Free Trade vs unFair Trade a compelling study by the Adam Smith Institute

Free trade relies on free individuals voluntarily seizing market opportunities,
rather than attempting to manage production and restrict the marketplace. In
contrast to Fair Trade, free trade relies on the absence of the price-fixing
arrangements and tariff barriers that restrict international trade.

To learn more please review the below document of the Adam Smith Institute

Click here to download:
unfair_trade.pdf (389 KB)
(download)

Human Rights’ and environmental toolkit for buyers of artisanal diamonds

Probably not complete but a pretty good guideline we would say.
Love the disclaimer, although unfortunate that this needs to be pointed out.
Suggestions and comments to:
certification@jeweltreefoundation.org

Click here to download:
Toolkit-Artisanal V1.2.pdf (99 KB)
(download)

The Scottish Gold Mine: Worth its weight in gold

When Scotland’s first commercial gold mine won planning approval last october it was the result of 20 years of hard work by the company behind it, and promises new jobs for a rural area. Kathryn Bishop looks at the mine’s potential benefit to the locals, Scotland and the UK jewellery industry.


more:
http://www.professionaljeweller.com/article-10637-the-scottish-gold-mine-wort...

RJC'S DIAMOND CHAIN OF CUSTODY: DESTROYING VALUE RATHER THAN CREATING IT - By Chaim Even-Zohar

CHAIM EVEN-ZOHAR

Every day our e-mail's in-box is filled with enthusiastic announcements of yet another diamond company being certified by the Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC) as "meeting the ethical, human rights, social and environmental standards as established by the RJC's Member Certification System." What these companies may not know (yet) is that the RJC is about to announce its diamond Chain of Custody standards, which - with the best will in the world - can never be properly adhered to by well over 98 percent of the RJC's diamond membership.

Of course, the RJC is nothing more than a private initiative aimed at providing its members with a brand that might inspire confidence among retailers and consumers. There is nothing wrong with this - bluntly speaking, whatever it does is none of our business. It's purely a matter for RJC members.

However, when the organization forces "mission impossible" standards on its members - when it sets conditions that will destroy value in their clients' businesses - and when it creates a compliance "myth," a compliance "fiction," in the diamond jewelry markets this becomes a grave concern for the entire diamond business. Inevitably, the falsehood of the RJC's claims will be exposed - backfiring not only on its members but also on the diamond industry at large. This must be avoided at any price.


(...)

The RJC's CoC system will be based on myth and make-believe in the best of circumstances and turn RJC members into deceivers in the worst of circumstances. Both outcomes should be sufficient reason for the RJC to stop its daily mass-certification and review its fundamentals. If there is a need for the RJC - and by now I would put a question mark here - it needs to be able to demonstrate that its membership adds value rather than destroys it.  

 

Read the full article:

Vivien Johnston of Fifi Bijoux named one of the Future 100 Young Social Entrepreneurs for 2011

Vivien Johnston founder and Managing Director of Fifi Bijoux, advisor to the Jeweltree Foundation and Open Source Minerals authorized reseller is announced as one of the Future 100 Young Social Entrepreneurs of the Year on Social Enterprise Day during Global Entrepreneurship Week 2011.

Global Entrepreneurship Week is a worldwide movement of entrepreneurial people, with millions unleashing their enterprising talents and turning their ideas into reality.
It began as Enterprise Week in the UK back in 2004. When news of the phenomenal success of Enterprise Week in the UK spread the globe, lots of other countries got excited about the potential of running similar initiatives in their own countries. Since its inception, Global Entrepreneurship Week has spread to 115 countries, with nearly 24,000 organisations planning more than 37,000 activities.
The Future 100 Awards were first launched in 2008 to recognise and profile young entrepreneurs running businesses, which have a triple bottom line. The definition of a triple bottom line, is a business that addresses people, planet and profit. They have a strong commercial foundation as well as a significant social and environmental impact.
The Future 100 Awards recognises the success of young entrepreneurs aged 18-35 who demonstrate entrepreneurial flair and innovation in progressing a responsible business venture.

Fifi Bijoux aims to spend time and care in securing suppliers who share their vision that human rights must be respected and upheld and that environmental impact should be minimised. This ethic is carried right through the supply chain to where it all begins, with the miners.

They  use only ethically mined and fairly traded precious metals and precious gemstones and operate a strict policy on this for all our suppliers of raw materials and sundries.

Every Fifi Bijoux product is designed in-house and creates key looks for each season. The jewellery is made in London.

Johnston said, “I’m thrilled to be named as a Future 100 Young Social Entrepreneur. I founded Fifi Bijoux in 2006 and since then, it’s grown in reputation as a brand synonymous with luxury and best practice for fair, responsible and equitable mining of precious natural resources. As a designer, I love to create exquisite pieces and want customers to enjoy beautiful jewellery; assured that no abuses of human rights or unwarranted impact on the environment has occurred to produce it. The Future 100 Award means a lot to me. Particularly in the current difficult economic climate, I think it’s especially important to recognize businesses which maintain a strong sense of conscience as well as a commercial focus”.

Founder of Striding Out and organiser of the Future100 awards, Heather Wilkinson said: "The future of our world is in the hands of individuals who are committed to generating commercial and ethical returns. 
Challenging economic times can offer opportunities to question the way we operate as both a business community and a society. We have a history of  profiling the 'Future 100' young entrepreneurs who are changing the face of everyday business and improving commerce's impact on the wider world."

The Future 100 awards encourages and rewards extraordinary vision, ethical business practice and social responsibility. They aim to showcase businesses that offer innovative and sustainable solutions to social problems. The Future 100 Awards is organized by Striding Out www.stridingout.co.uk, a social enterprise which is committed to supporting the development and growth of young and ethical entrepreneurs.

