Promise small farmers and committed Alternative Trade Organizations that you will not attempt to certify plantations into the Fair Trade system. Repeat that promise every year for eight years (even while behind the scenes you are quietly certifying and then not-so-quietly promoting plantation bananas). Unilaterally decide to change your name to signify that your organization IS synonymous with fair trade. Announce “Fair Trade for All”, a strategy which puts plantations into the Fair Trade system, and lowers the standards across the board, making it easy for anyone to become Fair Trade certified. So easy it begs the question, what does this Fair Trade actually stand for? Withdraw from the international Fair Trade system. Change your logo and position your brand to compete in the international market.
What’s all the fuss about?
Cartoon courtesy of John Klossner, copywrite 2011
Small Farmers. Big Change. 
Perhaps it’s time the shackling phrase of fair trade went away.
What is it anyway … just another misleading oxymoron. Fact is, there’s nothing “fair” about trade, which has been, and always will be, about profit.
Take a look at the business of education. How are teachers fairing in the whole scheme of things? Not so well, right.
There are 5 basic aspects to trade (business); resource, production, agency, and consumer. And as market demand increases, power moves from one end to the other–from resource to consumer. In other words, what was in the beginning, is flipped on its head in the end.
The environment of fair trade is currently experiencing this flip.
But something else also happens. Outside entities attempt to position their business concerns in a way that allows access to the financial aspect developing markets. Which means finding a way to establishing a connection with this developing market.
Some of these outside entities have a legitimate cause. Others are simply leeches. And an age-old way of covering the activity of a leech is through the institutionalization of the host.
Morgan Freeman said it clearly in the movie, The Shawshank Redemption. Initially, a prisoner feels the prison walls are keeping them away from what’s on the other side. But over time, the feeling changes, and these walls are what seem to protect those on the inside, from what’s outside.
Fair trade, and all that it represents, is (and has been for some time) on the tracks to institutionalization. Now, is the train is just picking up speed.
Exactly. Institutionalized fair trade = not small farmer-focused. So let’s outshine that term fair trade. Post any and all ideas for terms that convey “purchased from democratically organized farmer groups while treating them like whole people instead of just production units.” Suggestions please!
Excellent visual! I feel not only “fussy” about this, but also pretty scared about their change in attitude. I don’t think plantations shifted Fair Trade USA’s purpose so effortlessly– it’s the big corporations like Starbucks doing all they can to control the movement. Looking at the distancing you outlined earlier, (and I played off from here: http://ethixmerch.com/blog/fair-trade-month-news-usa-split-splitting-my-hairs) big corps like Starbucks co-opted Transfair/Fair Trade USA. Fair Trade USA should have changed their name to “Puppet of Big Biz” since they’re doing whatever they can to help Starbucks and others fatten their bottom line.
@bostonjlm- A solution? A new name for a new movement? Hmmm… “direct trade” has been thrown around and used by some honest coffee importers who split from Transfair a while ago. I also like emphasizing concepts like “living wage” when talking about real fair trade. Wages that allow people to thrive and have choice, not just survive, is something I can get behind.
very good illustration, but I am greatly dismayed. I worked and lived for years with organizations of small farmers in Honduras and other Latin American countries, and I dread to see the new vision of a “fair trade for all” that is being created. It’s like to see a future where all the work built by years will be lost. On the one hand, I wonder, where are the values of fair trade? .. but then again I wonder why create equal market conditions for disadvantaged groups and for larger and powerful companies that are already very competitive. It is like putting in a fishbowl, several large and small fish, what happens? just the big fish eat the little ones!