Fairtrade: An Ethics Girl for our times

from the Telegraph

Britain now leads the world in buying Fairtrade goods. Cassandra Jardine meets the driving force behind the movement

I'm confused, I tell Harriet Lamb, executive director of the Fairtrade Foundation. I buy chocolate and bananas that bear the Fairtrade sticker because it is a Good Thing, but I cannot understand why fairly priced third world produce is represented by what I see as a hawk's beak.

"A lot of people think it's a parrot," she says. "Or a representation of yin and yang. Some think it's an elephant. But watch, I'm going to draw a dot here."

Her dot joins what I'd assumed was the black hawk's eye to the middle of the gap between the yin and yang. "Do you see, it's a woman carrying something on her head?" Ahhh! "And the green and blue represent grass and sky.

We wanted cheerful colours that would stand out in the aisles, because, on average, people spend only seven seconds in the coffee aisle."

The logo may be hard to decipher, but it must work because Fairtrade is growing at a rate that would make shareholders in a normal business ecstatic.

For the six years that Lamb has been in charge, sales have increased by 40 per cent or more each year to an estimated £430 million in 2007; 320 towns in Britain have declared themselves Fairtrade zones, with another 300 working towards it, and the annual Fairtrade fortnight (February 25 to March 11) will comprise 10,000 events and involve celebrities including Sir Steve Redgrave and Natasha Kaplinsky.

Not bad for a brand that started in 1994 with a bar of Maya Gold chocolate.

"I hope we are no longer seen as fringe," says Lamb, blue eyes blazing with enthusiasm. "Now, do you want me to tell you about Malawi?"

I do, I do; stories of how lives have been transformed are always uplifting, but first I want to understand Fairtrade. Fair is the new organic, and we are all Ethics Girls now, but critics say that it's an easy way of absolving consumer guilt.

In the early days, it seemed to be little more than an excuse for coffee bars and supermarkets to sell some brands at high prices; now, with bigger volumes, Fairtrade coffee and chocolate is no more expensive. But I baulk at the £1 difference that remains between an ordinary pineapple and a Fairtrade one. I need to know that I'm not being had.

Fairtrade began with the collapse of coffee prices in the late 1980s. The first Fairtrade labelled coffee was imported into the Netherlands in 1988; four years later the Fairtrade Foundation was set up to bring Fairtrade labelling to Britain.

The movement consists of groups of producers getting together and agreeing to stick to rules that include a ban on child labour and a "dirty dozen" group of pesticides, Lamb explains.

The Fairtrade Labelling Organisation, in Bonn, co-ordinates standard-setting and certification.

In return, the producers are guaranteed a minimum price for their goods, plus a five per cent premium that allows them to invest in machinery, education, transport or what they need to improve their standard of living. Result: progress, happiness, fewer refugees and - perhaps - even fewer wars because people have more investment in the land.

The alternative scenario Lamb describes is of a few big companies that dominate buying in chocolate, coffee, tea and bananas and use their power to squeeze small producers who then sink further into poverty.

Prices for all those commodities have plummeted over the past 30 years; in the past three years, banana prices have almost halved. "It's a fallacy to think that farmers who have been growing coffee for generations and who now find they can only sell their crops at a loss will retrain to be computer engineers."

To those who say setting a fair price is anti free trade Lamb points out that the market is already distorted. In 2005, America spent $4.7 billion supporting its cotton growers - more than its entire aid to Africa - which made it almost impossible for farmers elsewhere to earn a living wage.

"I was reading Dickens the other day. He has mill owners saying that their businesses will fall apart if children are not allowed to work. Even free marketeers would accept that there are some minimum standards." She goes even further, likening the Fairtrade movement to the campaign to abolish slavery.

Lamb is a good ambassador for Fairtrade. A 46-year-old mother of two, with an uproarious laugh and a weakness for good chocolate, she's also a vegetarian who bicycles everywhere.

She's a thoroughly good egg type who, in another age, would be sorting out the hospitals of the Crimea or chaining herself to railings for women's rights. In the early 21st century she wants to change the world, not by "burdensome moralising" but by making shopping more "fun". Fun? "Consumers like to be put in touch with producers."

