Despite recent challenges, Fair Trade still answers big questions on trade and development, says Harriet Lamb of the UK's Fair Trade Foundation.

We are trying to create a little bubble in the global economy where we do trade differently, where we show it can be done successfully by putting people first,” said pioneer Robin Murray, as, over a decade ago he battled to get Cafédirect onto our shop shelves. At that time, supermarket buyers laughed in our faces. One said he wasn’t going to stock the first Fairtrade chocolate: “just because it’s backed by a bunch of Christians”. But as the grassroots campaign gathered pace, it wasn’t long before he was back on the phone: “You’d better get over here,” he said, “We’re being bombarded by telephone calls. From vicars!” Since then, that little bubble has expanded dramatically but the challenges before the movement remain pressing.

Fairtrade is one of Britain’s most extraordinary social change success stories thanks to the thousands of campaigners who have tirelessly talked about Fairtrade, pranced around high streets in wonderful costumes, given out mountains of chocolate to sweeten the drip, drip, drip of information. A fl urry of recent research has found

the Fairtade Mark is now the most recognised ethical label by a long chalk. In one survey twice as many respondents recognised it compared to the next most known, the Red Tractor. Sales are now doubling every two years, and seven million farmers, workers and their families are selling an ever widening range of crops.

Today one in four bananas sold in the UK, including all those in Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, carries the blue and green label, and all the bananas from the Windward Islands are Fairtrade. It shows just how far Fairtrade can go – that it can become part of the nation’s shopping habits, achieve significant shifts in markets and affect entire economies. The challenge now is to take this prototype and extend the reach and impact of Fairtrade, ultimately tipping the balance of British trade with poor producers decisively in their favour. But as companies, think-tanks or governments take Fairtrade more seriously, they want to know more about how it works and they raise challenging questions.

For example, critics assert that farmers outside the scheme are left worse off. But this is not only theoretically muddled (why would prices for some farmers fall if others receive a higher price?), it is plain wrong. Take the word of John Kanjagaile, Export Manager of the Kagera Co-operative Union with its 60,000 farmers in 125 local village co-operatives scattered across hilly countryside on the western shores of Lake Victoria. He says, “We sell a small percentage of our coffee as Fairtrade but the benefits are much, much wider”. He says that the certainty of the prices and orders KCU gets for its Fairtrade coffee enables the co-op to push up all prices in the coffee auction, so benefiting neighbouring farmers not yet able to sell anything under Fairtrade.

It’s an experience confirmed by independent research in Bolivia which concluded that Fairtrade was becoming a price setter. The study also shows how Fairtrade can generate significant widespread income benefits for producers. It found that when Fairtradecertified coffee producers in Bolivia received higher (Fairtrade) prices for their products, this developed the confidence of other, conventional, coffee producers to demand higher prices for their coffee. It’s a virtuous circle that’s good news for all farmers.

Other critics charge that Fairtrade encourages over-production when farmers would be better off diversifying or improving the quality of their produce. We could not agree more. But what encourages such diversification? Most poor farmers have few choices – that’s part of the definition of poverty. They grow the one crop they know about and that suits their soil; they cannot, to adapt UK politician Boris Johnson on redundant steel workers, start selling cappuccinos on the internet overnight. Therefore, against a backdrop of falling prices, farmers too often embark on a desperate and – usually hopeless – quest to maintain their meagre living standards by bringing more crops to markets.

So, in fact, Fairtrade is one solution to overproduction. For the extra finance and certainty, the market information, organisation and contacts that come through Fairtrade give producers the resources and opportunities to improve the quality of their crops, to go organic or to diversify into other ways of supplementing their livelihoods. Coffee farmers in Costa Rica have started processing their coffee while also selling macadamia nuts; cotton farmers in Mali have planted vegetables to eat and sell locally, while in St Lucia banana farmers have bought computers to equip young people for jobs in tourism. Concerns are also raised that supermarkets are charging premiums for Fairtrade which are not passed back to the producers. Pricing is fiendishly complex; it is illegal to set consumer prices in this country and certainly impossible to monitor prices at every stage of international supply chains from shipping and processing to packing. But it’s an issue the Fairtrade Foundation keeps an eye on and in our experience, the margins charged on Fairtrade are at – or below – the industry average. When Sainsbury’s switched all their bananas to Fairtrade, they did not put up the price at all – instead taking a £4 million hit on their margins in one year. But the Fairtrade Foundation, an independent charity owned by 13 non-governmental organisations from Oxfam to the Women’s Institute, and part of a global movement co-owned by producers, is focused on ensuring a better deal for growers. The public can trust the Fairtrade Mark because we trust no one. We rigorously check that producers’ organisations get the set minimum Fairtrade price and premium for crops: that is our guarantee. So every time you put in your shopping basket a packet with a Fairtrade Mark, you can be certain that producers are a little better off. The Fairtrade movement grapples daily with a multitude of complex questions, and constantly reviews its model. But the Foundation is focused on the single greatest challenge facing us all: that too few producers are yet able to sell their goods as Fairtrade. Hence our ambition to open more doors to more markets for more producers – especially from the least developed countries.

Visiting Malawi recently, I was struck again by the urgency of the need – and the potential. Malawi is the world’s fifth poorest country, with life expectancy of just 37 years. Tobacco aside, Malawi’s main exports, providing livelihoods to millions, could be Fairtrade: tea, nuts, sugar, cotton, soya, lentils… Many smallholders are well organised but they just need access to markets at fair prices. One tea smallholder told me that she could only keep her children in secondary school if she went without her main meal. That is why our tea-bags are so very cheap. But if we could scale up the demand for Fairtrade – if we could switch a significant chunk of the UK tea or peanut markets, for example, to Fairtrade – then the impact in Malawi could be transformative. Farmers would get money to put food on the table today and to invest in their communities – from drinking water wells and electricity to schools or revolving loan schemes. That’s the vision which informs the Foundation’s new strategy. We have plans to enable more producers to sell more of their crops as Fairtrade; to open up whole new areas from jute and silk to cosmetics and seafood; to see threequarters of the public recognising the Fairtrade Mark by 2012; with people having deeper understanding and purchasing more regularly, and we want companies to commit more seriously to Fairtrade, deepening their engagement with the producers.

But Fairtrade is only one piece in the jigsaw we need to put together to tackle poverty. That is why we are part of the Trade Justice Movement, providing evidence that trade can be managed in a way that tackles poverty and injustice, contributes to development, and is still commercially successful. It’s not an abstract policy position – it’s a reality being proven every day by millions of shoppers, producers and businesses worldwide.

And it is a citizens’ movement, helping build the momentum for change, creating the climate within which politicians can take the big bold steps needed in world trade talks, confident that there is a large constituency crying out for fairer international trade rules.

Harriet Lamb’s, Fighting Banana Wars and Other Fairtrade Battles is published by Rider Books.

MORE INFORMATION
www.fairtrade.org.uk