fairtrade chichester

What is Fairtrade

In our regular shopping, most of us buy items that cannot be grown in our part of the world – coffee from Kenya, Rwanda or Columbia, tea from India or Bangladesh, bananas from the West Indies. Many of these products are grown by small farmers in poor countries who have very little else but that their land to support their families. Often there is no pension, health service or social security to fall back on.

The farmer normally sells the crop on to a big business (examples are Nescafe, Kenco, Maxwell House), who process it, market it and ship it to richer countries like our own where it is sold on to shops and cafes. Sometimes a local middleman is used as well.

The benefits of this trade are not evenly spread:

• Only a tiny amount of the price the end-user pays in the shop goes to the farmer; the bulk of price goes to the processing or shipping firm; the rest to the retail outlet.
• Risks are not evenly spread. If commodity prices drop, it is the farmer who suffers, the consumer who benefits from cheaper goods in the shops. If a crop is wiped out, the consumer may pay more in the shop but the producer may lose his livelihood. With many products, those who run the most risks are small farmers least able to stand up for themselves in a global market and with fewest resources to ride out the bad years. In the late 1980s the plight of Mexican coffee farmers, faced with plunging prices for their beans in a market controlled by multinational buyers became headline news and was the trigger for the birth of the Fairtrade movement.

Fairtrade is essentially a means for putting a bit more equality back into the relationship between small farmers in the Developing World, the marketing firms who buy the raw produce and produce the finished product; and us the consumer.