Martin Luther King once said that before you have finished your breakfast each morning you will have relied on half the world.

Have you treated them fairly?

Have you thought about the farmers who earn next to nothing to harvest the coffee beans for your tall, trim mocha soy latte? Have you considered the tiny nimble fingers of the children who work the looms in Bangladesh to weave the cloth for your pajamas? Have you spared a moment for the people who made it possible for you to have fresh bananas with your cereal?

No?

Did you instead roll out of bed and start your day without any thought of the people who made that day possible? As long as the price of your coffee is kept down who really cares about what those delicious beans really cost. Not to you, but to the person who grew them and picked them, just to try and make ends meet.

The first two weeks of May officially mark Fair Trade fortnight, sear headed by Trade Aid. You may know the store – they supply delicious chocolate with the added ingredient: justice. You may have passed the shops and admired the jewelry, the bags and the woven baskets.

But this is not just a place where you can part with your money. It’s a challenge. Fair trade should not be limited to the environs of a single store. We have to ask ourselves – can the ideal of fair trade be expanded to the rest of our lives?

Third year student Erica Flaws is one consumer who will make the choice for fair trade, if she remembers it.
“If I am thinking about it then I will choose the fair trade option,” she says. “I try not to get sucked in to places like the $2 shop where I know it is too cheap to be fair.”
The governments push towards free trade agreements worry her.
“I don’t think the agreements our government has made are in anyway fair,” she says. “The words the government uses – it’s all about free trade and not fair trade.”
Ruby Gibbs, a first year student at Waikato, would like to make the fair trade option when she goes grocery shopping but the reality is, she simply can’t afford it.
“I don’t have the money for it, it’s generally a lot more expensive, but my mum always buys fair trade where she can – and organic. She’s into that sort of thing.”
Fellow first year, Manny Cullingford says that part of the problem is awareness as well.
“It’s a problem of advertising as well,” he says. “If fair trade products were more out there, then it would appeal to a wider group.”

Buy fair trade is a message a growing number of groups are trying to get across. And if the numbers are anything to go buy, they are succeeding.
In 2009, Australian and New Zealand retail sales of Fairtrade Certified & Labelled products grew by over 50% to just over NZ$64 million and in the last six years since the first Fairtrade Certified & Labeled products went on sale in both countries, cumulative retail sales figures have surpassed NZ$155 million.

Geoff White, General Manager of Fair Trade describes the role of Trade Aid as trying to create a connection between the producer of a product and the consumer.
“The ability to know who is making the stuff you are buying is being taken away,” he says. “Fair Trade is about bringing that back. We are trying to bring back the connection between the buyer and the person who made it.”
White describes the current supply chain as unbalanced, focusing on the end user and neglecting the person whose blood sweat and tears made the product possible.
“We are trying to look out for everyone on the supply train,” says White.
He says New Zealand’s uptake of fair trade products is improving – thanks in some part to our environmental activism.
“People began to ask: what is this doing to the environment. From there they started to say, if we can care about the environment we should also be caring about the people. There is a definite link between the two issues and at least part of our awareness of the issues comes from that link.”
This years Fair Trade fortnight is focused on the role of women in developing communities.
“The greatest change we see in communities comes from empowering women. When the money goes through the hands of women it gets spent on families, education and their communities more than if the money goes through men’s hands.”
White says Trade Aid’s focus is on giving traders market access.
“We don’t believe in determining what’s right for them, we just want to make sure they can sell their products.”

