Ruth Mena and Yadira Vallejos are clothing workers from Nicaragua. They were left jobless and homeless when Hurricane Mitch washed away their homes and belongings in 1999.

Among thousands of other former squatters on the shores of Lake Managua, they were relocated to Nueva Vida (New Life), a community with an 80 percent unemployment rate and the highest population density in Nicaragua. Ruth and Yadira joined other women in Nueva Vida to build their own sewing cooperative, a humane alternative to the sweatshops in Nicaragua. “I feel that we have made great strides in the co-op and that we are going to continue forward as long as we are united and we respect the rights of everyone,” says Ruth.

Francisco Gonzales Ruiz is indigenous Tzotzil from the Highland region of Chiapas, Mexico. The Tzotzil grow organic coffee. “For years, we knew little about selling our coffee,” says Francisco, “and the coyotes, or middlemen, who do the least work in the entire process of coffee production, took all of the benefits.” However, now they have organized coffee cooperatives, realizing that “we can be in charge of the entire process, from production of coffee from our own plants to exportation and direct sales to the consumer.”

King Hill Farm is a diversified, organic farm on Route 199 in Penobscot. The crops and animals on the farm complement each other, each supplying the other while sustaining both the earth and the people who work on the farm. They rotate crops, plant cover crops, and practice mineral balancing in the soil. “At King Hill, producing food is not just about getting as much as we can from the earth,” says farm worker Laura Millay. “It is about raising healthy food – food we are glad to eat, proud to feed our families and friends, and proud to sell.”

This time last year I was part of a PICA fact-finding mission to the fifth World Trade Organization meeting of trade ministers in Cancun, Mexico. The meeting collapsed amid sharp north-south differences, as sharp as the contrast between tourist Cancun, where the ministerial took place, and real-life Cancun. People from the world had come to protest the WTO rules, the “single constitution for the global economy,” in the words of a former WTO director. No one was against trade per se, but people took issue with specific rules, or argued that some things, like basic human services, should not be tradable commodities. People were in Cancun because their own lives, or the lives of people they knew, depended on the outcome of the meeting.

A Canadian woman told me: “We’ve lived with free trade longer than anybody. We signed the first free trade agreement in the world on Jan. 1, 1989, and we have a devastating loss to the manufacturing sector, totally lost control over our oil and gas. We signed what’s called a ‘proportional sharing agreement,’ which is that we cannot turn down one single request for export of our oil and gas to the United States. Not one. It used to be that we were sending 25 percent of our natural gas production to the United States. In 10 years it’s gone up to over 70 percent and it’s just going up every year. And we can’t reduce it. Even if we start running out. … And so I am here to tell the people around the world what it did to my country, and they should resist it.”

With drums and chanting of a 5,000-member peasant march in the background, a farmer from Missouri explained: “Today if there is a good crop farmers go broke. … Because when there is abundance in crops the multinational grain traders use those crops to move from the U.S. to around the world to flood various markets with cheap grain, putting thousands of farmers out of business worldwide. … The prices on the marketplace have so radically decreased that those [$20 billion] subsidies [to U.S. farmers] haven’t even been able to make up the difference. We’d much rather be taking in our bushels of corn and soy bean, and our cattle and hogs and be getting a fair price from the marketplace than getting subsidies from the government. So we want real free trade. What they call free trade is really simply corporate concentration of entire sectors of agriculture.”

A young woman from South Africa said that basic human services should not be tradable goods: “I want GATS [General Agreement on Trade in Services] out of the WTO because health, services, water doesn’t belong there. They don’t belong to the WTO issues because they know nothing about taking care of our citizens because in the first place they don’t know our people.” A teacher from Ecuador agreed: “We demand that education be kept out of trade agreements because education is after all a right of the people and not a commodity.”

A Fair Trade Fest in Bangor provides an alternative vision to the worldview of the WTO, giving us a glimpse of a world based on fair and democratic rules of trade: work with dignity and fair wages, sensibly managed natural resources, basic human services like water and education accorded to all, small farms providing sustenance to local families and communities. The Fair Trade Fest marketplace is where you can support this change. Come shop, learn, enjoy yourself, and help make history.

Bjorn Skorpen Claeson is program director for Peace PICA. The Fair Trade Fest takes place 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 2, at the Bangor Waterfront, with a Folk and Reggae Fair Trade Benefit Concert to follow from 3 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. For more information access www.pica.ws