The concept of fairness is deeply embedded in the human consciousness and reproduced in human societies. In the division of land, where some parts are more productive than others, to be fair the land is divided up in many societies into strips whereby each family has a share of good and poor land. In the division of labour, persons or families are free to produce what by natural endowment they are best at, or least bad at, leaving others to produce to meet their other needs. This is seen as a fair basis for trade exchanges. Differences in human endowment are regarded as fair, but differences resulting from the use of force, collusion or deception as unfair. Nevertheless, in the real world's trade exchanges of today such differences are common, having been established by colonial rule, and in Africa in particular they have not been subsequently redressed (Robinson, 1954:459-60).
The Colonial Division of Labour
The pattern of Britain's trade with ‘the colonies’ was firmly established with the American colonies as early as 1699 by the English commissioner for trade and plantations:
It was the intention in settling our plantations in America that the people there should be employed in such things as are not the produce of England to which they belong … the second great justification of colonies was that they could be constrained to buy English manufactures, and the whole trade be carried in English ships (Lipson, 1934:173).
The colonial division of labour was thus an entirely artificial one. Africa, like India, China or South America, had all the resources necessary for industrial development – iron and other minerals, cotton and hides for clothing and shoes, and many of theskills of iron working, wheel making, gold refining – whence the ‘golden guinea’.* North America had the most resources of all the colonies and the settlers, after disposing of the indigenous peoples, were the first to revolt against their colonial status which confined them to raw-material production. In the event, the economic development of the United States, like that of the European continent, Canada, Australia and South Africa, offered important markets for British industry and capital investment. British capitalism required both expanding markets in America and the Dominions and also cheap raw materials from the colonies. Africa's tragedy was that impoverished colonies could not provide rich markets and the share in world trade of agricultural products steadily declined (League of Nations, pre-1945; United Nations, post-1945).
The disadvantages of being allocated to the production of primary products, raw materials for use by manufacturing industry elsewhere, were manifold. First, there was the fact of dependence on at most two or three sources of income which could dry up, as indeed they did when artificial materials began to replace natural materials in the case of textile fibres, rubber and hides. Second, there was the fact that for many years it was easier to increase labour productivity and thereby reduce costs in manufacturing industry than in agriculture. Third, new technology steadily reduced the proportion of raw material used in manufactured goods. Fourth, as incomes rose people did not spend such a large proportion of their income on food, drink and clothing, and spent more on durable manufactured goods, such as electronics, and on services. Finally, industry was more amenable to the development of monopoly positions among a small number of great corporations than was agriculture with its hundreds of millions of small farmers (Kox, 1990, Tables 8 and 9; Barratt Brown & Tiffen, 1992, chapter 4).
Africa's Failure to Industrialise
Why Britain was the first to industrialise is a question that cannot be answered here, but being first gave many advantages which were, however, soon challenged by the US and continental European countries and later by Japan and China (Barratt Brown, 1970). What has to be answered is what held Africa back, even after the African colonies had gained their independence. The first answer must be the small size of each of the one-time colonial territories and their lack of interest in any real attempt at amalgamation of over 50 separate territories, only three of which – Nigeria, Egypt and Ethiopia – had a population even by the 1980s of over 35 million, thereby constituting potential industrial markets. This resistance to combining forces reveals the further cause of failure; that power was generally handed over on independence to a local elite whose wealth and influence were based exactly upon their association with the export to their one-time colonial masters of the several raw materials specific to the territory. This association then gave these new rulers both the opportunity to retain the loyalty of the clientele which kept them in power and the incentive to keep it that way and not encourage the emergence of any other source of power, such as the processing and manufacturing industry. The big importing corporations in the rich countries were only too happy to encourage this by persuading their governments to put tariffs and other taxes on the import of processed materials (Barratt Brown and & Tiffen, 1992, chapter 8).
