Making Trouble

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 jewelry business has brought him up against an industry riddled with problems. In the last fifteen years he has crisscrossed 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 jewelry, and to give the producers of that jewelry a fair wage and good working conditions. Along the way, he has exposed the jewelry 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 jewelry that could be certified as fairly traded from the mine to the shop, he achieved this in the UK.