Fair Trade

Fair trade seeks to enhance producer-consumer relationships in ways that reestablish trust, more equitably distribute the benefits of trade, and promote empowerment among [Page 151]impoverished smallholder farmers, artisans, and workers. The initial intentions were to create a real-life retort by developing alternative trade production, trade, and distribution channels that contrasted sharply with the profit-focused “free” trade system. Fair trades pioneers claimed that the mainstream fair trade system had contributed to chronic poverty and environmental degradation in the global South and thus needed to be reorganized and “transformed.” The fair trade approach poses an alternative trade system characterized by transparent trading partnerships connecting consumers and retailers with producer and/or worker organizations in a way that ensures human rights, livelihoods, and sustainable development. The current certified fair trade market finds its roots in the international solidarity work that aimed to support empowerment and provide postdisaster relief in ways that more highly valued the labor and artistry of impoverished peoples. The fair trade of agricultural products also started with an intercultural partnership connecting an indigenous coffee cooperative through a religious leader and into a solidarity-oriented market. A core element of this system is to build a more direct relationship that advances empowerment among producer organizations. The most important fair trade standard is related to the guarantee that disadvantaged small-scale farmers and artisans will receive minimum prices sufficient to cover the costs of sustainable production and premiums that enable social development.

The Fair Trade-certified coffee, chocolate, flowers, and crafts found on today's supermarket shelves and in hip cafes made their way to these places through an unlikely history that begins in the late 1940s with international people-to-people solidarity. The primary partnerships consisted of impoverished small-scale producer cooperatives and artisans selling food, beverages, and crafts to Northern volunteers from churches and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). A small, yet thriving, alternative trade system began to emerge. Producers and buyers shared the risk: on the one hand, farmers and artisans sometimes provided their products months or even years before receiving full payment after volunteers and alternative trade organizations sold their goods into distant and uncertain markets. On the other hand, fair trade organizers from the North provided producers with loans that would otherwise be unavailable and bought crafts and coffee before they had established demand in their home markets.