About Fair Trade
What is Fair Trade?
Fair Trade is a trading partnership, based on dialogue, transparency and respect, that seeks greater equity in international trade.
What is the mission of Fair Trade Organizations?
Fair Trade organizations seek to enable disadvantaged producers in the developing world to maximize their skills and resources to create sustainable livelihoods for their businesses and the communities in which they work.
What does Fair Trade hope to address?
Fair Trade works to confront and diminish the injustices in trading structures and practices that frequently result in the exploitation and marginalization of the disadvantaged.
How does Fair Trade benefit producers?
Producers in the fair-trade sector benefit from:
- fair wages in local context
- access to previously unreachable markets
- advance payments to help curb production costs
- consistent orders
- increased participation in business decisions
For products carrying the Fair Trade Mark, producers are provided a premium to spend on community development.
Why are advance payments important to producers?
The initial costs incurred by a producer can be quite large. In the cases of large orders, producers—under traditional trading structures—are forced to front the expense of an order. In many cases the high cost of this necessitates a small business taking out a commercial loan, with the producer also absorbing the cost of high interest associated with these loans. Certain situations leave producers out-of-pocket for months, paying interest on the loan the entire time until they finally receive payment from their buyer.
What is the advantage to producers of long-term relationships?
For a small-scale producer, planning for the future and creating a sustainable business model is extremely difficult—and in most cases impossible—without consistent partnerships. By building the capacity of producer groups, and through commitments to long-term relationships, fair trade assists in giving producers the confidence to plan and invest for the future. This structure benefits all levels of the trading cycle and also increases the producer’s ability to compete in local and international marketplaces.
How does Fair Trade benefit consumers?
Traditionally, the best consumers could do to inform themselves of a product’s origin and production process would be to look at a label, if one were to even be available. Consumers are now beginning to be able to benefit from buying quality products that also come with the assurance that others were not exploited through the production process.
Does Fair Trade mean that I am paying for products than I would otherwise?
No, this simply means that the conditions in which the products were sourced came from ethical and transparent business practices.
Why does one person’s choice make a difference?
Through the purchase of fair-trade products, consumers simultaneously send loud and powerful signals to businesses and governments that they are interested and concerned for justice and ethics in global trade. In many ways a purchase can be regarded as a vote supporting the practices and values of that respective business. Consumer pressure, through the choice of where to spend, encourages organizations and businesses to develop fair-trade ranges and challenges them to improve upon their business practices.
) 
