Everyone’s heard the term Fair Trade. The words conjure images of coffee, chocolate and happy farmers with fresh produce advertised on a product. Most consumers have an idea that Fair Trade products are probably a good choice, but maybe they’re not sure exactly why. And with 86% of millennials looking for responsibly sourced products, Fair Trade seems like a no brainer. But what exactly is Fair Trade and is it really more than just a marketing ploy to get consumers to feel good about their purchases?

I spoke with three experts to get the scoop: Maya Spaull, VP of Apparel and Home Goods at Fair Trade USA; Jennifer Gootman, VP of Social Consciousness at West Elm and Rebecca Van Bergen, Founder and Executive Director of Nest, a non-profit that supports women artisans globally.

The reason for some of the confusion is that the term Fair Trade can be thrown around as a blanket term for alternate methods of commerce – even those as simple as tourists buying from local artisans and bringing the goods back home to sell. But let’s start at the beginning. The Fair Trade movement began as early as the 1950’s when Europeans and Americans traveling to different countries observed that local artisans and farmers were struggling to cover the cost of their businesses. Most of these travelers would purchase some of those products and return to Europe or the US to sell them for a higher price, then bring the profits directly back to the artisans and farmers.

But clearly that process can be open to exploitation, without anyone able to confirm if the profits really went back to workers or more cynically, straight into the pockets of the tourists who brought them back. That’s why in the 1990’s, when Fair Trade USA founder Paul Rice was working with coffee farmers in Nicaragua, he wanted to get involved in creating standards that could govern the way that Fair Trade was monitored across the globe. This work served as the foundation for what we now know as Fair Trade Certification.

Rice returned to the US and founded Fair Trade USA in 1997, bringing the certification model to large companies who sold commodity goods like cocoa, bananas and tea. The organization began to educate corporations on why it was important not only to sell more ethical products under Fair Trade terms but also to educate consumers by using the Fair Trade Seal on products to increase awareness. Some of the earliest companies to get on board with Fair Trade were Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Numi Tea and Whole Foods Market.

That certification process is complex and rigorous, generally taking anywhere between 6-9 months for a producer to achieve Fair Trade Certified status. In the Apparel and Home Goods program brand partners such as Patagonia and Williams Sonoma nominate their best in class suppliers to enter the program. Then Fair Trade USA does a pre-assessment of the factory through an introductory webinar and in-person meetings with the workforce and management. They enlist an unbiased third-party auditor to evaluate performance against the Fair Trade standards, finally awarding certification to compliant factories. This audit process is repeated annually, and the Fair Trade USA Factory Services team provides in-country support to ensure everything runs smoothly on an ongoing basis.

Another piece the field workers help the Fair Trade committee with during that process is to open a bank account that will serve as the “Premium Fund” which will go towards a community project agreed upon by the Fair Trade committee – a combination of management and members of the workforce.

Deciding how to invest those premium funds depend on the needs of each particular workforce and the issues/barriers they face. Something as simply as giving every employee a bicycle can be transformational. This is something a group in India did, allowing workers’ families to more easily get groceries, take their kids to school and commute to work.

In one factory in Sri Lanka, workers elected to build a nursery school right next to the factory. It was the first time children there had access to school under the age of five, plus it gave the parents more time with their children since the school was so close to where they worked. Other groups have invested in things like health insurance, gasoline vouchers, health and sanitation kits, subsidized food at the factory or rebuilding homes after a devastating earthquake. One factory even funded a summer camp.

Van Bergen acknowledges that there’s a fair amount of skepticism that comes with certifications, and that’s understandable. “Industry-wide buy in is important, because you need to be sure that standards and certification holds weight, value, and meaning. For example, if West Elm uses one certification, but other retailers are using another, whose certification should you trust? Industry alignment is key in that sense and hopefully helps consumers feel more confident in the value of our certifications.”

And while Fair Trade USA is ensuring that factory, farm and fishery workers are treated ethically, Nest is setting standards for the millions of artisans across the globe who work out of their homes. The in-home piece impacts women in particular. The International Labor Organization estimates that there are 300 million of these ‘homeworkers’ globally, most of whom are women.

Written by Amy Shoenthal
Image: CC
Publication date: Dec 14, 2018

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