| About Fair Trade |
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History of Fair Trade
There are many stories about the history of Fair Trade. Some people say that the Americans were first with Ten Thousand Villages who began buying needlework from Puerto Rico in 1946, and the earliest traces of Fair Trade in Europe date from the late 1950s when Oxfam UK started to sell crafts made by Chinese refugees in Oxfam shop, creating the first Fair Trade Organisation in 1964. Parallel initiatives were taking place in other parts of Europe and in 1967 Dutch third world groups began to sell cane sugar. These groups went on to sell handicrafts from the South, and in 1969 the first "Third World Shop" opened.
During the 1960s and 1970s too, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and socially motivated individuals in many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America perceived the need for fair marketing organisations which would provide advice, assistance and support to disadvantaged producers, and many such Southern Fair Trade Organisations were established.
The growth of Fair Trade (or alternative trade as it was called in the early days) from the late 60s onwards has been associated primarily with development trade. It grew as a response to poverty and sometimes disaster in the South and focused on the marketing of craft products. Its founders were often the large development and sometimes religious agencies in European countries.
Crafts and Food
At the beginning, Fair Trade Organisations traded mostly with handcrafts producers, mainly because of their contacts with missionaries. In 1973, Fair Trade Organisatie in the Netherlands imported the first "fairly traded" coffee from cooperatives of small farmers in Guatemala . Now, almost 30 years later, Fair Trade coffee has become a concept and meanwhile the food range was expanded to include products like tea, cocoa, sugar, tea, wine, fruit juices, nuts, spices, rice, etc. Food products enable Fair Trade Organisations to open new market channels, such as institutional market, supermarkets, bio shops.
Market Access and Fair Trade Labelling
In the 1980s, a priest working with smallholder coffee farmers in Mexico and a collaborator of a Dutch church-based NGO conceived the idea of a Fair Trade label. Products bought, traded and sold respecting Fair Trade conditions would qualify for a label that would make them stand out among ordinary products on store shelves, and would allow any company to get involved in Fair Trade.
In the ensuing years, non-profit Fair Trade labelling organisations were set up and in 1997, the worldwide association, Fairtrade Labelling International, was created. FLO is now responsible for setting international Fairtrade standards, for certifying production and auditing trade according to these standards and for the labelling of products.
Parallel to the development of the labelling for products, IFAT has developed a monitoring system for Fair Trade Organisations. The IFAT Fair Trade Organisation Mark was launched in January 2004 and it is available to IFAT members that meet the requirements of the IFAT standards and monitoring system, and identifies them as registered Fair Trade Organisations.
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