasn’t really seeing the country.” So a year ago, Murchie signed up to a trekking trip in Ethiopia with a difference: led by a local guide, she hiked between villages, slept in comfortable, purpose-built huts and got to know the local...

Laos opened its doors to tourists in the late 1980s, and within years trekkers began searching for the next off-the-beaten-track experience. They started heading into the mountains in northwest Luang Namtha Province with untrained guides, who led them to unsuspecting ethnic villages in remote locations. The results were often disastrous. Visitors stumbled over cultural taboos and villagers were ill-prepared to greet them. The government quickly realised this was the wrong path for the country...

Millions of farmers around the world are facing poverty and starvation because global crop prices have plummeted to all-time lows in recent years. This worldwide crisis is causing problems such as malnutrition and loss of family farms in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and it has even led to increased drug cultivation in some countries like Colombia and Peru. In today's world economy, where profits often rule and small-scale producers are left out of the bargaining process, farmers, craft pr...

Tourism is the world’s largest industry, employing some 240 million people worldwide and contributing nearly ten percent to the global domestic product (GDP). Africa’s share of the global tourism market currently stands at less than five percent (UN-WTO, 2008), leading many in the continent to call for a more aggressive approach to tourism development as a means of spurring revenue, employment and investment. South Africa is no exception: international arrivals to the country reache...