According to EurasiaNet, Kyrgyz farmers are experiencing their worst nightmare since they are not able to sell their produce after Kazakhstan closed borders, and the unsold potatoes are rotting away and depriving them of money to buy food. Farmers are desperate to sell the potatoes even for a loss, and many believe the problems they are facing today are direct fallout of the ethnic violence that rocked the country two months ago.

A farmer said that the price per kilo potato has crashed by more than half from what it was last year. The potatoes are priced at 14 cents but are selling at 10 cents though they received more than 30 cents in 2009.

Furthermore, a new customs union connecting Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus is also seemed to be creating difficulty in getting goods across the borders. The Union is understood to have increased the tariffs by three times, making Kyrgyz products dearer in the new bloc’s markets.

The UN Development Program (UNDP) told that the only way to reboot the Kyrgyz economy was by making the borders open for trade, at least Uzbekistan. Kyrgyzstan, an impoverished Central Asian state hosting Russian and the US military air bases, expects the economy to shrink by 5 percent.

However, the World Food Program, the UN agency said it was preparing to bolster its operations in the country, where almost 350,000 more people might soon be in need of food. It also informed the threat stems from rising foods prices, a poor harvest, and the onset of winter.

Toboc Trade News

After being in the market for more than a decade, TransFair today has in excess of 6,000 FT products available in 105 product categories including wine, fruit, chocolate, rice, flowers and garments. To San Francisco Chronicle Paul Rice, TransFair USA’s founder and CEO told he was inspired by the success of FT coffee in Europe and decided to organize a co-op of small coffee farmers in Nicaragua several years ago.

Rice informed during the inception, his co-op could gather the trust of just 24 “brave souls” who each gave it 10 bags of coffee on consignment. It sold for $1.26 per pound, and $1 went to the farmers, who were used to receiving only 10 cents per pound. His co-op comprises of about 3000 farmers today.

Jean-Francois Daniel, co-founder of the 2-year-old Fair Trade Spirits Company based in Paris who has similar background and experience like that of Rice said his distillery made Fair Vodka from quinoa, a grain grown by an association of 1,200 small, TransFair-certified farmers in the Bolivian Highlands. He claimed the daily wage for a non- FT quinoa farmer in Bolivia was $1 per day, but the FT quinoa farmers which his company worked with earned $2.80 per day.

Currently, the vodka is available at some stores and restaurants in California. Amanda Womack the general manager of Cask, the first San Francisco retailer to sell Fair Vodka acknowledged even at $35 per bottle, Fair was one of the less-expensive vodkas Cask sold through its store and website.

According to TransFair, the offering of spirits will not be confined to vodka but also will be coming out with berry and coffee liqueur and rum as well. Fair Goji, a goji berry liqueur made with FT sugar from the African nation of Malawi and Fair Café, a coffee liqueur made with FT coffee from Mexico are likely to hit the markets soon for consumers to give spiritual contribution to FT programs.

Toboc Trade News

According to the Efe, the leading Spanish language news agency, the project called “Casas de Botellas” (Houses of Bottles) is the brainchild of Ingrid Vaca Díaz from Bolivia. The ‘green’ houses which Ingrid has been promoting for the last seven years are believed to have natural temperature-control capabilities.

A cluster of glass and plastic bottles of 600ml, one and two litres interlaced with honey, sand, debris, linseed oil and milk have gone into the making of these low-cost homes. Ingrid told “Casas de Botellas is a group effort in which the poorest families, with a helping hand from their friends, relatives, neighbours and volunteer workers, learn to construct their own houses and give themselves and their families a decent place to live.”

The project began in Warnes, her hometown, when a little girl called Claudia told her that for a Christmas present she dreamt of a bedroom of her own, since in her 4-square-meter (43sq.ft.) dwelling she shared a bed with five other people.

Vaca said earlier she used to store the bottles for making handicrafts and chairs; and while her husband informed that he had plans of disposing them off she overheard Claudia’s dream, and conceived a home out of these bottles. The house that Ingrid built in collaboration with Claudia’s family, people of the community and volunteers went from 43 to 1,827sq.ft, and made use of 36,000 two-litre plastic bottles.

The standard is to use for each meter approximately 81 bottles stuffed with throwaway material like paper, plastic bags, batteries, sand and dirt to build the walls of the house. The bottles are stuck together with bricks, lime and cement, and are held with a kind of webbing to make completely sure the construction will be permanent.

Other materials such as rods, roofing tiles, bricks, gravel, window panes, ceramic tiles, wooden frames and accessories for bathrooms and kitchens are donated by companies, individuals and institutions. The finishing touch for the houses is a coat of paint in which the colours of the columns contrast with the walls, and the bottoms of the bottles remain subtly visible and are painted in the form of flowers.

Until now Casas de Botellas has built six homes in Bolivia, one in Argentina and two in Uruguay and Mexico. Twenty more houses are planned to be built in Argentina, and the project is expected to continue collaborating with other communities throughout Latin America.

Toboc Trade News

Nevertheless, we succumbed to his coercion and dropped him near the shop with clear instructions for not to exceed half an hour. Then it was a long journey to find a parking slot. We almost circled 3km through the heavy traffic before we found an unconventional parking area, a by-lane seemingly empty. I told my friend to move the vehicle towards the shade and the shade happened to be the frontage of a boutique hotel. Surprisingly, no vehicle was parked in the frontage and had enough space to accommodate at least five cars.

We parked the vehicle towards a side of the road without trespassing the hotel’s premises that was patently marked with white line on the front yard extending to the road. While parking, we also made sure that in no way we would obstruct their way either to the reception or to the entrance of the basement parking. After making ourselves settled at that place, of course with the AC on, I phoned my friend. Then informed him about our global position and advised to catch an auto-rickshaw to reach the spot to avoid pushing ourselves to the traffic snarl once again. In this part of the world, many people park their vehicles in the available slots and proceed with their shopping or business activities by travelling in auto-rickshaws within a distance of 3 or 4km.

I hung up the phone and was about to say something to my friend in the driver’s seat only to hear a knock on the window pane at the side of my door. I slid opened the window and saw a man appeared to be the security officer of the hotel. Without any preface he said “Don’t park here”. I asked him why? But without giving any reason he said we were not allowed to park there. My friend kept quiet and let me do all the talking. I assured the officer that we would be inside the car so that if any vehicle coming to the hotel found us causing inconvenience to them then we would move the vehicle from there. Still he disdainfully insisted that we moved away from there. I retorted with a bold ‘No’ and slid down the pane. Immediately the officer hurried to the hotel.

Few seconds later another man in formals came to us and repeated the same words what was told by the security officer earlier, indeed followed by four or five extra security henchmen. I very clearly and politely explained him we had parked here for the shade on the side of the public road which has no ‘No Parking’ board and promised him we would leave soon. Then he introduced himself as the manager and informed us that he had strict orders from his higher ups not to entertain any vehicles other than the visitors or guests to the hotel. Without losing my cool I told him that I was not convinced. In a jiffy came the response, “Sir, if we could own the plot and the building, we are the ‘legitimate’ owners of its shadow too, and you have trespassed on our shadow. Therefore, it is our prerogative to allow or disallow anyone to use our shadow for whatever the purpose”.

Both of us were dumbstruck and meantime my phone started ringing. It was our friend who was over the phone pleading us to pick him up from the spot where we dropped him because the rickshaws were not willing to come to this area, always for reasons best known to these rickshaw-wallahs. Neither my friend nor I did utter a word to the hotel manager and in total daze we left the place.