Tuesday 5 April
This afternoon I arrived in Ecuador at our Panama hat association after a gruelling 30 hour journey via Amsterdam, Bonaire, Guayaquil and Quito. The road from Cuenca down to the village where our hat weaving association is based is always a dangerous one due to treacherous mountainous Z-bends and the propensity of drivers to overtake with insufficient visibility. Last time I took this 1 1/2 hour journey we were held up for half an hour by an accident and this was no exception: one truck crash blocking the road and a police car which had lost a wheel!
Since last year, my trips have been made imeasurably more pleasant by the construction of a beautiful Eco Lodge, a 10 minute walk along the river from our weavers. Hosteria El Barranco nestles in the hillside overlooking the rio Santa Barbara and the Andes mountains beyond and is a tranquil retreat where I can work, as well as having the occasional opportunity to enjoy the pool and steam room.
Learning to weave a Panama hat
Wednesday 6 April
This trip to Ecuador was only finalised a week before I left. Our Panama hat weaving association is one of the pilots for the Geo Fairtrade Project, a 3 year EU project which will provide visible accountability of sustainable provenance, both for raw materials and production processes using technologies which rely on different remote sensing imagery. The social, economic an environmental indicators collected will increase transparency throughout the supply chain, from the community plantations where the straw is organically cultivated through to the rural communities where our hats are woven. As the only non-food pilot, our work in gathering data on handicraft production will be vital in ensuring that the indicators work both for food producers and for production within the fashion supply chain.
Although an intern had spent 4 months collecting data in Ecuador, there was still a considerable amount of missing data. Although it could be perceived that our commercial interest could compromise the validity of the data, we believed that the long-standing trust and transparency we have with our association, coupled with understanding of production processes, would allow us to collect accurate data.
My day was spent researching the geographical, environmental, social and economic data which has already been collected and trying to work out where the gaps are in data collection.
The Cuenca region has particularly high levels of migration and, as a result of talking to our weavers this afternoon, I learnt that there are now 7 women to every man in this area. Statistics show that this has had a devestating effect on the chidren of this region, 60% of whom have one or both parents living overseas, with a suicide rate twice the national average and increased alcohol, drugs and truancy problems.
Thursday 7 April
As a result of the pressure put on families in this area by absent fathers, children are leaving school early in order to help support their families. In theory the minimum working age is 15 and educational is compulsory until 17, but in interviews we have found that many of our weavers' children have left school around the age of 13. Part of the problem is the lack of schools in this region and many children enroll in distance learning programmes.
However, working children in the area are being assisted by our Panama hat association who administer a series of grants within the region, one aimed directly at working children and providing $110 a year to keep 172 children age 7-18 in education. The management of our weaving association give both their time and their premises to be used in administering these grants and twice a week children come to receive education in values, maths and language skills.
Today we also conducted a long overdue experiment into the time it takes to weave a grade 2 panama hat, stopping the clock whenever the weaver took a break. In questionnaires with an intern for the Geo Fairtrade project, the weavers had claimed an average time of 18 hours which we doubted as there are so many distractions within their homes: agriculture, animals, children, elderly relatives. We carried out a time trial with two weavers making different hats, one plain and one patterned. The average time taken over two days to prepare the straw and weave a hat was 9 hours 23 minutes, around half the time previously indicated! This data is extremely important in order to ascertain how many hours a week the weavers work and calculate their average wage per hour.
8 April
We called in a representative group of members of our weaving association today in order to collect data for the Geo Fairtrade project and also for our certification under the Sustainable Fair Trade Management System as we have to conduct a baseline assessment of producers every 3 years and 2011 is an assessment year.
We started the morning by asking the weavers a selection of questions ranging from the time it takes them to reach the nearest primary health care facility (only 45% of weavers' houses are accessible by car and many have a long walk to the nearest road where they can catch a bus or hitch a ride in the back of a pickup) to detailed questions about their cost of living. I think the most surprising result was with regard to clothing purchased during the year. Almost all of the weavers started by saying "la ropa dura", or "clothing lasts" and many spent no money at all on an annual basis on their clothes, so different to our fast-fashion culture.
