Interested in adding a social mission to your business, or simply finding importable goods farmed and manufactured with an eye toward environmental and economic sustainability? Here's how to work with Fair Trade USA.
Brazil Cooperative director Luis Adauto, center, inspects coffee trees on Rosevaldo Pereiras farm with Paul Rice, preisdent of Fair Trade USA, a nonprofit group that promotes and certifies fair trade. Pereira's farm is fair-trade certified and also organic.
A tipping point for fair trade awareness came early in 2010, when Ben & Jerry's announced it would convert to fully fair-trade ingredients by 2013. For a certification that's only been in existence in the United States for 12 years, and is still gaining clout with consumers, that's not only a boon, but also a hearty stamp of approval.
The organization behind the certification, Fair Trade USA, was founded in 1998 as Trans Fair USA by University of California-Berkeley graduate Paul Rice. During travels to Nicarauga, Rice helped found a fair-trade-minded coffee cooperative—effectively the first of its kind in the world. Upon his return to the states, he wrote his thesis on reforming coffee importing practices. Today, the organization works with nearly 1,000 worker and farm collectives around the globe, with 2009 retail sales of $1.2 billion, and since its inception an estimated $200 million in additional income for farmers and workers.
Today, Fair Trade USA—the 501(c)(3)'s new moniker as of 2010—works with the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International, know casually as FLO, to promote environmental sustainability starting at the farm level, by developing and certifying growing cooperatives around the world, and connecting domestic importers to cooperatives that uphold social, economic, and environmental standards. Within the United States, the group aims to enhance consumers' awareness of their purchasing power to "enliven developing countries, relieve exploitation, and promote environmental sustainability."
"At the end of the day, our mission is to end poverty in the developing world," says Stacy Geagan Wagner, director of media and public relations for Fair Trade USA, which is based in Oakland, California.
You've seen the Fair Trade logo, the figure holding two basins in front of a tilted globe, on coffee—2009 imports topped 110 million pounds. The organization also certifies tea, grains, chocolate, sugar, spices, herbs, fruit, vegetables, certain textiles, wine are available from fair-trade sources. They're often priced at a premium, which is due to the higher cost of working with the sustainable growing collectives and certifying other facilities that work with fair-trade products. In the U.S. market, more than 7,000 products sourced from 58 countries are certified and labeled as Fair Trade. If you're interested in bringing fair trade products into the United States, or are interested in converting your supply line into one that Fair Trade USA could certify, here's how to get started.
Fair Trade Certification: Learn Precisely What it Means
Fair Trade products can be found in 60,000 U.S. retailers—but how they got there, and what that certification logo means can vary greatly from product to product. Coffee sold as beans, for instance, is considered a whole, pure product, so every step of the growing and packaging process must be certified by Fair Trade USA, and a bag of beans must be 100 percent fair trade coffee to be labeled such. However, if coffee beans of fair-trade origin are used in another product, such as ice cream, that doesn't qualify the ice cream product as fair trade—unless coffee is the only ingredient in that ice cream available for fair-trade approval.
That means when Ben & Jerry's converts to all fair trade products, and an ice cream made of domestic eggs and milk, and imported sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, and chocolate, can only be labeled as fair traid if the latter four ingredients are individually fair-trade certified.
Certification standards, however, vary per product category—which include such foodstuffs as beans, grains, and vegetables, as well as body care, apparel, flowers, and even sports balls. A detailed list is available on the products and partners page of Fair Trade USA's website.
For manufactured products, such as apparel, fair trade standards are introduced not only into the farm where the cotton or linen is produced, but also into the factory, so that workers living conditions and wages improved there as well.
"A couple of key things in manufacturing facility, are the working conditions, and having a voice in the workplace, having a private grievance process. We actually go in and train people as to what are their rights under fair trade," Geagan Wagner says.
What doesn't fair trade certification include? Although being certified by Fair Trade USA doesn't mean a product is organic, the overlap is significant: 47 percent of the Fair Trade imports into the United States were certified organic as well in 2009, according to the organization.
Although organic certification is done by the United States Department of Agriculture rather than a nonprofit, it is a natural pairing Geagan Wagner says.
"Rigorous environmental standards have always been part of the Fair Trade certifications," she says. "A healthy environment is part of a healthy future. Our product is impacted by chemical use, and so is the land. Things that preserve the natural habitat are also important for the development opportunity of a community, so we work toward that."
Numi Organic Tea works with fair trade collectives, and sells a wide array of organic teas from around the world, after working with individual farmers to source and produce tea in ways that are healthy to the workers and land. Brian Durkee, the company's vice president of operations, says organic certification, which requires roughly three years of supervision of growing land, to ensure no prohibited pesticides or fertilizers are used, can be a significant challenge for both producers and sellers.
"Even if everything is perfectly clean, and no pesticides are used, they have to wait three years after the point you request certification," he says. "Frankly, it entails a lot of doumentation. Organics is a process that takes a lot of investment from a farm. And once you get it into the U.S., it is a labeling law."
