Making Trouble: Fighting for Fair Trade Jewellery

“Valerio, you’re a natural born trouble-maker. Just make sure you make trouble for the right reasons.” Expelled from secondary school with these words ringing in his ears, it took Greg Valerio a little while to find the right cause to devote his trouble-making skills to – but eventually he found it. Fighting to apply fair trade standards to the jewellery business has brought him up against an industry riddled with problems. In the last fifteen years he has criss-crossed the globe, from the arctic circle of Greenland, alluvial diamond fields of Sierra Leone and equatorial gold rich rainforests of South America, in an effort to give the customer an ethically pure piece of jewellery, and to give the producers of that jewellery a fair wage and good working conditions. Along the way, he has exposed the jewellery industry’s dirty secrets: pollution, child labour, criminality, exploitation, dangerous working practices and much more. And he has passionately argued his case in boardrooms, sumptuous hotels and with government officials from Antwerp to Cape Town, to say there is another way. Having been told it was impossible to have gold jewellery that could be certified as fairly traded from the mine to the shop, he achieved this in the UK. Founder of Cred Jewellery in 1996, he was awarded The Observer Ethical Award 2011 for Campaigner of the Year.