For a time after the Second World War, the prices of Africa's commodities, which had risen during the war, stayed high and some economic development took place. But by the 1970s world commodity prices, except for oil, began to fall, while the prices of manufactured goods stayed up (Overseas Development Institute, 1988; Barratt Brown & Tiffen, 1992 :30 ff). The fall in commodity prices had several causes which have been noted in considering the disadvantages of dependence on raw material production: less extra income spent in the rich countries on goods, and more on services; less material used in manufacture; substitution of natural by artificial products; and to these must be added the entry into world markets of subsidised American and European competing products – not only of food grains but of sugar and vegetable oils. This fall in world prices of the products of the one-time colonies revealed all the disadvantages for any country concentrating on the production of raw materials to be used in industries elsewhere. As they had done between the wars, the terms of trade of exchanging commodities for manufactures turned against all the African countries except for the few which had oil (Overseas Development Institute, 1988). To cover the deficits on their trade, African countries began to borrow from the world's banks, and especially from the international financial institutions, the IMF and World Bank. As their debts grew and interest rates rose, these countries were required by the financial institutions to pay up by increasing their exports. This only led to further surpluses far in excess of demand and thus to a further fall in commodity prices (Mosley, 1991:23).
Before the Second World War the colonial powers had established commodity control schemes to protect the prices of their colonies' products from falling so low as to cause popular unrest. Similarly, there was an attempt after the war to operate international commodity agreements, in particular for coffee and cocoa, by building up international stocks when prices were falling (Rowe, 1936; 1965:154-5). But when prices fell too far these schemes collapsed, except in the case of oil where OPEC was able to hold up oil prices. It was the fall in world coffee prices with the destruction of the International Coffee Agreement in 1989 that first led concerned European groups to consider developing a coffee-trading system which would be fairer (Corea, 1992:27, 35). Coffee farmers were selling their produce below the costs of production. Many were leaving their farms for the towns and abandoning their trees. In the end, prices would recover as supply was reduced, but in the meantime misery and poverty were spreading across a whole continent as the same collapse was occurring in other world prices – especially of agricultural commodities – cocoa, cotton, palm oil, tea, sugar, tobacco, bananas, which in the 1980s made up nearly a half of sub-Saharan Africa's exports (UNCTAD, Commodity Yearbooks;Barratt Brown & Tiffen, 1992:170, Table A10).
Africa's problems were compounded by the fact that, even among the hard-hit primary producers in world trade, the share of Africa's staple products in world markets had been declining throughout the 1970s and 1980s. This was most obvious in the case of palm oil where Africa's share dropped from 60% to 20% and of cocoa where it dropped from 75% to 65%, but similar falls occurred also in shares of exports of sisal, coffee and groundnuts (Barratt Brown & Tiffen, 1992:161, chart A5). The workings of the world markets through which, via a thieving middle man – known according to locality as a coyote, jackal or piranha – the farmers had to sell their crops, left them hopelessly confused and totally exploited. Their governments' intervention exercised after independence from colonial rule only added another layer of exploiters who used their position to maintain their political followers (Healey & Robinson, 1992:75). The most obvious need was to establish a more direct connection in the commercial chain between the grower and the consumer. But here stood the giant corporations – Nestlé, General Foods, Cargill, Tate & Lyle, Unilever, R. J. Reynolds – the traders and often also the processors, straddling across the market, controlling between them 85% to 90% of each commodity, fixing output and prices by their manipulation of stocks (Clairmonte & Cavanagh, 1981; Barratt Brown & Tiffen, 1992:194, Table A35).
The ‘Fair Trade’ Concept
The concept of ‘fair trade’ emerged in 1985 from a conference on trade and technology organised by the Greater London Council. Representatives came from cooperatives in London and throughout Britain together with those from cooperatives from many developing countries. The aim was to establish a system of direct exchanges of trade and technology to challenge the unfair system widely existing in the world where some countries – including Mozambique, Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua – were actually excluded from trade by political boycott. The low prices received by developing countries for many of the commodities they exported and the high prices of much technology they had to import from the developed countries were the main subjects of discussion. These terms of trade were equally the causes of poverty in the developing countries and of unemployment in the developed, whose markets in the developing countries were drying up; a new system was needed by both. A list of principles of ‘fair trade’ were drawn up and two organisations, Third World Information Network and Twin Trading, were set up to organise future conferences, a newsletter to exchange experiences and to start a system of trade and technology exchange on fair-trade principles (TWIN, 1985).
