Making Fairtrade more fair

An article in Tuesday's Financial Times (7/11/06) discusses the annual meeting of AgroFair, a company that supplies Fairtrade fruit to European consumers. This year's gathering was held in the Rotterdam Zoo; as always, it was attended by representatives from both the developed world and the developing world - leading to some useful and entertaining insights on both sides.

Though AgroFair provides "Fairtrade" products, it is not affiliated with TransFair, the most-recognized organization involved in Fairtrade-certified agricultural products. I find this encouraging. TransFair has had a tendency to blur the line between the concept of fair-trade pricing and its own proprietary certification label. While its mission is an admirable one, and its public recognition is impressive, like all organizations it is imperfect - but unlike many it lacks transparency.

A few of the inperfections of TransFair's "FairTrade" brand:

1. It pressures companies to use its label, even if their own relationships with farmers are as good or better.
   
2. When a company switches to FairTrade, it must use pre-certified farmers, which means that many farmers currently supplying the company no longer qualify.
3. It does not incorporate environmental aspects of ethical sourcing.
4. A student-recruitment brochure of 20+ pages fails to mention the per-pound fee that TransFair collects.
5. In order to expand, the organization faces downward pressure on the prices it guarantees to farmers - exactly the situation it is trying to remedy!

I believe in the concept of fair-trade pricing, and the mechanism of using recognizable certification labels. These are some of the most useful things we can be doing to promote global corporate social responsibility. But at this point in time, we need more competition among fair-trade labels.

Until we have a commonly-accepted certification process that is transparent, objective, and inclusive, consumers should support a variety of fair-trade organizations - AgroFair among them.