learn about fair trade

What is Fair Trade?

Fair Trade is a Movement

Fair Trade is a piece of the global justice movement that seeks to empower producer communities, activists, and consumers and radically redefine power structures through people-centered, democratic trading alternatives.

Fair Trade is more than just trading: it proves that greater justice in world trade is possible. The Fair Trade movement values cooperative work and democratic, transparent decision making as a critical component of empowerment. It builds peoples' power in the face of globalization and highlights the need for change in the rules and practice of conventional trade, while demonstrating how a successful business can meet a triple bottom line.

Fair Trade is a Market Based Development Strategy

Fair Trade is a market based development strategy that gives marginalized producers a chance to succeed in the global marketplace and offers Fair Trade consumers a means to make their purchasing power a tool for real social and economic change in the world. Fair Trade products ensure that producer cooperatives were paid a fair price for their goods, which are produced under safe working conditions

Fair Trade is a trading partnership, based on dialogue, transparency and respect, that seeks greater equity in international trade. It contributes to sustainable development by offering mutually agreed upon trading conditions to and securing the rights of marginalized producers and workers.

Find out more:
Read the theses of USFTers and check out these other articles.

 

2006 Nicaragua Transition Summit Reading List

 

 

Fair-trade coffee in Nicaragua and Tanzania: a comparison

 

 

Seeking Common Grounds:
Analysis of the Draft Proposals for the International Coffee Agreement

 

Is this the end of organic coffee?

Response to the Press Release “Fairtrade coffee does little to help coffee farmers in developing countries"

 

FAIR TRADE IN AN UNFAIR WORLD?: The Prospects and Limitations of Social Justice Coffee, South and North


Fair Trade and Neoliberalism: Assessing Emerging Perspectives