Special Report: Fair Trade
About Fair Trade
Fair Trade is a vast and complicated subject. It works to ensure living wages, ethical working conditions, and sustainable business and environmental practices throughout the supply chain, from workers to producers to consumers. It eliminates many of the middlemen in conventional supply chains, ensuring that more of the price paid by consumers helps the small farmers and artisans that produced the goods. Many, though not all, products that are certified Fair Trade are also certified Organic.
This special report is a work in progress, now in its beginning stage. To become fair trade certified, a producer must be part of a democratically run, worker-owned cooperative. The cooperatives help provide health care and education for their members. Fair trade empowers women through equal pay for men and women for equal work, through greater opportunities for girls as well as boys to attend school, and because many fair trade businesses are owned by women.
According to Green America's Guide to Fair Trade, pages 10-14, the following products are available with Fair Trade certification: coffee, chocolate (infamous in conventional brands for its use of child slave labor), tea, rice, sugar, fresh fruit, flowers, vanilla, sports balls, wine, apparel, home décor, jewelry, handicrafts, musical instruments, toys, and more.
There are several Fair Trade labels, and this can lead to confusion. There are also questions about how effective Fair Trade is. For information on these subjects, see ResponsibleConsumer's Products and Services page, under "What's in a Fairtrade Label?"
Following are links collected by ResponsibleConsumer.net for further research. If you have comments or suggestions for other links, please email admin[at]responsibleconsumer.net with Fair Trade in the Subject line.
Links to Fair Trade Information
Green America's Guide to Fair Trade. This is a visually beautiful as well as informative site. Pages 21-32 show a Directory of Fair Trade products, with links to websites where they are available
Certification logos and explanations
Fair Trade Federation; North American certifying organization
Green America's Fair Trade Your Supermarket campaign
Pros and Cons of Fair Trade Coffee by the Organic Consumers Association
Organic Consumers Association criticism of TransFair certification organization; see also Organic Consumers Association criticism of TransFair name change
An alternative to Fair Trade: Coalition of Immokalee Workers Campaign for Fair Food