Fair Trade Today

Facts About Fair Trade

The Fair Trade movement today is a global movement with sales totaling billions of dollars per year. Over a million small-scale producers and workers are organised in as many as 3,000 grassroots organisations and their umbrella structures in over 50 countries in the South. Their products are sold in thousands of World Shops or Fair Trade shops, supermarkets and many other sales points in the North and, increasingly, in sales outlets in the Southern hemisphere. The movement is engaged in debates with political decision-makers in the European institutions and international fora on making international trade fairer. And Fair Trade has made mainstream business more aware of its social and environmental responsibility.

Fair Trade organisations typically return 1/3 to 1/4 of profits back to producers in developing countries; and sixty to seventy percent of the artisans providing fair trade hand-crafted products are women who often are mothers and the sole wage earners in the home.

However the total sales of Fair Trade products still accounts for less than 1 percent of all global trade. Small as it may be, the rapidly growing alternative or fair trade movement is setting standards that could redefine world trade to include more social and environmental considerations.

Fair Trade for Sustainable Development

Whether trade is good for producers and consumers depends entirely on how the goods are made and how they are sold. Fair Trade brings the benefits of trade into the hands of communities that need it most. It sets new social and environmental standards for international companies and demonstrates that trade can indeed be a vehicle for sustainable development.

Today, a growing movement of workers, environmentalists, consumers, farmers and social movements worldwide is calling for a global trading system that promotes workers' rights, protects the environment and sustains the ability of local producers to meet community needs. Together, as consumers, we can make a huge difference by demanding significant changes in the way goods are produced, and vote with our dollars for a more just and environmentally sound trading system.

Footnotes:

(1) The above is quoted and paraphased from the FTF website, accessed on 10 March, 2006. It is based on the article written by John Cavanagh, co-director at the Institute for Policy Studies