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Fairtrade is about better prices, safe working conditions, local sustainability, and fair terms of trade for farmers and workers.
Learn more What is Fairtrade?

Buying Fairtrade is easy. There are over 6,000 Fairtrade products from coffee and tea to flowers and gold, so when you shop, look for the FAIRTRADE Mark.
Learn more Buying Fairtrade

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Fairtrade is a system of certification that sets standards in the production of goods. For farmers it means safer working conditions and fairer pay. For shoppers it means high quality, ethically produced products.

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Belief in a Just World: Consumer Intentions and Behaviors Toward Ethical Products

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Belief in a Just World: Consumer Intentions and Behaviors Toward Ethical Products

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Tianqi Chen

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UK government giving grants to the fairtrade foundation

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Fairtrade Foundation secures DFID funding to support flower and cocoa producers hit by global pandemic - Fairtrade Foundation

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The Fairtrade Foundation has won 2 out of 8 grants launched today by the UK Government to support producers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Showing how cost of living rises affect people interacting with more costly fairtrade products

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The new tax year will see a rise in outgoings for millions of households

Millions of British households are bracing for further financial constraints when the start of the new month, and new tax year, arrives on Friday.

With a number of bills and taxes set to increase from 1 April, the UK's cost of living crunch is going to "step up a notch", said WalesOnline. The changes will "hit everything", from energy prices and rail tickets to National Insurance and council tax.

This is some good news, however, as state pensions will increase by 3.1% on 6 April, which equates to "an annual boost of up to £289", Which? reported. It was also confirmed in October's autumn budget and spending review that the National Living Wage will increase from £8.91 to £9.50 from 1 April. This means the country's lowest paid workers will receive an extra £1,000 per year, the i news site said.

Here we break down the key changes set to impact UK households in the coming months.

The UK's rate of inflation rose to 6.2% in the 12 months to February 2022 - up from 5.5% in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This "faster than expected" increase means the UK's inflation rate has now hit a new 30-year high, Reuters said.

An increase in the consumer prices index took inflation to the highest rate since March 1992, when it stood at 7.1%, The Guardian reported. And "further increases are expected".

April will "truly be the cruellest month" for tens of millions of Brits who are facing the "biggest cost of living crisis in decades", said The Mirror. And one of the major talking points is the surge in gas and electric prices. If you'd been "worrying about energy bills going through the roof this week, you should", said the Birmingham Mail.

In February regulator Ofgem confirmed that the energy price cap will increase by a record 54% from 1 April. Ofgem's price cap on an average bill will rise £693 for approximately 22m customers. Those on default tariffs paying by direct debit will see a £693 increase from £1,277 to £1,971 per year and prepayment customers will see an increase of £708 from £1,309 to £2,017.

The pain is "likely to get worse" in October, when the next cap is brought in, the Daily Express said. Experts believe it could rise to around £3,000 per year.

Industry body Water UK said bills will rise by an average of 1.7% in England and Wales from April. This will push up the typical annual bill by roughly £7 to £419 a year, The Guardian said. "In some parts of England bills could rise by up to 10%."

Customers in some parts of the country have noticed an increase in their bills, BBC News reported. "Of the 11 water and sewerage companies in England and Wales, customers of Northumbrian Water (10.8%) and Severn Trent (7.1%) have seen the highest average bill rises. Customers of some other companies have actually seen average bills fall."

With costs set to increase the Liverpool Echo has put together some tips on how to reduce your water bill. Tips include fixing dripping taps and leaking toilets and switching to an efficient showerhead.

From next month a £12bn rise in National Insurance will "hit working people" as the Treasury "looks to cut Covid backlogs in the NHS and begin funding social care", The Mirror said. This will mean that employees, employers and the self-employed will all pay 1.25p more in the pound for National Insurance from April 2022 - from 12% to 13.25%.

A health and social care levy of 1.25% is due to be added to employees' National Insurance contributions from April. The additional £12bn raised each year will initially go towards easing pressure on the NHS and then be pumped into the social care system.

In the spring statement last week the planned National Insurance hike to pay for NHS health and social care was not delayed or removed as many had hoped and called for. However, Chancellor Rishi Sunak did announce a £3,000 rise in the threshold on National Insurance payments. This significant increase to the planned £300 threshold rise will allow people to earn £12,570 before National Insurance becomes payable.

New council tax rates will begin 1 April, and will affect "everyone aside from those who are exempt, such as students and those on some benefits", the Daily Express said. "All in all, your council tax will increase by 5%. This is made up of a 2% council tax rise and an additional 3% for social care."

In February Sunak announced a "handout" that would give a rebate of £150 to those living in properties in council tax bands A to D, and a £200 reprieve on energy bills, to be paid back over five years, The Times reported. The chancellor is "considering proposals for a new council tax rebate" after his spring statement "failed to allay panic in No 10 over the spiralling cost of living crisis".

According to official inflation projections, commuters are "on track to be hit by the biggest increase in rail fares since records began", The Telegraph reported. "Ticket prices are expected to increase by about 10% if ministers keep them pegged to the Retail Prices Index."

There will also be a "shake-up" of air passenger duty, the tax that passengers pay on flights that take off from the UK, The Mirror said. Changes announced in last autumn's budget will see long haul flights become more expensive while the tax paid on domestic flights will be cut in half from April.

A number of broadband, mobile and TV companies have announced price hikes, YourMoney.com reported. Sky will increase its broadband and TV prices by around £43 per year on 1 April. And depending on which service they have and when they signed up, BT, EE and Plusnet customers will see a 5.4% or 9.3% hike from 31 March.

The Royal Mail announced that the price of first and second-class stamps will increase from 4 April. The price of a first-class stamp will rise by 10p to 95p with a second-class stamp going up by 2p to 68p. "If you're a regular stamp-buyer, it's worth getting your purchase in before the prices rise," The Mirror said.