The original concept of direct exchanges between cooperatives in the First and Third Worlds failed after many efforts because the British cooperatives did not have the technology which the developing country cooperatives needed and could not absorb the large quantities of commodities for which the developing country cooperatives wanted to find markets. In the case of coffee, a Dutch organisation named after the dissident nineteenth-century Dutch merchant in the East Indies, Max Havelaar, had led the way by drawing up a register of democratically organised coffee-growing cooperatives in Africa and the Americas and finding markets for their coffees in Holland and Germany. Twin Trading decided to try to expand the small coffee business it had started importing from Mexican coffee cooperative producers and selling through Oxfam, Traidcraft, Equal Exchange and other such small specialised outlets (Barratt Brown, 2004/05:4). Together with Oxfam, Traidcraft and Equal Exchange, a brand was established called Cafédirect and sales in UK supermarkets were achieved, in the first instance with the Co-op and Safeway in Scotland (Barratt Brown, 2004/05:5).
The idea of a direct supply of coffee from the producer to the consumer was the basis of the first fair trade business. In fact, farmers sell their beans to their cooperative which sells to Twin Trading which sells to Cafédirect which processes the beans and sells to the supermarket, packets of roast and ground coffee for filter or bottles of freeze-dried soluble coffee which are finally sold on to the customer. It is still a long chain and the farmer is still not getting much of the value added to their crop. He, or often she, minds the trees, picks the cherries, grinds off the pulp, washes and dries the beans, sorting out those of poor quality and then bags them; for that they get at best about 10 pence out of a pound paid for the final product in the shops. What does ‘fair trade’ add? The farmers get a guaranteed price, at least 10% above the world price. They get paid 50% to 60% of the price in advance when the bags are delivered to their co-op where they are hulled and the rest when they are finally sold. The coop gets help from TWIN with information about prices, with a computer and other equipment and advice on husbandry, and a proportion of the profits from Cafédirect goes to a producers' partnership programme of projects – funds for a clinic, school, co-op truck or other community needs. The rest of the profit goes to capital investment in promoting more sales from current or new producers and to paying a small dividend to Cafédirect's investors (Cafédirect, 2004/05:8-9).
‘Fair Trade’ in Africa
TWIN started to work in Africa to supply fair trade coffee from cooperatives and associations of cooperatives – two in Tanzania, two in Uganda, one in Cameroon and most recently with one in Rwanda. TWIN also helped with establishing a cocoa cooperative in Ghana and one in Sierra Leone. Kuapa Kokoo, the Ghanaian cocoa cooperative, is now the part owner of the Day Chocolate Company, founded in the UK by TWIN, which supplies the chocolate for its own Divine brand and for the ownlabel fair trade chocolate in the Co-op, Tesco's, Sainsbury's, Waitrose and other supermarkets. TWIN has also helped with establishing other fair trade companies in the UK drawing their produce from African cooperatives: an Ethical Nut Companyselling nuts from Malawi and Zambia and Agrofair selling bananas and tropical fruits from Ghana and Burkina Faso. Plans are in progress for supplying fair trade cotton from Mali and a new TWIN enterprise is ‘sustainable tourism’ providing an alternative income for coffee farmers in Tanzania. Cafédirect has also added Teadirect and Cocodirect to its range, so that all three are available in office and college vending machines (TWIN & Twin Trading, 2004/05:15 ff).
The fair trade coffee and cocoa market only takes a small proportion – around 5% – of the produce from the farmers with which TWIN is working. But the impact of the fair trade market is much greater than that. Cooperatives are helped to get started and to keep going when they are in trouble, provided with accountancy and business planning as well as with husbandry. No organisation is ever abandoned if mistakes are made, but instead, help is provided to solve the problem. The premium price offers an encouragement to improve quality up to gourmet level. The trust this inspires works both ways, and TWIN has never been let down. A visitor to a coffee farm will find the beans for fair trade bagging laid out to dry on mats and not on the bare soil or concrete. In particular, organic production is encouraged by the higher price realised in the market. Most important, the existence of a fair trade market has given many ambitious young farmers the confidence to go to agricultural college and help to run their cooperatives rather than leave the countryside for the towns (author's own visits).
From the consumers point of view, the availability of fair trade products in nearly all the UK supermarkets has provided consumers (who can afford to be discriminating) with a way to express their desire to help the producers in poor countries in a way that is not demeaning and guarantees a real improvement in their lot.