We then moved on to the baseline assessment and I decided to ask the same questions as three years ago in order to measure the change in % of the weavers' responses. Three years ago the association was headed by a tough and, it appears in retrospect, disliked President who in 2009 left the association together with the secretary and sued them for $10,000 in unpaid social security which she herself was responsible for paying.
We try to keep this activity simple using sad, happy and neutral faces in different colours, but always find that there are a few members who can't follow this and almost the only sad face collected in each question was consistently given in by the same elderly weaver, possibly just because she liked the colour pink!
The difference in the responses was astonishing in some cases: 
Volume of orders from Pachacuti: 2008 63% not happy, now 73% are happy and the rest are neutral.
Health: 2008 almost everyone unhappy but now almost all neutral.
Pay: 69% were happy and 25% neutral which were not dissimilar to the figures 3 years ago
Relationship with the management: 2008 the majority were neutral whereas now they are happy.
Saturday 9th April
It's Saturday, but I have such a busy schedule that I have to work all day analysing and measuring the data collected so far. However, there is always time for a swim and relaxation in the eucalyptus-scented steam room.
Sunday 10th April
The torrential rain during the night must have infiltrated my sleep as I dreamt of floods and awoke to find the river below had burst its banks and was a coffee-coloured raging torrent, carrying away trees and a considerable number of animals who had been left grazing overnight on the banks. A farmer down the road has lost 20 cows which represents over $10,000 in lost income, a fortune in this impoverished region.
Market day on Sunday is also the day when all of the weavers in the surrounding area come to receive payment for the hats they have woven during the week, both the weavers of our association who come to their community shop and for the rest of the weavers who are at the mercy of the whims of the intermediaries. Interviewing a few weavers who were selling to the middlemen, I was astonished that they knew the measurements they should weave in terms of crown height, width and brim, but none of them mentioned the grade of the hat as a means of measuring their pay. Considering a fine weave grade 8 is purchase by our association at around 3 times the price of a grade 2 and taking into account weavers' poor numeracy skills, it is clear how the intermediaries are taking advantage of them. Watching the intermediaries at work, they barely glance at the hat and offer a price, or reject the hat completely.
By contrast, we visited our association where a long queue of weavers from the 150 members were waiting to turn in the fruits of the week's labours. It was interesting to see not only the significant difference in price paid, but also how the President and Treasurer were giving clear feedback to the weavers, pointing out all of the green fibres and faults in the weave or measurement which meant that they may not be receiving the full price for that hat. Despite being in the Panama hat business for 19 years, this is the first time I realised the difference in purchasing by the association, not just in terms of price but in acceptance of hats with streaks of green fibres. These fibres later have to be painstakingly removed from the weave of the hat and replaced with a natural coloured fibre: a long and difficult job.
Back to the hotel for a delicious bar-b-q lunch with the President and Production Manager of our Panama hat association, discussing how to improve quality. Decided to rent the convention room in our hotel for a morning this week and convene all of the co-ordinators from the surrounding communities in order to give a talk on the quality issues we are facing and also to give a presentation on good working practice to improve the health of the weavers.
Monday 11th April
Probably not the right morning to work from the hotel in order to prepare for the baseline assessment with our hat weavers and our other hat co-op, felt hat producers and embroiderers. Below me is unfolding a beauty pageant to find the most attractive teacher in the area, complete with flower-strewn catwalk between the two pools, accompanied by loud music. However, the benefits of staying here have been that I have been able to sit out in the sun, indeed it is the first time in a week I have even seen the sun! We are fully in the middle of rainy season here in the highlands and I am so pleased that the sun shone today as the wonderful team of brothers who run this EcoLodge have worked so hard to put on this function. I'm looking forward to a swim in the balloon filled pool when the guests have departed!