Welcome to the Trade Activity Group. We're a volunteer group within the Ottawa Local Committee, looking at ways in which to educate the public on how world trade is closely tied to international development issues.

A surprising number of people are reluctant to buy coffee from a talking donkey, even if it would only cost them 2 cents. Fortunately, most of them were more than happy to buy a cup of coffee from Juan Valdez, who was with his donkey at the gates of Parliament Hill recently for the launch of Oxfam's new global campaign - "What's That in Your Coffee?" We probably sold nearly 100 cups of coffee in the 45 minutes we were out there. We also explained that 2 cents was the return a coffee farmer gets on the sale of a $1.50 cup of coffee to many more people. That included the listeners of CBC Ottawa's morning program, thanks to an interview with Mark Fried and Blanca Rosa Molina (one of Oxfam’s coffee farmer partners visiting from Nicaragua). Lots of people stopped and took the time to sign postcards asking the big coffee roasters to pay a decent price to coffee farmers, and we'll bundle these up and send them on to Kraft. And several people mentioned how surprised they were that Fair Trade coffee actually tasted much better than their usual Tim’s. It was a great launch to the coffee campaign here in Ottawa.

Check out some photos of Juan and his donkey on Parliament.

For information on our local activities, please contact Trevor Fleck .

See also Oxfam's international Make Trade Fair campaign.

November 23/02 Update: Juan and his donkey have continued to make appearances around town, thanks to all our Trade volunteers. In the process of selling coffee, we collected over a hundred postcards addressed to Kraft, demanding that they pay a decent price to coffee farmers. And the donkey and Juan got their pictures into the XPress, page 3 of the Nov. 14 edition. Check out these new photos.