For some years it was the brand name that sold the fair trade product – Cafédirect, Divine and Agrofair. Getting a brand onto the supermarket shelves is a costly business. It is not unusual to have to spend £1 million a year in promotion and advertising to get and to keep a brand product on the shelves. Cafédirect was launched by large posters on railway stations with pictures of an African child and the slogan: ‘He gets inoculations and you get excellent coffee’ (TWIN & Twin Trading Annual Reports). With the establishment of the Fair Trade Foundation in the UK and then internationally of a Fair Trade Labelling Organisation (FLO), with a fair trade mark, the market was much widened to include supermarkets' own label products which carry the mark and can easily be recognised as such, just as organic products can be recognised in the UK by the Soil Association mark (Barratt Brown, 1993:182-3).
The criteria for awarding the fair trade mark are minimal; production by smallholders is preferred but is not always possible, as in the case of tea, where plantations must have wages at ILO standard; a guaranteed price agreed with the producers, at least 10% above the world price; direct supply from the producers avoiding middlemen; at least 50% of the product (by dry weight) must be of fair trade origin (in coffee it must be 100% but can be less where a product like chocolate has other contents (milk and sugar); some payment in advance (Ibid.).
TWIN's partners – Cafédirect, Day Chocolate, Agrofair and the Ethical Nuts Company – also operate a gold standard which includes, not only the fair trade mark criteria, but also:
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Working only with smallholder cooperatives and similar associations;
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Always making payment in advance;
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Financing producer partnership programmes for community and personal development in producer organisations;
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Supporting producers to increase control over the whole supply chain of their products;
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Involving producer representatives in the control and strategic policy-making of the whole organisation and in the case of TWIN, moving towards producer ownership of TWIN and its associated companies;
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Following policies of environmental protection, healthy eating, safe packaging and encouraging wherever possible organic production;
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Working with other fair trade organisations and government bodies to advance the general worldwide success of ‘fair trade’ (Cafédirect, 2004/05:30-31).
‘Fair Trade’ Worldwide
While ‘fair trade’ as a movement was undoubtedly launched in Britain and in the Netherlands in the 1980s, it had spread worldwide within twenty years. A conference at Kilkenny in 1991 under the presidency of Mary Robinson, then the President of Ireland, brought together those involved in ‘alternative trade’ from the North and the South and established an International Federation for Alternative Trade (IFAT), which drew up agreed principles of ‘fair trade’ and has subsequently held biennial meetings to spread the message (author's own report of his keynote speech at Kilkenny). All the developed countries of the North have fair trade organisations and fair trade goods for sale generally in their supermarkets. Total sales worldwide were estimated to be some £758 million in value in 2005. The contribution of the UK was the largest of any single market at £195 million (Guardian Unlimited, 28 June 2005). These are, of course, minuscule figures out of a world total annual trade in goods of over a thousand times those sums. Even taking only those products in which ‘fair trade’ operates, the proportion of fairly traded is less than 1%. In the UK coffee market, Cafédirect provides a special case, supplying almost 10% of the coffees sold (Cafédirect, 2004/05).
While the base is still very small, the rate of growth is phenomenal: world sales of fair trade products grew by more than a third in 2005. In the UK, Cafédirect's sales grew in the same year by 14% to some £20 million in a stagnant coffee market (Ibid.). At the same time, Day Chocolate's sales topped £7 million, an increase of 25% over the previous year (Day Chocolate Co., 2004/05). What is most important, more and more of the giant retailers are offering fair trade goods. This does raise some problems: US fair trade enthusiasts complain that Starbucks makes much of the fact that they are a fair trade company while the proportion of fair trade coffees they sell is minimal with no agreed plan for an increased share. The most obvious one was raised when Nestlé announced that they were offering a ‘fair-trade’ coffee supplied from Ethiopia and it was duly granted the fair trade mark (The Guardian, 2006:27). Investigation showed that it really did comply with the fair trade criteria, but this Ethiopian coffee only comprised 0.02% of Nestlé's coffee sales and there was no agreement with the FLO for a minimum proportion of coffee from fair trade sources or for any future increase. More serious, it transpired that when the Body Shop sold out in 2006 to Loréal, Nestlé had a 25% share. Prior to that, TWIN had persuaded the Body Shop to invest in the Day Chocolate Company, so that Nestlé then was due to become a part owner of a leading fair trade company. Fortunately, the Roddicks, owners of the Body Shop, decided to give their Day Chocolate shareholding to the Ghanaian farmers' cooperative which was part-owner of Day – a wonderful precedent for any giant international corporation wishing to help poor African farmers (author's personal knowledge)
These stories well illustrate the problems facing the fair trade movement when the giant corporations decide to improve their public image by adopting ‘fair trade’. On the one hand, it is a great victory for ‘fair trade’ when they do. On the other hand, there is an equally great danger of standards being debased in what is only a token gesture. ‘Fair trade’ has been developed almost entirely with small-scale farmers and their cooperatives and similar associations, and there are difficulties in extending it to plantations, especially when these are owned by large corporations like Tetley. In many parts of Africa, small farms are the typical unit of production and account for a large part of the population. But they have suffered from lack of capital to invest in replacing trees and bushes and improving, or even maintaining, quality. Where plantations exist, especially in the production of tea, cotton and ground nuts, the aim of ‘fair trade’ is to bring wages and working conditions up to ILO standards. (Cafédirect, 2004/05)
What Difference has ‘Fair Trade’ Really Made?
