Opportunity of a lifetime!

Fair Trade Vancouver is proud to announce an exciting international opportunity to learn about where our food comes from by gaining firsthand experience in Mexico! Two lucky individuals are going to be selected for a two week placement to work the fields and learn about agricultural production, along the challenges that producers are facing.

Please download:

• Trip details
• The Application form

***Application deadline is February the 6th 2012***

The Trip:

For over a year now, Discovery Organics has been working with an Ejido, or common land that is owned and operated by local farmers, to set up a small farm operation in Northern Mexico. The farm is surrounded by a small village, where participants will live in an unheated adobe house. Fair Trade Vancouver is excited to partner with Discovery Organics and excited to announce the sending of two individuals for this once in a life time opportunity. Participants must be able and willing to work 10 hours/day, six days/week, cook their own food, and be prepared to charge their iPods from a car battery. It will be very rustico!  Tambien, ella o el aprenderá mucho español! 

Where:

The participants will be housed at Ejido Benito Juarez Leyes de Reforma. The nearest towns are San Luis de Colorado and Guadalupe Victoria, in the Sonora State, 40 km south of Yuma, Arizona.

Accommodation:

The accommodation will be basic and one step up from camping would be the most accurate way to describe this experience!

Transportation:

This is an independent internship; it will therefore not be sponsored by FTV or Discovery Organics. Discovery however will be donating the air fare rather than paying it and making all the arrangements on the ground. Airfare will be from Vancouver to Yuma or El Centro, where participants will be picked up by field managers and taken to the farm.

What it involves:

Participants will work full-time with farmers and coop members, picking and preparing fruits and vegetables for export. Full-time work consists of 10 hours each day, six days a week. Discovery Organics will donating the equivalent wage for your hard work in the field back to Fair Trade Vancouver, and your efforts will directly contribute to both the productivity of the farm, and to Fair Trade Vancouver as an organization. The total amount donated to Fair Trade Vancouver will be equivalent to $10 per day (or about $1 per hour) which amounts to 3 times the average wage of local farm hands who only make about $3.50/day!

What to expect:

This trip is meant to expose the participant to the everyday life that belongs to the majority of agricultural producers in Mexico. In other words long hot days, little water, no electricity, and few amenities!

The work:

The work will be quite labour intensive and will involve things like weeding, moving irrigation lines and pipes, transplanting, and seeding. The participants will be working with the employees of the project including the “ejidotarios” generally working 10 hours a day, and starting an hour after sunrise for 6 days a week.

***Please see above documents for full trip details and the application form and process***