How Fair Trade is Fairtrade really?

An Insight into the World of Fairtrade from the Producers' Perspective (Reading Time 5 Minutes)

From Bananas to Felt Slippers:

When it comes to Fairtrade, the image of a banana immediately comes to mind. Those who grow and pick bananas earn only a fraction of the revenue. Fairtrade aims to change this, so that farmers earn more.

Image: Lebensmittelpraxis, Source: shorturl.at/jvyVW

Each of us knows the Fairtrade logo from Max Havelaar. This serves as a sign that producers and especially workers have been paid fairly, but also, for example, that the goods have been pre-financed by the buyer.

Meanwhile, more and more "Fairtrade labels" can be found in stores. In a supermarket, you often find over 30 different labels, which limits transparency and credibility.

Some manufacturers also use tricks. For some products, for example, it is not clearly explained which component of a product was produced fairly. Another trick is to increase the percentage of "fair" components by subtracting the water content. The credibility is thereby naturally "watered down".

Another example is Fair Trade Coffee: Let's imagine a certified Fair Trade coffee farmer sells 50% of his coffee beans to a Fair Trade provider and 50% to the free market. The free market only pays him a good price for the best quality, so he gives his good beans to the regular buyer. He gives the rest to the Fair Trade trader, who will take it anyway. As a result, you unfortunately get lower quality coffee despite the higher price.

The point here is not to say that Fair Trade is useless, but one should always question things or understand them better and not just blindly let labels guide purchasing decisions. Since this works just as well, manufacturers gladly use such labels or even invent their own.

In the development phase of my slipper brand WoolFit, I also really wanted to be Fairtrade certified, as I was already striving for fair pay for the workers anyway. So why not get a label for it right away? The reason I ultimately decided against it is that such a certification is quite expensive, and the workers don't benefit from it.

Here's a picture of our felt makers in Nepal. A felt artist can only make two pairs a day. It's strenuous handwork that needs to be paid fairly!

Moreover, there's a lot of cheating in Nepal too. Certified Fair Trade companies simply buy felt products from other manufacturers and sell them to Fair Trade traders.

By working with the productions based on the principle of Direct Trade, 100% of the wages really reach the workers.

Another interesting example can be found with our partners in Kyrgyzstan, where we, for example, have the WoolFit Classic produced. The production there operates according to very high ecological and social standards, which makes the production costs for such a handmade product quite high. A large Fair Trade provider also wanted to produce there but offered so little money per pair that not even the production costs would have been covered.

Through Direct Trade, we cut out the middleman, making high-quality, handmade slippers affordable without people or nature being exploited. In the picture, my father and I are visiting the production in Kyrgyzstan. On the left and right are the two production managers, and in the middle is our translator Ekaterina.

Conclusion: Consumer awareness of where products come from and how they are produced is steadily increasing. Fairtrade labels offer the chance to directly show consumers that certain social standards have been met in production. However, one should not blindly trust these labels. For more transparency, it would therefore be important to have uniform standards.

An extended form of Fairtrade is Direct Trade, where all intermediaries are eliminated and the money goes directly to the producer, or the workers. A trusting relationship between all parties is important for this.

I hope this little insight into the world of Fairtrade was interesting for you. More and more people are interested in this topic and place more value on the origin of products. I think this also increases the appreciation one has for a product. Because if you've ever felted a pair of slippers by hand, you know how much work goes into it, and it's the same with bananas, coffee, t-shirts, and so on.