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Cost of living: what will increase in price? | The Week UK

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The new tax year will see a rise in outgoings for millions of households Millions of British households are bracing for further financial constraints when the start of the new month, and new tax year, arrives on Friday.

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Research some more ethical fashion brands and also researched their websites to show how buying ethical might be a good thing but is too costly for consumers

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Planet fashion: the 10 coolest ethical fashion brands

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Some labels are showing how fashion can put the planet first. To celebrate Earth Day, here are a few of our favourites

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I wanted to research fairtrade in a fashion context so i wanted to bring up a sustainable brand, so i chose storymfg who have an ethical and sustainable brand mission and with a very strong product manifesto

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Story mfg. was born out of a desire for a more authentic, fulfilling and kind approach to fashion -- one that doesn't involve a trade-off between aesthetics and consciousness. We are a husband and wife team and work with a large group of dyers, weavers, embroiderers and tailors.

We want to make things and choices that help change the fashion industry for the better and show that being considerate and kind (to people and the planet) is not only important but an enormous strength. We believe fashion can be a form of social activism and that STORY mfg. can help create a more positive future 🌍.

Our manifesto has been the cornerstone of our practice, but it's open to adaptation as more opportunities to create positive interactions arise.

In the past, the great luxury fashion houses would be ambassadors of craft - often keeping niche artisan practices alive. Art and craft are not only beautiful but crucial and important culturally for so many left behind in an ever faster and more automated economy. We aim to bridge the gap between these worlds and both promote artistic practices and foster new ones in places where people have been marginalised.
Waste Is Lazy
There is no 'waste' in nature. A seed grows into a plant with energy from the sun, lives, dies and turns into life-giving soil for everything else. This approach of not only 'zero impact' but 'positive impact' is our ultimate goal.

We collect our natural fibre offcuts from production and re use them for lining, stuffing or other items. If they're too small to be used in that way they are driven down the road and turned into paper which we use to make hangtags and packaging.

While we choose to use natural, unprocessed, materials and fibres wherever we can we will use synthetic in some cases where it is a better option or reduces waste.

We never, ever, use animal products because we don't feel there is anything sustainable or positive in raising and slaughtering other creatures. Our stand on kindness extends to our makers and customers too - we ensure that our materials and garments do not carry horrid toxic chemicals that could be harmful to work with or wear. Everything we do is vegan and completely cruelty-free.

Regenerative Agriculture

Our greater goal is to help reverse the damage done by industry and enter into practices that leave the planet better off after our work is done. Our natural indigo sourcing comes from an effort to fix nitrogen levels in over-tilled and farmed soil, and our dyeing takes place in a re-planted forest where all our waste is used to fertilise the gardens.

Our work is heavily craft-based and involves both teaching and learning new techniques together with our craftspeople. We are invested in giving continuous, well-paid work and do not switch for cheaper alternatives.

The Fashion industry is one of the most powerful oppressors. If it were a government, we would call it the cruelest regime on the planet for the way it upholds racist practices, disenfranchises, economically enslaves and perpetuates racist stereotypes. The industry relies on the hard work, culture, history, passion and resources of people it chooses not to represent - often perpetuating a disgusting measure of value to customers based on race. We will continue to champion those we work with, and challenge at every turn racist attitudes. We will be inclusive in our hiring practices, partnerships, collaborations, media and use our influence to fight systemic xenophobia, racism and discrimination.

If the chemicals in clothing were packaged into a cream you'd never let it anywhere near your skin - so why do we ignore it when it's in the things we wear? Our approach to fabric and dyes is to use only ingredients that are non toxic and skin kind. The vast majority of our dyes and materials are made from natural elements used throughout history (although it's important to remember that some people are allergic to things found in nature like peanuts, soy, etc.)

We build products to last because the most sustainable way to live is to buy less. Our construction methods are transplanted from vintage workwear and military making our goods durable and strong for their lifetime.

Synthetics Are Not Our Enemy

Synthetics have been vilified as enemy number 1. in the fight for a nicer future but it feels as if this is a bit of a distraction from more nuanced issues. Synthetics in the right application and with thoughtful design are sometimes a better choice of material. Single use plastic bags are obviously idiotic and short sighted, but we think recycling and mindful design with synthetic materials is important.

Story mfg. is constantly adapting to new discoveries and our manifesto is a living document. We are careful not to get stuck in an ideology if new, better, kinder, production options arise.

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Story mfg. was born out of a desire for a more authentic, fulfilling and kind approach to fashion -- one that doesn't involve a trade-off between aesthetics and consciousness. We are a husband and wife team and work with a large group of dyers, weavers, embroiderers and tailors.

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Buying Fairtrade - Fairtrade Foundation - Where to find Fairtrade products

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Research on the fairtrade foundation, what they do, what products do they sell and what stores to find them

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Buying Fairtrade - Fairtrade Foundation - Where to find Fairtrade products

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There are over 6,000 Fairtrade products from coffee and tea to flowers and gold, so when you shop, look for the FAIRTRADE Mark.

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I used to run a podcast, so i wanted to use real life examples of our episodes to reference the way in which we organise our podcast

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Listen to Homiesexuals Podcast | SoundCloud is an audio platform that lets you listen to what you love and share the sounds you create.

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Fairtrade definition - who they are, what they do, their members, etc.

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What does Fairtrade do? Fairtrade works with farming co-operatives, businesses and governments to make trade fair.

Together with Fairtrade farmers and workers we have a vision: a world in which trade is based on fairness so that producers earn secure and sustainable livelihoods.

Fairtrade has a network of dedicated supporters who help to raise awareness of the issues of unfair trade and fundraise to support us in our work. Find out more in Get Involved.

Fairtrade sets standards

Fairtrade sets social, economic and environmental standards for the companies and farmers involved in the supply chain.

For farmers and workers the standards include protection of workers' rights and the environment, for companies they include the payment of the Fairtrade Minimum Price safety net and an additional Fairtrade Premium. Read more about the Fairtrade Premium.