Free The Market

Free market ideology, as represented in the nuanced ideas of Adam Smith or F.A. Hayek, has not outlived its purposefulness. Indeed, rejecting this ideology would be not just intellectually tragic. Rejection would be practically tragic, threatening the welfare and well-being of billions of people throughout the world.

What we do need to reject is “free market ideology” as caricatured by critics and corrupted by politics. Now more than any time in my professional lifetime actual free market economics needs to capture the imaginations of young scientists, political intellectuals, and the general public, so that we can reverse the economic catastrophe we are starring down due to fiscal irresponsibility and monetary mischief. The dire fiscal situation in Europe and the US is not a matter of mere opinion; we have simply reached the tipping point of sustainable public expenditures. In order to address the problem, we need to revisit fundamental questions concerning the proper scale and scope of government in a free society. Sound economic reasoning, not flights of theoretical fantasy, is what is required for this task.

The past thirty years proved the validity of Adam Smith’s assertion, “The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition…is so powerful, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations".

During “the age of Milton Friedman”, as Andrei Shleifer dubed it, key developments in economic freedom—deregulation in the US and UK, the collapse of communism in East and Central Europe, and the opening up of the economies of China and India—allowed individuals to surmount government meddling in the economy. From 1980 to 2005, there were marked, world-wide improvements in life expectancy, education, democracy, and living standards as integration into a world economy delivered billions of individuals from poverty, ignorance and squalor.

September 11, 2001 changed that. “The war on terror” justified another great expansion of the scale and scope of government. Thus, like the Great Depression before it, the Great Recession was preceded not by a “do nothing” administration that supported free market policies, but by an activist administration that embraced the power of government intervention and greatly expanded the role of government throughout the economy and society at large.

The great free market economic thinkers from Adam Smith to F. A. Hayek would understand why this change happened. They never argued that individuals were hyper-rational actors possessed with full and complete information, operating in perfectly competitive markets. They only argued that individuals will pursue, in the best way they can, those activities that are in their interest to pursue. These thinkers knew that individuals are individuals, fallible but capable human actors plagued by alluring hopes and haunting fears, not lightening calculators of pleasure and pain.

Human fallibility may cause “failures,” inefficient markets, but this very fallibility also sets in motion the market process of discovery and adjustment.

A setting of private property rights, free pricing, and accurate profit and loss accounting aligns incentives and communicates information so that individuals realize the mutual gains from trade with one another. Efficient markets are an outcome of a process of discovery, learning, and adjustment, not an assumption going into the analysis. That process, however, operates within political, legal, and social institutions. Those institutions can promulgate policies that block discovery, inhibit learning, and prevent adjustment, causing the market to operate poorly.

So rather than free market ideology being obsolete, what is needed is a reinvigorated ideological vision of the free market economy: a society of free and responsible individuals who have the opportunity to prosper in a market economy based on profit and loss and to live in caring communities. Yes, caring communities. The Adam Smith that wrote The Wealth of Nations also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and the F. A. Hayek that wrote Individualism and Economic Order also wrote about the corruption of morals in The Fatal Conceit. Our challenge today is to embrace the full scope of free market ideology so as to understand the preconditions under which we can live better together in a world of peace, prosperity, and progress.

by Peter Boettke — 02.09.2011

via:

Green light for Scotland's commercial gold mine

After more than three years of planning applications, winning approval from local residents, the government and the industry, Scotland’s first commercial gold mine has been given the go-ahead.

The plans received unanimous approval at a meeting with the board of the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park Authority on October 25.

Planning had perviously missed approval by a narrow margin due to the National Park rejecting plans in August last year. Scotgold Resources - the company behind the plans for the mine - and members of the board of the park authority have since met several times to resolve issues that had been raised.

more via:

Earthrise - Japan's Ethical jewellery brand enters jewellery contest

Please vote for Earthrise's Swarovski Bridal jewellery
http://www.earthrise-jewelry.com/swarovskicontest_2011en.html
by going here:
http://www.bridalring.jp/contest_items/vote/2/128
and press the pink swarovski button below on the page (with Japanese characters that probably say: "vote here" :-) - then press "ok" )

Earthrise is a Japanese jewellery brand committed to ethical sourcing and the first Jeweltree Licensee in Japan.

Earthrise in coop with Jeweltree is promoting free and fair market access for small scale artisanal gold- / diamond- and gemstone miners.
Artisanal mining makes up for a huge part of the worlds production and involves millions of people but still very few of them earn over 1$ a day.

Development as Freedom! by Amartya Sen - winner of the Nobel prize for economics

Pastedgraphic-1

In Development as Freedom Amartya Sen explains how in a world of unprecedented increase in overall opulence millions of people living in the Third World are still unfree.
Even if they are not technically slaves, they are denied elementary freedoms and remain imprisoned in one way or another by economic poverty, social deprivation, political tyranny or cultural authoritarianism. The main purpose of development is to spread freedom and its 'thousand charms' to the unfree citizens. Freedom, Sen persuasively argues, is at once the ultimate goal of social and economic arrangements and the most efficient means of realizing general welfare.
Social institutions like markets, political parties, legislatures, the judiciary, and the media contribute to development by enhancing individual freedom and are in turn sustained by social values. Values, institutions, development, and freedom are all closely interrelated, and Sen links them together in an elegant analytical framework. By asking 'What is the relation between our collective economic wealth and our individualability to live as we would like?' and by incorporating individual freedom as a social commitment into his analysis Sen allows economics once again, as it did in the time of Adam Smith, to address the social basis of individual well-being and freedom.

Buy on amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Development-as-Freedom-Amartya-Sen/dp/0385720270/ref=sr...


JTF:Thís is what Capacity Building is all about!