Fairtrade fortnight roundup
Going bananas.

Fairtrade fortnight — designed to raise awareness of Fairtrade products — kicked off this week with some good news from the Fairtrade Foundation:

• sale of Fairtrade goods rose 81% in 2007 to reach £493m
• bananas accounted for more sales than any other Fairtrade item, at £150m
• Fairtrade cotton sales saw the biggest rise, up 660% to nearly £35m.

(via BBC News: Fairtrade product sales rise 81%)

And more sweet news — Tate & Lyle, a sugar producer in the UK, is in the process of becoming Fairtrade certified across all of its sugar products — making it the largest UK firm to be Fairtrade certified.

No Comments » | Tags: fairtrade, food
Posted by Trevor on Monday, February 25th, 2008 | Permalink |

What’s in a name?
Fairtrade names are all over the map.

We’ve been discussing how best to build naming conventions around the labels in this site. Particularly in the retail goods type this can be a challenge. Some labels have the country integrated into their name (Fair Flower Program Germany) others do not (Environmentally Friendly Label (Croatia)). Where the name is not in the title we decided to add it in brackets to make it easier for people using our site.

Here’s another pickle presented by Fairtrade, which seems caught between Fairtrade, Max Havelaar, and Transfair as well as between Mark and Label:

Fairtrade Austria
Max Havelaar Belgium
Transfair Canada
Max Havelaar Denmark
Max Havelaar France
TransFair Germany
Fairtrade Foundation UK
TransFair Italy
Fairtrade Mark Ireland
Fairtrade Label Japan

While we welcome diversity there are times when standardisation is useful. From a consumer and directory building perspective, we’re leaning toward the standards are useful end of the spectrum with regard to label names.

No Comments » | Tags: fairtrade, standards
Posted by Jacob on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 | Permalink |

IHT | ‘Fair trade’ certification yielding benefits for Brazilian coffee farmers

‘Fair trade’ certification yielding benefits for Brazilian coffee farmers - International Herald Tribune
‘Fair trade’ certification yielding benefits for Brazilian coffee farmers

No Comments » | Tags: fairtrade
Posted by Trevor on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 | Permalink |