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Fairtrade coffee. How fair is it? In Tanzania, farmers on Mount Kilimanjaro are improving the quality of their beans. But do they get a good deal from Fairtrade, and does it help improve their lives? Reporter Dilly Barlow travels to Tanzania with a select band of ‘local heroes’ from Sainsbury’s, employees who’d raised large amounts of money for local charities, and were being rewarded with a trip to meet the small coffee farmers on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. They belong to the KNCU, The Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union, which joined the Fairtrade scheme in 1993. Patrick Shirima is KNCU’s Chief Procurement Officer, who oversees everything from the picking of the coffee cherries, through to supervising the end payments to the farmers. Sheila Dillon is joined in the studio by Ian Bretman, deputy director of the Fairtrade Foundation, Jeremy Torz, one of the founders of the UK’s Union Hand Roasted Coffee Company and Professor John Sender, fellow in development studies at Cambridge University.
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