Fair Trade USA, formerly "TransFair USA", is a
501(c)(3) non-profit organization
A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...
that sets standards, certifies, and labels products that promote sustainable livelihoods for farmers and workers and protect the environment.
About
Founded in 1998 by the Institute for Agricultural Trade Policy (IATP), Fair Trade USA is an independent, nonprofit organization that sets standards, certifies, and labels products that promote sustainable livelihoods for farmers and workers and protect the environment.
Growth in fair trade
Although coffee remains the most popular fair trade product, Fair Trade USA certifies a variety of product categories, including tea, cocoa, sugar, spices, honey, produce, grains, wine and spirits, flowers, apparel and home goods, and body care. There are more than 12,000 individual
Fair Trade Certified products available in North America, and the market is growing rapidly.
Campaigns
Comedian
Jimmy Fallon kicked off Fair Trade Month by hosting ice cream makers
Ben & Jerry on the ''
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon''. The October 4, 2011, episode mentioned the March episode in which Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield introduced their new flavor featuring Fair Trade Certified ingredients, Late Night Snack. Introducing the ice cream flavor, which is made with Fair Trade Certified vanilla and cocoa, gave Ben and Jerry the opportunity to discuss Fair Trade and the company's goal to use entirely Fair Trade Certified ingredients by 2013.
Green Mountain Coffee partnered with musical groups
Michael Franti & Spearhead
Michael Franti (born April 21, 1966) is an American rapper, musician, poet, activist, documentarian, and singer-songwriter, known for his participation in many musical projects, most with a political and social emphasis, including the Beatnigs ...
and
Grace Potter and the Nocturnals
Grace Potter and the Nocturnals are an American rock band from Vermont, formed in 2002 in Waitsfield by drummer Matt Burr, guitarist Scott Tournet, and singer Grace Potter. They began their career as an indie band, self-producing their albums a ...
to broadcast live concerts promoting Fair Trade. Both concerts were streamed on the Green Mountain Coffee Facebook page. Green Mountain Coffee was recognized in September 2011 as the world's largest purchaser of Fair Trade Certified coffee, having bought 26 million pounds during 2010.
Also in 2011, pastry chef Malika Ameen of ''
Top Chef: Just Desserts'' Season 1 joined celebrity dietician
Ashley Koff to create three dishes using Fair Trade Certified ingredients for a live
Ustream
IBM Watson Media (formerly Ustream and IBM Cloud Video) is an American virtual events platform company which is a division of IBM. Prior to IBM acquisition, it had more than 180 employees across San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Budapest offices. ...
broadcast during Fair Trade Month. The episode was called "Every Meal Matters" and consisted of a live cooking demonstration using Fair Trade Certified honey, vanilla extract, ground cinnamon, ground cardamom, bananas, mangos, pineapples, quinoa, natural cane sugar, coffee, chocolate, and brown sugar.
Criticisms of Fair Trade
There have been very few attempts at
Fair trade impact studies. It would be methodologically and logically incorrect to use these attempts to conclude that fair trade in general does or does not have a positive impact. Griffiths (2011)
[Griffiths, P., 'Ethical objections to Fairtrade' Journal of Business Ethics July 2011(DOI) 10.1007/s10551-011-0972-0 www.springerlink.com Accessed at http://www.griffithsspeaker.com/Fairtrade/why_fair_trade_isn.htm] argues that few of these attempts meet the normal standards for an impact study, such as comparing the before and after situation, having meaningful control groups, allowing for the fact that fair trade recruits farmers who are already better off, allowing for the fact that a fair trade cooperative receives aid from a dozen other organizations – Government Departments, Aid Agencies, donor countries, and NGOs, and allowing for the fact that fair trade may harm other farmers. Serious methodological problems arise in sampling, in comparing prices, and from the fact that the social projects of fair trade do not usually aim to produce economic benefits.
Fair trade supporters boast of 'the honeypot effect' – that cooperatives which become fair trade members then attract additional aid from other NGO charities, government and international donors as a result of their membership. Typically there are now six to twelve other donors. Critics point out that this inevitably means that resources are being removed from other, poorer, farmers. It also makes it impossible to argue that any positive or negative changes in the living standards of farmers are due to Fairtrade rather than to one of the other donors.
