Linda Cowden, Produce Manager with the first shipment of EE bananas
Rita York, General Manager of the Community Mercantile, a food co-operative in Lawrence, Kansas sent the following note to Jeanie Wells, former GM who now works here with us:
Dear Jeanie:
We are so excited to have Equal Exchange Fair Trade Bananas! I attached a few photos for you to see and pass on to your buddies at Equal Exchange!
Small Farmers. Big Change. 
I am still perplexed by the thought that with the successsful history and experience of coffee, why cant the fair trade movement think big and get into commodities that are big. Getting into fruits where trading volume is small and may not affect many as also the value is limited e.g. pineapple , it is time that the movement starts looking at staples. Rice,wheat barley, maize are some of the largest crops both in terms of volume and value. And most of the farmers in the third world coutnries grow these. Ideally the cooperative and fair trade system should come together to consider value addition (be it packaging or branding) and upscaling (to give economies of scale) so that the small producers benefits so also customers.
Arun, I believe Fair Trade is active in more important sectors than you might think. For example, in dollar terms coffee is one of the most traded agricultural commodities in the world. Over 15 billion pounds are produced every year on 40,000 square miles of land. It provides the main income for millions of families, and is the leading generator of foreign exchange for countries like Uganda, Rwanda & Ethiopia, and a major source for many others like Nicaragua, Peru, Colombia & Vietnam.
Fair Trade is also making serious in-roads with cacao (aka cocoa), which provides the livelihood for 2 million families and is the main source of foreign earnings for Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana.
Similarly the trading volume for bananas (the fruit that is most likely to be fairly traded) is not small by any means. Four countries (Ecuador, Costa Rica, Colombia & the Phillipines each export over 2 billion pounds per year. It is also one of the lead sources of foreign earnings for Ecuador. In terms of consumption it is, after the grain staples you listed, one of the most important staple crops world-wide.
The story for tea (another important Fair Trade item) is similar.
As for Fair Trade grains, there is some progress, namely companies like Ethiquable (France), Alter Mercato (Italy) & Alter-Eco (France & US) are already selling Fair Trade rice, though as a newer Fair Trade category the volumes are still small.
But the bigger issue is that not all crops offer the same market potential for Fair Trade. One character that helps is for the crop to be consumed in wealthy countries and predominantly grown in the global South. Consequently a market hurdle for grains is that many/most wealthy nations that have embraced Fair Trade are also major grain producers themselves. Further subsidies for domestic farmers (for ex, with corn/maize, sugar and cotton in the US) present one more obstacle to the successful import and marketing of these Fair Trade crops.
As for collaborations to add-value in the South: many of the organizations that are most dedicated to Fair Trade (Equal Exchange, La Siembra, Ethiquable, Alter Mercato etc) have indeed been looking for ways to move more of the work for processing or adding value to producer countries and/or transfer it to the farmer co-ops themselves. Sometimes the nature of the crop or the market create real limits to what’s poosible – but we are trying. For example the refining of our cocoa for our hot cocoa mix has recently been shifted from Holland to the CONACADO co-op in the Dominican Republic.
Dear Phyllis Robinson.
My name is Beth Tonnard and I am a Year 10 student studing DiDA at Chilton Trinity Technology College in Bridgwater.
I was just emailing you to ask if I may have permission for one of your images of fair trade bananas for a DiDA project about fair deal.
I assure you that no one would see this image other than the moderator and myself.
If you could get back to me as soon as possible that would be great.
Many thanks,
Beth Tonnard.