Welcome to this special Christmas episode of the Rainbow Turtle Rebooted podcast where I’m delighted to be able to interview Pauline Tiffen of the Journal of Fair Trade. Ever since I started this series I have been trying to get Pauline onto it. I first heard her speak at a Scottish Fair Trade Forum lecture back in the summer of 2020, at the height of lock down, when she spoke about the future of fair trade. It struck me then that her thinking about fair trade was on a different level to mine.
She’s been involved in fair trade, or earlier versions of it, since the mid 1980s. She helped set up Cafe Direct and Divine Chocolate. Pauline was head hunted by the World Bank to look at ethical financing. And she currently edits the Journal of Fair Trade and is involved in the setting up of a business to business project, which links cooperative coffee farmers in landlocked Uganda and Rwanda with small coffee roasters and coffee shops around the UK.
We had a fascinating chat where she talked about her early bohemian childhood following her travelling actor father, to her studying russian in the old Soviet Union and then moving to Poland when Lech Walesa started the Solidarity revolution. I’ve decided to keep this longer podcast together in one episode just to maintain the fluidity of her interesting story. I do hope that you can find the time to listen to it and enjoy her story like I have done.
My thanks to Pauline for sharing her thoughts on fair trade and on her interesting life experiences. It was a real pleasure to interview her and I hope that you have enjoyed this episode as much as I have done. Listen out for more of our episodes, particularly for a series of talks we recorded during COP26.
Please subscribe to our podcasts on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and Google podcasts. If you like us give us a 5 star rating or leave us a comment.
