The history of Fair Trade throughout the world

The roots of Fair Trade can be traced back in ventures overtaken by churches in the end of the 40’s. These initiatives aimed at comforting refugees and other poverty-stricken communities of several developing countries by selling their handicrafts at Northern markets. By then, the Alternative Trade Organizations (ATO’s) had been buying at better prices from developing world’s producers via direct trading and fair pricing regulations. The first official Fair Trade shop selling these and other goods opened its doors in the US in 1958.

In Europe now, during the mid 50’s, Oxfam UK begun to gradually include among its stock Chinese handicrafts made by local refugees and by 1966 the company’s first Fair Trade organization had already been established. At the same time similar initiatives taken in Holland resulted in the formation of the first imports Fair Trade organization, called the “Fair Trade Organisatie”.

In the meantime, Third World Groups in Denmark where selling sugarcane sugar, this way stating that “buying sugarcane sugar, offers people in poor countries a place under the sun of prosperity”. It was these groups which in 1969 opened the first “Third World Store”. World Stores or else Fair Trade Shops, as they are called in other parts of the world, have played a crucial role in the Fair Trade movement as they not only establish new selling points but also use their campaigns as an active contribution to the society’s awareness on the matter.

During the 60’s and 70’s, several Asian, African and Latin American countries realized the need to establish specific organizations which would pursue a fair marketing approach, supporting this way the underprivileged producers. As a result, the constitution of numerous such organizations followed and associations with the newly born organizations of the North were achieved.

In 1968, the 2nd United Nations Conference on Trade And Development (UNCTAD) under the motto “Trade Not Aid” took place. Based on the “Trade not Aid” approach, emphasis was given to the mercantile relationships with the North, pointing the later to cease simply assuming all profits and returning a small fraction as developmental help.

Holland was the first country which introduced the certification of Fair Trade goods back in 1988, this way trying to give an answer to the global drop in coffee’s price. Today, 19 countries have already established their own labeling schemes under the FLO (Fair trade Labeling Organizations) auspices.