People Tree continues to celebrate Fairtrade fortnight – from a Fair Trade pioneer’s perspective

According to the Fairtrade Foundation 20% of people said they’d support Fair Trade but they just hadn’t made it their habit yet. For goodness sake the easy thing is buying it from a supermarket shelf - it can take years for a Fair Trade product and industry to benefit from being mainstreamed like this. The least you could do is buy Fair Trade.

As we continue to celebrate Fairtrade Fortnight you’ll see supermarkets decorate hoardings with photos of smiling food producers and the FLO mark and you will feel like the world could be a better place if all that social marketing became a reality.

The Fairtrade mark provides a valuable tool, set up by the pioneer Fair Trade organisations to help consumers find FLO food products alongside conventional exploitative ones on the supermarket shelves. Still, building new certification for Fair Trade products, so you can entice big retailers and big business takes time. This is because certification needs to reflect the realities faced by the people Fair Trade aims to help. If standards are rushed in, small scale producers could find that only large scale production and business can do Fair Trade. It would be crazy to punish a small scale hand-knitter in Nepal because they couldn’t source Fair Trade cotton, especially when a hand produced item makes 10 times more work at a fair price than a machine-made one.

All People Tree fashion is 100% Fair Trade and cover IFAT’s 10 Fair Trade standards. People Tree also has Fairtrade certified cotton in 50% of it’s clothing but the fibre is also certified organic and manufactured in Fair Trade projects in the developing world. At People Tree we gave hundreds of hours of our time, as did other pioneers, to develop the Fairtrade cotton standards.

Today you’ll be able to buy Fairtrade labeled cotton clothing here and there. But, you will not be able to buy Fair Trade manufactured products except from People Tree and other Fair Trade clothing pioneers.

So please make Fair Trade your habit, the least we can all do is buy the Fair Trade labeled products in front of us on the supermarket shelf. If you want to go a step further, then buy from the pioneer brands, Cafedirect, Divine, People Tree, etc.

Supporting the catalysts for change has never been more critical