Co-operating: the backbone of fair trade

By Harriet Lamb, Chief Executive Officer, Fairtrade Foundation

As Cooperatives Fortnight draws to a close, Harriet Lamb reflects on the role of co-operation in the Fairtrade movement.

To celebrate Co-operatives Fortnight, I sent off a cheque to buy a little share in the fantastic Holmfirth Fair Traders Coop making me their 500th member, while this Fairtrade Fortnight, I had a blast down at the North London The People’s Supermarket, made famous by Channel Four, where members gathered on grumpy old sofas to listen to farmers. It’s especially inspiring when co-operatives buy from cooperatives and certainly co-operation has been the backbone of the fair trade movement from the very beginning. Small-scale farmer co-ops grow all the Fairtrade cocoa, coffee, sugar and nuts.

It was co-operation – between Mexican coffee farmers and European NGOs – that led to the establishment of the FAIRTRADE Mark as we know it. Small-scale coffee growers, facing impending disaster as prices plummeted following the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement, proposed a way of identifying products grown sustainably by organised groups of small scale farmers, and traded for a fair price. And so a label was born.

These founding mothers and fathers were clear that if we are going to challenge all the injustices of trade, smallholders will have to be organized. Alone, selling small volumes from small plots, they can never change their position in global supplychains. But working together, they most certainly can. Indeed, they can become leading exporters. The enterprising cocoa farmers of Kuapa Kokoo in Ghana not only organize some 40,000 farmers to export their crop but are still to our knowledge, the only cocoa farmers anywhere in the world to be majority shareholders in their own chocolate brand, Divine Chocolate.

But one thing is for sure – it is never easy running a cooperative with challenges from every level. That’s why, meeting Fairtrade producer groups, I am always inspired by the sheer gritty determination of cooperative leaders, often against seemingly impossible odds. The small farmers of the Windward Islands, struggling to stay in a banana market that seems determined to exclude them, but still holding strong to a vision in which bananas act as a springboard to diversification and community cohesion. The dynamic nut growers of Malawi, India, Nicaragua, Bolivia who have formed a global super-co-op to supply cashews, brazil nuts and peanuts for their own company Liberation Nuts.

Rooting for those cooperatives, is our unique global grassroots network that now includes over 1000 International Fair Trade Towns who mirror the producers by organizing locally. From longstanding pioneers such as Equal Exchange to new businesses, Fairtrade seeks to harness the energy of cooperation to show just how trade can be run more fairly.

This blog was first published on Cooperatives UK