Fair Trade
WIKIPEDIA DEFINITION
The fair trade movement, also known as the trade justice movement, promotes international labour, environment and social standards for the production of traded goods and services. The movement focuses in particular on exports from the Third and Second Worlds to the First World. Standards may be voluntarily adhered to by importing firms, or enforced by governments through a combination of employment and commercial law. Click here for the complete Wikipedia definition of Fair Trade.
FTOs DIFFER FROM COMMERCIAL IMPORTERS
The goal of Fair Trade Organizations (FTOs) is to benefit the individuals and organizations they work with, not maximize profits. They work with producer co-operatives that use democratic principles to ensure that working conditions are safe and dignified, and that producers have a say in how their products are created and sold. Co-operatives are encouraged to provide benefits such as health care, child care and access to loans.
They encourage producers to reinvest their profits into their communities. Many producers who work with FTOs have committed time and money to build health clinics and support other community projects in their villages.
Some Fair Trade Organizations work to shift processing and packaging activities to the developing world, so that as much work as possible will remain in the producer country. Often, such activities are performed abroad, depriving the neediest countries of the opportunity to boost their incomes.
FAIR TRADE FACTS
- Worldwide, fair trade sales total $400 million each year
- In North America, fair trade retail sales totalled $35 to 40 million in 1998
- Of $3.6 trillion of all goods exchanged globally, fair trade accounts for only .01%
- Fair trade businesses return 1/3 to 1/4 of profits back to producers in developing countries
- According to the National Labour Committee, a Haitian sewing clothing for the U.S. market may earn less than 1% of the retail price
- Sales for Ten Thousand Villages, the largest fair trade organization in the United States, grew from nearly $3 million in 1985 to nearly $12 million in 1998. Ten Thousand Villages' Canadian operations reported another $3 million. Combined, that represents the creation of the equivalent of 12,500 full-time jobs for disadvantaged artisans and farmers
- North American consumers pay $4 to $11 a pound for coffee bought from growers for about 80 cents a pound. Growers who sell to fair trade organizations earn $1.12 to $1.26 a pound
- Sixty to seventy percent of the artisans providing fair trade
hand-crafted products are women. Often these women are mothers and the sole wage earners in the home.
- (c) Fair Trade Federation
PLANET BEAN AND FAIR TRADE
Planet Bean Coffee Roastery
Coffee as an agent of change? You mean it's not just a hot, mildly addictive brew?
That's what coffee becomes in the hands of alternative trading organizations (ATOs). The same goes for tea, bananas, and chocolate - as well as a growing variety of products traditionally grown only in the Third World, or South. Throughout the world, these small organizations are challenging how international trade is conducted - sometimes at the risk of lives and livelihoods.
Historically, developed countries have set the terms for how world commodities such as oil, minerals, and tropical foods are traded. Developing countries, as well as small-scale producers in those countries, had little choice but to accept the terms offered. Alternative trade is a way to address that inequity, not through charity but through the daily practices of international business. It's a way of using consumers' buying power to help producers help themselves.
Alternative traders have focused on coffee as their lever of change, a commodity in which setting up fairer trading relationships can make the most difference. Until 1989, when the world coffee price crashed to a 60-year low, coffee was the second largest commodity in the world after oil, and the industry was a major employer throughout Latin America, Asia and Africa. Now most farmers who have stayed in the coffee must struggle to cover their costs of production. Even though prices have risen in the past year, the producers can neither expect to see any benefits, nor count on prices staying high.
Meanwhile, in developed countries, consumers are more willing than ever to pay premium prices for high-quality coffee. Where does the money go? To retailers, roasters, exporters, processors, taxing agencies, creditors, and to a cast of middlemen known derisively as 'coyotes'. Speculators in the world's money markets also take their cut, as they bet on swings in coffee prices that have ranged from US$1.15 a pound in January of 1997 to $3.00 by the spring, and down to $1.90 by August. Less then ten percent of that price goes to the farmers, upon whom coffee quality depends. And it's clear that they can't count on high prices to remain high long enough to break their cycle of poverty.
Alternative trade cuts out the middlemen in the export country. By setting up direct trading relationships with coffee-farming co-ops, ATO's can pay farmers a fair price: a price that guarantees farmers a living wage for their labour. Alternative trade is a radical departure from the way international trade has been conducted for centuries, and it is radically different from the usual solution offered up to help charity.
Alternative trade goes far beyond charity. Instead of making
one-time donations that provide temporary assistance consumers create a stream of economic assistance by buying alternative-trade products when they shop. They use their dollars to vote for fair trade. Rather than making a donation to charity after the company's costs are covered after the sale is made and after profits are secured. ATO's give up-front in the form of premium prices for farmers' crops. Over time, the premiums pay farmers up to twice what they would have received n the open market. And that's the difference alternative trade makes.
LA SIEMBRA CO-OP AND FAIR TRADE
La Siembra Co-op
Founded in 1999, La Siembra Co-operative of Ottawa was the first organization to widely distribute Fair Trade and organic chocolate, cocoa and sugar in North America. Its mission is threefold: deliver a premium quality product; improve the livelihoods of family farmers; and make a positive impact on communities at home and in the regions where the ingredients are sourced in the Dominican Republic and Paraguay.
La Siembra was also awarded the prestigious 2002 Socially Responsible Business Award at the 2002 Natural Products Expo in Washington, DC. It was the first Canadian company to receive this award and was judged according to nine criteria: Ethics, Accountability, Governance, Financial Returns, Employment Practices, Business Relationships, Products and Services, Community Involvement, and Environmental Protection.
Sweet Victory for Fair Trade Chocolate
October 20, 2003 - Ottawa, Ontario
The Cocoa Camino Bittersweet chocolate bar wins GOLD in the organic category at the 2003 Alive Awards of Excellence. The voting and ceremony took place at the Canadian Health Food Association Trade Show in Toronto on the weekend. Alive Publishers, Canada's leading health magazine and book publishing company, sponsors the awards to shed light on leading companies and products in the health food sector.
This award is significant: The Cocoa Camino bar is the very first Fair Trade product to win the highly prestigious award. As well, there were a record number of voters comprised of product buyers and owners of Canada's leading health food stores and grocery store chains; they are people who know a good quality product when they taste one.
'We're deeply grateful, but we are most pleased for the 10,000 organic cocoa and sugar farmers with whom we work and indeed all our partners involved in the system of Fair Trade,' commented Kevin Thomson, Co-executive Director of La Siembra Cooperative, the makers and distributors of the Cocoa Camino products.
'It's a great vote of confidence that the retailers have given us. It says to chocolate lovers that Fair Trade is a great way of doing business, and, when discerning quality control is applied on top of the Fair Trade business principles, it produces premium quality results.'
Cocoa Camino bars contain only Fair Trade Certified, 100% organic ingredients. Chocolate connoisseurs have made it the cooperatives highest seller in Canada where it is available in over 600 health food and Canada's leading supermarket stores.