Feature Article

Yes, we have bananas

Abigail Frymann

... and over 2,000 other Fairtrade products, making British consumers among the leading buyers of goods sold under the mark. On Monday the Fairtrade Foundation launches a fortnight of events highlighting the work that guarantees prices for 5 million producers. But there's more to be done

McDonald's - nil; Caffè Nero - nil; Starbucks - one; Oxfam - 12; Pret A Manger - six. A quick high-street survey of the number of types of Fairtrade coffee on sale reveals a fairly patchy picture, and the staff's responses even more so. Caffè Nero: "Fairtrade? Do you mean ‘filter'?" Pret A Manger: "All our coffee is Fairtrade. It has been since we started 20 years ago." Fairtrade hasn't been around for 20 years in Britain. "Well, five years then." Starbucks: if you want an espresso/macchiato/ latte/cappuccino then you can't have a Fairtrade one. Yet, as Fairtrade Fortnight comes round again, there's optimism in the air.

Fairtrade is coming of age. Sixteen years since the first product - Cafédirect - was launched in Britain, consumers have 2,000 products on offer, sales of which are worth around £200 million a year. Worldwide, Fairtrade is benefiting an estimated 5 million people in 58 developing countries. And certified products are no longer just those you can put in a mug and add water and milk to: look out for Fairtrade rum, cotton wool, boxer shorts and sugar body scrub.

On Tuesday the Fairtrade Foundation's director, Harriet Lamb, will be making the case to MPs on the Commons International Development Select Committee that the Government should give £50m over five years to move Fairtrade further into the mainstream. But this entry into a new stage of development is not without its concerns - bullying, rivalry, criticism - all triggered by learning to survive in the "adult" world of big business.

In short the Fairtrade mark indicates that producers have been paid an unfluctuating living wage and an annually paid premium for community projects; there's a healthcare allowance and farming meets certain environmental standards, though this doesn't automatically make Fairtrade produce organic.

Fairtrade continues its slow increase; today half the UK population recognises the waving-man Fairtrade mark. In 2005 sales of products with the mark were up 40 per cent from the previous year. Sales of Fairtrade bananas account for 8 per cent of the money spent on the fruit in the UK, and 20 per cent of filter and espresso coffee bought in the UK is Fairtrade. There are more than 3,000 churches, 225 towns, 50 universities and 30 synagogues that have met the foundation's criteria by stocking Fairtrade goods. And more are interested, including the first mosques and temples.

Criteria have been established to certify cotton, and it's a year since Marks & Spencer introduced a Fairtrade T-shirt at £7, £2 more than its other T-shirts. Now the store is bringing out 70 lines of Fairtrade clothing and has switched the tea and coffee in its cafés to a Fairtrade brand without putting the price up. Sainsbury's is to start selling 20 lines and in December pledged that every banana it sold from July 2007 would be Fairtrade-marked.

There are heart-warming case studies of micro-transformation: the cocoa-farming widow in Ghana whose income enables her to feed her seven children; the Costa Rican coffee farmer who has been able to stay on his family farm rather than work illegally in the United States. The premiums have enabled tea-pickers on one Sri Lankan estate to buy an ambulance; children of cotton farmers in Dougourakoroni in Mali now have a school.

Nonetheless the effects of Westerners' benevolent shopping are taking time to show on the global horizon. In some developing countries Fairtrade is still "a tiny drop in the ocean of commodities", Harriet Lamb acknowledges. But one place where its impact is visible is the Windward Islands in the Caribbean, whose banana-growers had protected access to the UK market until 1992, after which they had to compete with larger-scale producers in Latin America who could undercut them. "The Fairtrade movement has prevented us from going out of business," says Simeon Green of Windward Bananas. Incomes are not at pre-1992 levels but Fairtrade has given the market a new lease of life. Do farmers prefer selling to the Fairtrade market? "They have no option - with world market prices we would be dead within two weeks."