Fairtrade certifies products and ingredients

FLOCERT, an independent organisation, checks that the Fairtrade Standards have been met by the farmers, workers and companies that are part of the product supply chains. In order to reassure consumers that this has happened, we license the use of the FAIRTRADE Mark on products and packaging to signal the standards have been met. When all the ingredients that can be Fairtrade are, the product carries this mark:

Companies can choose to source only one ingredient on Fairtrade terms for their ranges, in which case products may carry a mark similar to one of the below:

Visit our buying Fairtrade pages to discover some of the products that are available.

Fairtrade works with companies' own schemes

Shopper demand has driven companies to start thinking about sustainability. When considering whether to partner in some way with a business-own sustainability scheme, Fairtrade compares the way the scheme works to a set of core Fairtrade principles. This is to ensure we only work with schemes that share our values. These principles are at the heart of Fairtrade's mission and activities, and include ensuring that farmers and workers are paid a fair price, working to support strong, flourishing producer organisations and enabling democratic decision-making by farmers and workers on their business and community development. Find out more about Fairtrade Partnerships.

Fairtrade lobbies government

We mobilise our grassroots supporter base to demand fairer trade deals for farmers who supply us with so much of our food. See our current campaigns and find out how you can lend your support.

Fairtrade works directly with farmers and workers

With our Fairtrade partners, we support on specific issues, from Bolivian coffee farmers tackling the plant diseases linked to climate change, to cocoa-growing communities creating the Women's School of Leadership in Côte d'Ivoire. Read more about the Women's School of Leadership.

Fairtrade drives awareness with the public

Through our Fairtrade Towns, Schools and Faith groups, and through our campaigns, we drive awareness of the issues of unfair trade and ask the public to choose Fairtrade. See how you can get involved in your community.

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What Fairtrade does - Fairtrade Foundation

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What does Fairtrade Do? Fairtrade works with farming co-operatives, businesses and governments to make trade fair.

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Researching business engagement with freetrade and seeing how many of the biggest firms such as nestle have left to start their own fairtrade-esque schemes after which i then disovered the channel 4 documentary about Cadbury using child labour, so the authenticity of the executives is in question - is fairtrade really limiting businesses from making profits through high membership costs and wasting money or do businesses feel child labour is more profitable

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t wasn't very long ago that a banana was just a banana - just a curved, yellow fruit. All you knew, if you bought a bunch in 1986, was that they cost around 97p per kilo. You weren't told if they were organic or pesticide-free. You didn't know if they came from Costa Rica or the Dominican Republic. And you certainly weren't invited to worry about the farmers who grew them - or if their children went to school, or whether their villages had clinics. You just picked up your bananas and walked to the next aisle for your coffee or tea or chocolate, none the wiser about where they came from either, or about the people who farmed them.

Back then, the countries that grew these commodities and many others were still known as the Third World, and the habit of not caring about their farming conditions was a legacy of their colonial past. For centuries, trade propelled the colonial project, and exploitation was its very purpose. The farmers of Asia, Africa and South America were forced to raise the crops that the empire's companies wanted, to work the crops in abject conditions, and to part with them at ruinously low prices. In the last century, the empires melted away but the trade remained lopsided - with the imbalance now rationalised by the market, which deemed it "efficient" to pay farmers as little as possible. In the 1970s, a Ghanaian cocoa farmer often received less than 10 cents out of every dollar his beans earned on the commodities market; as a proportion of the retail price of a chocolate bar, his take was smaller still. Child labour was common. The chocolate companies prospered and their customers shopped well; the farmers stayed poor.

Then, in the late 1980s, you began to hear more about these farmers, encountering their stories on television or in newspapers or even on the labels of the packages you bought. The reasons were manifold. Environmental awareness was on the rise. The prices of some commodities were crashing, placing agricultural incomes in even more acute peril than usual. There had already been small groups pushing for more equitable trade: "little do-good shops scattered in cities around Europe, selling products ... bought at fair prices directly from small producers abroad", as one pioneerdescribed it. By the early 1990s, these disparate initiatives began to coalesce into a larger international struggle to radically reform our relationship with what we bought. Trade had long been unfair by design, but now there was a growing movement to make consumers care about that unfairness, and even to help rectify it.

The crown jewel of this movement was Fairtrade International, an umbrella body formed in 1997 out of various national chapters that had sprouted over the previous decade. Fairtrade was founded on the conviction that consumers could make the marketplace more moral. The spine of Fairtrade's philosophy has always been price: simple, clean, the kind of measure that economists like to deal with. If companies pay farmers equitably, Fairtrade believes, other benefits cascade out as well. Farmers can hire adult workers, rather than employing children; they can send their kids to school, and buy medicines; they can improve the yields of their farms by using better fertilisers. Producers must meet a number of standards to qualify for Fairtrade: rules about labour conditions, for instance, or waste disposal. But for companies, the core of their ethical responsibility towards their producers is defined by price.

So Fairtrade works by forming a kind of "virtuous triangle" of ethical business. It recruits farmers and farming cooperatives as members, asking them to meet its standards; periodically, Fairtrade sends inspectors to these farms around the world, ensuring they are still compliant. At another vertex of the triangle, Fairtrade enlists companies to pay a minimum price for commodities from these member farms if market prices plunge, and offers to certify products made from such ethically sourced commodities. The final corner is the customer, who can, with a little counsel, be galvanised to shop consciously, and to buy Fairtrade-certified products even if they cost a few pence more.

The Fairtrade certification mark has become widely familiar: a green-blue-black logo, resembling a yin-and-yang with a tear in its middle, soothing the consciences of shoppers the world over. Roughly $9bn worth of Fairtrade products were sold in 2017, their raw material sourced from 1.66 million farmers. Around 2,400 companies, including multinational giants such as Tesco and Marks & Spencer, pay licence fees to their national Fairtrade chapters to use the mark on their products. Fairtrade has becomea byword for ethical consumption; 93% of British shoppers now recognise its mark.

