In case you didn't know, Fairtrade Fortnight 2008 kicks off today. It is a massive, countrywide event organised by the Fairtrade Foundation to champion towns and retailers who are putting some welly behind promoting the Fairtrade movement.
And in case you're so behind you don't even know what "fairtrade" means, the short answer is that it means paying a fair price for products made by people who have been disadvantaged or marginalised by the conventional trading system, which makes it very difficult for new businesses in developing countries to get up and running.
As there is no such thing as a minimum wage in many (most?) countries in the world, the Fairtrade Foundation sets a minimum price for all the products it can, such as coffee, cocoa and bananas, to help people make sure their livelihoods actually provide them with enough to live on.
To mark the occasion and work out who exactly is benefiting when we buy products sporting the Fairtrade logo in the UK, I'm running a little competition to dig out some of the more original and inspirational stories behind the producers of fairly-traded ingredients. So: you email me the name of your favourite product and a few details such as why and where you buy it and like it, and perhaps where the ingredients come from (or you can just email me the name of the product and I'll do the hard bit!). In return for the best stories I am offering a few fabulous prizes - a fair trade (forgive me) I think you'll agree.
Today and over the next few days I'll be posting on the stories behind the prizes, which will include cosmetics, chocolate and wine. Something for everyone, I think? Let me know if not.
First up are fairtrade champions Lush cosmetics, who have plenty of ethical accolades to their name, of which using lots of fairly-traded ingredients is just one. There isn't space to look at them all here but the shea butter they use is quite special. Shea butter is traditionally extracted from the dried seeds of the Karite tree, which is common in west Africa, and Lush buy it from Ghana. They support a women's project in Gurugu in northern Ghana involving 130 women. They have teamed up with the non-governmental organisation Akoma, who helped the women improve the quality of their shea butter to be sold commercially.
The project has been such a success that Lush are in the process of expanding it quite considerably - they are building a substantial "village" where the profits from the shea butter will be used to provide health and education facilities for the women and their families - specifically malaria and diarrhoea prevention measures for children and libraries.
With the shea butter they make products such as this "Handy Gurugu" hand cream which is quite delicious. I have a pot on my desk. It is also used in Almond Kisses moisturiser, King of Skin body butter, Buffy skin conditioner
and other products, and I have a gift set crammed with these products
to offer up to the lucky reader willing to trade me a fairtrade story.
More prizes TBA as the week progresses.
Of course you can easily post the names of any products you want to draw my and anyone else's attention to, but for the purposes of this competition I would much rather you emailed me instead, and that way you can include more details, and we can maintain the element of surprise.
Fairtrade as the perfect name. And I like them - and I consume their products. But I have a few issues with them. They are not as perfect as their name implies. For instance, they do not work with the poorest of the poor, but only those organized in cooperatives. And farmers do not get the Fairtrade price, only a part of it and the rest goes to the cooperative. Don’t forget, farmers pay Fairtrade to be certified. More on my blog. But the quicker they come clean, the quicker we can address their reason for existence – making the world a better place. More on My Beef with Fairtrade at http://angryafrican.wordpress.com/2008/02/21/my-beef-with-fairtrade/
Posted by: Angry African | Tuesday, 26 February 2008 at 03:53 AM
Fairtrade is the biggest con around and the sooner people wise up to it the better. Fairtrade's policy is a joke and if you ask farmers how if they are benefitting from Fairtrade you may well get a different response. The problem is that Fairtrade now have a monopoly on ethical buying. If any new company comes along which offers a farmer a better deal they will go broke since they dont have Fairtrade's political clout ,subsidies or other economic benefits.
Fairtrade only deals with collectives and small farms and only buy the raw coffee. Hence farms which want to package the coffee and sell it direct miss out. If farms want to expand they miss out. Hence farms remain continually poor and Fairtrade remain in business.
Maybe the author should do an indepth analysis of Fairtrade before giving it free publicity. This paper is meant to be Independent after all. Why don't you do some serious digging first before you come to this conclusion. Why sont you spend a summer working in a farm and learn about teh difficulties they face before you go on here giving the impression that Fairtrade is the saviour for all these farms....
Posted by: Andy | Tuesday, 26 February 2008 at 10:01 AM
OK Fairtrade isn't perfect, but then you have to be realistic - this isn't the best of all possible worlds and Fairtrade is doing a lot more than the open capitalist market which is grinding these countries under. Nobody is saying it's a saviour for everybody and everything, but you don't help by carping about it. You might as well say raising money for charity is wrong because it doesn't stop the abuses it goes towards preventing. Every bit helps.
Posted by: Rose | Tuesday, 26 February 2008 at 12:36 PM
I don't know where 'Andy' is coming from, but his comments are singularly ill-informed.
