The goal was greater equity in international trade. These relationships were based on partnership, dialogue, transparency and respect. Many such Southern Fair Trade Organisations were established, and links were made with the new organisations in the North. They constitute not only points of sales but are also very active in campaigning and awareness-raising.ĭuring the 1960s and 1970s, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and socially motivated individuals in many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America perceived the need for fair marketing organisations, which would provide advice, assistance and support to disadvantaged producers.
World Shops, or Fair Trade shops as they are called in other parts in the world, have played (and still play) a crucial role in the Fair Trade movement. These groups went on to sell handicrafts from the South, and in 1969 the first “Third World Shop” opened. Parallel initiatives were taking place in the Netherlands and in 1967 the importing organisation, Fair Trade Original, was established.Īt the same time, Dutch organisations began to sell cane sugar with the message “by buying cane sugar you give people in poor countries a place in the sun of prosperity”. In 1964, it created the first Fair Trade Organisation. The earliest traces of Fair Trade in Europe date from the late 1950s when Oxfam UK started to sell crafts made by Chinese refugees in Oxfam shops.
The first formal “Fair Trade” shop which sold these and other items opened in 1958 in the USA. There are many stories about the history of Fair Trade. It all started in the United States, where Ten Thousand Villages (formerly Self Help Crafts) began buying needlework from Puerto Rico in 1946, and SERRV began to trade with poor communities in the South in the late 1940s. Producers marching in Malawi during the launching of the IFAT organisational Mark in 2006. In short: Fair Trade is becoming more and more successful. On top of that, Fair Trade has made mainstream business more aware of its social and environmental responsibility.
The movement is engaged in debates with political decision-makers in the European institutions and international fora on making international trade fairer. Their products are sold in thousands of World-shops or Fair Trade shops, supermarkets and many other sales points in the North and, increasingly, in sales outlets in the Southern hemisphere. Over a million small-scale producers and workers are organized in as many as 3,000 grassroots organisations and their umbrella structures in over 70 countries in the South.
60 YEARS OF FAIR TRADE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FAIR TRADE MOVEMENT Fair Trade todayįair Trade today is a truly global movement.
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