But its two real triumphs are in the realm of ideas, not numbers. First, and most obviously, Fairtrade challenged the entrenched model of the commodities business - the belief that a farmer's lean income was just an unavoidable reality of trade economics. Second, somewhat more stealthily, it cemented the notion that the modern corporation would be ethical if only someone held up a lamp and showed it the way. Capitalism didn't have to be feared; the market would figure out its own checks and balances, through labelling agencies such as Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance, without having to be regulated by any higher authority. Persistent and egregious inequality could be solved by deft pleats and tucks to the garb of trade, rather than by a full reconsideration of its fabric and seams.

Now, though, Fairtrade's success in helping to build a world of heightened expectations of sustainability is perversely paving the way to its own demise. Companies are losing faith in labels such as Fairtrade - losing faith in their ability to secure the future of farming and the future of commodities that drive corporate profit, but also losing faith that these independent stamps of sustainability carry any value at all any more. Instead, the world's giant food multinationals are taking matters into their own hands - setting up their own in-house certification programmes, appraising their own ethics to their own satisfaction.

Although the fate of Fairtrade is not necessarily the fate of fair trade, the former has kept the latter alive as an object of aspiration. A weakened Fairtrade portends the enfeebling of the very idea of fair trade. This poses a serious problem, because Fairtrade relies on companies to constitute one half of its virtuous bazaar. Without the buyers, the Fairtrade bazaar folds up, and companies return to their own devices, to pursue only what's best for themselves. Increasingly, companies are finding it easier and more expedient to produce their own certifications, said Trishna Shah, a Euromonitor analyst who tracks ethical labels: "A big change is happening."

What we're looking at, in short, is something like a corporate capture of fair trade - and it comes at a time when agriculture is already in crisis. The world's population expandedfrom about 4.4 billion in 1980 to more than 7 billion by 2011, but the proportion of people employed in agriculture shrank by 12%. Globally, the average age of a coffee farmer is 55. No one from a younger generation seems to want to grow crops any more. The work is difficult and, in the developing world, nearly always unrewarding. And the coming decades, with all the challenges of a changing climate - waves of heat, virulent pests, droughts and floods - appear grimmer still. The lives of farmers are already poised to get worse. A move towards unfairer trade will only push them back towards the exploited miseries of the past.

he single most damaging blow to Fairtrade came two summers ago, and it was delivered by Sainsbury's, which once proudly boasted that it was the world's largest retailer of Fairtrade products. In May 2017, without any warning, Sainsbury's broke the news that its own-brand teas would no longer be certified by Fairtrade.

"It was a bombshell," Paul Tiony said. He had travelled to Nairobi that month, from his tea farm in Nandi Hills, in western Kenya, to take part in a half-day workshop run by Fairtrade Africa. Other tea farmers, from Malawi, Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda, were there as well, at the Pride Westlands hotel; so was a team from Sainsbury's. The company called a meeting at the end of the workshop, and Tiony grew excited. Sainsbury's must have some kind of good news, he thought. But after gathering almost 50 workshop participants in a conference room of the hotel, Sainsbury's revealed that its in-house tea brands were abandoning Fairtrade. Instead, an executive said, it was piloting its own ethical label - and calling it "Fairly Traded". Later, Fairtrade estimated that these changes would affect nearly 250,000 farmers and workers.

Among these were the 8,000 members of Sireet, the tea-farming cooperative to which Tiony belongs. Sireet's produce is certified by Fairtrade, and Sainsbury's used to be, by far, the largest buyer of Sireet's Fairtrade tea. So Tiony was dumbstruck at the shock announcement. "Even Fairtrade Africa officials didn't seem to know much about it," he recalled. "They were asking: 'Why are you doing this?'" Someone inquired: "Are you moving out of Fairtrade because of Brexit?"

Sainsbury's had no real answers, Tiony said - but it seemed to be doubting that Fairtrade was working as promised. One Sainsbury's executive singled out one of the central principles of Fairtrade's model: the so-called "premium" above the minimum price that companies must pay, and which cooperatives must use to build schools, or run clinics, or improve their communities in other ways. Sainsbury's was concerned that the premium was being poorly used, and that it was money wasted. "But just a few days earlier," Tiony said, "someone from Sainsbury's had come to look at all our projects." The farmers tried to argue with the executives; the executives insisted they weren't going to change their minds. "The meeting ended just like that."

The announcement kicked off an immediate storm. In an open letter, Fairtrade's tea producers in Africa accused Sainsbury's of seeking "power and control" over farmers in a manner "reminiscent of colonial rule". A coalition of British non-profits urged consumers into a weekend of action under the rubric: "Don't Ditch Fairtrade". Buy a pack of "Fairly Traded" tea and then give it back, they suggested: "Let the sales assistant know you are returning it because it's not Fairtrade." In Parliament, MPs pressed Sainsbury's to reconsider; one accused the company of lying, and another complained to the Advertising Standards Authority that the name Fairly Traded would mislead shoppers who confused it for Fairtrade. (Sainsbury's declined to comment for this story. "The launch of Fairly Traded was a bit of a disaster," a former executive told me with a sigh.)

The Fairly Traded experiment ignited fears of a full divorce, in which Sainsbury's would abandon the rest of its Fairtrade products - its coffee and sugar; its flowers; the 650m bananas it sells every year - and move out of the Fairtrade house altogether. That would, the Guardian wrote at the time, bring Fairtrade "crashing down". So far, this hasn't happened, but Sainsbury's is still only a couple of years into its experiment with Fairly Traded. The divorce could still come.

