 |
| Khadir Khadir and wife Nadis |
Higher Grounds owner Chris Treter writes from Palestine, where he is attending the annual olive harvest and celebration.
At the young age of 14, Khadir Khadir was a day laborer in Israel working in plastic factories to help his family put food on the table. The life was difficult, many times he slept in the factory, away from his family months at a time. After nearly a decade, he returned home to the olive fields of his childhood.
Now 29, Khadir, with his wife, Nadis, and three children, is content to live the life of an olive farmer. "Now I can eat, sleep, and stay in my home with my family and no one tries to control where I am going. Today it is very difficult to be a worker in Israel – you have to be secretly snuck into the country paying 500 sheckles [$150 dollars] for entry."
He is one of a burgeoning group in Palestine that have decided to keep the traditions of their elders and work the fields to offer a better life for his family and community in this small farming village in the mountains of the West Bank, Palestine.
His village, Nos Ijbeel, nestled in the foothills of the northern part of the West Bank, is a quaint town of about 350 residents. Many of them rely on the olive harvest for their livelihood. Olive oil is the main staple of any house in Palestine. Many Palestinian households consume about a liter of olive oil a week. Ninety-eight percent of the world's olive oil is grown in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean, and with the help of Canaan Fair Trade and the Palestinian Fair Trade Association, many farmers throughout the West Bank now have their first opportunity to enter the export market and sell directly to gourmet companies such as
Higher Grounds Trading Co.
Asked what the biggest barrier to becoming a successful farmer is, Khadir quickly and definitively says, "the Israeli occupation. Any project I want to do I must have their approval – even electricity and water. If I have no approval, it won’t work. My only problem in life is that I am limited by what they decide I can do. We love to work, my wife and father and friends all work with me in the field. But, if the Israelis decide we can’t export olive oil, then we will not have a stable income."
The act of growing and harvesting olives is not only preserving a traditional way of life in Palestinian communities, it also is a way for them to try to break free from the Israeli occupation by offering more than 100,000 Palestinians an income. With more than 10 million olive trees, olive cultivation accounts for 45 percent of agricultural land in the West Bank and Gaza. 95 percent of olive production is used to produce olive oil.
According to a new Oxfam International report titled "The Road to Olive Farming: Challenges to Developing the Economy of Olive Oil in the West Bank," olive farming could have an increasingly positive effect on the Palestinian economy if the Israelis would lighten their restrictions and more investment was made available to growers.
"With limited investment, and simple changes in farming methods, Palestinian olive farmers could double their incomes and produce a consistent supply of high-quality olive oil able to compete at home and abroad," explains Jeremy Hobbs, executive director of Oxfam International. "Yet, such investments can have little effect unless Israel, which has occupied the West Bank since 1967, refrains from actions that restrict Palestinian farmers from access to their land and means of livelihoods, and to foreign markets."
Canaan Fair Trade, the processor and exporter, and The Palestine Fair Trade Association (PFTA), the largest fair trade producers' union in Palestine, with over 1,700 small Palestinian farmers, are not waiting around for an end to the occupation to create direct markets for their specialty oil.
And Tony Blair, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom and now the economic development head of the Quartet agrees with this move. In a recent visit to Canaan and the PFTA, he pronounced the olive oil project to be a showpiece of Palestinian economic development.
Meanwhile, Khadir and Nadis till the land Khadir's father has worked for a generation, selling 1,500 tons of olives to Canaan to process as olive oil for export. They are content to be young farmers, but cautious of what lies ahead in the future.
"I am very happy on my land… I have no worries… Of course I dream that those who lost their olive fields to the Israel occupation could get their land back. But at a minimum I would like our people to have our own country that is self-ruling and free," Khadir says, looking behind him as his neighbors holler at us to get back to work.
As he and his family work their land, and politicians on both sides of the literal "wall" argue back and forth, we can see a pathway to a better future through fair trade and organic olive oil production. For this reason, Higher Grounds is proud to have expanded beyond our fair trade and organic coffee selection to offer
extra virgin olive oil from Khadir and the members of the Palestinian Fair Trade Association.
