Your articles highlight the growing awareness of fair trade and the food companies’ response (Justice, March). But inherent in this success is a core contradiction. International fair trade criteria require producers in the south to meet strict social, economic and environmental standards. But there is no such standard for distributors and marketers in the north. The supermarkets that handle fair trade products do not have to reinvest in the community, adhere to good labour practices or use sustainable business practices. They can promote themselves as supporting fair trade if they carry one fair trade product, even though hundreds of other products meet no standard at all.
Fair trade is not just about paying a fair commodity price. It has to be about transforming the dominant northern-controlled economic relationships.