The departure of Sainsbury's wasn't a one-off. Around the world, the largest agribusiness companies are quitting independent certification, either because they think they can do sustainability better in-house, or because they see an opportunity to craft standards that fit their own purposes. Soon after Sainsbury's, the global confectionary giant Mondelēz - whose vast holdings include Cadbury and Toblerone - pulled several of its chocolate bars, including Dairy Milk, away from Fairtrade and into an in-house certification scheme called " Cocoa Life ". Nestlé had launched a similar programme, "Cocoa Plan", back in 2013; between them, Nestlé and Mondelez control roughly 40% of the British chocolate market. Starbucks has "CAFE Practices"; Barry Callebaut, the Swiss cocoa producer, has "Cocoa Horizons"; US giant Cargill has "Cocoa Promise"; McDonald's has its own "McCafé Sustainability Improvement Platform".

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All these firms still have a few products that are certified by third parties - by Fairtrade, or by other agencies such as Rainforest Alliance or UTZ. (The latter two merged in January 2018.) But the ratio is dwindling. The great energies of these corporations, said Trishna Shah, the Euromonitor analyst, are being lavished upon their own, bespoke schemes - each with its own little logo, its own definition of fairness, its own explanatory literature on a web page somewhere.

For shoppers, this promises bewildering times ahead at the supermarket: more and more instances of what people in the industry call "label fatigue". The shelves already crawl with sustainability logos: more than 460 of them on food and beverage packages, and a third of them created over the last 15 years. There are little chromatic decals to testify that tuna is dolphin-friendly; that coffee is bird-friendly; that "wild-collected natural ingredients" are up to FairWild standards; that a slice of salmon is Salmon-Safe and follows Best Aquaculture Practices; that a bottle of wine is LIVE, which means that it fulfills Low Input Viticulture and Ecology benchmarks. One logo promises a carbon-free product, another a carbon-neutral one, and a third a carbon-reducing one. The more labels there are, the less we know about them - about what they stand for, and about how meaningful they are.

In a crowd, there's room to hide. When Fairtrade began, labels were rare and precious things; when you bought a product with a label on it, you knew what you were getting. In contrast, a company today can launch its certification logo into the large ocean of labels, confident that most shoppers will not know what the logo guarantees, but that it will nonetheless salve their consciences. "I think companies are hoping that label fatigue is an enduring trend," said Elizabeth Bennett, a political economist who co-edited the Handbook of Research on Fair Trade. "They're hoping that consumers are tired of learning what 30 different labels in one sector mean, and that we'll all just think: 'Any claim of sustainability is an improvement over no claim.'" This makes it easy for companies to resort to the ruse of "greenwashing" - pretending to be ethical without really being anything of the sort.

Several people in the corporate world offered an even more depressing version of this story: companies are sidling away from third-party certifiers because their optimistic project - the idea that the market can be heedful of its own abuses and correct itself - has, in a grand sense, failed. After decades of work, these certifiers have been unable to truly alter the imbalance in global trade; they have struggled to protect farmers, or to arm them for their various social, economic and environmental battles.

The proof is in the dire projections for the future of farming, showing how vanishing agricultural biodiversity, the warming climate and the ageing and impoverishment of farmers are all endangering the world's crops - which means they are also endangering the supply chains of companies who rely upon farmers in Asia, Africa and Latin America to manufacture chocolate bars, coffee pods, or cotton T-shirts. By launching all these in-house programmes, companies are trying to take matters into their own hands - if only to secure their sources of commodities, and their bottom lines.

he Fairtrade movement was born in 1988, when a Dutch non-profit introduced the first certification for ethically traded coffee. The label was named Max Havelaar, after a seminal anti-colonial novel by the Dutch writer Eduard Dekker, published in 1860. In the novel, Dekker described how the Dutch in Indonesia, having made themselves "masters of the country", compelled the Javanese farmer to grow sugar and coffee, instead of rice for his family. The government "punishes him if he sells what he has produced to any purchaser but itself; and it fixes the price actually paid", Dekker wrote. "And because the entire trade must produce profit, that profit cannot be got in any other way than by paying the Javanese just enough to keep him from starving." Naming the label after the novel was a blunt acknowledgement of the straight line connecting colonial exploitation to corporate exploitation. When the label launched, three Dutch coffee brands signed on to source their beans from a farmers' cooperative in Mexico, paying a rate above market price that was agreed to be fair. The following year, coffee prices crashed following a breakdown of trade talks: the cost of a pound of coffee on the commodities market fell to rates last seen in the 1930s. Coffee farmers faced ruin. The universe seemed to be emphasising the urgency of Max Havelaar's mission.

The label was a swift success; within a year, 65% of Dutch consumers had heard of Max Havelaar, and the certified coffee found its way on to shelves at the biggest supermarkets. In tandem with the coffee crisis, Max Havelaar inspired other "alternative trade" initiatives across Europe. In Britain, the Fairtrade Foundation was set up by NGOs and church groups in 1992. By 1997, the various national Fairtrade chapters were gathered into an umbrella body, now called Fairtrade International and headquartered in Bonn, Germany.

In the voluminous literature on its website, Fairtrade sets out the prices it calculates to be "fair". As of mid-July, the minimum price for a metric tonne of cocoa beans was $2,000; for an 18.14kg box of bananas from Cameroon, €6.40; for 1,000 fresh coconuts from the Windward Islands, $112. But Fairtrade doesn't stop with ensuring these minimum prices; it also demands that producers be paid an extra premium - $11 for the Windward Islands coconuts, for instance - and that these premiums be spent to benefit the community.

Fairtrade insists that producers make these investment decisions democratically, which means that farmers have to organise into collectives such as Sireet. There is an undeniable power in Fairtrade bringing these collectives to the negotiating table, said Pauline Tiffen, the editor of the Journal of Fair Trade. "The tea industry used to be so hierarchical until quite recently that it was like something out of Dickens," she said. "And cocoa still felt like it was operating in the 18th century. Until 20 years ago, if you went to any big trade meetings on cocoa, you'd see no women, no people of colour."

