ENTERPRISE
Canaan Fair Trade and Dr. Bronner’s:
Working Together to Develop
Market Opportunities in the
West Bank
By Kat Schuett
Mahmoud Issa had given up on olive farming as a means of livelihood and was risking it all to illegally cross the Palestine border into Israel to work at a fac- tory in the city, leaving behind his family for months at a time to lessen the chance of being caught. During the occupation, Palestinian farmers like Issa
have been isolated from all major cities, with no access to an export market.
Instead, they often ended up selling their valuable olive oil for less
than the cost of production to local
traders who would conspire to wait
to buy till months after harvest,
when farmers were desperate to
sell for whatever they could get in
order to to finance the next crop of
vegetables or grains.
In 2003, amid the most dangerous time
of the occupation, Nasser Abufarha, who
had grown up in Palestine, left the safety of
In 2004, he took money he had saved running a Middle Eastern restaurant in Madison and re-
turned to the West Bank to form the Palestinian Fair Trade Association (PFTA). Working his way
through barricades and armed checkpoints, he visited village after village to meet with farmers to
ALL PHOTOS IN THIS FEATURE
BY VIVIEN SANSOUR
