A couple of years ago, Harriet Lamb, head of the Fairtrade Foundation, stood before a House of Commons select committee and told them that she wanted to grow, grow, grow. She wanted to get Fairtrade into the mainstream, she wanted it to give governments a mandate to make bold changes within the World Trade Organisation, she wanted, frankly, to start a revolution.
Now here she is taking another step along that road – the Fairtrade Foundation have just signed a deal with Cadbury to certify their Dairy Milk bars, a deal which, at a stroke, will double the amount of cocoa imported from Fairtrade certified smallholders in the developing world.
It is great news for Fairtrade, and will go some of the way to solving one of their perpetual problems: they always have farmers queueing up to join, but can't always guarantee a buyer for the product. Matching supply and demand is a constant venomous headache.
What is the problem here? As far as the Fairtrade Foundation is concerned there is probably no problem at all – they want to increase demand and now, hurray, they have. But the fairtrade movement is a broad one, which long predates the existence of the Fairtrade Foundation and its label, and many members of that movement will be feeling some of the unease over this deal that they felt over the deal with Nestle. There are two central problems. Firstly the Fairtrade chocolate producers like Divine have been slowly but surely carving out this market for a decade or so now. And here come great big Cadbury with their massive distribution, their hierarchical structures, their huge marketing budgets … and possibly blows them all out of the water. Is that fair?
But more importantly - and this goes to the very heart of the movement - when you make deals like this with mega-corps, aren't you betraying the very ethos of Fairtrade, the ideal of a better working model, a better way of being? The purest Fairtrade labels such as Cafedirect and Clipper Teas are co-operatives from head to toe, they have robust long-established relationships with their suppliers. The Fairtrade Foundation itself requires that all its farms either be co-operatives or work towards achieving that model. But Cadbury is not a small company or a co-operative, and is not likely to become one.
The deal is good news for thousands of farmers in the developing world, and that is what is really important. A large part of me thinks that these worries are ridiculous, idealistic quibbling. But another part of me thinks that you can never have too much ridiculous, idealistic quibbling – do you agree?