But the Fair Trade ethos has begun to expand beyond the niche market.
Grocery shoppers in New Zealand can now choose between fair trade products and those made with slave labour when they stand in the coffee, tea and chocolate isle.
More and more it seems Kiwis are taking a second look at how their food is made.
Ryan Allan, business manager for Scarborough Fair, says the solely fair trade brand has been selling in New Zealand supermarkets since 2005.
“I think there is a growing interest in Fair Trade, we certainly have seen an increase in inquiries,” he says. “Scarborough Fair is about bringing fair trade to the general market. When we started, we had a choice – to target the niche market and charge a high price or to take the traditional approach – to reduce our margins and sell as much as possible. We decided this was best. No one is going to benefit if we only sell 20 packets of tea.”
The company has big plans for the future,
“We want to move into office products – large tins of coffee, bulk tea in individually wrapped bags. We are also trying to encourage companies and hotels to think about using fair trade products.”
Allan points out that one of the banks in Australia has become a fair trade workplace, with everything they offer their staff certified as Fair Trade.
“We are trying to roll that out here in New Zealand. There’s huge potential,” he says.
Fair trade must be more than a marketing ploy.
“It’s absurd that in 2010 we still have slavery in the world,” says Allan. “In my mind, we have to try and ensure everyone has a decent standard of living. Fair trade is a way of doing that. Scarborough Fair works with a worldwide collective that ensures there are certain standards that we can get behind.”
Allan believes the New Zealand ethic is to help others. We need to connect ethically with what we buy
“I think generally as New Zealanders, we tend to believe in trying to assist others to get themselves a decent way of life. Fair trade is a way to do that.”

If you want further proof that the appeal of fair trade is growing – just look at the number of larger companies jumping on the fair trade bandwagon, says Allen.
Two of the largest chocolate companies in New Zealand, for example, are now proudly displaying fair trade certification on their milk chocolate range.
Whittikers Chocolate has recently begun an advertising campaign to highlight its use of fair trade cocoa beans in it’s milk chocolate blocks.
According to it’s website, Whittaker's source all of the cocoa beans that they use from Ghana.
“We purchase the beans through the Ghanaian Cocoa Board which is the government marketing organization that sells the Ghanaian cocoa crop. In a Labour study conducted into the Ghana Cocoa Industry in 2007, no evidence was found of child trafficking or children being bound on cocoa farms to the detriment of their education. We do not believe, therefore, that the cocoa beans that we purchase from Ghana involve child slave labour.”
According to Whittaker’s, the whole Ghanaian Cocoa Industry is currently going through a certification process that is focusing on four key areas:

1. Ensuring that cocoa is grown responsibly and that children are neither harmed nor denied schooling
2. Improving the long term sustainability of cocoa farming
3. Strengthening farming communities through access to education and training
4. Supporting effort to protect and enhance the environment

“We do not condone any abusive child labour or forced labour activities in the production of cocoa beans,” says a Whittikers spokesperson. “We are members of the Confectionery Manufacturers of Australasia and the World Cocoa Foundation. We fully support the programmes that these organizations, in partnership with other international agencies, are conducting in West Africa to end any abusive labour practices.”
Cadbury Chocolate also recently announced the Fair Trade certification of it’s Dairy Milk range. For the company that has recently had difficult publicity, this is considered a move in the right direction.
Corporate Communication Manager, Daniel Ellis, says the company made the decision to go Fair trade because, quite simply, it was the right thing to do.
“We believe it is the right thing to do,” he says. “And, this is genuinely good news for everybody: cocoa farmers, consumers, Fairtrade and Cadbury. It provides consumers with the same great tasting Cadbury Dairy Milk but with the added benefit of directly helping Fairtrade cocoa growers and their communities.”
The decision also allows the company to ensure it’s ongoing supply of cocoa.
“Our move to Fairtrade Certified Cadbury Dairy Milk milk chocolate builds on work we have been undertaking in Ghana for decades , including the NZ$120 million 10 year commitment to improve the livelihoods of cocoa farmers around the world as part of the Cadbury Cocoa Partnership. We are continuing this investment as well as our Fairtrade commitment.”
But don’t think that every bean in your dairy milk is fair trade. It’s not.
“Cocoa can come from many different farms and countries (in our case, Ghana and South East Asia) and is often mixed together for transport and production,” says Eliis. “To make sure that farmers receive the fair price and social premiums for Cadbury’s Fairtrade ingredients, the amounts we use are carefully monitored by the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO). Only the exact amount of chocolate that directly relates to the amount of Fairtrade ingredients in our Cadbury Dairy Milk can carry the Fairtrade label.”
Ellis says it is just a matter of time before other products in the company’s line go fair trade.
“We achieved Fairtrade Certification for Cadbury Dairy Milk milk chocolate first because it is our flagship brand and our best-selling chocolate by some margin,” he says. “It was the product that allowed us to make the biggest possible impact for cocoa farmers very quickly. We will continue to look at other brands and products on a case-by-case basis. The certification process is a complex issue as each individual ingredient needs to be Fairtrade Certified and this takes time.”

