CR spoke with the Fairtrade Foundation

Barbara: Yes that's right. With gold, like many products, you simply don't know where gold is coming from. Often you find it's been mined in very unsafe conditions, sometimes by small scale miners. 90% of the people who work in the gold industry are small scale miners who were getting a fraction of the real value in terms of the price they were being paid. In fact Channel 4 Despatches recently did a fantastic programme showing these problems.

We've been working with an organisation called the Association for Responsible Mining. We've been working with mining organisations of small scale miners to establish safe working practises; helping them get legal recognition; eradicating child labour, which is a big problem in the mining industry and establish a system where they get paid a fair price for their gold and a little bit extra to invest in their community. That gold is then fully traceable all the way through the supply chain.

There are now about 30 companies who've signed up. They're mostly small scale boutique jewellers. There's a list of them on www.fairgold.org you can go and have a look about it all.

We're not quite in the high street retailers yet, because we're just setting out on this process of trying to make gold available. At the moment it's coming from Latin America, but we're also looking into trying to get more miners in Africa involved with the programme. We've just launched a few months ago, so hopefully we'll see the next big wave of change we can bring about in developing countries.