By selling their produce at a better price a number of small farmers in Africa and elsewhere have been helped to improve their living standards by their own efforts and without the indignity of charity. But how far has this really improved the bargaining position in world markets of such farmers or increased their share of the value added to their produce after it leaves their farms? The best that can probably be said is that the self-confidence of the farmers involved has been raised, and this has strengthened the capacity of other farmers, and that an alternative model of trading based on trust and not on authority, on direct links without market intermediaries, has been tried and has been found to work. What more can be said about the bargaining position and the commercial chain?
Improving the producers' bargaining position requires joint action as the oil producers in OPEC demonstrated. At the launching of Cafédirect, TWIN found funds to bring representatives of all the cooperatives supplying the coffee together in London for a conference. They represented about half a million farming families from 13 different countries, with the largest number in Uganda. They formed an organisation called TWINCAFÉ to combine their efforts, and TWIN agreed to provide a monthly newsletter with detailed reports and commentary on current movements in the world coffee markets for both arabica and robusta coffees (TWIN and Twin Trading, 2004/05:5). At one time, TWINCAFÉ attempted to get the several country coffee producers to agree to withhold stocks, as OPEC does, in order to check falling prices. This attempt failed because of the refusal of two of the largest suppliers, Brazil and Colombia, to collaborate (author's own information).
One of the reasons for Brazil's lack of interest is the large market for coffee in Brazil itself, and one of the aims of ‘fair trade’ is to increase the producers' involvement in the processing and final preparation of their raw material for consumers, in the first instance in their own country. This has been happening in Peru on the initiative of cooperatives working with TWIN, using some of their fair trade earnings to add value to the coffees they produce. It is often asked why so little chocolate is made in Ghana when so much of the cocoa comes from there. Some difficulties are experienced in making chocolate in hot countries, but the main reasons for the failure to do this are, first, that all the rich countries which consume chocolate in large quantities prefer different mixes of milk and sugar and other ingredients with the cocoa base and, second, that the market is dominated by a few huge companies with whom it is difficult, but not impossible, for a small producer to compete as the Day Chocolate Company (with some Ghanaian ownership) has found out. Côte d'Ivoire accounts for over a third of world exports of cocoa beans and almost a third of world exports of cocoa paste (as well as over 10% for each of cocoa butter and cocoa powder), whereas Ghana which accounts for over a sixth of cocoa-bean exports only manages 5% of cocoa-paste exports. Here is clearly an area where several producer countries could be adding value.
TWIN has been involved in a scheme to process cotton for a fair trade product in Mali and Burkina Faso, where at least the first stages of manufacture can be achieved for making bandages and sanitary towels. Once again, in going beyond the first stages, competition is experienced with giant international companies which have the cost advantage of large-scale production, against which international rules now prevent local producers from protecting their infant industries. (Ormerod, 1994:3 ff.)