"Fairtrade have a monopoly on ethical buying" - not so. There are many other ethical marks, of which the Soil Association is the most familiar (to me at least). They all have their niche, with different emphases, e.g. on organic, or labour rights. None of them have gone bust that I know of, nor is there any reason for them to.
"Fairtrade only deal with collectives and small farms" - largely true (though they do also deal with e.g. tea estates where the emphasis is on ensuring fair pay and conditions for the workforce) because that's where the poor producers are - on small farms.
"Farms that want to package the coffee and sell it miss out". What planet are you living on, Andy? That's not how coffee production works. But if it did I see no reason why a Fairtrade company shouldn't buy the packeted coffee.
"Maybe the author should do an indepth analysis of Fairtrade before giving it free publicity". Maybe you should too, before knocking it.
Posted by: Bill Linton | Tuesday, 26 February 2008 at 12:54 PM
Nope, Fairtrade isn't a perfect system, or the solution to world poverty. It has its glitches and it isn't an open door for every "poor" person in the world to suddenly jump on the ladder towards self-sufficiency. It is just one way, to help some people. The purpose of this competition was to highlight their work, but while I'm waiting on a response from the Fairtrade Organisation to your criticisms, do have a look at Angry African's Beef with Fairtrade piece. There are heaps of labelling organisations around designed to help consumers know what they are buying, whether that means what is in the product or where it has come from. Sometimes this can make things more confusing,and one label cannot tell you everything. You could do worse than doing a little digging yourself and entering the competition with whatever you find out.
Posted by: Ethics Girl | Tuesday, 26 February 2008 at 01:35 PM
For all your coffee lovers/activists out there, there is a great film on the fairtrade concerns of one coffee co-operative on More4 tonight at 10pm - Black Gold. You can read my earlier blog post on it here - http://blogs.independent.co.uk/independent/2007/10/a-screening-of-.html
Posted by: Ethics Girl | Tuesday, 26 February 2008 at 06:41 PM
Fair trade businesses are all very well and good but fundamentally limited as an economic model for development. The enlightened few deign to select only the packets bearing the stamp of approval. Paying a surcharge that goes to the producers. Wow! Ground breaking!
Big Business exploits the producers because that’s what the western economic model of profit maximisation demands and as the companies are based in the developed world that’s where the money goes. Nobel Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has been working in social businesses and refining his social business model for decades. The Grameen Bank pioneered the concept of ‘micro lending’ and as an aside has a majority female customer base. Mr Yunus has been a pioneer in the field of ‘social business’ and argues for a social business model. His model is, simplified, to replace the profit maximising goal of the business with a social target. For instance, Danone in conjunction with Grameen have been building yogurt factories in Bangladesh where the new company has been set up to provide affordable yogurt for children to provide dietary elements they were missing. The goal of the new company isn’t to make western firms money but to improve the diet of as many children as possible. The company of course also fairly pays suppliers.
Think beyond loveable coffee growers in getting a ‘fair’ price, that’s only a start. Think social business model.
Posted by: Conor | Wednesday, 27 February 2008 at 03:44 PM
I am sure we all know organisations that are not perfect. But FairTrade is operating its model very successfully - not for it, but for its producers. And I think, even if you were to discount everything that it has done for African or South American etc communities, it still has done an amazing job of raising some awareness in our materialistic society about some of the inequalities in the world. I think it is unfair to criticise it blindly; I have seen first hand some of the problems coffee and tea growers in Kenya have had.
I agree with Conor also about the micro-lending. But, like Fairtrade, I don't think this is all the solution either. We need many initiatives, in all sorts of areas to even begin to get a fairer world.
Posted by: Arrick Wilkinson | Wednesday, 27 February 2008 at 11:51 PM
Conor, I couldn't agree with you more about Grameen and the idea of a social business, but this is not incompatible with Fairtrade, in fact the two can and do go hand in hand. Think about the fact that cocoa growers are the major shareholders in Divine Chocolate. Nut growers own 42% of the shares in Liberation Nuts. Equal Exchange rooibos tea is not just grown by smallholders in South Africa, it is also packed and exported by a business that operates as a social enterprise model. Many Fairtrade co-ops are also establishing micro-loan facilities for local people that very much follow the ethic of the Grameen bank model. I met coffee growers working with Fairtrade in El Salvador a couple of years ago - they were using their premiums from Fairtrade to hold back some of their coffee from export, and were developing their own roasting and packing facility to sell their coffee as a finished product into the consumer sector in their own country. What Fairtrade was stimulating was the confidence and the injection of resources for social entrepreneurism to flourish.
Posted by: Chocoholix | Thursday, 28 February 2008 at 08:36 PM
wow
Posted by: zac.b | Thursday, 04 December 2008 at 09:10 AM