Her interest in the developing world began early when, aged five, her ex-army father took his wife and three children to live in Pune, India, where he was working for the Formica company.

After she had finished boarding school - St Mary's, Calne - and Cambridge University, she returned to India to help a group of Untouchables grow grapes. She saw trade as the key to change, but first did an MPhil in International Development.

Then she worked for the Low Pay Unit - "the minimum wage is another idea which everyone said would cause havoc but hasn't".

After helping Somali refugees in Newcastle, she worked for the World Development Movement before landing the wonderfully named job of Banana Co-ordinator for the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation. That proved a seminal moment.

"I went to Costa Rica to find out about the lives of the workers who grow the bananas sold in British shops," recalls Lamb whose new book, Fighting the Banana Wars, is published this week. "There I met Maria.

Her husband Juan's job was to inject a chemical, DBCP, into the ground to protect the roots from parasites.

Day after day his body absorbed the poison and in 1993 when Maria gave birth to their first child, he was born a sickly green, severely deformed with parts of his brain missing." The chemical was later banned but the tears she shed with Maria made her embrace Fairtrade with redoubled energy.

The battle to provide growers with an alternative to the big companies was long and dirty. Boats carrying Fairtrade bananas were deliberately held up for so long that whole loads turned to inedible mush.

But there were triumphs, too. In 2000, the Co-op became the first British supermarket to stock Fairtrade bananas. One by one the others joined them. In 2006 Marks & Spencer agreed to make all its tea and coffee Fairtrade. Last year, Sainsbury's decided to stock only Fairtrade bananas; now it says its own brand sugar will all be Fairtrade.

Each year more products are added to the list: cotton is the new focus and M&S has agreed to buy 20 million Fairtrade items this year.

There are now 71 staff in Lamb's office in London certifying products, checking producers aren't cheating and investigating new lines.

Three-quarters of the foundation's income comes from producers paying to join Fairtrade but Lamb rejects the idea that this is a new form of colonialism. "They choose to be part of it.

We looked into working with British farmers who also suffer from being at the end of the supply chain but we decided that our focus had to be on relieving absolute poverty."

While 23 countries sell Fairtrade products, Britain leads the world. "We can be proud," Lamb says. "It's part of being British that we have a strong international outlook.

We have organisations such as the Women's Institute, Oxfam and Cafod which are concerned about poverty, some cracking companies like Cafedirect, Divine and Traidcraft that were prepared to go out on a limb with Fairtrade, and big companies which have picked up the baton."

It's time to hear about her trip to Malawi. "I went there to see the groundnut, cotton and sugar farmers. At one sugar-growing village, all the water came from a dirty river three miles away which was infested with crocodiles.

Using their first Fairtrade premium they have now made a bore well." Seeing their neighbours' lives improve, producers are queuing to join up and existing members want to sell more on Fairtrade terms.

"What they need now is for more people to choose our products, or to ask shops to stock them. As volumes grow, prices will come down and once you are in the habit of buying Fairtrade, you don't step backwards."

She's right. On my way home I go to a supermarket. Choosing between two brands of sugar, I feel uncomfortable with the one that doesn't carry that inscrutable little blue/green sticker. Fortunately, though, I don't want a pineapple.

•'Fighting the Banana Wars by Harriet Lamb' (Ebury) is available for £10.99 + £1.25 p&p. To order please call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4112 or go to www.books.telegraph.co.uk.

Fairtrade figures

• 3,000 products carry the Fairtrade mark, including ice cream, roses and condoms.

• More than seven million people in Africa, Asia and Latin America benefit from Fairtrade.

• 20 per cent of all cocoa sold is now Fairtrade and 12 per cent of bananas.

• Cotton is the fastest growing Fairtrade sector, rising from £6 million to £45 million in 2007.

• Fairtrade is promoted in Britain by 320 towns, 4,000 churches, 35 synagogues and 60 universities.

• More than 100 wines are now Fairtrade.