Sitting in his office above Canaan's modern processing plant, Abufarha, age 52, relates a business success story that would be impressive in ordinary circumstances -- but is astonishing given the conditions of belligerent occupation Palestinians live under. In little more than a decade, Canaan has become the largest fair-trade business in the Middle East, as well as the largest fair-trade supplier of olive oil in the world. It is now selling some 800 tonnes of oil each year, with a turnover of $9 million last year. It has clients, based in 18 countries, including Ben and Jerry's, LUSH cosmetics, Dr Bronner's soaps, the US retail chain Whole Foods and the UK supermarket Sainsbury's. In recent years Canaan has rapidly expanded into other fair-trade products, including almonds, freekeh, zaatar, olive pastes and sun-dried tomatoes.
Abufarha makes the challenges the company faced sound far easier than they must have appeared in 2004, when he returned to the West Bank and abandoned a promising academic career. He had just completed his doctorate on the "human bomb" -- the suicide bombers that had grabbed most attention during the early stages of the second intifada as they extinguished their own lives and those of others by detonating their explosives in Israeli buses and restaurants. Jenin and the surrounding villages had earned a reputation for dispatching many of these suicide bombers.
Abufarha's inspiration came not from the nihilistic human bombs he had studied but the life-affirming traditions of "sumud," or steadfastness, he had experienced as a child during the annual olive harvest in his parents' villages of Burqin and Jalameh, both just outside Jenin. Palestinian farmers, he concluded, could defy Israel's efforts to evict them from their land by taking a central place in the burgeoning global movement supporting fair trade and organic agriculture. They could open a new kind of front of non-violent resistance to the occupation.
"When I came back from the US, it was clear that the farmers I had grown up around were economically in trouble. Prices had plummeted to a level that made olive farming unsustainable." The figures told the story: olive trees accounted for 40 percent of Palestinian land under cultivation, but supplied only 18 percent of the earnings from agricultural production. "If we lost this crop, it would be both a cultural disaster and leave our communities in a situation of extreme food insecurity. Remember, most Palestinian children start the day with a breakfast of bread and olive oil before going to school. If the trees were lost, ultimately so too would most of these villages."
In response, Abufarha founded the Palestine Fair Trade Association in 2004, quickly followed by Canaan Fair Trade, which served as a production, marketing and export company. He began with only a handful of farmers, selling abroad to Dr Bronner's soaps. In 2008 he used the profits, his savings, as well as donor money from the Palestinian Authority and the Dutch government, to install a state-of-the-art Swedish press, and a storage and bottling plant at Burqin.
The problems facing Abufarha and the farmers were manifold. They could not change the environment created by the occupation or Israel's deep-seated hostility to Palestinian farming. After all, Zionism's early ideologues had been inspired by the idea that land could be "redeemed" only through Jewish colonization and Hebrew labor. "Making the desert bloom," in the movement's favorite slogan, was integral to its redemptive strategy.
Instead, Abufarha identified the Palestinian farmers' biggest weakness as a potential strength. Agriculture in the West Bank was still largely a family affair. Each family had a small plot of land on which its members depended economically. That made them extremely vulnerable to Israel's abusive military and economic policies. It meant, for example, that Israeli buyers of olive oil could play Palestinian farmers off against each other, waiting them out after the late autumn's harvest until the price fell so low it barely justified cultivating the land. But if the farmers organized and worked together, Abufarha concluded, they had enormous power. They could become an army of amoud -- as steadfast as their olive trees.
An evangelist for his revolutionary idea, Abufarha began travelling across the Jenin area, trying to persuade the farmers that they would be best served by establishing co-operatives and pooling their resources. It was no accident that the model took hold quickly in the Jenin region. The settlements had never managed to get real purchase in the northern West Bank, and the few that did were dismantled by Ariel Sharon during his Gaza disengagement in 2005. The farmers in the Jenin area were in a relatively privileged position, suffering the lowest levels of interference from the occupation authorities.
Today Canaan has 52 villages set up as separate cooperatives, representing some 2,000 farmers. The model's efficiency can be gauged by recent production figures: Canaan's farmers constitute about 2 percent of those farming olives in Palestine, but produce some 7 percent of the total crop.
The second stage was simpler. The family-run farms already largely respected fair trade practices, and they used techniques that often accorded closely with organic cultivation. The PFTA developed the first internationally recognized fair-trade standard for olive oil, and started certifying farmers who qualified.
"Before the cooperatives, the [olive oil] buyers had been able to drive down prices and, of course, with it standards," says Abufarha. "There was no government around to protect the farmers by insisting on minimum standards or price tariffs. So our job was to create the standards, adding quality and value, and thereby empower the farmers. We ensured that there was a business model that rewarded the farmers' traditional production methods. It recognized not only the economic value of their labor but also its deeper cultural value. It understood that the Palestinian farmer is the care-keeper of a treasure we inherited, of traditions that date back thousands of years."
Canaan Fair Trade provided the final piece of the jigsaw. It offered a central address to which the village cooperatives could sell their olive oil, guaranteed a premium price. The famers would not be selling individually to Israeli buyers but collectively to Canaan. Foreign markets eager for fair trade and organic products meant Canaan could pay the farmers a much higher price for the oil. And Canaan would act as the international face of the farmers' cooperative movement, developing and investing in new markets.
The wider changes on the marketing of Palestinian olive oil have been dramatic. Where once only 15 percent of oil sold abroad was labelled as extra-virgin grade, today 80 percent is.
"There is a market abroad that identifies with the Palestinians and their struggle but it is not the biggest one for us," he says. "Increasingly, people understand that there has to be a proper relationship between people and land, one that nurtures rather than ruins our planet. We have to be guardians, protecting and supporting the treasure we have here in Palestine by encouraging biodiversity."
The name, Canaan Fair Trade, he explains, refers to the name of this region more than 3,000 years ago, one that precedes Israel's political claims based on a presumed Biblical birthright. In fact, the Canaanite culture is frequently referenced in the Bible. "We have inherited here a paradise that dates back to the time of Canaan," he says. "We must not live exclusively in reaction to Israel and the occupation. We must draw on our own traditions and cultivate our own strengths. They are to be found in our natural environment, which is why the settlements are so intrusive and corrosive -- they disrupt our sense of home."
A convert to fair tradeA decade ago, Khader Khader was one of the youngest farmers to help establish a Canaan Fair Trade village cooperative -- and one of the most skeptical. Then aged 25, he had little faith in the future of Palestinian farming. His village of Nisf Jubeil, with a mixed Muslim and Christian population of 400, nestles on the lower slopes of one of the many dome-shaped hills characteristic of this area of the central West Bank. Concealed behind the hills south of the village lies the city of Nablus. Nisf Jubeil is relatively fortunate. Close to Nablus and located in Area B, it rarely sees incursions by Israeli soldiers and there are no settlers nearby. Nonetheless, for Khader the relentless decline in the price of olive oil had made agriculture -- following in his father's footsteps -- an unappealing prospect. "Like many of the young people here, I was looking for a way to leave the village," he says.
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