Recommended Fair Trade Reading & Viewing
Anything and everything you need to know about Fair Trade as told by the experts.
1. Fair Trade: A Beginner's Guide (2007)
Jacqueline DeCarlo
Interested in Fair Trade and have no idea where to start? Author and activist, Jacqueline DeCarlo, brings the Fair Trade movement to light in an easy-to-follow book. DeCarlo introduces Fair Trade to first-timers wanting to learn about the movement, and deepens the understanding of Fair Trade for those already active. She connects the reader to the soul of Fair Trade by offering several success stories from producers and artisans from around the world, and highlights challenges the movement faces. Pick up where the book left off and read DeCarlo's advice on how to live a Fair Trade life on her blog.
2. Business Unusual: Successes and Challenges of Fair Trade (2006)
Fair Trade Advocacy Office (FLO, IFAT, NEWS!, EFTA)
Published by the organizations that define Fair Trade, this book takes you behind the scenes of the movement. It gives an in-depth report of the World Trade system and its failures and explains how Fair Trade can serve as a viable business model. It also addresses important questions such as how FT concretely benefits marginalized producers and how the movement can cooperate with large transnational companies and still remain critical to local groups. One of the most comprehensive guides on Fair Trade out there.
3. Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival (2007)
Daniel Jaffee
Recommended to me by a colleague before I visited Fair Trade coffee cooperatives in Nicaragua, this book really enhanced my understanding of the Fair Trade coffee movement. Sociology Professor Daniel Jaffe gives a thorough investigation of the social, economic, and environmental benefits of Fair Trade through the stories of Oaxacan coffee farmers. From the coffee crisis to their participation in Fair Trade, Jaffe gives a detailed analysis of how this model affects their everyday life and the limits of Fair Trade's impact. Jaffe also explores the changing face of the movement, the politics involved, and gives concrete recommendations for improvement.
4. Artisans and Cooperatives: Developing Alternative Trade for the Global Economy (2000)
Kimberly M. Grimes & B. Lynne Milgram
Grimes and Milgram, both anthropologists, bring an economic and ethnographic analysis to bear on Fair Trade, detailing how opening markets for artisanal goods allows craft industries to become key components of local economies. Through Fair Trade and anti-sweatshop movements, artisans are becoming empowered and developing entrepreneurial roles by not only producing items, but also learning how to market them on the international market. The book shows that although the fate of subsistence economies continues to seem uncertain, the artisans are examples of people using their talent and innovation to create opportunities for themselves as well as maintain their cultural identity in the global economy.
5. Co-op America's Guide to Fair Trade
Co-op America
Co-op America - a national non-profit consumer organization - seeks to harness economic power for a just and sustainable planet. This guide gives you a chance to learn the power of Fair Trade for both producers and consumers, discover Fair Trade products from tea to wine to sporting equipment and take action with Fair Trade such as getting FT products into your local stores. There's also an extensive directory of over 200 Fair Trade organizations and businesses and helpful advice on how to bring Fair Trade into your life and your community.
6. Changing the Rules of Trade with Global Partnerships: The Fair Trade Movement (1991)
From the book, Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader, Chapter written by Kimberly M. Grimes
Grimes examines Fair Trade as a social movement and details its progression from its beginnings in the 1940s with church groups, to the creation of the Fair Trade Federation and the TransfairUSA in the 1990s. Grimes shows that producers, especially women, are turning to Fair Trade as a path of independent economic development instead of relying on an exploitative system with no growth. Fair Trade also connects the producer to the consumer, where the consumer has the opportunity to make socially just purchases and demand change in the world trade system while also learning more about the products and the people that make them.
7. Just Things: The Fair Trade Journal of Applied Counter Economics
Steve Herrick
An online magazine by Fair Trade activist Steve Herrick exploring how the Fair Trade model can be extrapolated out to the wider economy. Although the site has not been updated in months and Herrick has halted on publishing more magazines, you can still download past issues -- which discuss topics like Fair Trade and its role in the global market, Fair Trade certification, and Fair Trade Zones - on the site. An interesting read for Fair Trade beginners as well as Fair Trade veterans.
8. Black Gold: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee (2005)
Mark and Nick Francis
Multinational coffee companies dominate this $80 billion industry, but coffee farmers around the world still struggle with the low price paid for their crop, often leading them to abandon their farms. This acclaimed film follows Tadesse Meskela, the leader of an Ethiopian coffee cooperative, as he travels around the world looking for coffee buyers willing to pay a fair price for his farm's coffee in order to avoid declaring bankruptcy. The film shows the difficulties the coffee farmer must face in an attempt to get a fair price when the system is set up to only make money for powerful international traders.
9. Traidcraft in Bangladesh (2007)
Mark Batey
This three-part series follows a ten-year Traidcraft volunteer as she meets artisans she's worked with for years for the first time. As she meets with the artisans, she hears their stories of empowerment and the benefits that Fair Trade has brought to them, their children, and their community.
Film by EQ.tv & TransFairUSA
Film produced by TransFairUSA to tell the story of Fair Trade. They go on to tell the viewer that fair trade is not about a product, nor is it a brand, but rather a story involving the farmer, the retailer, the certifier and the consumer. Ultimately, the film argues, the big winner is the farmer because Fair Trade is enabling them to gain business skills to become sustainable and independent. Plus, Stone Gossard from Pearl Jam is in the film and that's always cool. :)
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