Some economists point out that the Windward Islands have an unhealthy dependency on Fairtrade and customers' willingness to pay that bit extra. Fairtrade, they argue, is a "false ledge" in the system. "The best way forward is not to hinder producers' progress by placing our ideals on how we think they should sell their goods," says Steve Bettison, the general manager of the Adam Smith Institute, which favours free and uninhibited markets. "We're basically taking away the responsibility of their actions from them."

European Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson believes that this protectionism is what will prevent Fairtrade from becoming the norm - the movement's long-distance aim. "I see Fairtrade as an alternative business model, and I do not think that the key issue of guaranteed price is easily transposed into a mainstream business setting."

This points to a possible fragility in the scheme, in that if British consumers had a change of heart, or suffered a recession, the appetite for Fairtrade could disappear - a point acknowledged by Simeon Green: "Any business you do is in a way dependent on the goodwill of your customers." Harriet Lamb adds: "If world coffee prices fall to catastrophic levels like they did in 2001, farmers in the highlands of Peru can't think, ‘Hmm, I think I'll become a computer programmer'. In the last crisis millions came down from the mountains and filled the slums or risked their lives trying to get into the US. Producers want to give their children opportunities so they can choose to stay and be farmers or choose to move forward. With Fairtrade you're doing that through education as opposed to driving people to the point of desperation." Holding back the crisis by a few years also gives producers the time to diversify into other crops.

Having weathered - or ignored - their free market critics, Fairtrade companies are now faced with a new challenge: interacting with supermarkets. "Companies will play hardball if there are commercial consequences," says Phil Wells, chairman of the Standards Committee of the international Fairtrade Labelling Organisation (FLO) and former director of the Fairtrade Foundation, where he says he encountered corporate bullying. "We found that a company was not fulfilling its commitments under the Fairtrade standards. We said, ‘If you don't do so, we will prevent you using the mark.'" They counter-threatened, saying they would get an injunction. "The Fairtrade Foundation, to be blunt, could not afford a court case. In the end we found a way of phasing in the meeting of the standards."

It's a tightrope walk the foundation can't afford to botch. Sainsbury's decision to ensure that every banana it sells is Fairtrade doubled the size of the Fairtrade market in the UK at a stroke. To chief executive Justin King, just back from the Windwards with Harriet Lamb, it made good business sense, even though they'll be selling the fruit at no extra cost. "We didn't do it to preserve the Windwards' banana industry; we did it because our customers want it, and because it's an investment in quality." He says it will cost the supermarket £4m but hopes it will attract values-led customers. He warns that some chains might exploit customers' willingness to pay extra. "The question is whether people have tried to get away with higher prices on the back of Fairtrade. All of us have to be subject to scrutiny.

With such retailers involved it's no surprise that British consumers are joint world leaders of Fairtrade-buying, along with the Swiss. In the US, Fairtrade sales are localised; high on the East and West coasts but as yet low in between. Most European countries have some Fairtrade presence while the market in Australia is just starting. In all, Fairtrade goods are sold in 18 countries, and in 2005 they were worth around £770m.

Meanwhile the Fairtrade Foundation is working to reach more producers in the supply chain. Although M&S's T-shirt is made from fairly traded cotton, it enters M&S's regular production line. Having signed up to the voluntary Ethical Trading Initiative, M&S says that it audits its supply chains annually. But other companies may not be so conscientious. And because there's no independent means of Fairtrade-marking garment factories, there's no guarantee of the foundation's high standards being applied. A firm could buy up Fairtrade cotton, ship it to an Asian sweatshop and still put the mark on its label. Only the canniest consumer would clock that only the cotton-growers, and not necessarily the factory workers, had been fairly treated.

Mr Wells blames impatient retailers for the loophole but says even hasty Fairtrade certification is better than someone else's. "If Fairtrade is too slow to offer a means of certification, it could approach a rival ethical standards body, which he says offer half-measures. For the producers that would be much worse." If M&S's Fairtrade T-shirt costs the customer an extra £2, how much might a "fully ethical" one cost?

For all their success at creating a new brand and stimulating declining markets, the visionaries behind Fairtrade are now having to tame the hand that has supplied their latest and by far their largest shipment of customers - a hand that expects to take as well as give, a hand that in some cases is driven by ambitions that haven't changed.

Back to the front page