Its not just businesses that are looking into the fair trade phenomenon. Academics have begun to investigate the reality of fair trade as a tool to help the poor. A recent report from the University of Durham called The Economics of Fair Trade, concluded that properly understood Fair Trade complements and strengthens the competitive market and has nothing to do with protectionism. Fair Trade is an essential complement to any free trade policy that includes a genuine concern for the welfare of the poor. Indeed, it could well be said that free trade needs fair trade.
But can fair trade go beyond chocolate and coffee?

University of Auckland lecturer, Rob Scollay says that some of the highest trade barriers in New Zealand are on products exported from the developing world. “Opening this will help the quantity they sell but no necessarily the quality of production,” he says. “Fair trade outlets do a good job but whether you can expand it – well I would personally wonder if you could really expand supply of these sort of products from developing countries.”
Scollay describes the fair trade conundrum as interesting question. For the answer, we will have to wait and see.

Over the next two weeks, New Zealanders have the opportunity to calculate what our shopping habits really cost. Not just in terms of the dollar and cents value that we pay but the cost to those who made the products. The cheap option may be the tempting one, but for every cup of tea, every banana, every block of chocolate that we eat that is not fair trade, we may have kept a child out of school, a women working 15 hours a day, a family earning less then $50 a month.
In the words of Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop, “If trade undermines life, narrows it, impoverishes it, then it can destroy the world. If it enhances life, it can change the world.”

What is Fair Trade?
Fair trade is about better prices, decent working conditions, local sustainability, and fair terms of trade for farmers and workers in the developing world. Fair trade certification tries to tackle the injustices of conventional trade, which traditionally discriminates against the poorest, weakest producers. It enables them to improve their position and have more control over their lives.

Fairtrade on Campus
Next time you buy a coffee on campus, spare a thought for the farmers who grew the beans and insist on coffee with fair trade certification.
Espresso Plus - The beans used here are UTZ certified. UTZ is not well known here in New Zealand but according to it’s website was set up by in 1997 by a group of Guatemalan coffee growers and Dutch coffee roaster Ahold Coffee Company.

Momento – The coffee beans used at the Momento sites across campus are from Hamilton based company Rocket. The beans are not fair trade certified.

The Station – Doesn’t use fair trade coffee beans

Fair Trade Fortnight
• May 1 – Fair trade Fortnight Tea Party, in store, 11-3, tea tasting and cakes.
• May8 – Mother’s Day Bonanza, in store, 11-3, coffee tasting and Wai Taiko drummers
• May 12 – Host to a talk by Meera Bhattarai, Trade Aid’s Nepalese Trading partner, a leader of the fair trade movement in Nepal. At The WEL Energy Performing Arts Academy, Dance Studio, 7pm.

The Fair Trade Essentials – beyond Fair Trade Fortnight
Fair trade tea and coffee may be within reach, but when it comes to buying fair trade clothing, for example, New Zealanders are more or less stuck.
Here are some ways to embrace fair trade (and be kind to your bank balance)
• Op Shop – it’s cheap and when we are recycling old clothes we are reducing the pressure on supply and demand.
• Inform yourself. Know where your clothes, shoes, food and furniture are coming from. The library is good for this (and it doesn’t cost you anything to join) and it’s amazing how much information you can find on the web.
• Make it and grow it yourself - learn to sew and plant a veggie garden. Then the only person you are exploiting is yourself.
• Buy New Zealand made. We all get an…ok…wage.
• And remember, the price you pay is not the only cost of each product.

Useful websites:
Fair Trade bananas:
http://allgoodbananas.co.nz/
Fair Trade certification:
http://www.fairtrade.org.nz/
Trade Aid stores:
www.tradeaid.org.nz