Happy New Year! I hope all is going well in the first month of 2007. Here in Bangalore, this is the year of my family located on Church Street. My grandfather had a special affinity for the number 007, so he put it on the license plates of all of our family's vehicles: motorcycles and cars for as long as we could remember. My uncle and I were just reflecting the other day on how this is the only year of our lifetime that the number 007 will be the last three digits. Thus this has become a year of special significance for my family, as it recalls so many fond memories of my grandfather.

I have become very bad at keeping all of you in the loop of what I am doing out here in India during my second year of this passage to discover my "roots", development and so much else about life. Basically, after my Indicorps fellowship ended I decided to stay on another year in South India, where I could learn Malayalam and live with my grandmother. I found an awesome group of people working on an idea called Just Change, which seeks to build an alternative trading structure to the market, in which poor communities can take control of their local economies and enter into bonds of cooperation and mutual gain with other poor communities. If any of you have read Malcolm X's theories of Buy Black, For Us By Us, or if you have read Gandhi's theories of Swadeshi, you will see how Just Change has built upon all of this, while adding the component of a producer's cooperative.

Basically Just Change is a company owned by producers of primary commodities, who are located in different parts of India- Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Orissa, and growing... We produce a range of goods such as tea, pepper, coffee, sambar powder, soap, coconut oil and as we add new members to our company we will hopefully produce the entire range of commodities that poor people depend on for their daily living. The way the company works is to facilitate trade between these producer groups, capture the profit involved in trade, and redistribute them to the communities for further development of production. As a company we invest capital into trading, distribution and setting up retail shops in our communities, while also take the financial risk to make the enterprise viable.

Some of you have heard me talk about how I am being introduced to the idea of a social business- one which performs a function that can both be revolutionary as well as beneficial for society. Just Change is such a possibility for a business and that is why I am inspired to work here and see the idea through at least for a little while.

The company is relatively new, and has only started trading in the past 4 months, and yet we have had lakhs (100,000's) of rupees of turnover since setting up our few shops in Kerala and Gudalur, located in the villages of our producer groups.

Basically I've been recruited to take over local economy research for the company. Currently I am writing up a study of the household income and expenditure of two our communities, both located in northern Kerala. I am also responsible for some of the other research we are doing on more theoretical things, such as the relationship between capital and labor in the fishing communities in south India. That part of my work brings me to the Nagapattinam area of Tamil Nadu, where the tsunami struck in 2004. I am going there tomorrow to finish up a study there and write up a paper.

I am also responsible for helping the director of Just Change, Stan Thekaekara, research new ideas for the company and help to write up promotional and explanatory material for what we do, such as web site, and content for his speeches. So it's exciting work even if a lot of it involves doing office work. I still get to travel and directly interact with the communities involved in our trading work.

Here's a pretty good document explaining the initial idea of how we started. It takes place in Gudalur, with a group of Adivasis (tribal people), who were organized to reclaim their ancestral land which had been converted from forest lands into plantations. They undertook the project of planting tea and marketing it themselves. If you know the status of tea, it is a colonial crop, connected with the British aristocratic planters. Thus the symbolism of Adivasis, some of the most marginalized people in India, planting, growing and marketing their own tea, was a political statement that Adivasis had the power, dignity and rights to do that which was only reserve for the elite. From that act, back in the mid'80s came the idea of starting a trading network with other poor communities in India and the UK. And that's how Just Change was born. Now we are exporting our tea to poor communities in the UK, who then market the tea in the UK. This in turn provides employment to those living in the council estates, the ghettos, of the UK. We have also started exporting to Germany and now France. Read on...

We are adivasis. The indigenous people of India. Once forest dwellers, systematically displaced and forced to become unskilled agricultural workers.

Our villages are surrounded by thousands of acres of big tea estates - in forest lands once ours, now cleared and encroached on by multi-national companies. But, still we survived. We organized ourselves into sangams, reclaimed a miniscule part of our ancestral lands. The brave ones among us even dared to grow TEA, a colonial crop, a rich man's crop. On plots as small as half or one acre.

We even organised ourselves into a marketing collective and sold almost the same quantity of tea leaves that a medium-sized estate would sell.

Suddenly there was talk of globalisation. They talked about cheap imports. There were rumours about Indonesian or Sri Lankan tea being cheaper than ours. Auction prices for tea are falling, they said. As a consequence, green leaf prices collapsed totally! Fell from Rs.12 to Rs. 4 per kg!!

Sugarcane prices are coming down, milk prices for the farmers are coming down, cotton prices are crashing. Yet, the tea, the milk the clothes, the sugar you buy has not become cheaper. If anything its gone up.

Most poor people in India drink tea.. Why don't we sell our tea directly to other poor people like us? We talked to some groups - even as far away as Orissa and Gujarat. Everyone is excited about it. "Yes, we are very keen to buy your tea", they said. "It will not only help you, but it will also be cheaper for us". "In fact, come to think of it, its the same with the rice we produce. Or dal. Or clothes. Why don't we exchange the products between ourselves?" We decided to create our own market. Outside The Market. To have our own Globe, where we trade our goods and services. Globalisation on our terms. So we launched JUST CHANGE, a co-operative of poor communities who believe in making the market Just ! Today, we, the adivasis in the remote Gudalur Valley in the Nilgiri Mountains are trading our products with other communities in far off places.

If you are also interested in becoming a part of this network, please write to us. Together we can create a new Just Trading System.

JUST CHANGE, ACCORD, P.B. No.20, Gudalur 643212, Nilgiris, Tamilnadu, India.
Phone (04262) 261504, 261506 email: oty_twaccord@ sancharnet.in

-- Sushil Jacob
Bangalore, Karnataka
http://groups.google.com/group/Passage2India

"In their rhetoric, governments of rich countries constantly stress their commitment to poverty reduction. Yet the same governments use their trade policy to conduct what amounts to robbery against the world's poor. When developing countries export to rich-country markets, they face tariff barriers that are four times higher than those encountered by rich countries. Those barriers cost them $100 billion a year- twice as much as they receive in aid." -OXFAM

"Power concedes nothing without demand...Those who profess to favor freedom yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning." -Frederick Douglas