Is the Fairtrade label quite the guarantee of good practice that we imagine? Bibi van der Zee looks at reports that all is not well down on the farms.
Tomorrow Harriet Lamb, the director of the Fair Trade foundation, will be in Switzerland asking a consortium of charitable donors for money. She was at it a month ago, too, putting her case to a House of Commons select committee, as part of her search for £50m from the department for international development. Lamb, as she will freely admit, has big plans for Fairtrade, the organisation that attempts to raise small producers out of poverty by guaranteeing them a fair and predictable price for their crops.
She wants to take the scheme to the next level, bring new crops and goods into the scheme and, most importantly, carry on expanding the market. She even dreams of “shifting the norm” and giving “a mandate to the government to make the big, bold changes needed at the World Trade Organisation”. This is not a good time for critics of the scheme to come out of the woodwork.
But criticism there has been. The way in which the Fairtrade mark works is simple in theory: a farm agrees to work towards certain standards and, in return, the produce it sells as Fairtrade fetches a higher price. That premium must then be used for projects for the community, such as good water supplies for workers or improved housing. But last week Channel 4 investigated conditions on two long-certified Fairtrade plantations in India, and found that on one some workers were being supplied with water only every other day, while on the other the premiums that should have been passed on to the community arrived late.
In the US, meanwhile, one independent coffee seller — Intelligentsia Coffee — has ended its partnership with Fairtrade and set up its own certification process. One of its directors, Geoff Watts, told the Guardian he believed the collectivisation of small farmers, which Fairtrade encourages, “disincentivises the hardest workers. In the end what you get is coffee that is solidly mediocre.”
Last year, a Financial Times investigation claimed that workers on a Fairtrade farm in Peru were being paid less than the minimum wage. Watts believes the Fairtrade monitoring process has “broken down”, and others are also concerned. As a spokeswoman for Women Working Worldwide says: “It would be a shame to see a dive in consumer confidence that discredits the brand. But the Fairtrade Foundation must react decisively to criticism. It must become more accountable as an organisation, review its auditing processes and the manageability of its growth in order not to mislead consumers. There are still far too many problems being found on Fairtrade certified farms.”
Might the difficulty with Fairtrade be not that it’s growing too fast, but that it’s not growing fast enough? This is the surprising suggestion from Christine Gent, who has been a fair trade campaigner since the 80s. Initially, the idea seems absurd. But on closer inspection it does answer one of the intriguing questions raised by the Channel 4 report: of the two plantations featured, one was selling only 3% of its tea as Fairtrade certified, and the other less than 1%.
Fairtrade farms don’t have to be perfect in order to become certified and get that precious premium: in fact, they only have to make a commitment to work towards “perfection”, and set up a joint body of workers and management in order to disperse the money. But it’s all pointless if the farms, or the Fairtrade organisation itself, can’t find a buyer for the product. Then, to put it bluntly, they don’t get the money.
“It’s the heart of the problem for Fairtrade,” admits Lamb. “You can’t insist to retailers that they must buy tea from this or that group, because it may be the wrong taste for them.”
But surely for farms such as those investigated by Channel 4, which are selling only tiny percentages of their goods as Fairtrade, and have been for several years now, there comes a point where somebody has to say, “This isn’t working out — we can’t find buyers for your tea.” Don’t they end up spending more on joining Fairtrade — certification starts at £400 and can go into the thousands— than they earn from it? “I think that for these particular farms the premium must be very tiny,” says Lamb.
But with falling commodity prices, and the general squeeze on small farmers, “there aren’t many alternatives out there at the moment says Lamb. “So they think Fair-trade is their future and they want to invest in it and stay with it. And for many groups there are some rocky years where they may not sell very much. There are many, many groups in the Fairtrade movement who are only selling 2-3%. But there are also many groups selling 40% and 100%.”
It must still be frustrating for her. “Not as – frustrating as it is for the farmers. Because they have met Fairtrade standards, they have a product they are proud of and want to sell it.”
Lamb feels that the monitoring issues are being dealt with: Fairtrade is working towards achieving ISO 65 certification, which requires a certifying body to carry out internal auditing and have proper procedures for dealing with complaints and problems, as well as the F possible termination of certification (although certified farms need only be “periodically evaluated). She was not happy with the Financial Times investigation: “We had pretty strong queries about some of the research. The key point that it raised, once again, was back to this question of balance, between the demands we make on the producer organisations against our ultimate goal of reducing poverty,” she says.
Similarly, the Channel 4 report was a great disappointment. It didn’t really make clear, she says, the economic climate in which these farms are operating — the falling prices for commodities such as tea, for example. Lamb also disputes the programme-makers’ portrayal of the water situation, and states that the delay in the arrival of the premium was due to the Indian government’s legislation on foreign currency transactions.
As for the other criticisms… well, the fair trade movement, she says, is a democracy, and all these things get discussed. In depth. But at the moment, as Lamb goes cap in hand I to potential donors, she must sometimes wish they didn’t.
‘Fairtrade discourages the hardest workers.’ says one critic. ‘In the end what you get is coffee that is solidly mediocre’