The debate over whether Fairtrade's systems truly transform the lives of farmers has raged for nearly all of Fairtrade's lifetime. Its numbers, in relative terms, are still puny. The 1.66 million farmers in the Fairtrade network form a speck within the 2 billion or so people who make their living from agriculture. The sale value of Fairtrade's products may add up to $9bn, but the global market for coffee alone is worth $200bn.

A more dramatic sign of Fairtrade's struggles is that it can't sell, on its terms, all the volumes of commodities it certifies. In 2016, of all the coffee grown as Fairtrade, only 34% of it could be sold at the minimum price. There were no takers for the rest; farmers had to unload the surplus into the standard "unfair" market, at the lower prices that the market determined. For cocoa, the rate is a bit better, 47%. For tea, it's much worse, only 4.7 %. There are tonnes of harvest for which Fairtrade fails to find any fair-minded buyers at all.

Even the benefits that Fairtrade promises to deliver to farmers have been called into question. In 2014, Fairtrade entered into a public squabble with a team from Soas University of London, which had examined how well Fairtrade did in shrinking poverty in Ethiopia and Uganda. The study, funded by the British government, found that schoolchildren had worked on Fairtrade-certified farms. The researchers compared wages on Fairtrade-certified tea and coffee estates - always owned by smallholders, in keeping with Fairtrade's belief in championing the small farmer - with wages on larger, uncertified plantations. Workers on the Fairtrade estates were paid less and often laboured in worse conditions, they concluded. Fairtrade called these "distorted comparisons" and rejected the researchers' conclusions.

In Kenya, the tea farmers of Sireet have experienced some of the frustrations of Fairtrade, but also the sudden precariousness of life without it. The cooperative came together 14 years ago, when 6,230 farmers raised money to buy nearly 1,000 hectares of land to cultivate their tea. Sireet has been a Fairtrade producer from the very beginning, its chairman, Wilson Tuwei, told me. Sireet's farmers worked hard to meet Fairtrade's rules and standards, he said, but even so, the cooperative was never able to sell more than 13% of its harvest at Fairtrade rates.

Even that feels like a bonanza, though, compared to what has happened over the last two years. After Sainsbury's stopped its purchases, Sireet's sales of Fairtrade tea plummeted. "Last year, we were at not even 1%," Tuwei said. Sireet's careful plans started to go up in smoke. "We've stopped most of the projects we were funding with the Fairtrade premium. There were dispensaries. We were paying school fees for some children. There were irrigation projects. They've all become white elephants now. It has really affected us."

he rupture between Sainsbury's and Fairtrade over tea has become the most prominent case of a large company concluding that Fairtrade wasn't quite cutting it any more. The details of that rupture convey why Sainsbury's was dissatisfied with Fairtrade, but also why replacement corporate schemes such as Fairly Traded feel flimsy or stifling to those meant to benefit from them.

Two people who have worked with Sainsbury's told me that the company had been unhappy with Fairtrade for years. When I spoke to these anonymous sources in April, both sounded exasperated at the way Sainsbury's had handled its exit, but they made the case that its reasons were sound. "We were paying these premiums, but it wasn't clear where the money was going. Fairtrade isn't good at keeping tabs on it," one of them said. "It wasn't always going to medicines and schools and things like that, as we found through our own investigations."

Other Fairtrade partners had raised this as well, she added. "We wanted more data ... Instead, there was just a systemic inefficiency." Sainsbury's, as a corporation, was constantly pressured to be transparent, she said. "But it turned out that Fairtrade wasn't quite as transparent. That was frustrating." The other Sainsbury's source confirmed this. "If you wanted to find out what a cooperative had done with a whole wad of Fairtrade premiums, or what the impact of that had been over the years, nobody could tell you. Or you'd get some anecdotal stuff."

A Fairtrade spokesperson told me, in response to these claims, that the organisation wanted farmers to spend their premiums the way they wished, setting their own goals and monitoring their own progress. She added that, since April, Fairtrade has "strengthened the requirements on Fairtrade premium use, management, and reporting, in order to promote best practices and increase transparency". Now, if a cooperative's annual premiums exceed $150,000, it must hire an external auditor to inspect the way it accounts for the money.

Even as Sainsbury's was stewing over the premiums it was paying out, the second Sainsbury's source told me, it had begun to "rain down with standards" over the past decade. Companies and non-profits introduced a fleet of new labels and certifications, their names all seeming to blend hazily into each other. Pasture for Life. New Forest Marque. Food Made Good. Soil Association. Free Range Dairy Pasture Promise. LEAF Marque. "Then Fairtrade starts to look just like a sliver of the pie - an expensive and not very satisfactory one," said the source. "And Sainsbury's thinks: 'I'm sure we can do this ourselves, I'm sure we know what needs to be delivered.'"

Fairtrade didn't think so. Under Fairly Traded, farmer collectives no longer receive their premiums directly, or decide how to spend this money. Instead, they must work on "action plans" and convince a Sainsbury's board of experts in London to release their funds. In their open letter, Fairtrade's tea producers protested that the company was characterising these premiums as "donor money" rather than earnings that rightfully belonged to the farmers. Fairtrade called the board "a further layer of bureaucracy controlled by a group far removed from day-to-day life in Africa".

It feels like a paradox: that, in a moment when sustainability and ethics are more important than ever, corporations want to desert an agency such as Fairtrade, the most famous certifying entity in the field. Companies are under pressure - from customers, governments, banks and investors - to prove their sustainability credentials. Signatories to the UN's Principles of Responsible Investment now manage around $89tn in assets. The network of Sustainable Stock Exchanges - more than 80 bourses around the world - guide and sometimes even require listed companies to report on their sustainability.

In a way, this dialled-up consciousness explains why companies are searching for alternatives to independent labelling systems, said Fredrik Galtung, who runs TrueFootprint, a firm that analyses data to tell businesses if their various sustainability projects make any sort of impact. He detects, in the industries he works with, a hardnosed sense that unsustainable practices will result in economic risk. So he isn't surprised that companies, finding Fairtrade insufficient at tackling that risk, are rushing to erect their own standards. "If Fairtrade producers could show that their farmers were 10 or 20 years younger on average, that would be something. If they could show they're more climate-resistant, that would be a massive advantage. But we're unable to see all this."

