Bali is often referred to as a tropical paradise. I like to think of it as the island of cats. Its economy rests on tourism and crafts – wherever you go, you see shops by the roadside selling them. And an awful lot of them seem to be cats.
Mitra Bali, based near Ubud, is one of the foremost Fair Trade organisations in Indonesia. Agung Alit, its founder, is a sort of Fair Trade ageing hippy; indeed his long hair and laid-back attitude belie his intense desire to combat rural poverty, and some people don’t treat him seriously when they meet him for the first time. His staff love him not least because he frequently gets drunk with them and shares the most outrageous stories. When Michelle, Shared Earth’s head designer and I arrived in Bali on 10 March, a workshop on finance for Mitra Bali staff and producers had just ended, run by a British consultant.
“I met him at the airport,” said Agung, “picked up his bags, you know, carried them to the car. He thought I was the driver. I didn’t contradict him, why should I? I just pointed out things to him like all good drivers do – this is Kuta, that’s the president’s palace, that sort of thing. At the hotel he thanked me and said I’d been very helpful. ‘No problem,’ I said.
“Next day I heard him talking to Rah Aji, our Assistant Director. He’s an elite kind of guy, suit and tie, you know? He nodded in my direction. ‘Who’s your driver?’ he asked. ‘He was very helpful last night. You have a good member of staff there.’ Aji looked a bit surprised. ‘That’s Agung, our founder and M.D.,’ he replied. The consultant was very embarrassed.” Agung roared with laughter.
Agung became an activist in the late 1980s, when Suharto’s top-down, centralist development policy benefited his cronies in Jakarta a lot, and those in Bali very little. In 1991 he started working with Pekerti, a Fair Trade exporter in Java. But he kept wondering if he could do a better job exporting direct from Bali himself.
Then in 1993 Shared Earth’s buyer visited him and encouraged him to set up on his own. It was a challenge. “It’s so tempting - but I don’t know if I can,” he said. “Will you place an order if I do?” The answer was yes. And the most popular product we bought was carved wooden cats.
It wasn’t long before he was taking orders from Oxfam too, and soon there were other customers in Holland and the USA. One room in his house became an office, another a packing room, the third for living and sleeping in – until his wife, now with a young son, insisted he find separate premises elsewhere. Today, Mitra Bali has a large purpose-built office/warehouse/showroom complex, and works with hundreds of different producers.
Agung embodies the attitude that Fair Trade is not just about paying fair prices – it’s also about relationships and building respect and self-reliance. He drinks coffee and jokes with producers, lends them money interest-free, and recently even started buying some of them cows when orders were short.
He’s also passionate about the environment. Shared Earth has always been keen on using Albesia wood for its products – a softwood which grows to maturity in only 7-10 years – and in 1995 Agung started planting them for future use. A breakthrough came in 1994 when a woodcarver’s family got into serious debt and were about to be forced off their land. Mitra Bali paid off the debt in return for use of the land for ten years to plant trees. When they are harvested, the family will receive 70% of the income, and will have free timber to use for its carving. In the meantime, the ground in between the trees can be used for planting cassava and potatoes. The project has expanded to include 27 families, and 2,000 trees have now been planted. Planting symbolically takes place on World Fair Trade Day each May.
It’s all about trust, and working together. Mitra Bali has had a huge impact on the lives of hundreds of artisans and their families, and Shared Earth is proud to have helped Agung to get it going, and to have worked with him for so long.
More stories about Agung and Mitra Bali will be included in Jeremy’s forthcoming book, ‘Coffins, Cats and Fair Trade Sex Toys’, to be published in January 2009.
