Values Spotlight: What Does It Mean to Be Fair Trade Certified?
What Is Fair Trade?
Fair Trade (sometimes styled Fairtrade) is a system of certification meant to ensure that certain standards are met as ingredients or products are produced and supplied. It aims to verify that workers and farmers receive basic human rights, fairer wages, and safer working conditions. Certain environmental standards may also be part of the certification. Consumers often see Fair Trade certification marks on coffee, tea and chocolate products, among others.
All good, right?
In reality, decades of Fair Trade have revealed flaws and drawbacks. From low demand for Fair Trade products to corporate interests diluting or undercutting the benefits, the Fair Trade movement is ripe for a rethink. The Values Movement is the answer.
How Fair Trade Works
Participating buyers and traders must pay the Fair Trade price (a guaranteed minimum price) or the market price, whichever is higher, plus a “Fairtrade premium.”
Recognized Fair Trade certifiers include Fair Trade International, Fair Trade USA, and Fair for Life. A third-party auditor must verify that the necessary standards have been met for a business to get a license to use the Fair Trade mark from one of these organizations. The process, according to Forbes, is “complex and rigorous, generally taking anywhere between 6–9 months for a producer to achieve Fair Trade Certified status.”
Benefits
Fair Trade arrangements guarantee small farmers a minimum price for their yield. More income can lead to higher wages for workers, greater decision-making power for farmers in their community, ability to negotiate higher rates through cooperative action, and improved access to agricultural services like premium markets and organic training.
An additional Fairtrade Premium feeds a communal fund for workers and farmers. It’s typically used to improve education, health care, and housing for workers.
A Fair Trade seal on a product can increase sales by attracting consumers who value what it stands for. Fair Trade can also benefit the environment by encouraging sustainable practices.
By putting them on firmer economic footing and encouraging more sustainable practices, Fair Trade can help make farmers more financially secure against natural or man-made disasters and economic upheaval.
Drawbacks and Limitations
Typically, limited demand means fair trade cooperatives can sell only a modest percentage of their supply at Fair Trade prices. They must sell the rest at (normally lower) market prices. Farmers’ cooperatives must also pay auditing fees, and producers further along the chain are responsible for licensing fees, which can reduce their incentive to participate.
The Fair Trade movement is subject to corporate capture, with retailers and agribusiness companies abandoning independent Fair Trade certification and substituting their own internal “ethical” certifications to suit their own needs. This can subject farmers who want the benefits of Fair Trade to corporate control. Sainsbury, Starbucks, Nestlé, Cargill and even McDonald’s have waded into these dubious waters.
Farm workers don’t always benefit. The journal Nature Sustainability reported that a study of farmers’ cooperatives in the Ivory Coast in 2019 found that while Fair Trade benefited farmers, those benefits did not extend to their hired workers, who did not enjoy higher wages or better working conditions. The study hypothesized that it’s harder (and evidently sometimes too hard) to meet and monitor labor standards in these cooperatives, with their hundreds of small farmer members, than in a large corporation.
Enter the Values Movement
The Values Movement provides a transparent mechanism to strengthen and raise confidence in certifications like Fair Trade by:
- Uniting ethically motivated consumers into a powerful buying group, increasing the market for Fair Trade products.
- Consolidating and further validating existing certifications so consumers can be more confident that a certification seal means what it says. Confusion and doubt result when one retailer uses one certification and another uses a different one. The Values Movement can give businesses a clear choice to seek trusted certifications.
- Increasing trust in validation while reducing the cost of certifying products. Via comments and perhaps backing a Certification with their own credits, Members of the Values Movement continuously vouch for Certifications, validating them and their creators’ reliability. This helps reveal both good and bad actors more regularly and fosters trust in the system as a whole. Individual Certifiers’ accuracy and trustworthiness also transfer to the new Certifications they create, so that the system reinforces itself to strengthen overall credibility.
A Match Made on Earth
At heart, Fair Trade aims to more closely connect farmers and workers with the consumers who ultimately buy their products. The Values Movement aims for an economy based on the values that matter to us as people. Fair Trade, with its emphasis on human rights, economic fairness and opportunity, is one example of a complex, in this case global, certification that the Values Movement strengthens. The Values Movement can make Fair Trade more dependable for consumers, while potentially helping to improve working conditions for laborers around the world.
Join the Values Movement: www.ValuesMovement.org