Fairtrade denies that its future is dim, or that a schism has appeared between itself and the companies with which it aims to work. In his discussions of these issues, Dario Soto Abril, who has been the CEO of Fairtrade International since 2016, is a model of genial tact. He's in an unenviable position. He must keep his relations with corporations warm; Sainsbury's still retails plenty of Fairtrade-labelled products, for example, and Mondelēz uses Fairtrade's skills to track payments and commodities up and down the supply chain. At the same time, Soto must project his conviction that it is best for everyone concerned - shoppers, farmers, but especially companies - if they all commit fully to Fairtrade.

Agriculture has never been under more stress, Soto said. The world is so densely connected now that a tremor in one part of a supply chain sets off instant price fluctuations elsewhere. Corporate power is consolidating. Just three giants - Barry Callebaut, Cargill and Olam - control 60% of the world's cocoa-processing business, for example; this gives them enormous leverage over the prices they pay to producers. "Cocoa farmers still live in poverty," Soto said. "Banana farmers find that there are hidden costs of production that their sales are not covering."

The effects of climate change alone are "so accelerated", Soto said, "that we think if nothing of significance is done by 2050, at least half the land under coffee production now will be lost, one way or another."

Last year, the UN released a map of the world predicting where yields were likely to drop or rise before 2050. In West Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia, which have been plantation-farmed by colonists and then corporations, harvests will shrink. In North America and Europe, which have already cornered the profits of centuries of agribusiness, harvests will expand. The map is iniquity compounded upon iniquity.

Soto insists Fairtrade is flourishing: "Our credibility remains high. We get new partners all the time." Sales of Fairtrade-certified products have swelled year on year around the world, partly as a result of companies exploring new markets. On the other hand, farmers are entering Fairtrade at a slowing pace. Between 2015 and 2016, Fairtrade managed to bring 3,199 new workers into its network; the previous year, it recruited 9,955.

"It's important to note that Fairtrade can't solve everything," Soto said. "We're here trying to solve challenges as old as humanity. We need more committed partners. We need more innovative ideas." But Soto is also forgiving of companies that have chosen to set up schemes to certify themselves. "I think companies are looking to test something new," he said carefully. "We need to allow for that. I will never doubt that companies will do the best they can."

For the chief executive of an organisation founded on the premise that companies need to be cajoled or nagged into paying farmers a living income, this sounded like an astonishingly trusting statement. Soto's most barbed opinion concerned farmer premiums and the larger issue of involving producers in decision-making. "I'm with you when you say that these companies aren't giving farmers a seat at the table," Soto told me. "You have to allow farmers a say in the income generated by sales. They have to own their premiums. That was our biggest suggestion to Sainsbury's."

Last October, the Fairtrade Foundation in the UK acknowledged that, in the new era of self-certification, its function had to evolve. Since companies are setting up their own sustainability schemes, said Lord Mark Price, who chairs the Foundation's board of trustees, "the role of Fairtrade is to help those organisations be the best they can be". Fairtrade will still operate its certification programme; the yin-yang logo will still be seen on products. But for Fairtrade to climb into the role of a consultancy - a supplier of guidance, rather than an umpire enforcing a line for companies to toe - is the most conclusive evidence yet of the transformation under way. And it raises two questions. How will companies behave if they have to testify only to their own code of ethical sourcing? And in what shape will that leave the future of agriculture?

f the animating principle of Fairtrade is "price," that of most corporate in-house programmes is "yield". These programmes may differ in other details. Some are just two years old; others were established more than a decade ago. Some pay their farmers Fairtrade-like minimum prices; others do not. But they are united by their unwavering focus on yield - on squeezing more produce out of a hectare of land. They consider it the best way to protect and grow their supplies of coffee or tea or cocoa, and thus the best way to save agriculture.

The investments are massive. Starbucks has sunk $100m into CAFE Practices, a programme started in 2004 to source sustainably grown coffee. Roughly 99% of Starbucks coffee now falls under this programme, said Michelle Burns, a senior vice president who heads global coffee and tea for the company. Mondelēz will have spent $400m on Cocoa Life, its sustainable cocoa scheme, by 2022. Nearly half of all Mondelēz cocoa is already sourced under this scheme, said Christine McGrath, who heads global impact and sustainability for the $80bn snack giant; she expects that number to have scaled to the full 100% by 2025. Both companies claimed they found existing third-party certifiers inadequate. "There were no programmes we could find that had an emphasis on quality," Burns said. "Nothing that was comprehensive enough."

In my conversations with Starbucks and Mondelēz, farmer welfare rarely came up. The tacit assumption seemed to be that if the companies help farmers improve their productivity, their lives will improve in tandem. Starbucks doesn't set a minimum price, or pay a premium for every tonne of coffee it purchases, the way Fairtrade would have it do. Instead, it pays "strategic premiums" for preferred producers. As a result, last September, when coffee prices fell more than 20% to around $1 a pound, Starbucks had to inject a one-time $20m subsidy to its farmers in Central America.

Mondelēz also does not set a minimum price. It pays "loyalty premiums" to the farmer collectives with which it chooses to work, and Cathy Pieters, director of Mondelēz's Cocoa Life programme, said it was up to them to decide what kind of "action plans" can be funded with the money. She added, though, that Mondelēz commissions large NGOs to work with these cooperatives in determining and crafting these action plans. Once again, as with Sainsbury's and its Fairly Traded programme, the premiums intended to benefit farmers aren't quite wholly theirs to spend as they see fit.

