Sustainable Transportation
| The Challenge |
|
Greenheart Contribution |
| The unavailability or unaffordability of transport links to remote and impoverished communities is a major obstacle to development. Many producer communities in the developing world are unable to bring their quality products to market profitably, although their production costs are low. The great costs of deepwater ports and road and rail infrastructure have limited economic development to specific areas with access to concentrated capital. For most subsistence-level producers, lack of access to transportation hubs, and all the additional warehousing and middleman costs involved in getting their product to the most profitable markets, have marginalized them from the global economy. The huge commercial advantage of owning and controlling one's own transportation link to rich markets is limited to very large and rich producers that can command the investments necessary. |
|
Greenheart vessels are ideally suited for development applications. They provide an affordable means for communities with access to the sea or a river, to transport their goods directly to the most profitable point of sales, no matter how far away. Using technologies that are already familiar to even the most remote communities (sail & dc electrics), Greenheart ships could be owned and operated by coastal communities as transport links, marketing devices, and even as energy sources, since they will continue to provide electrical energy while in their home port. Their unlimited range, zero fuel costs, low maintenance costs, and unprecedented access to shallows and cities will revolutionize trading between excluded producers and rich markets. Greenheart intends to make our ships available at microfinancing terms, to make them viable options for many applications worldwide. |
Fair Trade
| The Challenge |
|
Greenheart Contribution |
| The challenge implicit in Fair Trade is to improve the international trading system to allow everyone involved the reasonable expectation of profiting from their resources and labor. At present, the majority of producers in developing countries, although providing the resources, time, and labor to grow or manufacture goods, are paid so little for their efforts that they have no hope of improving their situation. Goods purchased at market prices in the developed world bring vast profits to corporate retailers and middlemen, yet compensate the worker that produced them at such a low rate that they are compelled to live in poverty, without health care, education opportunities or the prospect of enough freedom to better themselves. |
|
Greenheart combine technologies in a novel way to make ships that are perfectly suited as Fair Trade implements. These ships are at once simple enough to be operated with minimal training, and robust and flexible enough to permit routing between any two points on the world's coasts. Although the economics of an oceangoing ship with a cargo capacity of only 3 TEU's (twenty-foot containers) will not attract the attention of present-day 4000-container ship owners, poor producers around the world will now have the tools to command their own transportation links to distant rich markets and increase their profits many fold. Greenheart ships are ideal appropriate development tools that will add a new dimension to the concept of Fair Trade by freeing producers from the constraints of actual trading routes and costs. We expect a small revolution in the way Fair Trade is transported, with another appreciable share of the profits to stay with the original producers.
Our first Greenheart ship will be actively involved in Fair Trade campaigns and promotions, carrying Fair Trade cargos, and collaborating with experts in the field to identify prospective recipients of the first Greenheart ships to go to Fair Trade producers. |
Community Empowerment & Cultural Preservation
| The Challenge |
|
Greenheart Contribution |
| The globalizing economic system is excluding more people than it benefits. Today nearly half the world’s population lives, suffers and dies in poverty. Products, services and technologies developed by global corporations are designed to be sold to consumers in the world of disposable income, not to address the actual needs of the underprivileged billions of people who have almost no purchasing power. Urban drift is the name for the tendency of tens of millions of people to abandon their homes, fields and traditional lifestyle in an often vain effort to improve their situation by working in a city. This movement has swollen the slums of cities as it drains the world of the cultural diversity, strong community structures, and traditional skills of the shrinking myriad of village lifestyles. People are reduced to bleak urban poverty without the communal safety net and social security of their heritage communities. |
|
We believe that Greenheart ships can serve as a lifeline to withering communities around the world's shores and riversides. A single ship could provide a community with a locally-owned source of transport of people and goods among nearby communities and a link to the next larger market town. The support to local industries by offering trading links to richer markets, the access to more distant fishing grounds, and the electricity provided to the community while the ship is in port, are all factors that would help sustain the community. A Greenheart ship will also provide a marketable outlet for the traditional skills of sailing, the traditional knowledge of local weather and tidal patterns, as well as providing training in the operation of photovoltaic arrays, battery banks, and dc electrics. We expect Greenheart ships to have a significant effect in arresting urban drift and instill a new sense of hope in such communities. |
|
