Monday 25 February is the start of Fairtrade Fortnight – one of the highlights of the Fair Trade year. But is it Fairtrade Fortnight or Fair Trade Fortnight? And does it matter??

Fairtrade (one word) is the “mark” which now applies to over 3,000 products in the UK – a fantastic achievement. It has enabled more and more Fairtrade products to appear in the supermarkets, which in turn raises awareness of Fair Trade (two words!) in general. 52% of the public recognise the mark, and this percentage is increasing all the time.

The mark appears almost exclusively on food. Two other commodities have been recognised – cotton and flowers – and one manufactured product, footballs from Pakistan. There are two reasons for this.

First, the procedures and paperwork make obtaining Fairtrade certification a time-consuming and expensive process; one importer told me it takes the profit from two containers of coffee, for instance, for the producer to cover the cost of obtaining the mark. That’s a lot of coffee! Orders for handicrafts are usually tiny in comparison. A container holds about 100,000 keyrings, for instance, or 25,000 spectacle cases. Shared Earth places orders for less than 500 of these items. Also, fashions change quickly, so products would often go out of date before the cost of obtaining the mark can be recuperated.

But the main reason handicrafts don’t have the mark is that the certification system was set up only to deal with agricultural products. The aim was to get Fair Trade products into the mainstream – and getting food into the supermarkets was the way to do this.

What about clothing? you may ask. Doesn’t M & S have a clothing range which carries the Fairtrade logo? It does – but it only applies to the cotton, not to where and how it’s made.

This is all set to change. The two main Fair Trade bodies worldwide are IFAT (International Federation for Fair Trade, which includes buyers and sellers of both food and crafts), and FLO (Fairtrade Labelling Organisation, the umbrella organisation for labelling initiatives worldwide – the Fairtrade Foundation is its UK representative).

IFAT and FLO have started talks with the aim of creating a single mark which could apply to all products. A committee is setting up pilot projects, and by autumn, concrete proposals should be in place.

It’s not going to be easy. The system has to be credible, or businesses which are not committed to Fair Trade could take advantage of it. But it also needs to avoid complexity and bureaucracy, or small producers will not benefit from it.

Solutions to these problems will, I am sure, be found. Soon, I hope, Fair Trade will receive an excellent boost from a new mark, which will increase market access for handicraft producers, and raise awareness even further amongst consumers.

At Shared Earth, we celebrate Fair Trade Fortnight (not Fairtrade). We want all trade to be fair, not just food.

Long live Fair Trade!

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