Booth says that the selling techniques used by some sellers and some supporters of Fairtrade are bullying, misleading and unethical. There are problems with the use of boycott campaigns and other pressure to force sellers to stock a product they think ethically suspect. Some people argue that these practices are justifiable: that strategic use of labeling may help embarrass (or encourage) major suppliers into changing their practices. They may make transparent corporate vulnerabilities that activists can exploit. Or they may encourage ordinary people to get involved with broader projects of social change.
There are complaints that the standards are inappropriate and may harm producers, sometimes imposing months of additional work for little return.
There have been claims that adherence to fair trade standards by producers has been poor and that enforcement of standards by Fairtrade is very weak, notably by Christian Jacquiau
[Hamel, I.: 2006, 'Fairtrade Firm Accused of Foul Play', Swiss Info http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/Fair_trade_firm_accused_of_foul_play.html?cid=5351232 23/12/2009.] and by Paola Ghillani, who spent four years as president of Fairtrade Labelling Organizations
There are many complaints of poor enforcement problems: labourers on fair trade farms in Peru are paid less than the minimum wage; some non-Fairtrade coffee is sold as Fairtrade
'the standards are not very strict in the case of seasonally hired labour in coffee production.' 'some fair trade standards are not strictly enforced' supermarkets avoid their responsibility. In 2006, a ''
Financial Times
The ''Financial Times'' (''FT'') is a British daily newspaper printed in broadsheet and published digitally that focuses on business and economic current affairs. Based in London, England, the paper is owned by a Japanese holding company, Ni ...
'' journalist found that ten out of ten mills visited had sold uncertified coffee to co-operatives as certified. It reported that "The FT was also handed evidence of at least one coffee association that received fair trade certification despite illegally growing some 20 per cent of its coffee in protected national forest land.
A lot of volunteers do unpaid work for firms, or market fair trade in schools, universities, local governments or parliament. Crane and Davies' study shows that distributors in developed countries make 'considerable use of unpaid volunteer workers for routine tasks, many of whom seemed to be under the (false) impression that they were helping out a charity.' Other critics in the
Fair trade debate
The fair trade debate concerns the ethics and economic implications of fair trade, and alleged issues with the Fairtrade brand in particular.
Pro-Fairtrade researcher Alastair Smith claims that while some criticisms are grounded in acceptable st ...
claim that the volunteers cannot know what fair trade does achieve and what harm it does, because the information is concealed from them.
Segments of the
trade justice
Trade justice is a campaign by non-governmental organisations, plus efforts by other actors, to change the rules and practices of world trade in order to promote fairness. These organizations include consumer groups, trade unions, faith groups, ...
movement have also criticized fair trade in the past years for allegedly focusing too much on individual small producer groups while stopping short of advocating immediate trade policy changes that would have a larger impact on disadvantaged producers' lives.
French author and
RFI correspondent
Jean-Pierre Boris championed this view in his 2005 book ''Commerce inéquitable''.
There have been largely political criticisms of fair trade, both from the left and the right. Some believe the fair trade system is not radical enough. French author Christian Jacquiau, in his book ''Les coulisses du commerce équitable'', calls for stricter fair trade standards and criticizes the fair trade movement for working within the current system (i.e. partnerships with mass retailers,
multinational corporation
A multinational company (MNC), also referred to as a multinational enterprise (MNE), a transnational enterprise (TNE), a transnational corporation (TNC), an international corporation or a stateless corporation with subtle but contrasting senses, i ...
s etc.) rather than establishing a new fairer, fully autonomous trading system. Jacquiau is also a staunch supporter of significantly higher fair trade prices in order to maximize the impact, as most producers only sell a portion of their crop under fair trade terms. It has been argued that the approach of the fair trade system is too rooted in a Northern consumerist view of justice which Southern producers do not participate in setting. "A key issue is therefore to make explicit who possesses the power to define the terms of fair trade, that is who possesses the power to determine the need of an ethic in the first instance, and subsequently command a particular ethical vision as the truth."
[Catherine S. Dolan (2008), ''Research in Economic Anthropology'', "Arbitrating risk through moral values: the case of Kenyan fairtrade", Volume 28, Pages 271-296] Some of the criticisms of fair trade from the free market approach to economics appear to be linked to right wing political approaches, but this does not mean that their analysis in this particular case is unacceptable to mainstream economists.
References
External links
Fair Trade USAOfficial website
Institute for Agricultural Trade Policy
{{Fair trade
Fair trade organizations
Organizations established in 1998
Organizations based in Oakland, California
Product certification
Ecolabelling
Certification marks
Environmental certification marks
Consumer symbols
Standards organizations