Much has been made of this German study, at least by Fair Trade critics, and it has attracted a fair bit of press too. Unfortunately, despite only being nine pages long, it has too often been misrepresented by those seeking to discredit Fair Trade. This just doesn’t seem fair because the study appears to have been conducted thoughtfully by researchers at the University of Hohenheim and they do provide some interesting findings.
If you are reading this, chances are that you think about more than just price when you shop. In at least some of your purchasing decisions other factors come into play. Fair Trade Certified products aren't necessarily more expensive than conventional products, but they can be. Most of us spend a little extra to know that workers’ rights were respected, that the environment was protected, that farmers received better compensation. Even in tough economic times we do what we can: we buy organic, we buy local, we buy Fair Trade.
So what about the larger purchasing power of our government institutions?
I was recently in Honduras for the Fourth General Assembly of the CLAC (the Latin American and Caribbean Network of Small Fair Trade Producers). Interestingly, Day 1 opened with a great presentation on climate change by Yvette Aguilar, El Salvador’s official Rapporteur to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
There’s a reason why this talk featured so prominently on the agenda: climate change is having an enormous impact on the world's agricultural producers. It’s a true global injustice that, while countries in the global South may not be significant contributors to climate change, these producers are the ones constantly being forced to mitigate against and adapt to its devastating effects.
Many Fair Trade actors work primarily for one mission: to better the trading conditions of southern producers. Since joining TransFair Canada, first as a volunteer in 2006, this goal has certainly guided my own actions and motivated me in my daily tasks. When I was mailing out packages of promotional materials to Fair Trade activists across Canada, I reminded myself that I was helping the producers by getting information out to Canadians, one package at a time.
Decisions in Fair Trade certification tend to be made with the earnest desire on the part of decision makers to do what the producers would want us to do. The tendency in Fair Trade discourse is to frequently and somewhat automatically refer to the people who grow and work to make Fair Trade Certified products as a group. A group called “the producers”.
This week is Co-op Week, and we're launching our brand new national campaign for co-ops and credit unions: Co-operating for Fair Trade. So what do co-ops have to do with Fair Trade? A great deal, actually.
Let's start with Fair Trade producers in the global South. The majority of these producers are organized into co-operatives or associations, which they own and govern democratically. Fair Trade cocoa, sugar, cotton, coffee, herbs and spices all come exclusively from small producer organizations with an elected Board of Directors, a transparent administration, and a General Assembly of producers or their delegates. This means that, through the co-operative model, producers unite to meet their common economic and social needs.
Certain criticisms of Fair Trade periodically rear their heads, and I recently received an email from someone who'd attended a Fair Trade debate in Edmonton where some of these very criticisms were brought up.
Below is some of the response I sent her in case it's helpful for people who are unsure how to respond to these criticisms, and so anyone who believes there's something to them has a platform to elaborate further. Not surprisingly, neither the criticisms nor my responses go into great detail here. The bits in bold are what were sent to me, presumably a quick summary of the points made at the debate.
Five employees from TransFair Canada recently attended the Fair Trade Futures conference in Boston, MA. It was inspiring for all of us to spend a weekend surrounded by almost 800 other people as passionate about Fair Trade as we are – meeting producers, networking with advocates and businesses, and participating in a wide variety of seminars and debates.
One of the most interesting sessions for me was a session titled Innovating the Fair Trade Model in the North and the South, which included information about emerging models of biodiversity and sustainability for farmers, agroecology programs in Brazil, and the production of Fair Trade bananas. However, it was Darryl Reed’s presentation about a state-operated poverty eradication mission in India that really grabbed my attention.
Something you learn pretty quickly in Fair Trade is that there isn't really one definition that covers how everyone understands it, nor is there a single vision that sums up where everyone wants it to go.
Since we all bring our own ideas to the table, we thought it might be interesting to democratize things a bit. We wanted to create ways for people to ask questions, be exposed to different points-of-view, share their own, and generally discuss different ideas, so the good ones rise to the top and the bad ones sink to the bottom.