One argument that is widely used against ‘fair trade’, especially with Africa, is that whole export orientation of African economies should be greatly reduced, rather than attempting to make it marginally more fair. Thus, it is argued, that land devoted to export crops should be reduced and converted to growing food so as to reduce the frequent occurrence of famines. This implies a belief that large plantations are stealing land from food production, but the facts do not support this. By the 1990s, land devoted to export crops in Africa amounted to 18 million hectares compared with 15 million in 1960, whereas the area under food production grew over the same period from 70 million to 113 million hectares (FAO, Yearbooks; Barratt Brown & Tiffen, 1992:24). Most small farmers need to have a cash crop to provide an income to meet the needs which they cannot meet from their own land, and moreover their normal practice is to plant their export crops amongst food crops, coffee or cocoa next to bananas for example. This has the added advantage of preventing the spread of disease and providing a compost from the banana leaves. No chemical fertiliser or pesticides are then required and an organic product can be assured (Harrison, 1987:95).
Export-led Growth: a Conclusion on the Role of ‘Fair Trade’
Because the IMF and the World Bank have encouraged African countries to expand their exports, the concept of export-led growth has become discredited. What has gone wrong is not the process, but the concentration on raw materials. All economies in the world – equally in the North and in the South – have been developed through expansion of their foreign trade (Landes, 1998). Africa's tragedy has been that it was prevented from diversifying and industrialising, first by the external pressure of the colonial powers and then by internal pressure of local elites in control of the existing trade, supported by mistaken policies of the IFIs (Davidson, 1992). There is nothing else on which African economies can be built except their natural resources, but these require more value to be added to them by processing. To the extent that ‘fair trade’ gives producers the opportunity to move along the commercial chain, it can only be advantageous to them and do something to correct the unequal relations in international trade.
Here the policies of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), in seeking to open up markets in Africa to Northern manufactures and even to Northern services, are nothing less than disastrous, as admitted even in World Bank publications (OECD/ World Bank, 1993). All the Asian economies that have recently developed have started by using state measures to protect infant industries (Ha Joon Chang, 1993; Barratt Brown, 1995:45). To deny African developing countries this possibility is to hold them back forever. They are, of course, perfectly aware of this and have been opposing WTO proposed measures to open up their markets to the more developed countries' products and services (The Guardian, 2006b:21). All that ‘fair trade’ can do is to encourage African farmers to resist. It is true that fair trade exchanges do not generally involve governments. In fact it has been the withdrawal of the state in developing countries from marketing commodities that permitted local cooperatives to export directly (Barratt Brown, 1995:320-21). Cooperatives have, in some countries, been regarded as dangerous rivals to government authority and some of their leaders have even been jailed for their activities (author's information). This means that the successes of ‘fair trade’ have not been brought to bear on the wider arguments about foreign trade. NGOs attend WTO meetings, but these NGOs tend to be from developed countries. This is even true of IFAT's representation (IFAT, Annual Reports).
There is a further argument adduced against encouraging developing countries seeking export-led growth. This is the food miles argument; that transporting commodities over long distances adds greatly to carbon emissions (Lang & Hines, 1993:126 ff.). This is certainly true of air transport of fruit and vegetables, but is not true of sea transport; less fuel is used per tonne of product on a 1000-mile journey by sea than on a 100 mile journey by truck in the UK. Against this argument, there is great advantage for Africa in developing on the basis of its exports, so long as the producers are able to move up the commercial chain to increase the value added to their primary products. World Bank and OECD studies, such as the OECD study of New Technologies and Enterprise Development in Africa based on industrial development in six SADC member states concluded that ‘the contribution of expatriate companies was much less important than the upgrading of traditional small-scale activities’ (OECD, 1992:11) and supported the conclusion of the World Bank author, Sanjaya Lal: ‘The ideal set of incentives [for economic growth] thus combines some competition (of the right sort, ideally from world markets) with protection for the period of learning when costs are high and quality low’ (Lal, 1002:112; Barratt Brown, 1995:ch. 11). This is just what ‘fair trade’ ensures.
The most important role of ‘fair trade’ for developing countries has thus been to bring together producers in different countries. The best example is the coffee producers who meet internationally through the organisation TWINCAFÉ and specifically in East Africa between the cooperatives working with TWIN in Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda (TWIN internal reports). Similarly, meetings have been organised between cocoa growers in Ghana, Sierra Leone and, before the troubles, in Côte d'Ivoire. There is, moreover, an annual meeting of all TWIN's producer partners at which there is an exchange of experiences and when representatives are elected to the various company boards (TWIN internal reports). It is regarded as a central element of TWIN's fair trade model that TWIN should be producer-owned. This has to be the ultimate aim of all ‘fair trade’: that the producers, and not the giant corporations, own the commercial chain for their products.