Fairtrade is half-owned by its producer cooperatives, so its standards and metrics are decided in large part by the representatives of farmers. The standards of Cocoa Life, CAFE Practices and other schemes aren't like that; they are written by the companies themselves, in the companies' own best interests. No independent third party certifies their success or failure in meeting these standards and publishes those results. Companies reporting on their own sustainability frequently fail "to prioritise planet over profit", Hans Hoogervorst, who heads the International Accounting Standards Board, said in a speech in April. "Greenwashing is rampant."

Industries are increasingly left to audit themselves, in part because governments have shredded their budgets in the name of austerity. From Volkswagen to Boeing, we don't have to look very hard for evidence that companies fib and cheat when they get to mark their own homework. Bringing sustainability certification in-house is unlikely to empower farmers, or to renovate the structure of trade. "But it's simplistic to say that companies will act in ways that are injurious to farmers," said Fredrik Galtung of TrueFootprint, the sustainability analysts. In his view, the crises in agriculture are so stark that companies are motivated to protect farms and farm workers - if only to secure their own future profits. But TrueFootprint's scorecards indicate that most companies only report their spending on sustainability; almost none of them investigate the impact of these schemes on farmers or on natural resources like air and water. Galtung described it as "just being happy to check off boxes".

Economists like to examine incentives, and to deduce behaviour from them. If the incentives of these companies are misaligned with those of their producers, it's only a matter of time before they produce conflict and rupture. Companies perceive Fairtrade to be rigid, and say that keeping sustainability programmes in-house gives them "flexibility". That word is really standing in, though, for "control": control over how commodities are priced, how to select or discard producers, how farmers farm, even how they live. This may look, for firms and even for consumers, like efficiency, but the effects can be dysfunctional. When four firms - Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus - control between 70% and 90% of the global grain trade, they can bulldoze governments into clearing forested land for crops, crowd out smallholder farmers and push more and more processed grains into our diets. Many of the failings of global agriculture are not the result of multinational companies having too little control; they are the result of companies having too much.

That lesson is available to students of the past as well. After the publication of Max Havelaar shocked the public, in 1901 the Dutch government formulated a new ethical policy - one that would treat Indonesia as a moral responsibility rather than simply as a territory to be exploited. Millions of guilders had flowed from these islands into the Dutch treasury - 187m between 1867 and 1878 alone - and so the government committed to spending 30m guilders over the first decade on the welfare of the Indies' farmers. Not surprisingly, they received agricultural credit and irrigation canals, because the Dutch corporations were avid for better yields. They also gained more schools and more roads; they were not, however, encouraged to industrialise, because this would have inflated the cost of local labour and led to competition with Dutch businesses.

The Dutch ethical policy came undone as soon as the colonist's aims started to clash with those of the colony. The harvests improved, but not enough to warrant the investment. The Great Depression set in, and the government thinned down its expenditures even as Indonesian farmers slid into debt. Educating the populace began to seem like a mistake; there was no work for young Indonesian men who had attended university, and they inevitably drifted into the nationalist movement. By 1940, the government had ceased to fund the welfare projects.

An unnamed administrator, who had once supported the ethical policy, watched with disappointment as the meagre progress unravelled and said: "As soon as we withdraw our hands, everything sinks back into the marsh." But what the Dutch didn't recognise was that they were the ones who made it impossible for the Indonesians to rise from the marsh in the first place.

This article was amended on 24 July 2019. An earlier version said that Fairtrade enlists companies to pay a minimum price, which is always set above market price. In fact, the Fairtrade minimum price is charged only when market prices drop below a pre-determined level. Sainsbury's pulled its own-brand teas out of Fairtrade, rather than ceasing to sell any Fairtrade-certified teas; companies buying Fairtrade must meet other standards in addition to price; and the minimum price for bananas from Cameroon is €6.40 per 18.14kg box, not per 1kg. These have been corrected.

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Researching real life engagement on fairtrade in order to discuss how the higher prices of fairtrade products means less people can engage with it and discuss how the government can combat this

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Sustainable claims appear on 28% of products, but consumer engagement low, new study finds

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Latest Lumina Intelligence analysis draws on labeling and product information of almost 3,000 chocolate, coffee and tea products in leading online stores across 20 countries, as well as 900 commitments to sustainability from 34 leading companies.

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I was researching fairtrade companies/companies who left and i stumbled across a news article about Cadbury - formerly fairtrade who still use child labour as i wanted to research fairtrade in a wider context and see real life examples

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Illegal child labour is being used to supply cocoa beans to Cadbury – Britain’s favourite chocolate brand.

#Dispatches has been undercover in Ghana where children as young as 10 have been working gruelling hours to supply cocoa beans to Cadbury.

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Illegal child labour is being used to supply cocoa beans to Cadbury – Britain’s favourite chocolate brand.

#Dispatches has been undercover in Ghana where children as young as 10 have been working gruelling hours to supply cocoa beans to Cadbury. https://t.co/nS90jyBr8w

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Illegal child labour is being used to supply cocoa beans to Cadbury – Britain’s favourite chocolate brand.#Dispatches has been undercover in Ghana where children as young as 10 have been working gruelling hours to supply cocoa beans to Cadbury. pic.twitter.com/nS90jyBr8w
— Channel 4 Dispatches (@C4Dispatches) April 4, 2022

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Illegal child labour is being used to supply cocoa beans to Cadbury – Britain’s favourite chocolate brand.

#Dispatches has been undercover in Ghana where children as young as 10 have been working gruelling hours to supply cocoa beans to Cadbury. https://t.co/nS90jyBr8w

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Illegal child labour is being used to supply cocoa beans to Cadbury – Britain’s favourite chocolate brand.

#Dispatches has been undercover in Ghana where children as young as 10 have been working gruelling hours to supply cocoa beans to Cadbury. https://t.co/nS90jyBr8w

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Illegal child labour is being used to supply cocoa beans to Cadbury – Britain’s favourite chocolate brand.

#Dispatches has been undercover in Ghana where children as young as 10 have been working gruelling hours to supply cocoa beans to Cadbury.

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How to create a podcast intro your listeners will love